Bacon Sandwich

I'm pretty busy writing up my work at the moment, hence the long break in posting this month. I'll try to fire out a few short but useful entries over the coming weeks rather than saving it all up for the monolithic posts I usually make.

Every week, some newspaper or another makes us frightened or happy by covering the latest risk data regarding "causes" or "cures" for cancer, stroke, heart disease and the like. Apparently they won't be happy until they've fully catalogued all Things at least once over, and preferably twice with flatly contradictory information. They present us with statements such as "Bacon Sandwiches raise cancer risk by 20%". That would probably put quite a few people off eating bacon sandwiches, but it's not a statistic you'll ever find in a peer-reviewed scientific paper. And there's a good reason for that. This sort of figure is what is called a "relative risk increase". It's calculated by taking the dividing the new risk (with bacon sanswiches) by the normal risk (sans sandwich) and multiplying by 100. We can see the weakness of that way of representing the numbers with an illustration such as this:

The risk of killing yourself with a revolver loaded with only a single bullet in a random chamber is 1 in 6. Put two bullets into two random chambers and the risk is 2 in 6 (or 1 in 3). These are absolute risks as opposed to relative risks. In percentages, the absolute risk is just over 16% with one bullet, but twice that (32%) with two bullets. Now let's do a Daily Mail on it and express this as a relative risk increase. That's a 16% increase over 16%. So by putting in the extra bullet you've just increased your risk of killing yourself when you pull the trigger by 100%. That last number is certainly the scariest, although we must admit that none of these numbers is particularly fun.

But here's where it gets interesting (stop rolling your eyes please). Imagine the risk of catching a fatal dose of the flu is 1 in 10,000,000 for each time you go to work on the train, but is 2 in 10,000,000 if you take the bus. These odds are very much lower than the absolute risks relating to the gun. In percentage terms they sound comfortingly low too (0.00001% increasing to 0.00002%). You're probably not going to base your public transport decision making on these numbers. However when we convert these numbers into a relative risk increase, we get... 100%. A headline that says "Buses Raise Flu Death Risk by 100%" is certainly going to either make you think twice about using the bus, or is going to make you think that those silly boffins are just spoofing (didn't they say buses were better for some reason last week?). You get exactly the same punch in a Daily Mail headline as the gun risk, and yet in reality they're not even vaguely similar.

This week a nice site caught my eye which puts all of that statistical wonder into a fun little web program that allows you to see the various ways in which scientific data can be made more scary. There's all sorts of ways to make a scare story out of a non story, and you can rest assured that most of the newspapers are quite prepared to use them.

Image from Wikipedia released under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Accept Evolution, Eat People

During the weekend Donna Garner, a former language arts teacher in Central Texas and a conservative activist, circulated an email in response to the recent move by the Texas State Board of Education to close a long-standing loophole in their policy on the teaching of science. Previously, it was a requirement to debate the "strengths and weaknesses" of the theory of Evolution (or any scientific theory). A requirement, even if the matter was not prompted by students. In practise, this has been used as a back door to introduce creationist and intelligent design arguments into the classroom. Not actual scientific weaknesses, but religious criticisms. Science is not debated in terms of strengths and weaknesses, but in terms of evidence. But I'll return to that point.

She begins:

Dear Friends of Students:

This year, 2009, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (born in 1809), author of Origin of the Species. Atheist groups across America are using this anniversary to move aggressively to force all 50 million public school students to be taught that macro-evolution (life spontaneously springing from a chemical reaction with all life stemming from that common chemical reaction and becoming different species through mutations) is a fact–without allowing the teaching or discussion of the scientific “weaknesses” increasingly being discovered concerning the theory of evolution. Texas, with its 4.7 million students, was selected as the first state to conquer. And, so far, the atheists are winning in Texas.

Let's just take a look at what has been said and left unsaid in her opening statements.

Garner immediately puts a suggestion into our minds without backing it up. "Atheist groups are using this...", "the atheists are winning". Immediately the subject is not education, but religion. In her mind (and she wants us to join her there), this is not about science, but faith. No names are named, no figures cited. We are to assume that science advocacy groups such as Texas Citizens for Science, The Texas Freedom Network and countless others are atheistic in nature. The atheists are doing this, and presumably it's part of a grand plan. A war to be won at terrible cost to you the reader, a cost to be outlined later.

Next she both introduces and defines "macro-evolution" and states that everyone will be forced to learn this thing that she has defined as fact. Macro-evolution is a term not used in the scientific literature or in text books, so it is good that Garner defines it for us. But her definition does not actually match up with anything taught in US schools. Her target, Evolution, does not attempt to explain the origins of life itself (which are not conclusively known) but merely the origin of the great variety of life that we now see. That origin is indeed a common ancestor, but for now at least, Garner's "spontaneous springing [of life] from a chemical reaction" remains within the realms of hypothesis. If it is taught at all, it is taught in that context. Macro evolution then, is something of a Straw Man.

Finally, she implies that Evolution has "scientific weaknesses" that are, she says "increasingly being discovered". Well I'm quite sure that evolution does have flaws, but with what relevance to high school students? With what support within the expert community? If a fringe group of historians contend that Abraham Lincoln's murder was motivated by Wilkes-Booth's phobia of beards (or something more plausible perhaps) we're not going to open up the floor for students to specifically "debate the weaknesses" in the theory that the assassination was politically motivated. This is not an end to questions about the motive or the politics which formed it, but the dishonest notion that a meaningful debate exists in the field is not entertained. And of course, the curriculum for a given subject should reflect the consensus of the relevant experts.

As for weaknesses "increasingly being discovered", well there's certainly nothing new in the pseudoscience that Ms. Garner will shortly inflict on us.

Let's move on.

For more than 20 years, the rule in Texas has been to teach both the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution. Last week, by a margin of 1 vote, the Texas State Board of Education voted to remove the word “weaknesses” so that only the strengths of evolution could be “analyzed and evaluated” in all Texas public schools. The final vote is in March, so there is time to make a difference.

As I indicated previously, the "strengths-versus-weakness" model of debate or analysis is a curious idea, and it is not really one which applies to science, assuming we are seeking to invite serious debate in a classroom. If evolution is open to being "analysed and evaluated" (and of course it is), it stands to reason that this should be on the basis of evidence.

Some evidence will support evolution and some, if evolution is incorrect, will contradict it. The thing about scientific theories is that we do not weigh-up the "pros and cons" of a theory when deciding if it is legitimate. If one piece of evidence contradicts the predictions of a theory (and it can be shown that the evidence is real and reproducible), then the theory is dead. Totally dead. No balancing of strengths or weaknesses. The theory is in the bin and we have to build a new one. One piece of falsifying evidence automatically outweighs all the "strengths" we could care to present.

The strengths and weaknesses method of debating science is perhaps a reflection of a science curriculum that does not address how hypotheses, evidence and theories are constructed in science. Or perhaps it is a back door designed to allow spurious attack upon theories which are seen to contradict an agenda.

Garner then lists who voted on the new wording and how, providing contact details for each so that we can phone up and demand that somebody think of the children. I'll cut this on the basis of it also being really boring.

*Snip*

Garner continues with an attempt to make "the atheists" look like hypocrites. After all, everyone knows that if you're a hypocrite, you're wrong about everything, right? Ad hominem much?

Charles Darwin, in Origin of the Species said the following concerning the proper evaluation of his theory: “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts on both sides of each question.” Too bad Darwin wasn’t on the State Board of Education to vote to keep “weaknesses” in.

Darwin, of course, was stating the obvious. That we must consider all the evidence before making a decision about something. Ms. Garner won't like to admit it, but Evolution was accepted by scientific consensus by this very means a very long time ago. Debate over the course of some decades by the finest minds in science.

In a pedantic point, Darwin's book was not called "Origin of the Species" but "On the Origin of Species", being as it is a work explaining the emergence of species plural. You'll also note that it is not called "On the Origin of Life", and thus must not have anything to do with Garner's proposed "macro-evolution".

At least, he was intellectually honest about his theory.

Ah, "at least". Suggestion once again. He wasn't honest about everything. This casts doubt on evolution. Painful.

He recognized that science advances by constantly probing and questioning, not by censorship, intimidation, or indoctrination.

Are we talking about the advancement of science? I'm quite sure that Darwin would also have recognised that continuing to debate a scientific theory 100 years after it has come to be considered accurate by scientists is rather counter-productive. But that is not even the issue here. Whilst we should certainly teach our children about gravity, it wouldn't exactly be "scientific" to perpetuate a debate on the matter on the basis that we should never stop questioning. We never do stop questioning these theories, but what Ms. Garner has failed to grasp is the nature of that questioning. Scientific research. Experimentation. Not debate in a room full of teenagers. How would such a debate advance science or some other subject such as history?

We have debate in the public between creationists and evolutionists, although that debate is painted as a scientific one, the matter has already been resolved in the scientific community for some 100 years or more. Finally, we have debates like these. The reader can see Ms. Garner's side, and the side of people such as me. So it doesn't really look like anyone is pulling off the censorship routine. Or at least not doing it well. So I'm sure Darwin would be more than satisfied (well of course I'm not sure, I never knew the guy and neither did Ms. Garner). The question that remains is whether that debate has any place in the class room.

The 3 Republicans don’t seem to get it. They want to water down the current standard to eliminate any airing of “weaknesses” by eliminating the word “weaknesses.” The battle is over that one word. It needs to be there. As a lawyer, I know more than most that words are important. So don’t be fooled, the retention of the word is worth all of us fighting for.

Again, the "strengths versus weaknesses" model of assessment does not really work for science and really should be scrapped entirely in favour of teaching kids how to assess scientific evidence, form and test hypotheses and build theories.

Garner then decides to elaborate further on her definition of Evolution. In doing so, she describes a theory that only appears in one kind of text book or scholarly publication anywhere: creationist ones.

Short primer on evolution: In describing evolution, there are 2 catagories: (1) Micro-evolution, and (2) Macro-evolution. Micro-evolution (small changes over time within the same species) is something we can observe today (bugs become resistant to drugs; birds beaks grow longer, moths change colors).

Biologists make no such distinction, and for a very good reason. There are no differences in the underlying mechanisms that drive the micro or the macro. Evolution is driven by replication, mutation, genetic drift, natural selection, gene transfer. Ask creationists what micro-evolution is driven by and they'll give the same answer. So it's rather like making a distinction between taking a walk in your garden (by using the easily provable micro-walking) versus going down to the shops (which would require the obviously impossible macro-walking).

If we're agreed that some evolution can generate some variation, then why can we not agree that more evolution can generate more variation?

But Garner has evidence that there's a difference between the macro and the mirco.

I personally think it makes perfect sense that a good Designer would design each creature with built-in abilities to adapt to survive. But the debate before the Board is not over micro-evolution, but over the teaching of macro-evolution. We have never observed one species becoming a different species (macro-evolution).

In fact, we have observed species become a different species quite a number of times both in the lab and in the wild. Some nice (but not at all exhaustive) examples of these are detailed at the following links:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html

But on to more "evidence". Am I using sarcastic quotes too much?

And we have never observed how life began.

Indeed we have not, but then we don't teach highschool kids how life began. We don't teach abiogenesis as fact to anyone at all. It's not a part of the theory of evolution at this time and won't be until that evidence is in. At this time, the origin of life is rather irrelevant to the debate.

This is where we need to examine the scientific strengths and weaknesses. And with respect to macro-evolution there are numerous scientific weaknesses, to name a few: (1) the Cambrian explosion of life; (2) gaps in the fossil record; (3) the intractable origin of life chemistry problems; (4) the origin of information in the DNA molecule; and (5) irreducibly complex features. Honest scientists acknowledge these and other weaknesses—but atheists don’t want these weaknesses highlighted—particularly not to our children. This is the Scopes Monkey Trial in reverse.

It would take another blog post in itself to fully refute the five points outlined here. They are classic cliches, and nothing new at all. But briefly, number 1 is something of a mystery. That is to say, I have little idea what Garner is getting at and it's unlikely that she does either (I have seen one argument regarding the Cambrian Explosion used by creationists, but that argument was dropped some years ago when it was mysteriously removed from the creationist website that had hosted it). Number 2 represents limitations to our knowledge. I think we can safely say that were there no gaps in our observations, we would have little need for theory (or religion) and science itself would become a job dedicated to teaching rather than research. If the reader has been following closely, we can of course immediately dismiss number 3 as having exactly nothing to do with how evolution is taught. Number 4 is in a similar vein since it deals with events prior to the origins of life and with concepts of "information" that are perhaps rather beyond a high school class. Number 5 is a topic I've already made a nonsense of here.

She concludes her list of "weaknesses" by claiming that "honest scientists" acknowledge these issues. Certainly, mainstream biologists don't assume that abiogenesis is an answered question, but they also don't consider it a part of theory. The vast majority of biologists, and the scientific community at large, consider evolution accurate. Just as consensus determined by historians informs the history syllabus, so too does the scientific consensus inform the scientific syllabus. What Garner of course means by "honest scientists" is creationists and intelligent design proponents. What "atheists" refers to here is not clear, but is presumably "everyone else" including the scientific community and all of the science advocacy groups. And the Catholic Church. Hmm...

Because their fields are a pseudoscience (as distinct from a fringe science), these people are considered to be scientists only by themselves. But what if we decided to include creationists and intelligent design proponents in our definition of the scientific community? Would evolution remain accepted by consensus? Are scientists redrawing the lines of the definition of "scientist" so that they can maintain an artificial consensus?

In terms of raw numbers of people, it's hard to assess just how many creationists are active in research. Newsweek puts the figure at approximately 700 in the United States. There are 480,000 life scientists in the United States, and evolution also is accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists in the physical sciences, an even larger group. Not to mention almost universal support in scientific communities across the world. Let us generously suppose then that we are talking about 2000 creation scientists in a worldwide community of just 1 million biologists and geologists. 0.2% of a community does not break a consensus. So even if we include creationists in the scientific community the consensus, unsurprisingly, remains that evolution is valid and thus it should be taught as valid.

The "scientific debate" is a fabrication. To the scientific community, it is a (scientifically) small and illogical tantrum. It is only in the public eye that the debate has any validity or support at all. And the bulk of creationist efforts are bent towards increasing that validity. We need only look at the publication patterns of the creationists to see evidence of this. They produce little original research, preferring instead to publish essays and glossy text books. In 2008 alone, biologists published over 3000 research papers with the word "evolution" in the title (plus over 400 reviews, an unknown number of essays and textbooks). We can assume that there were many more on the topic of course, since most papers would not mention such a broad topic as evolution in their titles. It would greatly surprise me if the various creationist communities combined have managed to publish 3000 research papers in the last 20 years. Or even an output of research comparable to their small size. This is not reflection of general poor output or funding,creation advocacy groups generate plenty of essays and command tens of millions of dollars annually. Propaganda is the priority, not science.

Ms. Garner has one more shot to fire. The cost. The terrible danger that exists if we do not allow the Creation Tantrum to be given the validity of discussion in the classroom. The cost of accepting that evolution is both a valid theory and a reflection of fact.

Thus she concludes:

Jeffrey Dahmer, one of America’s most infamous serial killers who cannibalized more than 17 boys before being captured, gave an last interview with Dateline NBC nine months before his death, and he said the following about why he acted as he did: “If a person doesn’t think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what’s the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we died, you know, that was it, there was nothing….” (Dateline NBC, The Final Interview, Nov. 29, 1994).

The implication is clear. Evolution is part of a nihilistic and atheistic attack on religion. It leads to more atheism. And atheism leads to cannibalism (oh okay, at least to immorality). And the moral expert she cites to both imply and support this? A serial killer and cannibal. It makes my mind sore.

Will evolution kill faith? The Catholic Church seems to think not. The 1 billion Christians who follow that church seem to have no issue accepting evolution and their faith side by side. Evolution only poses a threat to Christian faiths which consider the book of Genesis to be a literal account of Creation. And that by no means assures that those who lose their faith in that literal truth are destined to become atheists. And what if they do become atheists? It is, of course, utterly unsurprising that someone like Dahmer could only build morality on the basis of personal consequence meted out by authority. He was a psychopath. He did not value human life in itself.

If the punishment of God is all that keeps Ms. Garner from killing and eating people, then I do hope she retains her faith. But I suspect that this is not the case. There is, in truth, no evidence at all that atheists are less moral on average than Christians. But we're rather getting away from the point, which is that the path from evolution to people-eating is a fantasy. One dreamed up by people who seem to think that morality is a very thin veil, a tenuous construction drawn over the amoral animal that is man. And held in place only by the ten commandments. I do wonder how strong the faith of the Creationists must be if they really see science, the simple observation of nature, as this manner of threat. But certainly, a little more faith in people is sorely needed.

Fear and Vaccination in London

Author's note: After my successful foray into soapboxing with the LHC story, I decided to get back up on the box again to trumpet my current hypothesis. Science, the scientific method and scepticism are misunderstood by almost everyone and something has to be done. For more evidence of just how bad things are, check out the ongoing research into the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. The research itself is satire (sorry to spoil the fun, but I certainly don't want people to think I don't get it). The reactions of the public are the really frighetning part. Anyway, on to the self-righteous ranting.

In 1998 a British-based surgeon, Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a research paper in which he and his team tentatively identified a bowel disorder associated with autism which he coined “autistic enterocolitis” and speculated (a very important word there) that this might be caused by vaccination with the MMR vaccine. Most people are roughly aware of what MMR is. The measles, mumps and rubella triple vaccine. It is a mixture of the three viruses, alive but weakened to the point that they’re not even able to infect infants. They do however cause the recipient’s immune system to generate lots of cells and antibodies that will basically squash the three viruses should they ever be seen again. The need for vaccination against these three diseases is an easy case to make. Measles in adults can cause brain damage. Mumps may cause infertility in males, especially kids. Rubella, if it infects the unborn through the mother, can cause a wide range of birth defects. These complications don’t occur often- but the viruses are so infectious that those rare cases would be a big deal in any highly populated country.

Cause and Effect

So MMR was suggested to have an influence on autistic intestinal inflammation, but there was more. According to Wakefield’s paper, there also appeared to be a connection between the time of administration of MMR to a child and emergence of autism, though that element of the study was retrospective. The paper itself did not rock the boat in the mainstream media, though the scientific community began criticising it immediately. The connection between MMR and autism was not clear, and the study group was small. Just twelve children, all selected because they had autism. At best, that sort of study would represent a starting point for some more solid research. To be meaningful and to make that connection really clear we’d need thousands of examples, and we’d to be able to compare our results with loads of non-autistic kids.

It wasn’t until Wakefield decided to jump outside of the peer-review system that things began to go bad. I discussed in a previous posting how science makes its way into the mainstream media. I even included a flow chart, which I’ll reproduce now. What Dr. Wakefield did was follow the path on the far right. Skipping all external controls and critique he instead decided to talk directly to the press. And what he had to say would cause a sensation. He called for a halt to administration of the MMR vaccine in favour of vaccinating for each of the three diseases separately over an extended time of several years. His stated reasoning was that he believed that MMR might be causing Autism. The initial response in the media was muted. The press release and an accompanying video released by Wakefield’s hospital drew some attention. Wakefield found himself defending his work in letters to the journal that had published his paper, Lancet. In 2000, Wakefield published more papers pushing his MMR hypothesis. Then in 2001, something snapped. Perhaps it was the publicity, the momentum built in the last couple of years. Perhaps Wakefield’s recent high-profile exit from his hospital position (a “mutual decision”) was noticed. Perhaps some of his new research papers pushed the right buttons. Whatever it was, the MMR and autism story hit the mainstream.

What Grows in Darkness

The newspapers went wild, particularly in the UK. By 2002, the stories in the press questioning the safety of MMR numbered in the thousands. Few dealt with the inconvenient peer-reviewed research papers that refuted Wakefield’s findings and the controversy dominated health reporting for several years. Here was a piece of news based on the (very carefully worded) concerns of a single surgeon. But somehow the line (in the Daily Mail at least) became “Scientists Fear MMR Link to Autism”. “One Scientist Cautiously and Inappropriately Suggests MMR Link to Autism” is not very catchy perhaps, but the fear mongering sentiment went further than headlines and permeated the reporting. As a direct result, MMR vaccination rates in the UK fell to 80% by 2003. In some urban areas of London, the rate was as low as 65%. When we learn a little about how vaccination works these, figures become even more alarming.

Vaccination is not 100% effective on a person-to-person basis, though it is usually above 99% effective. This is generally not an issue however, as vaccination also serves to protect the unvaccinated by eliminating the pool possible hosts for a given virus. Because your neighbours are all immune, your chances of even encountering the virus, let alone contracting it, are dramatically reduced. The virus is much less likely to be passed around by accident. This effect is called “herd immunity”. For the three viruses that MMR protects against, the threshold for good herd immunity is around 95% of the population. With the rate of uptake so low in 2005, the risk was rapidly increasing that herd immunity would collapse, resulting in large scale epidemics amongst the roughly 20% of unvaccinated children and the 1% for whom the vaccine had failed to take.

Predictably, the epidemics began around 2000, when the earliest signs of concern had begun to filter through to the public. Measles epidemics were reported in Ireland, Austria and Italy. Most significantly, measles incidences in the UK have increased steadily over the last eight years. Although the increase may appear minimal (from 56 cases per year in 1998 to an estimated 900 cases per year by 2006) the disease was declared “endemic” in the British population earlier this year. This means that the virus is now circulating freely in the population without need for re-infection from outside sources. So anyone without immunity is immediately at much greater risk. Herd immunity is degenerating. There is also evidence that travellers to and from Europe triggered minor outbreaks in the United States. Mumps is on the rise again also, primarily hitting age-groups who passed through infancy prior to the introduction of MMR. Some 70,000 cases were reported between 2004 and 2006. There were a handful of deaths as a result of the measles and mumps resurgences. Three deaths were reported in Ireland, one death in the UK and two cases of brain damage. Not many, but a reminder to us of times when these diseases were a true threat.

The degeneration of herd immunity is just the first step, there is another risk associated with allowing these viruses to become endemic. For every infected person there are literally billions of mumps, measles or rubella viruses in their system. The more viruses there are, the faster they reproduce. The faster they reproduce, the more often they mutate. With part of the population vaccinated and part not vaccinated, what we are doing is presenting the mutating viruses with an obstacle to overcome. The risk is growing that one of these three viruses may undergo the mutation required to evade MMR entirely.

In 2004, ten of Wakefield’s co-authors on the 1998 paper withdrew their support for the work. Since the first publication, at least twenty peer-reviewed research or review papers have discredited the MMR link to autism. Wakefield’s suggested new “autistic enterocolitis” has been dismissed by autism researchers as a common symptom of the condition. Ten years after the controversy began, MMR is not the only vaccine to fall victim to the resurgent paranoia and disillusionment with modern medicine, though this is a trend which predates the MMR scare. Some papers continue to lead a crusade against any proposals for new “multivalent” vaccines that, like MMR, would combine protection from several diseases.

Apportioning Blame

It was a need for a simple cause which ultimately brought the MMR crisis into being. But the fact is, there’s no known single cause for autism. And nor are the causes of the vaccination crisis as clear as they seem. It would be easy to point the finger at Dr. Wakefield. He’s certainly not free of blame. Wakefield’s 1998 study was prompted when he was approached by solicitors representing a group planning to sue MMR manufacturers for causing the autism. According to a Sunday Times report in 2006, Wakefield received money from that group to perform his 1998 study and it appears that some of the study participants were sourced by them too. It is also alleged that Wakefield’s hospital, who were quick to back his findings and arrange press contact, also received money in the form of legal aid. It seems clear from interviews at the time that Wakefield was aware of the fine balance of risks associated with his bold statement. He was aware that switching from the use of MMR to using three vaccines over a number of years very significantly increases a child’s risk of contracting one of the diseases in that time. Wakefield’s point was that the risk of autism outweighed both the fact that his results were unclear and the fact that his suggested course of action brought great risks. He should absolutely not have been going public with his poorly-conceived idea, yet his language in the press release and interviews was actually quite suitably cautious. The subtlety was lost on many news outlets. Rather than exhibit caution themselves, they perpetuated a fear-laden story that has done incalculable damage to public health in Europe. Many of these are the same papers that, years later, are now assassinating Wakefield’s character in light of professional misconduct charges. Ultimately we have to blame pretty much everybody; parents looking for simple answers, lawyers looking for litigation, a surgeon with a bias, a hospital looking for publicity, a media willing to spin anything to sell papers. Not to mention the confused reactions of most GPs and politicians (a blog in itself). And then there’s us. The scientists fought the good fight on the day, sure. But it could be argued that our aloofness from the public has created a culture in which science is only noticed when it is sensational; a culture in which the people have neither the education nor the inclination to view science with proper scepticism. It’s conceivable that just one of those groups had it in them to prevent this whole huge mess. Instead we are now facing continued vaccine paranoia and a dangerous resurgence of diseases we once had on the run.

Science Goes Boom: The Large Hadron Collider

Update 10 September 2008: Well, the world is still with us. The LHC has powered up and run a successful one-way test collision. We live to collide another day. The real experiments are due to begin on October 21st so I expect we shall hear more from the panic mongers. But for now, every-day scientists, a funky-looking picture (the first data produced by the LHC).


Author's note 04 September 2008: Beaten to the punch! A geologist friend of mine suggested an article debunking the LHC panic a few weeks ago, but I thought it more appropriate this week. The Short Sharp Science blog (1st September) however, has pretty much pre-empted my own commentary, practically down to the last point. Here's my take anyway.

On the 10th of September, if Dr. Walter L. Wagner is correct, there’s a pretty good chance that the world is going to end. Or at least begin ending. On that day, the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC for short) will power it up and perform their first experiments. The LHC is a particle collider, a giant ring tube, 27 kilometres in circumference and buried beneath the Swiss countryside at a depth of about 50 to 100 meters. The point of this ring, as the name suggests, is to collide particles. Particles can be atoms, the building blocks of all matter, or even pieces or these. The particles are launched into the ring tube in opposite directions. Large electro magnets keep the particles traveling along the same line inside the ring and ensure that they follow the curve of the ring around to the far side. At the far side, the particles collide. When this happens, the particles effectively explode on a tiny scale, producing new and even smaller particles. This effectively replicates the sorts of collisions that occur between cosmic rays and the upper atmosphere of the Earth.

The collision is timed so that it happens just as the particles enter an enormous eight-storey-tall detector (pictured to the right). There are already many devices like the LHC in the world, and they’ve taught physicists a whole lot about the universe, but the LHC is different. It’s the biggest particle collider to date, and it can throw the particles out with greater energy than any device previously built. In fact, the LHC will propel tiny particles about 1x1025th (that’s 1 with 25 zeros after it) the size of a grain of sugar, with the same energy as a high speed train. The goal of this €5 billion project is to test the current major hypothesis in physics, the Standard Model. This includes the search for a particle that has been predicted to exist by our current understanding of physics, but which has never been observed; the Higgs boson, the particle that is thought to give all matter its “weight” or more correctly, its mass.

If these collisions are so very common in the atmosphere of Earth, why bother with the LHC at all, you might ask? The answer is in that eight-storey tall detector. Not an easy thing to lug around, let alone fly into the atmosphere. And since we can never predict where a particle collision may naturally be about to occur, we would have no chance to move the detector to the correct spot, let alone line it up so that the collision happened exactly at the centre of the detector. The far more sensible option is to bring the particles to us, which is what the LHC is for. If the experiment fails or succeeds, it might well usher in a paradigm shift in physics.

Doomsday

The problem is that some hypotheses about the universe predict that we’ll find something much less pleasant than the Higgs boson in our detector. Amongst the suggested doomsday outcomes of the LHC experiments are the creation of stranglets, magnetic monopoles and, Dr. Wagner’s favourite, mini black holes. It’s unlikely that most people (including me) will know what those first two things are, but pretty much everyone has heard of black holes. And pretty much everyone knows that they are, to put it mildly, A Bad Thing. And it’s black holes that are what Dr. Wagner is warning the world about. If formed, Wagner predicts, such tiny black holes would not be detected at first. They would zoom right through the LHC (they’d be too small to interact with matter) and off into space, at least for a while. Caught in the gravity of Earth, a micro black hole would fall back and right through the planet before flying into space again. This might happen a number of times before the black hole starts to collect matter, and starts to slow down as it does so. Eventually, it would settle down in the core of the Earth. And there, it would literally swallow the planet in just over two years. We would probably figure out that something had gone wrong when the earthquake would start. Things would get very nasty very quickly after that, and it is unlikely that anyone would survive to see the actual imploding death of Earth itself.

Scary stuff, and with that kind of story making the rounds, it’s little wonder that some people are calling for the LHC to be stalled, shut down or destroyed. The tinfoil hat brigade on the internet (conspiracy theorists), are out in force and claiming that the LHC is in fact a weapon to destroy life on Earth. A story that has something to do with aliens seems the most popular motive for such an expensive way to do a job that could be more cheaply and easily performed with a few nuclear warheads.

But let’s take a step back from Crazyland for a moment and take a look at what the scientists who started the controversy are actually saying. They’re not actually claiming that the LHC will cause catastrophe, but rather that it might. Nor are they calling for the dismantling of the LHC, but rather for an injunction to stall experimentation while safety assessments are carried out. Further safety assessments, that is. A major independent safety review already concluded that the LHC was safe in 2003. Another review confirmed this in 2008, and that review was double checked by yet another independent scientific council. Two groups of physicists have also published peer-reviewed papers backing up these claims of safety. So the majority of the science brigade stand on the side that says everything is going to be okay. And the critics are not even sure that they’re right. The problem for those of us outside of physics (and The Biologista is very much unsure what a Higgs boson actually is), is that the portents of doom, and the defences against these, are delivered in very difficult physics-speak.

Look up

So how do we satisfy our scepticism and sooth our, let’s face it, fear? There is on easily palatable piece of scientific knowledge that can put our minds at ease. The collisions that will take place in the LHC in these coming years have already happened countless trillions of times all around us, or more specifically, above us. As I already stated, the upper atmosphere is constantly bombarded with particles from space. These particles are of all shapes and sizes and impact at energies that are higher than anything the LHC can produce. Indeed, even stronger impacts than these occur around neutron stars and white dwarf stars. And these bodies have such a huge gravity that any possible micro black holes formed would surely not escape to space but would come to rest within the stars, gobbling them up from within in a spectacular and frightening manner. Given how often such collisions take place that ought to mean we’d see loads of white dwarfs and neutron stars popping their celestial clogs left right and centre. But we don’t. In fact, we never have.

It could also be said that at a certain point we have to have, I hesitate to use the word, faith in the physicists. I can feel fairly certain that the very clever employees at CERN, which hosts the LHC, would rather not die. And despite media portrayals to the contrary, scientific experimentation has a great safety record. The Mad Scientist bringing doom due to his meddling with nature is a myth based more upon the failings of the products of science in the hands of others than on the actual practice of research itself. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were built upon scientific knowledge, but they exploded in ignorance of science.

Whilst we might doubt the motives of military research and commercial research such as the big pharmaceuticals companies and the nuclear industry, the LHC is something quite unique. You see, there’s no direct commercial or military benefit to it at all. On the contrary, the LHC represents the rarest of things in modern science; billions of euros spent in the pursuit of... knowledge. Nothing more. In June, Wagner’s case in the US was dismissed, and a similar case brought in the EU was dismissed just last week.

Trillions of natural test runs in our atmosphere, numerous independent safety reviews, two peer reviewed defence papers, the survival instinct of scientists and above all, a noble goal. Perhaps I’m naieve, but that’s good enough for me.

Alternative Expectations

Scepticism is a balancing act. It’s not about a dismissive nature, any more than a credulous one. I like to think of myself as being a balanced, quite open-minded sceptic. Doubt, but don’t reject without evidence. Mind you, I get it wrong sometimes. Watching a fairly mindless piece of entertainment TV last week, I was introduced to the concept of light therapy, in particular for the treatment of depression as well as skin conditions. I could barely contain a snort of mockery as the wide-eyed presenter explained the serotonin-inducing and antibiotic wonders of various shades of intense light. Actually, I’m pretty sure I didn’t contain it at all. My automatic mistrust of the concept was hasty. After all, it is quite well established that sunlight may have all manner of influences on us, both emotional and physical. However, my scepticism led me to investigate further, which is never a bad thing. I visited Google Scholar to browse some of the peer-reviewed journals on light therapy. My aim; to find out if any evidence of the effectiveness of this therapy actually exists. Sure enough, there is some manner of science in there. Broadly, the studies performed to date have tended to be pretty inadequate in terms of sample size (rarely more than 20 patients) and time scale (weeks when we’d like years). So let’s say that the jury is still out, but that I look more favourably on the concept now than I did previously. I’m still a little dubious as to whether such treatments should already be available in clinics, when it appears as if a full-scale trial has yet to be conducted. It wouldn’t happen with a drug, after all. The wide-eyed presenter, perhaps familiar with the concept of “scepticism”, ensured us that the treatment was “scientifically proven”. Whatever that means.

So I figure that light therapy should not be dismissed. But it should certainly not be accepted on the basis of a TV personality’s assessment of what constitutes “scientific proof”. While light therapy may not be something that would conventionally be classed as “alternative medicine”, it did get me thinking about the topic. The very concept of alternative medicine is often offensive to many medics and scientists. It is a notion that thrives on the modern public’s disillusionment with science in general and the misguided concept that “another way” exists. The disillusionment is not entirely unjustified. And the philosophical rejection of reason shouldn’t prejudice our scientific judgement of the individual therapies classed under the blanket term of “alternative”. Just where did this sense of disillusionment with conventional medicine come from? I have some notions on that. Following the sudden revolution that began with the sanitation practices of the late 19th century, the western world witnessed an unprecedented improvement in public health. The work of scientists such as Koch and Pasteur did away with vague notions of the nature of disease. Ever hear of miasma theory? Nope, because it’s rubbish. Koch and Pasteur, giants of medicine, saw to it that the war upon germs could begin in earnest. Within a century the world’s greatest killers, smallpox, tuberculosis and polio, were either utterly destroyed or reduced to a shadow of their former threat. It was a true revolution. It was the end result of a paradigm shift in biology; the formulation of germ theory. But things have settled down now, we’re back to normal science. Cancer, once largely unheard of, is now the big killer. Many blame modern life, and the science that brought it, for putting things into their food and environment. The newspapers are obsessed with reporting on “things that cause cancer”, which apparently is almost everything. It’s easy to forget of course that 100 years ago very few people lived long enough to get cancer. Modern medicine’s perceived inability to “cure” cancer, heart disease and AIDS, has lead people to lose faith, even to become cynical about the means and even motives of doctors and the health industry. Of course, we scientists and doctors have not helped. Our curious culture of maintaining aloof superiority has fuelled the common man’s sense that science has become disconnected from humanity. In the absence of understandable contact from us, what has anybody to go on other than the caricatures of the media?

So, the “other way” becomes attractive. Dismissive scepticism, the worst kind of scepticism, now rules when dealing with doctors. Many have come to the assumption that alternative medicine forms part of what They Don’t Want You to Know, for reasons that are never entirely clear. A grand conspiracy. This attitude is no better than the average scientist’s blanket views on alternative therapy. It’s really just a matter of getting more information, and if we actually look for it, the beginnings of what we need to know are often already there in the journals. What should the average prospective patient look out for? The journals don’t make for an easy read, but I’ll try to summarise what makes for good testing.

In evidence-based medicine, efficacy and safety are tested using clinical studies. Because humans are so very unique and variable, the only way to be sure that a technique or drug is effective and safe is to go large. To use the biggest study groups possible. We also have to ensure that we study the effects over extended time periods. Both features are vital for the statistical analysis needed to make sense of all that human unpredictability. Most importantly of all we must use what scientists call “controls”. A control in a clinical study is essentially a group, as large and as similar as possible to the group receiving the test treatment, which is treated differently for the sake of comparison. To properly test acupuncture, for example, the bare minimum would be a study of several thousand patients with one group receiving conventional treatment, one receiving acupuncture and one receiving “sham” acupuncture in which the needles are applied but applied incorrectly. The last two groups must be “blinded”, which is to say that neither group should be aware of which is receiving real acupuncture.

A recent-ish study of acupuncture for back-pain followed this very template. They found that acupuncture beat conventional therapy for pain relief. But that isn’t the full story. Firstly, the volunteers consisted of patients for whom conventional therapy had failed. Secondly, they found that the sham acupuncture was just as effective as real acupuncture. This may be an indication of what is called the placebo effect. This is an apparent beneficial effect caused by a fake control treatment, be it the administration of a sugar pill or random pinpricks. Or perhaps there’s some peculiar value to being poked with needles in general. Put simply, it’s not clear what’s going on there. Acupuncture must remain in the realms of the untested for now and we should treat it as such. With doubt, but not with contempt.

On the flip side, we can ditch reiki and reflexology as they have been tested quite thoroughly and found to have no greater benefit than a massage. “Allergy tests” based upon applied kinesiology (the one where bottles of varies substances are held near your muscles) are pure and utter witchcraft in my view. There’s no connection between the results of these and the standard medical allergy test. Hell, some of those tests use sealed bottles, so quite how your body could ever react to the contents is a mystery. As for chiropractic... don’t get me started. Few studies have been able to demonstrate anything more than a placebo effect. Most damningly of all, as pointed out by Ben Goldacre, some chiropractors would rather block the process of scientific criticism of their field. The New Zealand Chiropractors Association has taken the highly suspicious step of attempting to sue a peer-reviewed journal. With your health on the line, is this the sort of carry-on you should accept from your doctor? (Author's Note 21 Aug 2008: The British Chiropractic Association are also sueing journalist Simon Singh for an allegedly libellous article on their faith. I mean, science.)You can be quite sure that no reputable scientist has ever sued in response to academic criticism. Proper studies such as I outlined above are hard to conduct on chiropractic spinal manipulation. This is primarily because the medics who usually run studies are not trained in the methods and chiropractors are reluctant to get involved. What information there is tends to be both limited and self-contradictory. This isn’t a nail in the coffin by any means, but it’s clear that the professionals could be doing more to make us trust them. The general folk and herbal medicine scene is a whole can of worms in its own right. It’s quite clear that some of it works, after all many modern drugs are derived from plant and fungal components. But it’s clear that we don’t know enough about the complex mixture of active ingredients in many such preparations to draw generalisations. Much like light therapy and acupuncture, it remains for me at the fringes of reason for the time being. Ultimately, the advice for navigating the maze that is alternative medicine is much the same as my advice regarding the reading of science in the mainstream media. Scepticism, but open scepticism. Demand evidence, statistics and hard facts. Mechanisms must be rooted in what we can observe. As for doctors, expect more from them too. Ask for explanations, don’t just accept prescriptions. Doctors are often impatient with patient questioning and take a dim view of patients coming to them with their own research from books or the internet. This needs to change. Try to open a dialogue, one that is respectful and yet still sceptical. Never forget that your doctor has some ten years of training and perhaps decades of practical experience. The relationship should ideally be a two-way communication.

As for “alternative medicine”, the term encompasses too wide a range of ideas and carries too much prejudice. To my mind there should be only two kinds of medicine. Tested and not. Only the successfully tested has a place in our lives. Much of what is now untested may one day be worthy of our trust, but right now our health and our lives are at stake. Nothing is more valuable, and nothing is more worthy of healthy scepticism.

It's Revolution, Baby

Science is usually portrayed and imagined as one of two clichés. The scientific establishment is a vast panel of crusty old sceptics, dismissive of innovative thinking and ever willing to attack upstarts. On the flip side of this, “revolutionary” science is so frequently fanfared to the front pages of newspapers that we could almost believe that scientists are as excitable and credulous as the tabloids appear to be. Everyone loves a David and Goliath story, so it is hardly surprising that every controversial finding is pounced upon. Miracle cures and perpetual motion machines are all the more exciting when it appears that they show up those stuffy old boffins. Strange how the rebels and their miracles most often vanish without further updates. With so many contradictory findings being touted each week, it’s easy to see why so many people become disillusioned with science. Going by the newspapers, I’m still not sure if my coffee addiction is going to give me a stroke or save me from a heart attack. In my previous blog (Science Says) I talked about why I think this happens, and why it’s not actually a reflection on proper science at all. True scientific revolution is another story and an exciting one. Maybe not “tabloid exciting” though.

The best explanation as to How Breakthroughs Happen goes like this. A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to work with a rare kind of scientist. The man, who we shall simply call Oz, is to my mind one of an elite subset of scientists who dedicate their careers to answering a single, if profound question. Oz is also something of a philosophy buff and introduced me to the scientific philosophies of Thomas Kuhn, a man who had a lot to say on the matter of scientific revolutions. On the small scale, science is a cyclical process, as I outlined in First Assumptions. Hypothesise, test, refine, repeat. In time, hypothesis becomes theory or a new part of an existing theory. We can call the prevailing set of theories the “standing model” as they represent a human modelling of reality as we see it. Conferences and the peer review process serves as a rigorous test of the output of the scientific cycle. Scientists are a competitive, aggressive bunch. Attack, until only the truth remains. This constitutes what Kuhn called “normal science”. An overall model, the standing theory is in place, and scientists are filling in the blanks. It is tough work and worthy work. But, as the normal science phase drags on, discrepancies begin to arise.

When Isaac Newton published his theory of universal gravitation in 1687, it represented a fundamental change in the scientific understanding of the universe. It was a true piece of revolutionary science that dismissed theories as old as Aristotle. Once it was put forward and accepted by the community, normal science proceeded. Newton’s theory remained the standing model for over 200 years as the universe was measured and scrutinized using newer and better technologies. The cracks began to show. The movements of some of the planets didn’t fit the theory. The effects of gravity on light didn’t seem to either. And there was more. As always happens, a few contradictory measurements will tend to be dismissed as errors. But as they mount up, efforts will be made to explain them away within the context of the current model. This may well resolve the situation, but for Newton’s legacy this did not suffice. The physics community had entered what Kuhn called a “crisis phase”. The standing theory was clearly inaccurate, yet no theory existed to replace it. New hypotheses were put forward, amongst them the notion that the universe was filled with some manner of “aether”.

In 1905, almost unnoticed, a patent office clerk called Albert Einstein suggested a few things that might help explain how light worked. He demonstrated his ideas via some nice publications which were pretty much entirely dismissed as being a bit strange. A few years later, with a PhD under his belt, Einstein went the whole hog and published General Relativity, a new model that explained pretty much everything that was inconsistent in the Newtonian model and blew the aether out the window. The new thinking was so fundamentally different to Newton’s view of the universe that there was considerable resistance to his new model. As with all new science, revolutionary or otherwise, it had to face the purifying fire of skepticism, particularly from the aether heads. It wasn’t until 1919 that the experimental confirmations finally started to emerge. Einstein’s hypothesis prevailed and within a few years the scientific crisis was resolved. Kuhn called this sort of changeover a “paradigm shift”. The information, the observations, they’re still the same. The understanding has changed. Although the more recent notions of the aether-filled universe was now dismissed, Newton’s theories were not abolished. Instead they became merely a small part of a much bigger picture. Used for simple calculations where Einstein’s equations would be overkill. And so, the task of filling in the blanks in the new model began. Normal science was resumed.

Whilst scientists are often painted as inflexible types sticking to their established knowledge and rejecting change, the reality is that this resistance to change is as valuable as the change itself. It ensures that only the most robust hypotheses become theory. We stuffy boffins are always aware that one day the theories that we hold to may be superseded just as Newton was or may be overturned completely. Almost 100 years later, General Relativity, with additions, is still the accepted model. Yet at the extreme ends of physics the cracks are showing once again. It is perhaps ironic that it was Einstein’s ideas regarding the nature of light that would lead to the birth of Quantum Theory, a model which may one day lead to the next great paradigm shift in physics. For those interested, read up on the Large Hadron Collider. This year it may just prove or disprove a huge chunk of Quantum Theory. I have only a vague idea how, mind you. Physics is witchcraft in my books.

Normal science, crisis, paradigm shift, repeat. It’s a pattern that gave birth to giants of science such as Theory of Evolution and the Galilean model, or such field-specific shifts as the discovery of adaptive immunity. Don’t worry, I’ll probably write about those ones some day. My point is that paradigm shifts may change an entire arm of science, such as Biology, or just a small corner of that arm. Dr. Oz is, to my mind, on his way to heralding a paradigm shift in Biology. He’s in one of those small corners of the field, but the implications of his work speak for themselves. He’s convinced me, at least. The information hasn’t changed, but the way I understand it will never be the same. Let the crisis begin.

Science Says: Popular Science “Will Give You Cancer”

"Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology." -Nietzsche

How often do we pick up a newspaper to find that science has yet again warned us of the dangers of something we all like doing? Power lines cause cancer. Coffee causes strokes. Wait no, it protects against heart attacks. So does wine. But it causes liver disease. Several weeks later, it’ll be something else. Fear it. What passes for science news in the mainstream media, be it highbrow or tabloid is often understandably simplified. Maybe it is too simplified, but what is perhaps of more concern is just where this science is coming from, and whether the editors of our beloved media outlets have sufficient knowledge of the workings of science to make good calls on what is likely to represent real findings.

Take the recent (ish) example cited by Ben Goldacre in his column, Bad Science. It all started when the British newspaper the Sunday Express ran with a headline that said:

Suicides “Linked to Mobile Phone Masts”

This front page article revisited the recent epidemic of suicides in Britain, citing the opinion of a certain doctor “who sits on a government advisory committee on mobile radiation” and who has apparently discovered a link between mobile phone deflector masts and depression. The opinion was presented as a revolutionary scientific finding and doubtlessly caused many people great concern. Ever sceptical, Bad Science found out that said scientist is not part of a government advisory committee but of an independent group which interacts with the British department of health via a mediation group. They’re quite far removed from the government and have no official standing. They further found that said scientist had not published his findings via the conventional route and that the data was not readily available. To a scientist, this sort of evasiveness sets off major alarm bells. And they were justified in this case. It emerged that the same scientist has previously made the claim that AIDS is not caused by the HIV virus but by electromagnetic radiation. In scientific circles, this is roughly equivalent to holocaust denial. Not very coincidentally, this claim looks very much like the claims he is now making regarding depression in the Sunday Express. This smacks of an agenda, and an agenda was indeed found. The “scientist” has numerous books available to buy online regarding the dangers of electromagnetic radiation and the healing power of magnets. Magnet healing kits may also be purchased from him, albeit with no explicit (or legally-binding) claims of having any sort of healing power at all. To put it bluntly, The Sunday Express have given their front page to the science world’s version of Delboy.

There’s far more to the story but Ben Goldacre explains in much greater depth and with greater eloquence than I could. His website comes highly recommended.

What should the non-scientist reader believe these days? To my mind, the best way for the average Joe to approach mainstream science reporting (and all popular science in print or on TV) is with scepticism and basic knowledge of how scientific findings are published and validated. So let’s look at that process. Please? I’ve even provided a flow chart as a visual aid! See, the mainstream press is represented by a small explosion which I hope makes the flow chart exciting.

So, scientific research is conducted all over the place. It is done to varying standards and with varying bias or agenda. For a recap on how proper research is conducted check out my previous posting, First Assumptions. This research is submitted to science journals. These are like ultra specialist magazines, and they mostly will only publish raw science, fresh from the lab. Scientists don’t get paid for this. It’s a privilege to be accepted. In order for that to happen, the work has to pass through “peer review”. This means that the work is assessed by an independent group of scientists in the appropriate field. Every figure, graph and photo is scrutinised. Every turn of phrase dismantled. It’s rather like sending your work to a whole group of Simon Cowells. A lot of research gets rejected out of hand or must be brought up to scratch. Mean things are said, feelings are hurt. The best stuff, the most solid stuff, gets into the journals. Unless you are a scientist or an extreme enthusiast, don’t even think of trying to read these journals. The boredom alone may actually make you die.

If your material is particularly hot, it may well feature as a part of a review paper. These are articles that the journals publish in an attempt to summarise the current cutting-edge of a given field for easier reading. “Easier” being very much a relative word. These reviews are only likely to maim the average reader via boredom and an unforgiving learning curve.

If the research has broad appeal to the scientific community as a whole, it may get picked up by the specialist press. Publications such as Focus, Scientific American or New Scientist cater for scientists who like to read news from other fields. The Biologista, for example is a life scientist who also happens to enjoy reading about robots, dinosaurs and jetpacks. New Scientist provides, and it has pictures.

Finally, the very most relevant and exciting research with the broadest appeal possible reaches the mainstream press. Many newspapers have science supplements, many websites carry science news and some papers will go so far as to carry science-oriented stories on their front pages at times. Radio programmes will often do a round-up of the most amusing science of the week.

This system, from peer reviews through the journals and finally to the mainstream is how things would ideally work. What actually happened in the case of our Prof. Delboy is that information was passed from research of unknown quality directly to a credulous newspaper. No peer review or quality control. No vetting for relevance or, most importantly, bias or agenda. This happens a lot in the mainstream press when it comes to science. The source material appears tricky, so information is accepted on the basis of authority, rather than evidence. Newspapers rarely cite anything more than a name as a source, but that’s the starting point for critical reading, as Dr. Goldacre has ably demonstrated for us.

You don’t have to go read those tricky journals. You don’t even need to read the specialist magazines, though it helps. Just do a little digging. Google a name and look for connections to industry or lobby groups. If you want to see if a named source publishes their research much, follow the link on this blog to Google Scholar and put their name in the search box. Ask yourself, did this pass through peer review? Most importantly of all, demand more of your news source. Look for multiple opinions in science articles. Look for evidence and look for data. Demand critical coverage. Above all, be a sceptic, but reasonable. Be a scientist in your own right.