Posts Tagged ‘skepticism’
some thoughts on humanism and activism
What Australia needs
I’ve been a little more involved in ‘movements’ in recent years, though I’m not usually much of a joiner, and I’ve always been wary of ‘activism’, which is often associated with protesting, personning the barricades (doesn’t have quite the aggressive ring to it, does it?), even a bit of biffo – if largely verbal, by preference. I’ve just been hungry for a bit of stimulus – salon culture, witty and cultured and informative exchanges with people cleverer than myself. But since I’ve been occasionally asked to engage on a higher, or deeper level, in ‘the culture wars’, on the side of reason, atheism, secularism, humanism, whatever, my thoughts on the matter have started to crystallise, and they’re hopefully in evidence in my blog writing.
I don’t mind calling myself an activist for humanism, or for other isms, but I think we should be activists for rather than against. Now it might be argued that to argue for one thing is to argue against another, so it doesn’t really matter, but I think it matters a great deal. It’s a matter of trying to be positive and influencing others with your positivity. Secular humanism has a great case to promote, as do reason, self-awareness and ‘skepticism with sympathy’.
I’ve learned from years of teaching students from scores of different countries and cultures that we all can be excited by learning new stuff, that we’re amused by similar things, that we all want to improve and to be loved and appreciated. The ties that bind us as humans are far greater than those that divide us culturally or in other ways. I’ve also learned that the first principle of good teaching is to engage your students, rather than haranguing or badgering them. This may not seem easy when you’re teaching something as apparently dry and contentless as language and grammar, but language is essentially a technology for communicating content, and if we didn’t have anything meaningful or important to communicate, we’d never have developed it. So the key is to engage students with content that’s relevant to them, and stimulating and thought-provoking enough that they’ll want to communicate those thoughts.
I suppose I’m talking about constructive engagement, and this is the best form of activism. Of course, like everyone, I don’t always ‘constructively engage’. I get mad and frustrated, I dismiss with contempt, I feel offended or vengeful, yet the best antidote to those negative feelings is simple, and that is to throw yourself into the lives, the culture, the background of your ‘enemy’, or the ‘other’, which requires imagination as well as knowledge. I mis-spent a lot of my youth reading fiction from non-English backgrounds – from France and Germany, from Russia and eastern Europe, from Africa and Asia. It was a lot cheaper than travelling, especially as I avoided a lot of paid work in order to indulge my reading. Of course I read other stuff too, history, philosophy, psychology, new-wave feminism, but fiction – good fiction, of course – situated all these subjects and issues within conflicted, emotional, culturally-shaped and striving individuals, and provided me with a sense of the almost unfathomable complexity of human endeavour. The understanding of multiple backgrounds and contexts, especially when recognising that your own background is a product of so much chance, creates multiple sympathies, and that’s essential to humanism, to my mind.
However, there are limits to such identifications. Steven Pinker discusses this in The better angels of our nature (the best advertisement for humanism I’ve ever read) by criticising the overuse, or abuse, of the term ’empathy’ and expressing his preference for ‘sympathy’. Empathy is an impossible ideal, and it can involve losing your own bearings in identifying with another. There are always broader considerations.
Take the case of the vaccination debate. While there are definitely charlatans out there directly benefitting from the spread of misinformation, most of the people we meet who are opposed to vaccination aren’t of that kind, usually they have personal stories or information from people they trust that has caused them to think the way they do. We can surely feel sympathy with such people – after all, we also have had personal experiences that have massively influenced how we think, and we get much of our info from people we trust. But we also have evidence, or know how to get it. We owe it to ourselves and others to be educated on these matters. How many of us who advocate vaccination know how a vaccine actually works? If we wish to enter that particular debate, a working knowledge of the science is an essential prerequisite (and it’s not so difficult, there’s a lot of reliable explanatory material online, including videos), together with a historical knowledge of the benefits of vaccination in virtually eradicating various diseases. To arm yourself with and disseminate such knowledge is, to me, the best form of humanist activism.
I’ll choose a couple more topical issues, to look at how we could and should be positively active, IMHO. The first, current in Australia, is chaplaincy in schools. The second, a pressing issue right now for Australians but of universal import, is capital punishment.
The rather odd idea of chaplaincy in schools was first mooted by Federal Minister Greg Hunt in 2006 after lobbying from a church leader and was acted upon by the Howard government in 2007. It was odd for a number of reasons. First, education is generally held to be a state rather than a federal responsibility, and second, our public education system has no provision in it for religious instruction or religious proselytising. The term ‘chaplain’ has a clear religious, or to be more precise Christian, association, so why, in the 21st century, in an increasingly multicultural society in which Christianity was clearly on the decline according to decades of census figures, and more obviously evidenced by scores of empty churches in each state, was the federal government introducing these Christian reps into our schools via taxpayer funds? It was an issue tailor-made for humanist organisations, humanism being dedicated – and I trust my view on this is uncontroversial – to emphasising what unites us, in terms of human rights and responsibilities, rather than what divides us (religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation etc). To introduce these specifically Christian workers, out of the blue, into an increasingly non-Christian arena, seemed almost deliberately divisive.
Currently the National School Chaplaincy Program is in recess, having been stymied by two effective High Court challenges brought by a private citizen, Ron Williams, of the Humanist Society of Queensland. As far as I’m aware, Williams’ challenge was largely self-funded, but assisted by a donation from at least one of the state humanist societies. This was a cause that could and should have been financed and driven by humanists in a nationally co-ordinated campaign, which would have enabled humanists to have a voice on the issue, and to make a positive contribution to the debate.
What would have been that contribution? Above all to provide evidence, for the growing secularism and multiculturalism of the nation and therefore the clearly anachronistic and potentially divisive nature of the government’s policy. Identification with every Christian denomination is dropping as a percentage of the national population, and the drop is accelerating. This is nobody’s opinion, it’s simply a fact. Church attendance is at the lowest it’s ever been in our Christian history – another fact. Humanists could have gone on the front foot in questioning the role of these chaplains. In the legislation they’re expected to provide “support and guidance about ethics, values, relationships and spirituality”, but there’s an insistence that they shouldn’t replace school counsellors, for counselling isn’t their role. Apparently they’re to provide support without counselling, just by ‘being there’. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just have their photos on the school walls? The ‘spirituality’ role is one that humanists could have a lot of fun with. I’ve heard the argument that people are just as religious as ever, but that they’ve rejected the established churches, and are developing their own spirituality, their own relationship to their god, so I suppose it would follow that their spirituality needs to be nourished at school. But the government has made a clear requirement that chaplains need to be members of an established religion (and obviously of a Christian denomination), so how exactly is that going to work?
While humour, along with High Court challenges and pointed questions about commitment to real education and student welfare, would be the way to ‘get active’ with the school chaplaincy fiasco, the capital punishment issue is rather more serious.
The Indonesian decision to execute convicted drug pedlars of various nationalities has attracted a lot of unwanted publicity, from an Indonesian perspective, but a lot of the response, including some from our government, has been lecturing and hectoring. People almost gleefully describe the Indonesians as barbarians and delight in the term ‘state-sanctioned murder’, mostly unaware of the vast changes in our society that have made capital punishment, which ended here in the sixties, seem like something positively medieval. These changes have not occurred to the same degree in other parts of the world, and as humanists, with a hopefully international perspective, we should be cognisant of this, aware of the diversity, and sympathetic to the issues faced by other nations faced with serious drug and crime problems. But above all we should look to offer humane solutions.
By far the best contribution to this issue I’ve heard so far has come from Richard Branson, representing the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP), who spoke of his and other commissioners’ interest in speaking to the Indonesians about solutions to their drug problems, not to lecture or to threaten, but to advise on drug policies that work. No mention was made about capital punishment, which I think was a good thing, for what has rendered capital punishment obsolete more than anything else has been the development of societies that see their members as flawed but capable, mostly, of development for the better. Solutions to crime, drug use and many other issues – including, for that matter, joining terrorist organisations – are rarely punitive. They involve support, communication and connection. Branson, interviewed on the ABC’s morning news program, pointed to the evidence showing that harsh penalties had no effect on the drug trade, and that the most effective policy by far was legalisation. It’s probably not a story that our government would be sympathetic to, and it takes us deeply into the politics of drug law reform, but it is in fact a science-based approach to the issue that humanists should be active in supporting and promulgating. Branson pointed to the example of Portugal, which had, he claimed, drug problems as serious as that of Indonesia, which have since been greatly alleviated through a decriminalisation and harm-reduction approach.
I hope to write more about the GCDP’s interesting and productive-looking take on drug policy on my Solutions OK website in the future. Meanwhile, this is just the sort of helpful initiative that humanists should be active in getting behind. Indonesians are arguing that the damage being done by drug pushers requires harshly punitive measures, but the GCDP’s approach, which bypasses the tricky issue of national sovereignty, and capital punishment itself, is offered in a spirit of co-operation that is perfectly in line with an active, positive humanism.
So humanism should be as active as possible, in my view, and humanists should strive to get themselves heard on such broad issues as education, crime, equity and the environment, but they should enter the fray armed with solutions that are thoughtful, practicable and humane. Hopefully, we’re here to help.
the low-down on antioxidants
forget ORAC, just eat them coz they look so yummy
I’m going to risk alienating other colleagues here, but this post follows on from the last set in being inspired by work conversations, this time about plants and antioxidants. A plant was brought in by a staffer who apparently dabbles in naturopathy on the side, and its antioxidant properties were extolled. What do I know about antioxidants? Very little, except that some years ago red wine and various berries were being sold to us as containing life-enhancing quantities of these good molecules or whatever they are. It had something to do with binding to and neutralising ‘bad’ free radicals in our bodies. Of course I had no idea what free radicals were. Then later, via the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe and other sources, I heard that the experts were back-tracking heavily on these life-enhancing properties.
So, what with being told in the staff room that antioxidants could cure cancer or some such thing, while elsewhere hearing that they’ve been wildly over-hyped, I’ve been considering for some time that I should do a post on these beasties, for dummies like me.
As usual, the first thing that greets me when I attempt to research this kind of thing is the pile of propadandist rubbish you have to wade through in order to find bona fide, science-based info sites. The good thing is that, over time, you get quicker at dodging bullshit.
I immediately homed in on a link saying ‘beware of antioxidant claims’, as being right up my alley. It took me to the ‘Berkeley Wellness‘ site out of the University of California. There I’m given the first definition – that an antioxidant is ‘a substance that helps mop up cell-damaging substances known as free radicals’, which leaves me hardly the wiser. I’m also told that selling products with claimed antioxidant properties is real big business in the US.
I’m also introduced to the ORAC (oxygen radical absorbance capacity) concept. My neighbour has an ORAC diet book and I’ve wondered what it meant. It seems that in the USA there’s a trend towards advertising the ‘antioxidant power’ of products based on ORAC scores – 7,300 ORAC units per 100 grams for a certain cereal, for example, or 6000 ORACs for a pack of corn chips. Are these numbers reliable, and what do they mean exactly?
Not much, apparently. The fact is that antioxidant interactions in the body are extremely complex and little understood. ORAC is only one of a number of different antioxidant tests used by different scientists in different labs, and even when they use the same test, such as ORAC, different labs come up with widely different results. Let me quote the Berkeley site directly:
Moreover, ORAC and other tests measure antioxidant capacity of substances only in test tubes. How well the antioxidants suppress oxidation and protect against free radicals in people is pretty much anyone’s guess.
A lot can happen to antioxidants once a food is digested and metabolized in the body, and little is known about their interactions. What has high antioxidant activity in a test tube may end up having little or no effect in the body. Preliminary research has found that when people eat high-ORAC foods, their blood antioxidant levels rise, but such results still don’t prove that this translates into actual health benefits.
The article ends with the usual smart advice. Choose a balanced diet, don’t eat too much, not too heavy on the meat, and with a fair quantity of whole grains, nuts and legumes, fresh fruit and veg, and you’ll get all the antioxidants and other nutrients you need. Actually, this article from I fucking love science, which gathers together expert advice on avoiding cancers, covers it all – keep your weight down, keep to the above-mentioned diet, exercise regularly in moderation, watch the sugar and salt intake and usually she’ll be right, whether it’s cancer, heart disease or whatever.
Not much more to say, really. But no doubt a lot more can be said about the science, and I’ll say just a bit about it here. Antioxidants, as the name suggests, are compounds that reduce oxidation in the body. Free radicals – unstable molecules – are produced when oxygen is metabolised. Free radicals remove electrons from other molecules, damaging DNA and other cellular material. They’re necessary for the body to function, but an overload can cause serious problems, and that’s where a common-sense diet comes in – though there are other factors which can bring about an overload, including stress, pollution, smoking (pollution by another name), sunlight and alcohol. Everything counts in large amounts.
Antioxidants come in many varieties. Nutrient antioxidants found in a variety of foods include vitamins A, C and E, as well as copper, zinc and selenium. Non-nutrient antioxidants, believed it have even greater effects (raising antioxidant levels), include phytochemical such as lycopene in tomatoes, and anthocyanins, found in blueberries and cranberries. I can’t find any clear info on the difference between non-nutrient and nutrient antioxidants, and it doesn’t appear to be important. There is, of course, a lot of ongoing research on all of this, and it would be easy to get obsessed with it all, raising your stress levels and sending those free radicals zinging through your body in legions. And if that’s what you want, why not buy this book, for a small fortune, and find out all that we currently know about how frying food affects its nutritive value, with particular attention to antioxidants. Of course, by the time you’ve finished it, it’ll likely be out of date.
There’s a ton of material out there on antioxidants, but Wikipedia is an excellent place to start, and to finish. One key piece of advice, in this as with other matters of diet, is – don’t rely on supplements when you can simply improve your diet (recent large-scale trials have shown they don’t work anyway). Get what you need from real food, as far as you can.
on vaccines and type 1 diabetes, part 3 – causes
As mentioned earlier, it’s not precisely known what causes diabetes type 1, more commonly known as childhood diabetes. There’s a genetic component, but it’s clearly environmental factors that are leading to the recent apparently rapid rise in this type.
I use the word ‘apparent’ because it’s actually hard to put figures on this rise, due to a paucity of historical records. This very thorough and informative article, already 12 years old, from the ADA (American Diabetes Association – an excellent website for everything to do with the evidence and the science on diabetes), tries to gather together the patchy worldwide data to cover the changing demography and the evolving disease process. At the beginning of the 2oth century childhood diabetes was rare but commonly fatal (before insulin), and even by mid-century no clear rise in childhood incidence had been recorded. To quote the article, ‘even by 1980 only a handful of studies were available, the “hot spots” in Finland and Sardinia were unrecognized, and no adequate estimates were available for 90% of the world’s population’. Blood glucose testing in the early 20th century was far from being as simple a matter as it is today, and the extent of undiagnosed cases is hard to determine.
There’s no doubt, however, that in those countries keeping reliable data, such as Norway and Denmark, a marked upturn in incidence occurred from the mid 20th century, followed by a levelling out from the 1980s. Studies from Sardinia and the Netherlands have found a similar pattern, but in Finland the increase from mid-century has been quite linear, with no levelling out. Data from other northern European countries and the USA, though less comprehensive, show a similar mid-century upturn. Canada now (or as of 12 years ago) has the third highest rate of childhood diabetes in the world. The trend seems to have been that many of the more developed countries first showed a sharp increase, followed by something of a slow-down, and then other countries, such as those of central and eastern Europe and the Middle East, ‘played catch-up’. Kuwait, for example, had reached seventh in the world at the time of the article, confounding many beliefs about the extent of the disease’s genetic component.
The article is admirably careful not to rush to conclusions about causes. It may be that a number of environmental factors have converged to bring about the rise in incidence. For example, it’s known that rapid growth in early childhood increases the risk, and children do in fact grow faster on average than they did a century ago. Obesity may also be a factor. Baffled researchers naturally look for something new that has entered the childhood environment, either in terms of nutrition (e.g. increased exposure to cow’s milk) or infection (enteroviruses). Neither of these possibilities fit the pattern of incidence in any obvious way, though there may be subtle changes in antigenicity or exposure at different stages of development, but there’s scant evidence of these.
Another line of inquiry is the possible loss of protective factors, as part of the somewhat vague but popular ‘hygiene hypothesis’, which argues that lack of early immune system stimulation creates greater susceptibility, particularly to allergies and asthma, but perhaps also to childhood diabetes and other conditions. The ADA article has this comment:
Epidemiological evidence for the hygiene hypothesis is inconsistent for childhood type 1 diabetes, but it is notorious that the NOD mouse is less likely to develop diabetes in the presence of pinworms and other infections. Pinworm infestation was common in the childhood populations of Europe and North America around the mid-century, and this potentially protective exposure has largely been lost since that time.
The NOD (non-obese diabetic) strain of mice was developed in Japan as an animal model for type 1 diabetes.
The bottom line from all this is that more research and monitoring of the disease needs to be done. Type 1 diabetes is a complex challenge to our understanding of the human immune system, and of the infinitely varied feedback loops between genetics and environment, requiring perhaps a broader questioning and analysis than has been applied thus far. Again I’ll quote, finally, from the ADA article:
In conclusion, the quest to understand type 1 diabetes has largely been driven by the mechanistic approach, which has striven to characterize the disease in terms of defining molecular abnormalities. This goal has proved elusive. Given the complexity and diversity of biological systems, it seems increasingly likely that the mechanistic approach will need to be supplemented by a more ecological concept of balanced competition between complex biological processes, a dynamic interaction with more than one possible outcome. The traditional antithesis between genes and environment assumed that genes were hardwired into the phenotype, whereas growth and early adaptation to the environment are now viewed as an interactive process in which early experience of the outside world is fed back to determine lasting patterns of gene expression. The biological signature of each individual thus derives from a dynamic process of adaptation, a process with a history.
However, none of this appears to provide any backing for those who claim that a vaccine is responsible for the increased prevalence of the condition. So let’s wade into this specific claim.
It seems the principle claim of the anti-vaxxers is that vaccines suppress our natural immune system. This is the basic claim, for example, of Dr Josef Mercola, a prominent and heavily self-advertising anti-vaxxer whose various sites happen to come up first when you combine and google key terms such as ‘vaccination’ and ‘natural immunity’. Mercola’s railings against vaccination, microwaves, sunscreens and HIV (it’s harmless) have garnered him quite a following among the non compos mentis, but you should be chary of leaping in horror from his grasp into the waiting arms of the next site on the list, that of the Vaccination Awareness Network (VAN), another Yank site chock-full of of BS about the uselessness of and the harm caused by every vaccine ever developed, some of it impressively technical-sounding, but accompanied by ‘research links’ that either go nowhere or to tabloid news reports. Watch out too for the National Vaccination Information Centre (NVIC), another anti-vax front, full of heart-rending anecdotes which omit everything required to make an informed assessment. The best may seem to lack conviction, being skeptics and all, but it’s surely true that the worst are full of passionate intensity.
There is no evidence that the small volumes of targeted antigens introduced into our bodies by vaccines have any negative impact on our highly complex immune system. This would be well-nigh impossible to test for, and the best we might do is look for a correlation between vaccination and increased (or decreased) levels of disease incidence. No such correlation has been found between the MMR vaccine and diabetes, though this Italian paper did find a statistically significant association between the incidence of mumps and rubella viral infections and the onset of type 1 diabetes. Another paper from Finland found that the incidence of type 1 diabetes levelled out after the introduction of the MMR vaccine there, and that the presence of mumps antibodies was reduced in diabetic children after vaccination. This is a mixed result, but as yet there haven’t been any follow-up studies.
To conclude, there is just no substantive evidence of any kind to justify all the hyperventilating.
But to return to the conversation with colleagues that set off this bit of exploration, it concluded rather blandly with the claim that, ‘yes of course vaccinations have done more good than harm, but maybe the MMR vaccine isn’t so necessary’. One colleague took a ‘neutral’ stance. ‘I know kids that haven’t been vaccinated, and they’ve come to no harm, and I know kids that have, and they’ve come to no harm either. And measles and mumps, they’re everyday diseases, and relatively harmless, it’s probably not such a bad thing to contract them…’
But this is a false neutrality. Firstly, when large numbers of parents choose not to immunise their kids, it puts other kids at risk, as the graph at the top shows. And secondly, these are not harmless diseases. Take measles. While writing this, I had a memory of someone I worked with over twenty years ago. He had great thick lenses in his glasses. I wear glasses too, and we talked about our eye defects. ‘I had pretty well perfect vision as a kid,’ he told me, ‘and I always sat at the back of the class. Then I got measles and was off school for a fortnight. When I went back, sat at the back, couldn’t see a thing. Got my eyes tested and found out they were shot to buggery.’
Anecdotal evidence! Well, it’s well known that blindness and serious eye defects are a major complication of measles, which remains a killer disease in many of the poorest countries in the world. In fact, measles blindness is the single leading cause of blindness in those countries, with an estimated 15,000 to 60,000 cases a year. So pat yourself on the back for living in a rich country.
In 2013, some 145,700 people died from measles – mostly young children. In 1980, before vaccination was widely implemented, an estimated 2.6 million died annually from measles, according to the WHO.
Faced with such knowledge, claims to ‘neutrality’ are hardly forgivable.
on vaccines and diabetes, part 1
A picture lies better than 1000 words
The other day, when I grumbled about anti-vaccination views during after-work drinks, a colleague said she was ‘semi-anti-vaccination’, specifically in relation to the connection between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and diabetes. When I expressed skepticism, she challenged me on my knowledge of the science, which admittedly isn’t great – and I made matters look pretty bad for myself by egregiously claiming that children couldn’t be vaccinated before two years of age, instead of two months, a mistake I wouldn’t have made if I’d had kids of my own to vaccinate (or not), like most of my workmates.
When I inquired about this mysterious connection, I was curtly informed that it was nothing vague, but crystal clear causation. The link so often made between diabetes and increased sugar in our diets was bogus, I was told, because the timing didn’t make sense. Presumably the timing of the rise in diabetes did match the introduction of the vaccine, though such a correlation, if it exists, is far from proving causation. Proof would require that some component of the MMR vaccine was having a direct effect on our immune system in such a way as to increase susceptibility to the disease. If this were true, it would be absolutely sensational news, demanding domination of newspaper headlines worldwide. Extraordinary claims, as they say, require extraordinary evidence
Now, I must say that my sceptical antennae were immediately raised when I heard this claim, because I hadn’t heard it before, and as a regular reader of science magazines and relatively up-to-date popular science books, and a regular listener to science and scepticism podcasts, I’m reasonably sure I’m more scientifically literate than the average layperson. I’m aware, of course, of the vociferous anti-vaccination crowd and their claims of a causal connection between vaccines and autism, asthma and just about everything else that currently ails us. And I’m familiar too with the medical and immunisation experts, such as Doctors Paul Offit, Steve Novella and David Gorski, who are fighting the good fight against the tide of misinformation with evidence-based science. However, I’m perfectly willing to admit to a possible blind spot re diabetes, as it hasn’t personally affected me or anyone close to me.
I must say, though, that my ‘sceptical training’ enabled me to turn up this article from the Scientific American website within 5 seconds of looking (the first 4 seconds were spent avoiding the many innocuous-sounding websites that I knew to be fronts for anti-vaccination propaganda). The article reports on a review, conducted by the US institute of medicine, of over 1,000 published research studies on the adverse effects of eight vaccine types (including MMR). These vaccine types constitute the majority of vaccines against which claims have been made to the USA’s National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). The report concludes that ‘vaccines are largely safe, and do not cause autism or diabetes’. Specifically on the MMR vaccine, the report had this to say:
The committee found that evidence “favors rejection” of discredited reports that have linked the MMR vaccine to autism and, along with the DTaP vaccine, to type 1 diabetes.
The DTaP vaccine covers three deadly bacterial diseases – diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, or whooping cough.
End of story? Well, there’s always the possibility of a medical conspiracy, or of sloppy and complacent scientific analysis – doubtless influenced by Big Pharma. Needless to say, I’m very doubtful about this.
The final chapter of Dr Ben Goldacre’s landmark book Bad Science is entitled ‘The media’s MMR hoax’. It deals essentially with the claimed link between the vaccine and autism, but it has much of value to say about health scares in general and the role of the media in promoting them, either deliberately or inadvertently. For example, the MMR-autism connection scare was almost entirely confined to Britain at first, though it has since spread to the USA and Australia. It is almost unheard of in non-English-speaking countries, in spite of their using the exact same vaccine. Conversely, in France in the 1990s, the hepatitis B vaccine was being linked by some members of the public, supported by some in the media, to a rise in multiple sclerosis. No such link was being made outside of France, though the vaccine was the same everywhere. And there are many other examples to show that these scares are more culturally than scientifically based.
The anti-vaccination movement has a long and, it must be said, inglorious history, with the same sorts of arguments, and the same sorts of results, occurring from the beginning. Goldacre cites this interesting Scientific American article from 1888:
The success of the anti-vaccinationists has been aptly shown by the results in Zurich, Switzerland, where for a number of years, until 1883, a compulsory vaccination law obtained, and smallpox was wholly prevented– not a single case occurred in 1882. This result was seized upon the following year by the antivaccinationists and used against the necessity for any such law, and it seems they had sufficient influence to cause its repeal. The death returns for that year (1883) showed that for every 1,000 deaths two were caused by smallpox; In 1884 there were three; in 1885, 17, and in the first quarter of 1886, 85.
But, hey, measles is hardly smallpox, is it? It’s harmless. Is it worth disrupting our ‘natural immune system’ with vaccines just to protect ourselves against a few character-building ailments? Isn’t our over-reliance on vaccines potentially catastrophic for our bodies?
Well, I’ll delve more into such claims, and into diabetes more specifically, in my next piece.
disassembling Kevin Vandergriff’s gish gallop, part 1
I’m always taken in a thousand different directions by my vagabond mind, as the history of my blog shows, but philosophy has long been an interest, more recently neglected due to trying to keep up, unsuccessfully of course, with the wonders of scientific discovery and speculation. A move away from rational to empirical stuff you might say, if only it was that simple.
So I recently listened to a very wordy debate presented on the Reasonable Doubts podcast between Jeffrey Jay Lowder (atheist) and Kevin Vandergriff (theist) on whether metaphysical naturalism (essentially the scientific approach) or Christian theism yields the best understanding of the universe (or multiverse?), based on ‘the evidence’. It sounded like a good idea at the time, as it sounded like it might be as much a report on empiricism – presenting the evidence – as a philosophical debate. Not surprisingly though, I became increasingly frustrated as I listened, especially to Vandergriff’s long-winded, fast -paced exposition of way too many points (he had to get everything in within the specified time limit, and was still gushing when the end-game theme music started playing). Vandergriff has clearly been inspired by the ‘success’ of William Lane Craig’s debating tactics, even trying to outdo WLC in the number of debating points that he claims must be rebutted by Lowder in order to ‘win’. Well, if wishes were fishes the sea would be swarming.
So the bewildering number of points (though many of them tediously familiar to anyone acquainted with WLC’s arguments) and the speed of delivery naturally reminded me of the old ‘gish gallop’, and my response is to regain control by taking my own good time to pick apart the arguments, so replacing the debate approach with a more effective ‘philosophical’ one, in writing. Not that this was a public debate; it was a written-and-read audio exchange, and many of the comments, linked to above, deal pretty effectively with Vandergriff’s fails. I’m just doing this to get back in the saddle, so to speak.
I won’t be dealing so much with Lowder’s pro-naturalism argument except where it supports my own, but generally I thought that there was too much emphasis, on both sides, on the old philosophical approaches, and not enough on evidence per se.
Vandergriff starts by saying he wants to defend three claims:
1. Christian theism is not significantly less simple than specified naturalism.
(Vandergriff doesn’t explain what he means by ‘specified’ here, and seems to use it as a technical term. A google search on ‘specified naturalism’ has come up with nothing (though the creationist William Dembski likes to use the term ‘specified complexity’), so I will assume he simply means metaphysical naturalism as per the debate title.
2. If God [i.e. the god called God] exists necessarily, then the prior probability of naturalism, no matter how simple, is zero.
3. Christian theism has significantly more explanatory power and scope than specified naturalism.
Before listening to Vandergriff’s defence of these claims I want to make some preliminary remarks. On (1), presumably Vandergriff has the Ockham’s Razor heuristic in mind – keep your assumptions to a minimum. But obviously Christian theism involves two assumptions over and above the assumptions of naturalism (that all is natural and potentially explicable in naturalistic terms). It assumes not only that there’s a supernatural agent responsible for the multiverse, but that the said supernatural agent is the god called God, who had an earthly son who was also a god, sort of, and all the other baggage that attaches to him, or them. These are big assumptions, and, to my mind, far from simple. On (2) yes, if any supernatural agent exists necessarily, I suppose that means supernaturalism reigns supreme and naturalism is vanquished. All we need is evidence, but not only can we not find any, we don’t even know what we’re looking for. Concepts like supreme goodness and maximal power are no more real than Plato’s ideal forms. We don’t call them ideal for nothing. And on (3), it seems to me that the explanatory power of naturalism is virtually infinite, because each new explanation leads to a host of new things to be explained (e.g the DNA molecule is discovered to be the essential building block of all life, but then why is it made up of precisely these amino acids, and why this sequence and why the helical structure, and why introns and exons, etc etc). Christian theism seems to me more like an evasion of explanation, and the ‘don’t question God’s handiwork’ argument was in fact quite prevalent in the 17th century and before, and was often used effectively to limit scientific inquiry.
Vandergriff next defines his god for us, with the usual ‘ideal form’ language. The god called God is maximally powerful, intelligent and good. I’ve elsewhere described this abstraction as a boob: a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent being. Do boobs really exist? I’d like to hope so, the more the merrier. But I may be confusing my concepts here, so I’ll stick with gods. The god called God, according to Vandergriff, is a transcendent, personal being who created the physical world, and who sent a set of moral messages to us via Jesus.
Vandergriff emphasises his contention that a personal being (a being with personhood, just like us?) caused the physical world (presumably the multiverse) to exist, and that this multiverse is value-generating rather than indifferent, as it is claimed to be under naturalism. He also claims that, under naturalism, the universe or multiverse is eternal and uncaused, which his theism disputes. I would’ve thought naturalism remains open to the questions of ‘eternality’, finitude or infinitude, and ultimate causation. My own recent readings on the universe/multiverse tell me that cosmologists have many positions on these matters, though all approach them from a naturalistic perspective.
Next Vandergriff returns to the 3 claims stated above. He takes issue with Lowder for presupposing an indifferent universe in some of his arguments, which he cites another philosopher, Paul Draper, as claiming ‘is roughly equal in simplicity to theism’. One wonders how these various simplicities can be weighed or measured, by Draper or anyone else. Presumably all that’s meant by this is that it’s just as straightforward to posit a naturalistic universe, with no intrinsic value, as it is to posit a supernatural-being-created universe, full of value. Vandergriff thinks that this goes a long way to prove the claim that theism is not a more complex explanation than naturalism, and this somehow bolsters theism. But it seems to me, on reflection, that the two cases are not roughly equal in simplicity, because with theism, first you have a supernatural creator, second you have value-adding, so to speak. In fact, these two elements struck me as separate when I first leaned about a supernatural creator as a child sent to Sunday School. Full of skepticism and curiosity about this new entity I was learning about, I wondered, how do we know this being is so concerned about us being good? If he created the world in the long ago, why does that automatically mean he’s still obsessed with us? If he’s so all-powerful and super-clever, why wouldn’t he want to test his powers on some new project, just as I might build a fabulous house out of lego and then abandon it for bigger and better projects? In other words, couldn’t a supernatural creator be indifferent too? Or only interested for a period before turning his attention to something else? Vandergriff would get round this objection, I suppose, by pointing to his assumptions about the supernatural being, especially the one about ‘goodness’. An all-good god would never abandon his creation but would, apparently, be eternally obsessed by it. But I’m not sure that perfect goodness (whatever that means) entails this, and anyway these are just assumptions.
Now to Vandergriff’s second claim. Again he quotes Paul Draper, who says that if the god called God necessarily exists, then naturalism is incoherent and theism has a probability of 1. That’s a long-winded way of saying if theism has to be true, it’s true, like absolutely. Of course, that’s a big if, possibly bigger than the known universe. However, at this stage, Vandergriff provides no evidence for this necessary existence (though he says he has two arguments up his sleeve).
On the third contention, Vandergriff goes straight into argument.
1. God is the best explanation for the origin of the universe.
Here, Vandergriff cites the 2003 Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem relating to an expanding universe (and, I think, other universe models), to support his argument that the universe is non-eternal, to which one commentator on the Reasonable Doubts blog replied tersely ‘Yet another William Lane Craig clone abusing the Borde Guth Velenkin theorem’. In fact I’ve dealt with this claim myself well enough in one of my responses to WLC’s typical debates. Of course the issue here is not whether the universe had a beginning, but what was the cause of that beginning, or what were the conditions at that beginning, or is it meaningful to talk of a ‘before’ the beginning. But here’s where the likes of Vandergriff and WLC make the leap into metaphysics or the supernatural with wild talk of a transcendent, miraculous cause, which, of course, allows tremendous scope for the imagination. The fact is, we’re far from clear about the origin. I’ve read one hypothesis that the big bang may have been the result of a collision or interaction between two ‘branes’, of which there are presumably many in the multiverse. I’ve also read that, as we get asymptotically close to the big bang (going backwards), the laws of nature break down in the super-intensity of it all, so who knows? The Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem, moreover, even on Vandergriff’s (and WLC’s) much-disputed interpretation of it, doesn’t disconfirm naturalism at all, because naturalism is not dependent on an eternal, uncaused universe. Says who?
But it really gets ridiculous when Vandergriff, having proved to his satisfaction that the universe must have a cause, ‘wonders’ what that cause might be, and concludes that it must be an ‘unembodied mind’ (gifted, of course, with miraculous powers). How did he come to this conclusion? Well, this mind must be miraculous because it ‘created the world with no prior materials’. How does Vandergriff know this? The obvious answer is: he doesn’t, he’s just making stuff up. And why would this ‘transcendent’ cause have to be an unembodied mind? Because, according to Vandergriff, only abstract objects and unembodied minds can transcend the universe, but since abstract objects can’t cause anything, the cause must be an unembodied mind!
But of course an unembodied mind is just another abstract object. There are no real unembodied minds that we know of (though Fred Hoyle sort of created one in The Black Cloud, but that one didn’t go around creating universes, in spite of being super-smart), and Vandergriff doesn’t even consider it a requirement to prove that such things exist. As for ‘miraculous’, that just reminds me of the old cartoon – which I’ve put on top of this post.
I’ll have a look at Vandergriff’s next argument, and so forth, in my next post, though I’m not sure why I’m bothering. It’s good mind-exercise I suppose.
For now, though, I’ll watch some FKA Twigs videos, for delightful relief.
a plague of mysteries
Well, maybe not quite
I’m writing this because of some remarks made in the workplace which – well, let’s just say they set my sceptical antennae working overtime. They were claims made about the bubonic plague, of all things.
Bubonic plague, dubbed the Black Death throughout European history, is a zoonotic disease, which means it spreads from species to species – in this case from rodents to humans via fleas. Actually there are three types of ‘black death’ plagues, all caused by the enterobacterium Yersinia pestis, the others being the septicemic plague and the pneumonic plague. Other zoonotic diseases include ebola and influenza. Flea-borne infections generally attack the lymphatic system, as does bubonic plague. The term ‘bubonic’ comes from Greek, meaning groin, and the most well-known symptom of the disease were ‘buboes’, grotesque swellings of the glands in the groin and armpit.
It wasn’t called the Black Death for nothing (the blackness was necrotising flesh). It’s estimated that half the European population was wiped out by it in the 14th century. If untreated, up to two-thirds of those infected will be dead within four days. With modern antibiotic treatments, the mortality rate is of course greatly reduced. The broad-based antibiotic, streptomycin has proved very effective. Of course treatment should be immediate if possible, and prophylactic antibiotics should be given to anyone in contact with the infected.
The plague is first known to have stuck Europe in the sixth century, at the time of Justinian. The Emperor actually caught the disease but recovered after treatment. It’s believed that the death toll was very high, but little detail has been recorded. The fourteenth century outbreak appears to have originated in Mongolia, from where it spread through Mongol incursions into the Crimea. An estimated 25 million died in this outbreak from 1347 to 1352. More limited outbreaks occurred in later centuries, and the last serious occurrences in Europe were in Marseille in 1720, Messina (Sicily) in 1743, and Moscow in 1770. However it emerged again in Asia in the nineteenth century. Limited for some time to south-west China, it slowly spread from Hong-Kong to India, where it killed millions of people in the early twentieth century. Infected rats were inadvertently transported to other countries by trading vessels, resulting in outbreaks in Hawaii and Australia. By 1959, when worldwide casualties dropped to under 200 annually, the World Health Organisation was able to declare the disease under control, but there was another outbreak in India in 1994, causing widespread panic and over 50 deaths.
So that’s a v brief history of the rise and fall of bubonic plague, but I’m interested in looking at early treatments and the discovery of its cause. For the fact is that, even in 1900, when the plague first came to Australia, there was no clear consensus among the experts as to its means of transmission, with many believing that it was as a result of contact with the infected. However, a growing body of evidence was showing a connection with epizootic infection in rats, and as it happened, work done by Australian bacteriologists Frank Tidswell, William Armstrong and Robert Dick, working for a new public health department in Sydney under Chief Medical Officer John Ashburton Thompson, established as a direct result of the plague outbreaks in Sydney from 1900 to 1925, contributed substantially to the modern understanding of Yersinia pestis and its spread from rats to humans. This Australian work was another step forward in the germ theory of disease, first suggested by the French physician Nicolas Andry in 1700, and built upon by many experimental and speculative savants over the next 150 years. The great practical success of John Snow’s work on cholera, followed by the researches of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, established the theory as mainstream science, but zoonotic infections, especially indirect ones where the infection passes from one species to another by means of a vector, have always been tricky to work out.
In fact it was in Hong Kong that the Yersinia pestis bacterium was identified as the culprit. A breakout of plague occurred there in the 1890s, and Alexandre Yersin, a bacteriologist who had worked under both Pasteur and Bloch, was invited to research the disease. He identified the bacterium in June 1894, at about the same time as a Japanese researcher, Kitasato Shibasaburo. The cognoscenti recognise that both men should share the honour of discovery.
What is fascinating, though, is that the spread of plague from Asia in the 1890s to various ports of the world in the earlier 20th century was very different from the spread of earlier pandemics. Did this have anything to do with science or human practices? Well, what follows is drawn from by far the most comprehensive analysis of the disease I’ve found online, Samuel Cohn’s ‘Epidemiology of the Black Death and successive waves of plague’, in the Cambridge Journal of Medical History.
Cohn’s research and analysis casts credible doubt on the whole plague story, specifically the assumption that we’re dealing with one disease, from the sixth century through to modern outbreaks. He recounts the standard story of three separate pandemics, in the sixth century with a number of recurrences, ditto in the fourteenth century, and in the nineteenth. However, the epidemiology of the most recent pandemic, definitely attributed to Y Pestis and its carrier the Oriental rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, is substantially different from that of pandemics one and two, a fact which, according to Cohn, has been obscured by inaccurate analysis of the records. Cohn’s own analysis, it must be said, is fulsome, with 30 pages of references in a 68-page online essay. He doesn’t have a solution as to what caused the earlier pandemics, but he asks some cogent questions. For my own understanding’s sake, I’ll try to summarise the issues in sections.
speed of transmission
Pandemic 3, if we can call it that, was a much slower mover than the previous two. It seems to have sprung up in China’s Yunnan province from where it reached Hong Kong in 1894. It was noted in the early 20th century that Y pestis was travelling overland at a speed of only 12 to 15 kilometres a year. This can be explained by the fact that Y pestis is a disease mainly of rats, though other rodents can also be infected, and rats don’t move far from their home territories. At this rate pandemic 3, even in a world of railways, cars, and dense human populations, would have taken some 25 years to cover the distance that pandemic 1 covered in 3 months. Pandemic 1 made its first appearance in an Egyptian port in 541 and quickly spread around the Mediterranean from Iberia to Anatolia. Within two years of first occurrence it had reached to the wastelands of Ireland and eastern Persia. Pandemic 2, believed to have originated in India, China or the Russian steppes, made its first European appearance in Messina, Sicily in 1347. Within three years it had impacted most of continental Europe, and had even reached Greenland. The fastest overland travel recorded for plague occurred in 664 (pandemic 1), when it took only ninety-one days to travel 385 kilometres from Dover to Lastingham (4.23 km a day)— far faster than anything seen from Y pestis since its discovery in 1894. Pandemic 2’s speed was similar, as Cohn details it:
like the early medieval plague, the “second pandemic” was a fast mover, travelling in places almost as quickly per diem as modern plague spreads per annum. George Christakos and his co-researchers have recently employed sophisticated stochastic and mapping tools to calculate the varying speeds of dissemination and areas afflicted by the Black Death, 1347–51, through different parts of Europe at different seasons. They have compared these results to the overland transmission speeds of the twentieth-century bubonic plague and have found that the Black Death travelled at 1.5 to 6 kilometres per day—much faster than any spread of Yersinia pestis in the twentieth century. The area of Europe covered over time by the Black Death in the five years 1347 to 1351 was even more impressive. Christakos and his colleagues maintain that no human epidemic has ever shown such a propensity to cover space so swiftly (even including the 1918 influenza epidemic). By contrast to the spread of plague in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the difference is colossal: while the area of Europe covered by the Black Death was to the 4th power of time between 1347 and 1351, that of the bubonic plague in India between 1897 and 1907 was to the 2nd power of time, a difference of two orders of magnitude.
All of which raises the question – why was pandemic 3 so much slower than the others? Could it be that Y pestis wasn’t the cause of the earlier pandemics?
mode of transmission
We know that Y pestis is a disease of rats, and we know that the Black Death was all about rats, so that’s an obvious connection, no? Well, according to Cohn, what we think we know is just wrong. ‘… no scholar has found any evidence, archaeological or narrative, of a mass death of rodents that preceded or accompanied any wave of plague from the first or second pandemic.’ I must say I found this incredible when I first read it, yet Cohn seems to have investigated the sources thoroughly.
Cohn notes that:
while plague doctors of “the third pandemic” discovered to their surprise that the bubonic plague of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was rarely contagious, contemporaries of the first suggest a highly contagious person-to-person disease. Procopius, Evagrius, John of Ephesus, and Gregory of Tours characterized the disease as contagious and, in keeping with this trait, described it as clustering tightly within households and families; the evidence from burial sites supports their claims.
Pandemic 2 made the word contagium popular among the general public, and the incredible speed of transmission became one of the principle signs of the Black Death, differentiating it, for example, from smallpox, which had some similar physical characteristics. This contagion suggests person to person contact, more typical of pneumonic plague, which is highly infectious and can be transmitted through coughing and sneezing. A later chronicler of pandemic 2, Richard Mead, writing in the 1700s, advised against crowding plague sufferers in hospitals, as it ‘will promote and spread the Contagion’. However, those treating pandemic 3 noted, to their surprise, that plague wards were the safest places to be, and that this particular plague rarely took on the pneumonic form.
Cohn notes that the earlier pandemics were often associated with famine. For example in Alexandria and Constantinople in 618 and 619 famine preceded the plague and appeared to spark it into life. However, pandemic 3, definitely caused by Y Pestis, tended not to thrive in situations of dearth and was instead fed by increased yields. Such yields lead to higher rat populations, and higher rates of possibly infected rat fleas and so higher rates of transmission to humans.
death rates
According to contemporary accounts the first pandemic wiped out entire regions, decimating the inhabitants of cities and the countryside through which it so swiftly passed. These accounts are backed up by archaeological and other evidence. It’s pretty clear that millions died in the second pandemic too. Compare this to the third pandemic, which spread so slowly and was limited to coastal areas and even just shipping docks. Restricted to temperate zones, this last pandemic resulted in deaths in the hundreds, with never more than 3% of an affected population dying.
symptoms
Although few quantitative records describe the signs or symptoms of plague for pandemic one, those that do (and Cohn cites 6 different ancient authors) are in general agreement in their descriptions of ‘swellings in the groin, armpits, or on the neck just below the ear’, the classic symptoms of bubonic plague. Procopius of Caesaria also observed that victims’ bodies were covered in black pustules or lenticulae. Pandemic 2, which begins with the Black Death of 1347-52, is marked, on the other hand, by extensive records, both professional and popular – writings about it were amongst the first forms of popular literature.
range and seasonality
Another problem for the view that this has all been the doing of Y pestis, is that pandemics 1 and 2 could strike all year round, but generally settled into a pattern of prevailing in summer in the southern Mediterranean and the Near East, which is not the best season for the flea vector X cheopis. The seasonal cycle of modern plague is quite different, and the range is much more limited.
So all this opens up a mystery. Scientists are agreed that we don’t have a clear-cut story of Y pestis causing horrific disease through rats and fleas over millennia (archaeological and other evidence suggests that rats were scarce in 14th century Europe) , but they’re much in disagreement about what the real story might be. If not Y pestis, then maybe a hemorrhagic virus (one of which causes ebola). Such viruses are notorious for their rapid transmission, their resurgences and their high mortality rates. Pneumonic plague, the more infectious, lung-infecting form of plague may also be implicated, but this doesn’t appear to agree with most of the described symptoms of pandemics 1 and 2. Other types of fleas, not associated with rats, as well as lice, are also being considered as possible vectors. Some geneticists believe that a variant of Y pestis may have been responsible. It looks as if genetic analysis is the most likely pathway to finding a solution.
This article got started, as I wrote at the beginning, because someone keen on naturopathy said something about bubonic plague in our staff room. Some plant she brought in, which had great anti-oxidant properties (she clearly hasn’t kept up with the latest findings on anti-oxidants) was also a cure for bubonic plague, or maybe it was a variant of the plant, and the person who discovered the secret of its healing properties died suddenly (presumably not from plague) and the secret was lost to us for centuries…
some people really don’t like atheists
‘Atheism is not a great religion. It has always been for elites rather than for ordinary folk. And until the 20th century, its influence on world history was as inconsequential as Woody Allen’s god. Even today the impact of atheism outside of Europe is inconsequential. A recent Gallop poll found that 9% of adults in Western Europe (where the currency does not trust in God) described themselves as ‘convinced atheists’. That figure fell to 4% in eastern and central Europe, 3% in Latin America, 2% in the Middle East, and 1% in North America and Africa. Most Americans say they would not vote for an atheist for president.’
Stephen Prothero, from God is not one: the eight rival religions that run the world & why their differences matter (2010).
I should admit at the outset that I’ve not read Prothero’s book, and probably never will, as time is precious and there are too many other titles and areas of knowledge and endeavour that appeal to me. However, since, as a humanist and skeptic I have a passing interest in the religious mindset and in promoting critical thinking and humanism, I think the above quote is worth dwelling on critically.
First, the claim that ‘atheism is not a great religion’. It’s an interesting remark because it can be interpreted in two ways. First, that atheism is not a religion of any kind, great or small; second that atheism is a religion, but not a great one. I strongly suspect that Prothero has the second view in mind, while also playing on the first one. Of course atheism isn’t a religion and it’s tedious to have to play this game with theists (assuming Prothero is one) for the zillionth time, but my own experience on being confronted with the idea of a supernatural entity for the first time at around eight or nine was one of scepticism, though I didn’t then have a name for it. I don’t think scepticism could ever be called a religion. And nothing that I’ve ever experienced since has tempted me to believe in the existence of supernatural entities.
Next comes the claim that atheism has always been for elites rather than ordinary folk. This is probably true, but we need to reflect on the term ‘elite’. I assume Prothero can only mean intellectual elites. The Oxford dictionary succinctly defines an elite as ‘a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society’. Generally, therefore, the best of society, or the leaders. It’s broadly true, especially in the West, that you won’t get to the top in business without a good business brain, you won’t get to the top in politics without a good political brain and you won’t get to the top in science without a good scientific brain, and these are all positive qualities. The elites are the best, and the best tend to be society’s movers and shakers.
Yet Prothero doesn’t appear to agree, quite. His juxtaposing of the two sentences intimates that atheism is not a great religion because it has always been for elites. What are we to make of this? My guess is that he’s trying to downplay atheism but has made a bit of a mess of it. And there’s more of this. Before the 20th century, we’re informed, atheism was as influential ‘as Woody Allen’s god’, by which, I presume, he’s referring to Allen’s farce of 1975, God, with which I’m not particularly familiar. I do know, though, that it’s fashionable these days to trash Woody Allen, so the message appears to be that, before 1900 or so, atheism was very inconsequential indeed.
A reasonable person might wonder here why Prothero seems so keen to diminish atheism. A big clue is surely to be found in the subtitle to Prothero’s book. Which raises some questions: What are these eight religions? Are they really rivals? Do they run the world?
The contents page answers the first question: Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba religion, Judaism and Daoism make up the Premier League. Presumably Jainism, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism are struggling in the lower divisions. There is some debate amongst authorities as to whether Confucianism or Daoism are recognised religions, and they’e often found blended, along with Buddhism, in Chinese folk tradition – so, maybe not so much rivals.
Surely the most important question, though, is whether these religions ‘run the world’. I have the strong suspicion that Prothero hasn’t given deep consideration to his terms here, but I’ll try to do it for him. What does ‘running the world’ entail? I’ve heard people say that multinational corporations run the world, or that various superpowers do so, or have done so, but the idea that the major religions run the world between them is a novel one to me. Of course, if I want to find out whether Prothero provides evidence for his claim, or sets out to prove it, I’d have to read his book, and I’m reluctant to do so. It’s surely far more likely he’s tossed in the subtitle as something provocative, a piece of unsubstantiated rhetoric.
A lot of ingredients make the human world run, including trade, transport, law, festivals, education, sex, empathy and new ideas. Customs, habits and religious rituals play their part for many of us too. However, there’s no doubt that, for most westerners, global networking, the take-up of higher education, multiculturalism and travel have transformed earlier customs and habits, with religion taking a major hit in the process. The places where religion is holding its own are those where such modern trends are less evident.
Prothero also seems to be downplaying the 20th century when he writes that the influence of atheism was negligible before that time, as if to say ‘setting aside the 20th century, religion has been the most powerful force in humanity.’ Maybe so, but you can’t set aside the 20th century, a century which saw the human population rise from less than two billion to around 7 billion, a century of unprecedented and mind-boggling advances in science and technology, and in the education required to keep abreast of them, and which has seen a massive rise in travel and global communication. Continuing into the 21st century, these developments have been transformative for those exposed to them. It is unlikely to be coincidental that the same period has seen ‘the rise of the nones’ as by far the most significant development in religion for centuries – or more likely, since the first shrine was constructed. Of course, correlation isn’t causation, and I’m not going to delve deeply into causative factors here, but the phenomenon is real, though Prothero engages in what seems to me a desperate attempt to minimise it with his data. I’ll examine his statistics more closely later.
Prothero also presents the ‘inconsequential outside of Europe’ argument, which, apart from dismissing Australians like me – where more than 23% professed to having no religion in the last census (2011), with some 9% also choosing not to answer the optional question on religion – seems to dismiss Europe as an aberration in much the same way as he dismisses the 20th century. Yet in the last seventy years since the end of WW2, western Europe has only been an aberration in terms of its stability, its growing unity, its overall prosperity, its high levels of literacy and other positives on the registers of well-being and civility. Surely we should hope that such aberrations might spread worldwide. Many of the western European nations are regarded and valued as ‘elite states’, where religious strife, a problem in the heart of Europe for centuries up to and including the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century, is now almost entirely confined to its immigrant populations. These are now among the least religious countries in the world.
So let’s look at Prothero’s data. He states that 9% of Western European adults are ‘committed atheists’. Why, one wonders, does he choose this category? Most atheists aren’t ‘committed’ if by this is meant proselytising for non-belief in supernatural beings. They don’t go around ‘being atheists’. As I’ve said, I consider myself first and foremost as a sceptic, and it’s out of scepticism and a need for evidence and for the best explanation of phenomena that I consider belief in creator beings, astrology, acupuncture, fairies and homeopathy as best explained by psychology, ignorance and credulity.
My view is that Prothero chooses the ‘committed atheist’ category for the same reason that William Lane Craig does – to minimise the clear-cut ‘rise of the nones’, to reduce non-belief to the smallest category he can get away with.
Prothero cites a website for his figures on ‘committed atheists’ (9% in western Europe, 4% in eastern and central Europe, 3% in Latin America, 2% in the Middle East and 1% in North America), which is a 2005 Gallup Poll. I cannot find the 2005 poll, but an updated 2012 Gallup Poll is very revealing, as it compares some figures with those from 2005. What it reveals, sadly, is a degree of intellectual dishonesty on Prothero’s part. Prothero claims that atheism is inconsequential outside of Europe, yet the same Gallup Poll from which he took his figures – but this time the 2012 version – states that 47% of Chinese self-describe as committed atheists*. Presumably this was slightly up on 2005 (the 2005 figure for China isn’t given), because almost every nation shows a rise in atheism in recent years, but the huge percentage, together with 31% of Japanese ‘committed atheists’ completely discredits Prothero’s ‘inconsequential outside of Europe’ claim.
It’s worth giving more comprehensive data on western Europe here, based on the 2012 poll by Gallup International. The 9% figure for ‘committed atheists’ is now 14%, with a further 32% describing themselves as ‘not religious’, and 3% ‘no answer or not sure’. The rest, 51%, described themselves as religious. It’s clear that, by the next poll, most western Europeans will not describe themselves as religious. Only 14% of Chinese people currently describe themselves as such – and as we all know, China will soon take over the world.
I was surprised, too, that only 1% of North Americans were committed atheists, according to Prothero. I can’t confirm this, but according to the 2012 poll, the figure is 6%, with a further 33% claiming to be ‘not religious’. The percentage of the self-described religious is a surprisingly low 57%. Perhaps Prothero combined the North American and African figures to arrive at the 1% mark. Who knows what paths motivated reasoning will lead a person down.
The 2012 poll, if it’s reliable, is revealing about the speed with which religion is being abandoned in some parts. In France, for example the percentage of ‘committed atheists’ has jumped from 14 to 29%, an extraordinary change in age-old belief systems in less than a decade.
But beyond these statistics about how people see themselves, the change is most marked, in the west, by the vastly diminished role of religion in public life. It’s precisely Prothero’s claim that religions ‘run the world’ that is most suspect. In virtually every western country, secularism, the insistence that the church and the state remain separate, has become more firmly established in the 20th century. The political influence of the Christian churches in particular has noticeably waned. Of course there are a few theocratic nations, but their numbers are decreasing, and none of them are major world powers. If you believe, as most do, that the world is run by governments and commercial enterprises, it’s hard to see where religion fits into this scheme. In some regions it may be the glue that holds societies together, but these regions appear to be diminishing. Religions these days receive more publicity for the damage they do than for any virtues they may possess. Any modern westerner might think of them as ruining the world rather than running it.
The fact is that, in every western country without exception (yes, that includes the USA), the trend away from religious belief is so rapid it’s almost impossible to keep up with. I’ve already written about the data in New Scientist suggesting that the ‘nones’ are the fourth religious category after Christians, Moslems and Hindus, numbering some 700 million. Wikipedia goes one further, putting the nones third with 1.1 billion. Of course these figures are as rubbery as can be, but its indisputable that this is overwhelmingly a modern phenomenon, covering the past fifty or sixty years in particular. It’s accelerating and unlikely to reverse itself in the foreseeable.
Books like Prothero’s are symptomatic of the change. Remember The Twilight of Atheism (which I also haven’t read)? Deny what’s going on, promote the positive power and eternal destiny of religion and all will be well.
Well, it won’t. Something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Prothero?
*To be fair to Prothero, it looks like no 2005 figures for China were available, though the large figures for Japan certainly were. Also, though these figures for China have been uncritically reported by the media, the sample size, as mentioned on Gallup International’s website, was preposterously small – some 500 people, less than one two-millionth of the Chinese population. The survey was apparently conducted online, but no details were given about the distribution of those surveyed. Given the resolutely secular Chinese government’s tight control of its citizens and media, I would treat any statistics coming out of that country with a large dose of salt.
how much damage is synthetic fertiliser doing to soil?
“A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
In a recent conversation, in which I was accused of being too black-and-white about the positives of conventional agriculture and GMOs, the damaging effects of synthetic fertiliser were mentioned as a negative, as it ‘kills the soil’s organisms, including earthworms’.
So now I’m going to focus on that issue specifically, and follow the evidence where it leads me. There’s no doubt that intensive agriculture and mono-cropping are having a negative impact on soil quality, just as there’s no doubt that intensive agriculture is currently required to feed the world’s human population. So what’s to be done? First, we could reduce or stabilise the world’s population, which we’re trying to do. Second, we can try to find biotech solutions, developing a type of intensive agriculture that’s less damaging to the soil and the environment – and organic approaches might help us in this. GMOs also offer promise, developing crops which require less in the way of fertilisers and pesticides, and deliver higher yields.
There are other ways of looking at this and so many other problems, as I’ve recently become aware of complexity theory, which I’ll write about soon, but for now I’ll look at the claims being made and the solutions being offered.
So what exactly is synthetic or chemical fertiliser doing to our soil? Needless to say, in order to obtain accurate data in answer to this question we have to negotiate our way through sources dedicated to maximising, or minimising, the harm being done. So I’ll start with a definition. Here’s one from a website called Diffen, dedicated apparently to making unbiased comparisons between rival goods and services, in this case chemical v organic fertilisers.
A chemical fertiliser is defined as any inorganic material of wholly or partially synthetic origin that is added to the soil to sustain plant growth. Chemical fertilisers are produced synthetically from inorganic materials. Since they are prepared from inorganic materials artificially, they may have some harmful acids, which stunt the growth of microorganisms found in the soil helpful for plant growth naturally. They’re rich in the three essential nutrients needed for plant growth. Some examples of chemical fertilisers are ammonium sulphate, ammonium phosphate, ammonium nitrate, urea, ammonium chloride and the like.
Diffen goes on to describe the pros and cons, but there isn’t much detail beyond high acidity and ‘changes to soil fertility’. A 2009 article in Scientific American goes further, describing these mostly petroleum-based fertilisers as having these dire effects:
wholesale pollution of most of our streams, rivers, ponds, lakes and even coastal areas, as these synthetic chemicals run-off into the nearby waterways.
What this article doesn’t mention is that human waste (i.e feces), grey water etc is also getting into our waterways and causing damage, and it’s hard to separate out these many forms of pollution. In any case, I’m confining this piece to direct damage to the soil rather than to waterways, important though that obviously is.
One of the principal causes of soil degradation is leaching, the loss of water-soluble plant nutrients through rains and storms, and irrigation. Fertiliser can contribute to this problem. When nitrate (NO3) is added to the soil to boost plant growth, excess NO3 ions aren’t able to be absorbed by the soil and are eventually leached out into groundwater and waterways. The degree of leaching depends on soil type, the nitrate content of the soil, and the degree of absorption of the nitrates by the plants or crops on that soil. Again, though, the leaching is caused by water, and the soil degradation is largely a natural process, though over-irrigation can contribute. This is why the older soils, such as those in Australia, are the most lacking in nutrients. They’ve been subjected to eons of wind and water weathering. The richest areas have been renewed by volcanic activity.
Not all chemical fertiliser is the same, or of the same quality. Phosphate fertilisers commonly contain impurities such as fluorides and the heavy metals cadmium and uranium. Removing these completely is costly, so fertiliser can come in grades of purity (most backyard-gardener fertiliser, the stuff that comes in little pellets, is very pure). Many widely used phosphate fertilisers contain fluoride, and this has prompted research into the effects of a higher concentration of fluoride in soil. The effect on plants has been found to be minimal, as plants take up very little fluoride. Livestock ingesting contaminated soils as they munch on plants could be a bigger problem, as could be fluoride’s effect on soil microorganisms. Fluoride is very immobile in soil, so groundwater is unlikely to be contaminated.
Acidification from the regular use and over-use of acidulated phosphate fertilisers has been a problem in some areas, particularly in Malaysia and Indonesia, where aluminium toxicity has caused severe soil degradation. Acidity of soils is a serious problem in Australia, where in NSW more than half the agricultural land is affected. Most agricultural plants require a pH of 5.5 to 8.0 to grow best, though some plants are much more tolerant than others of lower pH levels. Surface acidity can be corrected with the application of ground limestone, but subsurface acidity is a growing problem and much more difficult to correct. Acidification is generally a slow natural process caused by wind and water weathering, but it can be greatly accelerated by the use of fertilisers containing ammonium or urea. It can also be caused by a build-up of organic matter. As an example of the complexity of all this, superphosphate doesn’t directly affect soil acidity but it promotes the growth of clover and other legumes, a build-up of organic matter which increases soil acidity.
A comment on fertiliser and worms. No, they don’t kill worms, and because they stimulate plant growth they’re likely to increase the population of worms – but there are worms and worms. Some are highly invasive and have been transported from elsewhere. Some can be damaging to plants. At the same time new plants, and new worms, tend to adapt to each other over time. Again, complexity cannot be underestimated.
Another concern about chemical fertiliser, again not connected to soil quality as such, is nitrous oxide emissions. About 75% of nitrous oxide emissions from human activity in the USA came from chemical fertiliser use in agriculture in 2012, and we are steadily adding to the nitrous oxide levels in the atmosphere. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas which, on a unit comparison, is 300 times more damaging than carbon dioxide.
In conclusion, it’s likely that everything you do in agriculture has a downside. There are no free lunches. The key is to obtain as much knowledge as possible, not only about your patch, but about nutrient and resource cycles generally. It’s all connected.
Oh and above all be sceptical of some of the ridiculous claims, and the ridiculous propaganda, out there. Check them out on a reputable, evidence-based site.
more on organic food
Since my post of almost a year ago, on the marketing scam that is ‘organic’ food, I’ve noted that this niche market continues to be less niche and more mainstream, so that I no longer make an effort to avoid it. As long as the food’s fresh, tasty and nutritious, I’m happy.
And yet… I think part of my irritation is that I hate fashion. I mean, why the fuck do all these drongos go around wearing Hurley tank-tops and t-shirts? It’s not as if they’re even remotely interesting or imaginative or anything.
However, I must admit the fashion for ‘organics’ is more comprehensible to me than the fashion for Hurley or Nike, labels for goods that are clearly no better than those of their rivals. It seems that organic food has captured the imagination largely because it sounds environmentally positive for those who want to do the right thing without thinking about it too much. Okay it’s a bit more expensive, but there has to be a price for being on the side of the angels, and it’s nice to be trendy and holier-than-thou at the same time.
Then there are the hardened ideologues who take to ‘organics’ as to a religion, actively seeking converts and feeling smugly superior to those who haven’t yet been ‘saved’. Among those are the real fanatics who warn that conventional food is killing us, that GM ‘horror’ foods and the agribusinesses pedalling them will take over the world and make zombies of us all, and/or that there’s a conspiracy to hide from us the damage that chemically-infested conventional food is doing world-wide.
Of course some will describe me as an ideologue through-and-through, or at least as a hopelessly biased person making fatuous claims to objectivity – a description I’m quite accustomed to hearing – but I can only do my best to be open-minded and undermining of my own prejudices. And if that doesn’t convince anyone I’ll soldier on anyway.
One excuse for returning to the subject is a blog/website called Academics Review, subtitled ‘testing popular claims against peer-reviewed science’, which has posted a piece called ‘Organic Marketing Report‘. Dr Stephen Novella has spoken about the piece on the SGU podcast and on Neurologica blog, but I want to take the opportunity to revisit the issue, as I’ve done so many times in my mind.
For me, three popular claims are made about ‘organic’ food, a kind of ‘nest of claims’ of increasing grandeur and complexity. The most basic claim is that it tastes better, the middle claim is that it’s more nutritious, and the grandest claim is that it’s better for the environment. So let’s look at these claims one at a time, with particular reference to the Academics Review post, where it can help us.
taste
The perception of taste is one of the most subjective and easily manipulable of all our perceptions. Researchers have had a field day with this. You may have heard of the experiments done with white wine dyed with food colouring to look like red, and how this fooled all the wine experts. Numerous other experiments have been done to show that our taste perception can be influenced by mood, by colour, by setting and by the way the food is talked up or talked down before tasting. Then there’s the question of differences between people’s taste buds. What are taste buds? These are the areas on the surface of the tongue, the soft palate and the upper oesophagus that contain taste receptors. Taste buds are constantly being replenished, each one lasting on average 5 days, and it’s estimated that we’ve permanently lost half of our taste receptors by the age of 20. Separate receptors for the basic tastes of bitter, sweet and umami have been found, and the hunt is on for sour. It’s likely that the number of receptors and differences in action of those receptors varies slightly in individuals, so it’s pretty well impossible to get anything substantive out of individual claims that x tastes better than y. However, if in a blind tasting, with a good sample size, we get 80%, or a substantial majority, saying that x tastes better than y, that would be significant.
Of course, it’s difficult to control for all the variables and just to test for ‘organic’ versus conventional. The age of the food, freshness, soil quality, method of growing and various other factors not directly related to organics would have to be neutralised. So we have to take a skeptical approach to all findings.
One blind tasting, reported on here, compared tomatoes, broccoli and potatoes. 194 ‘expert food analysts’ tasted the food and found, according to the report, that the conventional tomatoes tasted sweeter, juicier and more flavoursome than ‘organic’ ones. No significant differences were noted with the broccoli and potatoes. The report doesn’t give the percentage of experts who preferred the conventional tomatoes, and there were some vital differences in the way the produce was grown. In all, not a very convincing study either way.
A series of informal taste tests, conducted in 2007 by Stephanie Zonis, an organic food advocate, comparing eggs, yoghurt, cheese, raspberries and peanut butter among other foodstuffs, found mixed results, mostly a tie in each case, though it seems not to have been a blind tasting and was entirely subjective. She showed commendable honesty, ending with the remark that she didn’t buy organic for the taste.
This cute little video has 3 different products – eggs, carrots and goat’s cheese – and three different subjects tasting them, all of them food experts. Results again are mixed, but the subsequent discussions show that it isn’t the organic v conventional distinction that matters so much. With the cheese it’s the cultures used to produce them, with the carrots it’s the soils and climate, with the eggs it’s whether they’re free range or battery animals, how long the eggs having been hanging around in the supermarket, etc. There are just too many variable to make these kinds of tests particularly useful.
The taste issue regarding organics, I contend, will never be resolved. The trouble is, organic food is constantly touted by advocates (though, to be fair, not all of them) as having superior taste.
Guys, stop doing that.
nutritional content and health
Organics are often recommended as the healthier option, and there are, it seems to me, two aspects to this claim. First, that they contain more and/or better nutrients, and second that they’re healthier because they contain less ‘toxic chemicals’ in the form of pesticides and/or fertilisers. Naturally most consumers of organic foods conflate these two separate issues.
So let’s look briefly at the nutrient issue first.
The Mayo Clinic, the Harvard Medical School and various other reputable sites that I’ve checked out have all said much the same, that there is no statistically significant evidence that organic food is more nutritious. Of course you will be able to find studies, amongst the very many that have been carried out, that do provide such evidence, but that’s to be expected. Overall the jury’s still out. I don’t think it’ll ever be in. Personally, though, I think we can bypass the findings of endless studies by asking the question “How can nutrients be added to food by organic practices?” I can’t quite see how the practices of organic farming – no synthetic fertilisers or pesticides, no food irradiation, no GMOs – can by themselves add to the nutrients of food grown conventionally. If anyone can explain to me how they can, I’d be prepared to take the studies more seriously.
A more complex issue is that of organics and food safety and public health.
This issue is largely a negative one – that organic foods are healthier because of what they don’t have. Unfortunately, this often involves playing up, as much as possible, the risks and dangers of conventional food. The Organic Marketing Report makes some disturbing points here, quoting one organics promoter, Kay Hamilton, speaking at a conference in 1999: If the threats posed by cheaper, conventionally produced products are removed, then the potential to develop organic foods will be limited. In other words, it’s in the interests of organic food marketers to stress the dangers of conventional foods at every opportunity, and this is being done all over the internet, in case you haven’t noticed.
Some 15 years ago, when the organic marketing push really started to get under way in the USA, conventional food producers expressed concern to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) that the organic movement was seeking to increase market share by promoting bogus claims about its own products and misinformation about conventional practices. In response, the USDA, with support from the organic food industry, sought to clarify the then recently developed formulation of the organic marketing label. The Secretary of Agriculture had this to say in 2000:
Let me be clear about one thing. The organic label is a marketing tool. It is not a statement about food safety. Nor is ‘organic’ a value judgment about nutrition or quality.
Not surprisingly, though, these remarks have fallen on deaf years, and consumer surveys regularly show that organic food is perceived as healthier, safer and more nutritious, both in the US and elsewhere. Also, a study by the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service showed that people bought organic on the basis of the organic label or seal, rather than their understanding of the organic definition. Some 79% of those familiar with the seal could not identify the production standards behind the seal. As many independent observers have noted, the aggressive marketing of organic produce, with little concern for accuracy, has been the main driver of sales. US observers have also noted that the responsible regulators in terms of consumer protection and truth in advertising, namely the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have been ineffective due to lack of resources and a lack of will to investigate vague and nebulous claims.
The organic food industry constantly plays on public fears in its marketing strategies, without necessarily telling outright lies. For example, a campaign by the USA’s Organic Trade Association, using the slogan ‘Organic, it’s worth it’ trumpeted the fact that “All products bearing the organic label must comply with federal, state, FDA, and international food safety requirements”, as if this wasn’t the case with conventional food. Similarly, Stonyfield Organic, a major US producer of organic foods, made a decision in August 2013 to add to the organic seal on their products the term ‘no toxic pesticides used here’, as if this marked them out from other food producers.
If we look beyond the aggressive marketing, which appears to be a mixture of deliberate misinformation and wishful thinking – a sort of naturalistic utopianism, – we find no clear evidence at all that organic food is either more safe or more nutritious than conventional food. The most comprehensive meta-analysis of these claims to date was published by Stanford University School of Medicine in September 2012. The study ‘did not find evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or carry fewer health risks than conventional alternatives’ (that’s a quote from the above-linked ‘Organic Marketing Report’).
The authors of the Organic Marketing Report have little to say about the broader environmental claims made by the organic food industry, because they’ve found from their own market research that the industry sees that health and safety concerns are the main drivers of consumer organic purchasing. So the focus of the industry has been on driving home the message that conventional food is unhealthy if not dangerous, and less nutritious. This message is succeeding in spite of a complete lack of scientific support. People should, I think, be more annoyed than they currently are about a campaign of exaggeration and misinformation that is in no way aligned to the evidence.
I should point out that, while many organic growers are sincere in their belief that they’re producing safer foods, the fact is that using ‘natural’ fertilisers and pesticides is not necessarily safer. David Waltner-Toews provides a salutary example in his excellently-titled book The Origin of Feces:
In spring 2011, a mutant, severely pathogenic, and antibiotic-resistant strain of E coli spread across 13 countries in Europe, sickening more than 3000 people and killing 48. The normal home for all E coli species, most of which are law-abiding, contributing members of society, is in the intestinal tracts of warm-blooded animals – that is, in excrement. This epidemic, however, was spread through fresh sprouts from an organic farm in Germany. The original contamination source was identified as fenugreek seeds from Egypt. The genetic make-up of the strain of E coli includes material last seen in sub-Saharan Africa.
Waltner-Toews isn’t trying to bag organic farming here – this is about the only mention he makes about organics in his book. As one of the world’s foremost experts on shit, or manure if you prefer, his concern is to educate us on the enormous complexity of the ‘shit cycle’, and its potential for harm as well as good. It’s a complexity that, I suspect, few commercial organic producers are aware of, though they’re dedicated to the idea that their naturally-fertilised produce is safer than conventional stuff. Sadly, food regulators have been conned into believing this, and organic foods, like naturopathic ‘medicines’, are nowhere near as rigorously checked and tested as their conventional counterparts. More than thirty years’ experience of studying manure and fecal-borne infections has convinced Waltner-Toews that these fecal-borne infections are becoming more frequent and more dangerous because global in their reach, due to the internationalism of modern agribusiness. The lack of monitoring of ‘organic’ production with its ‘safe’ natural fertilisers and pesticides is arguably a greater threat to global health than conventional production, which is well-regulated and heavily scrutinised, at least in the west.
environmental impact
Probably the most important claim made by the organic movement, though not as attention-grabbing as the health and safety claims, is that it is more sustainable and has less of an environmental impact than conventional farming and food production. This is, of course, a very difficult claim to analyse because of the enormous variations within conventional food production, but let’s look at some problems with the claim. First, if the organic marketeers succeed in their clear aim of taking over the world, there will be a problem of space. Small-scale backyard organic producers often con themselves into thinking ‘if I can do it, the world can’, but this is a false logic. In my own small backyard I’ve grown – ‘organically’ I suppose – lettuce and spinach and rocket and tomatoes and quinces and almonds and a whole range of herbs, and if I wasn’t such a slackarse I could produce much more, but the fact is that I work for a living, and increasingly my burgeoning neighbourhood is becoming stacked with medium to high-density housing for corporate types who have no time for gardening even if they had an interest, and they have no gardens to garden in anyway. And I suspect a high and growing percentage of these young corporate types would swear by ‘organic’ food. So just a clear-eyed view of the square kilometre or so around my home tells me feeding the multitude with organics would be quite a feat. As James Mitchell Crow reports, in the science magazine Cosmos, ‘Yields drop when switching to organic, and there isn’t enough organic fertiliser to go around anyway’. As long-time organic farmer Raul Adamchauk (one of the world’s foremost experts on organic farming) puts it:
The challenge for organic agriculture is to help solve the global issues of feeding people in the face of climate change and with increasing population… On some level, it becomes clear that organic agriculture isn’t going to do that by itself. No matter how you figure it, there aren’t enough animals making enough waste to fertilise more than a small fraction of the cropland that we need.
Much more land, therefore, would have to be dedicated to agriculture, with consequences for forestation and biodiversity – and then there’s the fertiliser problem. There are solutions, but the organic movement’s ideological negativity towards biotechnology will block them for the foreseeable future.
These global problems hold little interest, however, for most urban organic consumers. They’ve largely swallowed the negative message that conventional food is both unhealthy and environmentally damaging. For some, it’s part of a whole ideology of anti-modernity – the modern world is toxically chemical and we need to get back to nature.
But conventional food production, like science, never stands still. Over the past 50 years, during which the world’s population has doubled, food production has increased by 300%, though land taken up with such production has increased by only 12%. These astonishing statistics describe the results of the green revolution begun by Norman Borlaug in the sixties and still ongoing. The green revolution saved millions of lives, and could even be ‘blamed’ for contemporary obesity problems. Here are some more statistics: In 1960, the world’s population stood at just over 3 billion, and the average calorie consumption per person per day was 2189 (according to the UN Dept of Economic and Social Affairs). By 2010 the population was near 7 billion, and the average consumption had risen to 2830. Yields per hectare of rice, wheat, maize and other cereals have been spectacular, and these increases have been attributed more or less equally to improved irrigation, improved seeds and more effective synthetic fertiliser. There have been downsides of course, but biotechnological solutions, if they could be applied, would greatly improve the situation. They include not only pest-resistant and higher-yielding GMOs, but such exciting developments as precision agriculture, an automated agricultural system which restricts pesticide and fertiliser use to those areas of a crop that need them, reducing wastage to a minimum.
The green revolution has been far more beneficial than harmful, and the harms have been exaggerated by the ideologues and marketeers of the organic movement, but organic techniques have been effective in many areas, especially in low-tech farming. The real problem isn’t organic farming per se, it’s ideology, ignorance and sometimes downright dishonesty. Almost all the food we eat has been genetically modified – especially if you’re a vegetarian. It was through playing around with modifications and noting recessive and dominant traits in peas that Mendel discovered genes, that’s to say, he discovered just what it was that we’d been manipulating for millennia. We have transformed the food we eat to make it more tasty and filling and life-giving, though for centuries we barely knew what we were doing. The ‘nature’ that some of us want to go back to is entirely mythical. And we’re not being poisoned by our food, we’re too smart and determined to thrive for that.
acupuncture promotion in australia
I tried to find a picture of the chi energy system online, but guess what, nothing to be found. Here’s a chi-reflexology map instead – from the Australian College of Chi-Reflexology, no less!
On the ever-reliable US-based NeuroLogica blog, Steven Novella reports on an interesting case of acupuncture promotion here in Oz, via Rachel Dunlop. As Novella reports, acupuncture has been studied many times before, and Cosmos, our premier science mag, did a story on the procedure a while back, reporting no evidence of any benefits except in the notoriously vague areas of back pain and headaches.
Not surprisingly, lower back pain was one of the conditions that supposedly benefited from acupuncture, according to media hype about the latest study. The trouble is, this study was being reported on before being published and peer reviewed, which, to put it mildly, is highly irregular and raises obvious questions. The Sydney Morning Herald is the offending news outlet, and Dr Michael Ben-Meir the over-enthusiastic researcher. As the article points out, Ben-Meir is already a ‘convert’ to acupuncture, having used it for some time in acute cases at two Melbourne hospitals. That’s fine, if a bit unorthodox, but it doesn’t accord with other findings, and there are therefore bound to be questions about methodology.
One of the obvious difficulties is that acupuncture can hardly be applied to patients without them knowing it. It’s a much more hands-on and ‘invasive’ experience than swallowing a tablet, and this will undoubtedly have a psychological effect. It seems to me, just off the top of my head, that acupuncture, with its associated rituals, its aura of antiquity and its oriental cultural cachet, would carry greater weight as a placebo than, say, a homeopathic pill. But in fact I don’t have to speculate here, as there is much clinical evidence that injections have a greater placebo effect than pills, and big pills have a greater placebo effect than small ones. So it doesn’t greatly surprise me that people will report a lessening, and even a dramatic lessening, of acute pain, after an acupuncture treatment, however illegitimate. I presume there are illegitimate treatments, because the ‘key meridional points’ where the needles are applied are precisely know by legitimate acupuncturists, and they apply their treatments with rigorous accuracy.
Well, actually there’s a big question as to whether or not there are any legitimate acupuncturists, because acupuncture is based on an energy system known as ‘chi’, which supposedly has meridional points at which needles can be inserted quite deeply into the skin, but there’s no evidence whatever that such an energy system exists, let alone about how such a system might function – for example, its mode of energy transmission (whatever ‘energy’ might mean in this case). Considering that we know a great deal about the autoimmune system and the central and peripheral nervous systems, it seems astonishing that this other bodily system has gone undetected by scientists for so long, and especially in recent times, with our ultra-sophisticated monitoring devices. When you look up ‘chi, sometimes spelt ‘qi’ or with other variants, you’ll find nothing more specific than ‘energy’, ‘life force’ or something similar – nothing corpuscular or in any sense measurable by modern medicine. Even so, researchers into acupuncture have come up with an attempt to measure its efficacy by comparing it to ‘sham acupuncture’ in clinical trials. Sham acupuncture uses the ‘wrong’ meridians and the ‘wrong’ depths to which the needle goes.
But herein lies an obvious problem. Sham acupuncturists insert needles only millimetres deep, while real acupuncturists put their needles between one and three or four centimetres deep: ‘Depth of insertion will depend on nature of the condition being treated, the patients’ size, age, and constitution, and upon the acupuncturists’ style or school’, according to an acupuncture site I visited at random. These are rather wide parameters, but the point that interests me is this. If you don’t put your needle in deep enough, you won’t make contact with the chi that needs to be stimulated or other wise modified to heal the patient. So goes the rationale, surely. It’s like, if you don’t put the needle for a standard vaccination in the right place, you’ll miss the vein. But veins are clearly real. If you go dissecting, you’ll find veins and arteries and nerves and muscle and fat and so on. But you won’t find chi. Yet, apparently it does have real existence. It’s between one and four centimetres down, according to real acupuncturists, depending on the above-mentioned variables (and no doubt many others).
So we can’t actually see it, or find it on dissection, but it’s locatable in space, vaguely. Or is it that chi is everywhere in the body but the right kind of chi, the bit that’s causing the pain and needs to be treated with needles at certain precise meridional points, is at a certain distance from the surface of the skin?
It all begins to sound a bit like theology, doesn’t it?
Here’s the ‘take-home’ for me. If you read about treatments that ‘work’ but you get virtually nothing about the mechanism of action, as is the case, for example, with homeopathy and acupuncture, be very skeptical. In the end I’m not impressed with clinical trials that show a ‘real effect’, even a startling one, because I know about regression to the mean, and I particularly know about the placebo effect. I want ‘proof of concept’. In this case proof of the concept of chi and of meridians. I’ve heard homeopaths defend their pills on TV recently by claiming that, ‘whatever the mechanism, clinical trials consistently prove that this treatment works’, and I can’t be bothered chasing up those clinical trials and testing their legitimacy, I go straight to the concepts and processes behind the treatment – the law of similars, the law of infinitesimals, and don’t forget succussion. These concepts are so intrinsically absurd that we needn’t bother looking at the clinical data. If there are positive results, they haven’t been produced by homeopathy. The fact that homeopaths themselves are largely uninterested in the mechanisms is a dead giveaway. You’d think that the law of infinitesimals and the law of similars would surely have myriad applications far beyond their current ones. They would revolutionise science and technology, if only they were real (and they’d also render obsolete much that we currently know).
The same goes for acupuncture, and chi. If this bodily system were real, and chi could be captured in a test tube, and its constituents examined and isolated under a microscope, how revolutionary that would be. How transformative. Chi pills, chi soap, chi breakfast cereal…
Ah but I’m thinking like one of those limited westerners, so modern, so smug, so lacking in the insight of the ancients…