I had thought I was finished with the whole Playfoot/Silver Ring Thing for the time being – at least until the High Court issued its judgement and we could see whether sense and reason have prevailed, but then I’m a bit of sucker for debunking bad science (and bad social science for that matter) so when I came across some information and the research data that’s in widespread use by pro-abstinence only groups I just had to take a look for myself.

The historical background to this is that since 1996 the US Federal Government has poured around £1billion dollars into the funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage sex education programmes – Silver Ring Thing, in the US, had its modest sum of federal funding suspended in 2005 after complaints from the ACLU, amongst others, about its use of federal funds to push its religious agenda in breach of the US’s constitutional separation of religion and state, and then withdrew from the programme entire. It was never, however, a major recipient of federal grants.

And yes, the date is correct and this did all kick into gear under that noted abstainer, Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton, a fact that will become rather more ironic in a short while.

These programmes were established under a programme common known as ‘Title V’ under which £50 million per year was distributed amongst States, who are required to match-fund the programme with three State-raised dollars to every one Federal dollar received, and operate these programmes to very specific parameters, such that these programmes must:

• · Have as their exclusive purpose teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realised by abstaining from sexual activity;
• · Teach that abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school-age children;
• · Teach that abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems;
• · Teach that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity;
• · Teach that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects;
• · Teach that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parents, and society;
• · Teach young people how to reject sexual advances and how alcohol and drug use increase vulnerability to sexual advances, and
• · Teach the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity.

These programmes are not permitted to advocate or discuss other contraceptive methods other than in the context of their failure rates.

Right, that information should, hopefully, put to rest the idea that abstinence education programmes are about ‘choice’. They’re not, they’re about pushing an agenda derived from a very conservative brand of Christianity and using it as a means of social engineering. These programmes are also, and unsurprisingly, inherently discriminatory as they are constructed in such as way as to entirely exclude any reference to or acknowledgement of same-sex relationships.

These programmes got a further shot in the arm with the election of George W Bush, who introduced a second, and even more lavishly funded abstinence-only programme that bypassed State authorities and funnelled money directly to organisations delivering abstinence programmes, many of which were ‘faith-based’ (naturally). For the fiscal year 2006, the amount of money allocated to this programme was $155 million.

In 2001, the abstinence-only lobby got the real boost they were looking for with the publication of a study by Bearman and Brueckner [Bearman, P. S. & Brueckner, H. (2001). Promising the future: Virginity pledges and first intercourse. American Journal of Sociology, 106, 859-912.] that appeared to confirm the success of these programmes. This research used non-experiemental correlation data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, conducted between 1995 and 2003, which surveyed 20,000 young people from the age of 12 to 18, including 4,000 that had taken a virginity pledge, and arrived at two conclusions that supporters of abstinence-only education immediately leapt upon and promoted heavily as ‘proof’ that their preferred approach to such education was a success.

First, the study indicated that those who took the ‘virginity pledge’ tended to commence their first full sexual activity (i.e. full penetrative vaginal intercourse) anything up to two years later than the control group that had not undergone an abstinence-only education programme and made a virginity pledge. The study concluded that this indicated a causal relationship between abstinence-only education and the decision to delay the commencement of sexual activity.

Second, the study showed a lower incidence of sexually transmitted disease in the ‘pledge group’ (4.6%) than in the non-pledging group (7%).

Which sounds promising, until you consider that a delay in becoming sexually active of a couple of years is only going to amount to abstinence until marriage if the pledge group all get married within two years of taking the pledge. You won’t be surprised to find that the majority don’t – get married within two years, that is. Oh, and, of course, you still have 4.6% of the pledge group contracting an STD, which shows that a fair number of those taking the pledge most certainly do fall off the virginity wagon.

Nevertheless, the pro-abstinence camp were not to be deterred by such trifling details and pronounced themselves to be a resounding success, which in turn had a direct impact on both State education policy and government health policy. By 2002 it was estimated that up to a third of US secondary schools, which cover the ages of 11-18, were using an abstinence-only approach to sex education, and, in 2003, the US Department of Health altered the evaluation criteria for these programmes so that to justify their continued receipt of funding they simply had to report back on numbers taking virginity pledges where, previously, they were required to report “the proportion of program participants who have engaged in sexual intercourse” and the birth rate of female program participants.

The problem with this last policy change should be obvious – the US government have stopped measuring the performance of these programmes in terms of their actual impact on adolescent sexual activity and have, since 2003, simply measured the number of sign-ups on the assumption that that behavioural patterns identified by Bearman and Brueckner will automatically hold valid. So the evaluation method used by the US government tells them nothing of value whatsoever about the actual performance of these programmes.

However, there are a couple of other important problems with the Bearman and Brueckner study and how it has been used by the US government and, particularly, by supporters of abstinence-only education.

Taking the study first, the big problem with it is its conclusion that there is a causal relationship between virginity pledges and the delay in first sexual activity. There is certainly evidence of a correlation between the two but a correlation alone does not imply causation, and Bearman and Brueckner’s assertion of causation is actually based on a post hoc fallacy*, not least because their efforts to apply a statistical adjustment to the data the cancel out the effects of self-selection in the pledge group have been shown to be both logically and statistically invalid.

*post hoc ergo propter hoc (”after this, therefore because of this”)

To explain what all that means, one has to understand when and how one can validly assert causality based on non-experimental correlation data, for which one must turn to John Stuart Mill.

Mill asserted that at least three criteria must be invoked in justifying causal claims:

(1) association (or correlation-the cause is related to the effect),

(2) temporality (the cause comes before the effect), and

(3) elimination of plausible alternative explanations (i.e. other plausible explanations for an effect must be considered and ruled out).

To assert causality, all three are necessary, and yet the Bearman and Brueckner study neglects to consider a number of plausible alternative explanations for the correlation between pledging and delay in first sexual activity, not least that of a pre-existing disinclination to become sexually active. This is where self-selection become problematic as those who take these pledges do so by choice, i.e. they are already likely to predisposed towards delaying their first sexual activity before choosing to take the pledge and this attitude can be accounted for by a number of factors relating to parental and other influences on the behaviour of the adolescent none of which need necessarily stem from or be supported either the taking of a virginity pledge or abstinence-only sex education.

The causal link claimed by Bearman and Brueckner does not stand up to scrutiny.

Moreover, supporters of abstinence-only education have used the data from the Bearman and Brueckner study in, not surprisingly, a highly selective manner that disregards importance evidence about the sexual behaviour within the pledge group that doesn’t fit in with the moral views of the pro-abstinence lobby.

As noted previously, this study shows only up to a two-year delay in first sexual activity, which falls some considerable way short of abstinence until marriage and a recently published study by Mathematica, which was commissioned by the US Congress and followed 2,000 students from age 11/12 in 1999 to age 16, including students who participated in one the four main abstinence programmes and a control group of students who had not received this type of sex education found that around half of all students in both groups abstained for sexual activity through the full period of the study and that those the abstinence-only programme group reported having around the same number of sexual partners as those in the control group, started their sexual activity at about the same age and were just as likely to use contraception as those in the control group, i.e. the abstinence programmes had no effect on sexual activity and behaviour whatsoever.

The response of the pro-abstinence lobby was to claim that the Mathematica study was ‘too narrow’, began when the abstinence-only curricula were in their infancy and ignored other studies that supported their position – i.e. give us more time and money and we’ll come up with better brainwashing techniques.

The STD data, while showing a lower level of STDs in the pledge group still showed that 4/6% of that group contracted an STD despite taking a virginity pledge. The study also showed that not only did taking a virginity pledge only delay first sexual activity for a couple of years, rather than prevent it until marriage, but that virginity pledge group showed marked differences in sexual behaviour compared to the non-pledge group. Only 2% of the non-pledge group indicated that they had consented to oral and/anal intercourse during the period in which the data used in the study had been collected, while amongst those who took a virginity pledge, the number who consented to either oral or anal intercourse rose to 13%.

If you’ll forgive the crudity of the next remark, which is necessary to drive the point home, the Bearman and Brueckner study showed that putting your daughter through abstinence-only education makes them more than six times more likely to give head or take it up the arse than other young women of the same age, leading Bearman to conclude that:

“An abstinence movement that encourages no vaginal sex inadvertently encourages other forms of alternative sex that carry a higher risk of sexually transmitted disease,”

Yes, its the good old law of unintended consequences yet again.

A 2002 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation also found that 55% of girls who had taken a virginity pledge admitted taking part in oral sex while 50% of those in the 15-17 age group considered that giving head did not compromise their pledge of abstinence – suddenly the reasoning behind Clinton’s ‘I did not have sexual relations…’ remark becomes crystal clear.

Oh, and unlike the Mathematica study, the Bearman and Brueckner study did show that those in the pledge group who did fall off the virginity wagon were less likely to use [conventional] contraception – rather than alternative orifices - than those who received sex education that included accurate advice on contraceptive methods other than abstinence.

And finally, to cap it all, a 2004 report issued by California Congressman, Henry Waxman, provided several examples of where Federally funded abstinence-only sex education programmes were providing students with manifestly inaccurate information, including:

• · misrepresenting the failure rates of contraceptives
• · misrepresenting the effectiveness of condoms in preventing HIV transmission, including the citation of a discredited 1993 study by Dr. Susan Weller, which the federal government had acknowledged , in 1997, was inaccurate false claims that abortion increases the risk of infertility, premature birth for subsequent pregnancies, and ectopic pregnancy
• · treating stereotypes about gender roles as scientific fact
• · other scientific errors, e.g. stating that “twenty-four chromosomes from the mother and twenty-four chromosomes from the father join to create this new individual” (the actual number is 23)

Little wonder, in light of all this information, that the now Democrat controlled Congress has indicated that it will terminate the Title V programme when it expires this year, after several States indicated that they would no longer accept the funding.

That’s the reality of abstinence programmes, not a silly little girl with her holier-than-thou parents and their crappy jewellery franchise, but a taxpayer-funded billion dollar ignorance economy.

Should sex/relationships education in the UK cite abstinence as an option for young people?

Of course it should, it’s their body, their life and their choice after all. But if you are going to include it, then give young people the facts and the evidence to make informed decisions, which is an altogether alien concept to the pro-abstinence lobby.

When my oldest child was born - 15 years ago… gulp! - my partner and I made a conscious decision that, I’m glad to say has born dividends and has, so I’m convinced, rewarded my son, and his younger sister, who came along later, with something very precious and yet also something that money can’t buy.

That something is good health, and the decision we took was simply that when he became ill, as children invariably do from time to time, we would look to the NHS for help only when it was absolutely necessary; that we wouldn’t be the kind of neurotic parents who go running to the GP to demand a cocktail of potions and lotions at the first sign of a sniffle.

That decision has given us our fair share of sleepless nights over the years, sitting at our kids’ bed-sides managing routine childhood ailments armed with nothing more than than love, over the counter medicines, a bowl/bucket with a quarter-inch of Dettol sloshing around in the bottom, and a wet flannel to keep the fever at bay, but its decision that in the long run has served our children well. My son, in particular, enjoys not just good health but rude health. If he’s unlucky he may succumb to the common cold once a year and the occasional stomach ‘bug’ and the very worst he’s had to put up thus far in his life has been the humble Chickenpox, which, in these days of near universal childhood vaccination, it pretty much the last of the traditional childhood illnesses that regularly does the rounds.

As for why we took that decision, that’s simple. We looked at the advice coming from the medical profession at the time and some of evidence and came to conclusion - the right conclusion in our view - that nothing the medical profession had to offer would serve our children quite so well as a good, healthy and active immune system and that the best, and only way, to achieve that was to let it do its job as much as possible without unnecessary intervention.

All of which brings me to today’s front-page article in the Independent, which, in keeping with its usual practice of eschewing mere news in favour of pamphleteering, has irritated the hell out of me:

Hay fever: the cure and the catch

A once-a-day pill for hay fever that could transform the lives of sufferers is being denied to thousands of those most severely affected because of the cost.

Okay, so this tells us two things. First, its another ‘miracle cure’ story and second that what follows is likely to be almost entirely made up of propaganda and contain the minimum possible news, and especially, scientific content.

The pill, which is dissolved under the tongue, is the first oral vaccine developed for hay fever.

Well, would you look at that. Not is it a ‘miracle cure’ but, heaven’s to Murgatroyd, its an easy miracle cure as well, a paragon of medical virtue insofar as it requires none of that icky and off-putting stuff involving needles, side-effects or surgery.

But the majority of NHS trusts have failed to fund it.

Note the propagandising language here. The ‘majority’ of NHS trusts have ‘failed‘ to fund the drug (the Telegraph are using ‘denied’ to much the same purpose and effect), which appears to tell us both that a large number of Trusts have already looked at the possibility of providing this new new drug and rejected the idea and that by doing so they’re implicitly letting us all down and denying us something that we should have by right.

That’s not, however, the position that emerges a fair bit later in the article:

Peter Anderson, the UK managing director of ALK-Abello, the Danish manufacurer of Grazax, said the “lion’s share” of NHS Trusts in the UK had yet to decide whether to fund the drug. “About 20-30 have reached a decision and about a dozen have agreed to fund it.”

So the majority of NHS Trusts haven’t actually made a decision one way or the other on whether they will make this drug available. After the last round of reorganisations, there are 152 Primary Care Trusts in England alone, so the number in the UK that have reached a decision is considerable less than 20% even allowing for Anderson’s rather vague exposition of current numbers, with anything from 40-60% (so far) deciding to put up the money.

By now, if you’re of a somewhat suspicious disposition (like me) you may be wondering quite where this story has come from, particularly as the construction of the story and the order in which quotations are introduced appears to imply that it may have come from the charity Allergy UK, who are first in line to put their views over - except that it would appear from the charity’s website that they haven’t issued a press release since the end of May, which rather rules them out of the running.

Another possibility is, of course, the conference cited in the article, at which a paper on this new drug was presented only yesterday:

Stephen Durham, a professor of respiratory medicine at Imperial College London and the Royal Brompton Hospital, London, who led the study presented at the 26th European Academy of Allergology and Clinical Immunology Congress (EAACI) in Sweden yesterday, said: “Reducing symptoms and improvement in quality of life are the number one priorities for hayfever sufferers …

Again, however, there is nothing by way of a news item or press release on either the conference website, or that of the EAACI for that matter, that relates directly to this story… and you may have already guessed where this is going next.

ALK-Abello, the pharmaceutical company that has developed this new ‘wonder drug’ and which, incidentally, is one of corporate sponsors of the EAACI conference, appears to be the only source of press information, in the form of two press releases published on its website, yesterday; one trailing its clinical efficacy (which includes a quote from Stephen Durham) and a second which focusses exclusively on claims about its cost-effectiveness:

GRAZAX® significantly reduces the use of symptomatic medication compared to placebo GRAZAX® significantly reduces the time lost from work compared to treating with symptomatic medication alone GRAZAX® significantly increase the number of QALYs compared to treating with symptomatic medication alone

Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) takes into account both direct costs (e.g. medication and physician visits) and indirect costs (productivity losses such as time away from work) caused by a condition e.g. allergy. One QALY is equal to one year of perfect health for a patient. The lower the cost per QALY gained, the more cost-effective the medical intervention.

Quality Adjusted Life Years, on their own, measure only the apparent clinical benefit of a particular treatment in terms of the number of years of ‘perfect health’ added to the lives of individuals by the intervention in question and make no assessment whatsoever of the economic benefits of such interventions; those are assessed by means of Cost-utility analysis, which are general expressed in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Years when making health technology assessments (i.e. evaluating new drugs, surgical procedures, etc.).

How this works through in health policy is by way of calculating the incremental cost effectiveness ratio, which is a measurement of change in costs change in costs of a therapeutic intervention (compared to the alternative, such as doing nothing or using the best available alternative treatment) to the change in effects of the intervention and not actually incremental at all, at least not in terms of the standard economic meaning of the word. What happens next is that the ICER for the treatment is compared to a monetary threshold set by policy makers (believed to be £30,000 per additional QALY in the UK) with those treatments that exceed the threshold likely to be rejected on cost grounds.

The problem with all this is that, first, the value and utility of QALYs is open to question and dispute. All of the methods of calculating the weighting in QALYs are to a considerable degree subjective and contingent on the population being surveyed - those who do not suffer from a specific condition, in particular, show a clear tendency to over-estimate its likely detrimental effect on quality of life compare to those who have the condition and such measures have also been heavily criticised for placing a disproportionate emphasis on physical pain and disability over mental health and for failing to take account of social factors, particularly the impact on the quality of life of others, i.e. carers, family members, etc.

Second, one cannot read up on any of this without coming away with the impression that it all seems designed to avoid putting over the ‘bottom line’ in clear financial terms. There’s no great problem in identifying the unit and per patient costs of particular interventions - drug companies want to get paid, naturally - which in this case amounts to £67.50 per month (or £810 per year, if you prefer to think in terms of annual costs) but to a layman the whole system of QALYs, CUAs and ICER’s is, at best impenetrable, and looks for all the world to be nothing more than a prime example of PNOYA economics - that’s ‘Pulling Numbers Out Your Arse’, by the way.

The other problem that seems apparent in all this, writing as a layman, is that it appears, in traditionally reductionist fashion, to be making assessments of the economic benefits of interventions in complete isolation and without regard to the possibility that patients may have more than one health problem at a given time. Its stands to reason that the economic benefits of a new hay fever treatment will differ markedly depending on whether these stem from an individual in otherwise robust health or one with a plethora of other debilitating conditions on top of their allergy, which reinforced the general impression that this is all amounts to something in between bullshit and voodoo.

Of course, I could be wrong and be walking into a right going over from one of more of our noted econo-bloggers, but sorry, that’s how it looks to me.

With the hay fever season at its peak, millions of people with an allergy to grass pollen are sneezing, snuffling and rubbing itchy eyes. Hay fever affects about 20 per cent of the UK population - more than 10 million people - of whom up to one million are so badly affected it interferes with their lives.

What is this ‘interferes’ business? Interferes is hardly medical terminology and tells us nothing at all as to the extent to which hayfever actually impacts on these people’s lives - interferes could be anything from seriously debilitating and life-limiting to simply a bit of nuisance necessitating the odd day off work. In the context of trying to form an impression about the ‘value’ of this new treatment, the verb interferes is almost entirely without substantive meaning.

The new treatment, Grazax, is the first oral vaccine for hay fever developed to tackle the underlying condition rather than the symptoms. Manufactured by a Danish company, and licensed in January, it contains small amounts of Timothy grass and is designed to “recondition” the immune system’s response to pollen in people who do not respond to normal treatment.

Oh good, at last we’ve got to a real fact - not a particularly illuminating one, admittedly, but nevertheless a fact and therefore something of an empirical oasis in a desert of meaningless subjectivity.

According to a study released yesterday, the vaccine can produce a cumulative and long-term improvement for hayfever sufferers. Results presented at an international allergy conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, yesterday showed that the longer the treatment is taken the greater the protection it offers.

A trial in 2,500 patients in 12 European countries and Canada showed it reduced symptoms by 36 per cent in the second year compared with a 30 per cent reduction in the first year. Patients in the trial were allowed to use their usual antihistamines and nasal steroid sprays and the findings showed a 44 per cent reduction in the need for this “rescue” medication in the second year, compared with a 38 per cent reduction in the first year.

Well, that does sound impressive even if this calling standard antihistamines and corticosteroid nasal sprays ‘rescue’ medication is rather over-egging the pudding - those with peanut allergies also carry what is referred to as ‘rescue’ medication with rather more justification for the use of the term ‘rescue’ as in those context it means a self-administered shot of adrenaline to stave off anaphylactic shock, which, if untreated, can be fatal. Not quite the same thing then.

Still, figures of 30% and 36% percent for reductions in symptoms and 38% and 44% reductions in use of ‘rescue’ medication look fairly impressive, even if one allows for the fact that improvements in year 2 of treatment are left than a fifth of those in year one, which suggests the dear old law of diminishing returns may be kicking in, and that there’s no year three data as yet as this appears only to reflect the interim findings of an ongoing five year trial.

Still, as the Indy’s report (and the Telegraph are carrying a short but otherwise near identical report, which backs up the suggestion that there’s a press release lurking in the background) note, about half the Primary Care Trusts who’ve evaluated the drug thus far have failed to fall at the feet of its manufacturer and beg for supplies. Why is that, do you think?

Well, you can get some insight from this report (pdf) by the Thames Valley Priorities Committee, which covers PCTs in Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes.

In the main efficacy trial, mean daily symptom scores during the pollen season were 2.4 with Grazax and 3.4 with placebo (symptom scale 0-18). In total, 68% of the active treatment group used any rescue medication including antihistamines and topical corticosteroid sprays compared with 80% of the placebo group. Grazax contains allergens to only one type of grass. There is evidence of cross-reactivity with some other grasses, although allergies to other types of pollens (e.g. tree) will not be covered.

Its product licence restricts it to initiation by physicians experienced in treating allergic conditions pending more information on long-term safety

The Committee noted that:

− No data are currently available for use beyond one pollen season.

-Vaccine is a sublingual tablet to be taken daily starting at least 4 months before the hay fever season and continued for 3 years

− Most patients (68%) still have to take antihistamine medication

− There is no experience with children, adolescence and the elderly.

So, in another trial, our ‘wonder drug’ showed a reduction in use of ‘rescue’ medication of less than half that reported by the drug company’s own trials, it only covers one type of grass for certain and although other grasses may get some coverage you’re still knackered when it comes to tree pollen, two-third of those using it still need antihistamines and there’s no safety data on either long-term use or use by children, adolescents and older people.

Not quite such a miracle after all.

Campaigners for allergy-sufferers are now insisting that the new pill be made generally available. A spokesman for Allergy UK said the incidence of severe hay fever was growing but there was a shortage of allergy clinics. Six specialist centres and 32 allergy specialists serve the entire country. “The hayfever season is getting longer and the condition can be very debilitating. This pill is very effective and it should be available. We need to see more funding for it.”

Ah, I did wonder on first reading this if there was anything significant about Allergy UK having a general whinge about the shortage of allergy clinics/specialists but the Thames Valley report has cleared that up by noting that current product licence conditions mean you can only get the drug from a specialist and not from your local GP.

Of course, if the drug is ultimately successful in completing its full safety trials and taken up universally by the NHS then it seems likely that it’ll make its way on to the list of drugs than can be prescribed by your GP, in which case will we really need a shedload of extra allergy clinics and specialists?

Oh, while we’re on the subject of Allergy UK, the charity’s accounts (pdf) make for somewhat interesting reading as well, especially the Statement of Financial Activity on page 8 of the report, which appears to show that it spent £275,000 or so during 2005/6 on ‘trading operations’ which, so far as one can tell amount to some charity shops which generated an income on the year of around £42,000, unless much of its trading expenditure relates to its ’seal of approval’ scheme which nets it a cool £355,000 a year in payments from companies whose product are awarded this mark.

The hayfever season coincides each year with the exam season. A study released yesterday showed half of children with untreated hay fever suffer reduced concentration, potentially affecting their future prospects.

What did Thames Valley say?

There is no experience with children, adolescence and the elderly.

Not that that makes much difference, of course.

Professor Jean Emberlin, the director of the National Pollen and Aerobiology Research Unit, who led the study, said: “It appears that when suffering from hay fever, children are less able to concentrate on specific tasks. This is a trend that I have previously suspected and heard in anecdotal evidence, and this study offers further evidence to confirm the relationship.

But, the drug isn’t licensed for use with children and adolescents yet and could yet fail safety trials, so all this is irrelevant for the time being, other than, of course, as a means of racking up the emotional pressure in the hope than PCTs will cave in and start buying the drug.

“Often hay fever is trivialised, but this helps to bring it to the forefront of people’s minds, and emphasises the need for parents to take the problem seriously.”

Would the observation that Professor Emberlin appears to be laying on a bit thick here be trivialising things, do you think? After all, the research study cited shows that “half of children with untreated hay fever suffer reduced concentration” which may supports the use of hay fever treatments generally but says nothing at all about whether using this particular product has any impact on children’s concentration over and above that afforded by existing (and much cheaper) treatments.

Professor Pamela Ewan, a consultant allergy specialist at Addenbrookes hospital, Cambridge, and one of the UK investigators on the Grazax trial, said: “The results are quite impressive. It appears safe and it is convenient to take. But we can’t prescribe it because we can’t get anyone to fund it. The problem is the cost and the potential number of patients.”

Note the important corollary that now belatedly enters the fray -the problem is the cost and the potential number of patients.

Treatment with Grazax is recommended to start eight weeks before the beginning of the grass pollen season and to continue daily for three years. In the UK the drug costs £67.50 a month, about £2,400 for the three-year course. The cost of treating the one million worst-affected hayfever sufferers would be £800m a year. Professor Ewan said it was hoped that taking the drug for four months each year over the pollen season would be equally effective, which would cut the cost by two-thirds.

Except that this whole business of taking the drug only during the peak pollen season is not the treatment regime that’s been suggested by its producer and also not a regime that’s been tested, so Professor Ewan’s suggestion is not so much that we cut two-thirds of the annual cost so much as we should spend £267 million a year on a drug treatment for which there is currently no evidence for its efficacy or value when prescribed in the manner she suggests.

The only alternative treatment for severely affected sufferers is a course of immunotherapy injections, which require weekly hospital visits and close monitoring in case of side effects. It is risky, inconvenient and costly, and is limited to a couple of thousand patients in the UK. In contrast, Grazax, does not require injection or attendance at hospital, is safe and can be taken at home. This increases its appeal and the likely pressure on the NHS budget.

Without looking into this exhaustively, one of the immunotherapy options currently available is a drug marketed under the name Pollinex, which does indeed require weekly visits to the hospital to receive each of the four injections that make up a full course of treatment - funny, but the Indy doesn’t mention that. Pollinex is similarly limited to a specific type of pollen - ragwort - and is prescribed only in serious cases where other drug treatments have failed to provide relief and, so far as side effects go, these occur in around 15% of patients, most of whom experience nothing worse than a bit of tenderness and swelling around the site of the injection, although in very rare cases it can trigger anaphylactic shock in individuals with an extreme ragwort allergy.

As for expensive, well judge for yourself - a full pre-seasonal course of Pollinex currently costs £320 for the vaccine, compared to £800 for a full year’s course of Grazax, and if we assume that the Indy’s figures are somewhere in the right ball park, i.e. a couple of thousand people receiving Pollinex injections every year, then the actual cost to the NHS is around £640,000 a year, compared to the project £800 million cost for prescribing 1 million people with Grazax.

By the way, if further comments seem a little strained from this point forward, please forgive me - my bullshit allergy is flaring up something rotten.

Stephen Durham, a professor of respiratory medicine at Imperial College London and the Royal Brompton Hospital, London, who led the study presented at the 26th European Academy of Allergology and Clinical Immunology Congress (EAACI) in Sweden yesterday, said: “Reducing symptoms and improvement in quality of life are the number one priorities for hayfever sufferers … The ongoing trial may also show whether long term remission occurs with Grazax, which would be great news for allergy sufferers.”

Early results from some patients followed up for six years suggest the effects of the vaccine are long lasting. Professor Durham said the treatment was suitable for severely affected individuals in whom other treatments were not effective. “I believe about 10 per cent of the hayfever population, potentially a million patients in the UK, could benefit from this treatment.”

At £800 million a year, and with 68% of people still requiring other treatments on top, I don’t fucking think so…

Peter Anderson, the UK managing director of ALK-Abello, the Danish manufacurer of Grazax, said the “lion’s share” of NHS Trusts in the UK had yet to decide whether to fund the drug. “About 20-30 have reached a decision and about a dozen have agreed to fund it.”

Remember this from earlier? Okay, we’ll move on because the Indy is now going in to helpful mode…

Pollen, pollution and the symptoms that cause misery

* Hay fever is the commonest allergy in Western countries, affecting an estimated 20 per cent of the population in Britain.

* It is an acute allergic reaction to airborne particles of pollen which penetrate the nose, throat and upper respiratory passages.

* Typical symptoms include red, itchy and watery eyes, blocked or runny nose, frequent sneezing, coughing, and wheezing.

* The symptoms are caused by the over-sensitivity of the mucous membrane that lines the inside of the nose, throat and eyes.

* The commonest cause of hay fever is grass pollen. Pollen from birch trees especially causes hay fever in spring and from mugwort and chrysanthemum in autumn.

I’ll pause there for a second to reflect on the fact that neither new miracle Grazax or dear old Pollinex provides treatment for tree pollen, mugwort pollen or chrysanthemum, so if you are allergic to any of those then you’ll still have to keep a hankie a handy and tough it out.

* Hay fever affects many people in towns because of pollution. Pollen grains become attached to particles from car exhausts, increasing their allergy-inducing effect.

Its also thought that over use of antibiotics in childhood may be a contributory factor as this inhibits the development of a robust and effective immune system, which is why I mentioned my kids at the start of all this - neither suffer from hay fever.

* Treatment is mostly symptomatic, with anti-histamines and steroids to reduce the inflammation in the mucous membrane.

What else could the Indy add after all that. Well only the kind of trite ‘human interest’ angle story more usually found in cheap weekly magazines for bored housewives and office workers and those afflicted with an altogether more common and serious problem, congenitial stupidity:

‘I can be sneezing all day in summer’: Lisa Young, hay-fever sufferer, 37

Really? You should think yourself lucky you’re not in ‘Take A Break’ and husband’s not a serial bigamist who’s undergoing gender reassignment after running off with the lesbian dominatrix next door who used to be your best friend.

The first thing Lisa Young does every morning is swallow her anti-histamine tablets in a vain attempt to keep the runny nose and itchy eyes that blight every summer at bay.

“My eyes are the worst, smarting, itchy, continually sore. As soon as I go outside I start to itch. I can be sneezing all day in summer. I have suffered badly for years.”

Awwww… No, sorry. This may sound a bit hard-hearted but you’re still not going to persuade me its worth £800 million a year just to shave a few quid of your Kleenex bills.

Aged 37, she is a teaching assistant in Reading and has to accompany classes outside which can make it difficult to work. Her two children, Jane, eight, and Cain, four, are also affected and under the care of the specialist allergy clinic in Basingstoke.

Ms Young said of Grazax: “It sounds like what I need. If it can ward off the effects of hay fever and is more effective than anti-histamines, then I would be very interested in having it.”

Can’t blame you for that.

“It should be provided on the NHS.”

Houston. We have a problem.

Why should it be provided on the NHS? Or more to the point, at £800 million a year, which NHS services do you suggest we cut - of which taxes should we raise - so you can have an as yet unproven drug treatment that offers limited relief for a non-life threatening condition that, for most people, amounts to not much more than a bit of a bloody nuisance?

Allergies are growing throughout the UK and people who live in towns tend to be worst affected, owing to the pollution interacting with the pollen grains.

Ms Young said she knew many friends and neighbours who suffered in a similar way. “Where we live in the Thames Valley, it seems to be bad for allergies.”

Ohhh shit. This would be the same Thames Valley whose priorities committed has recently decided that Grazax “should be considered a LOW PRIORITY treatment due to lack of evidence of incremental clinical and cost effectiveness when compared to existing therapies.”

Do I get to allow myself a few moments of insufferable smugness for spotting that information when the Indy appear to have missed it, and the chance to play the ‘it’s just not fair’ postcode lottery angle, entirely? I think I do…

…okay, that’s quite enough of that, just one more line to go.

If it is too late for her to have the oral vaccine herself, she would want it for her children, she said. Grazax is not licensed for children, but it may be in the future.

Why on earth would it be too late for her to have this vaccine? Is she planning on dying before it completes its clinical trials or something? Methinks they’ve sent one of the interns out to get cover this bit of the story without explaining to them that this new Grazax stuff is like the flu vaccine that people get every year, not like the TB vaccine or the standard run of childhood vaccinations which are no use at all unless you have your shots before contracting any of the relevant illnesses.

FFS, if you’re going to run a human interest angle, you might at least go to the trouble of not making your subject look a bit of an idiot because you’ve not explained even the basics about how this vaccine works.

Which leaves only the same question posed in the title?

Why is the Indy (and the Telegraph for that matter) shilling for Big Pharma?

Ben Goldacre comprehensively fisks Gillian McKeith…

In fact, I don’t care what kind of squabbles McKeith wants to engage in over the technicalities of whether a non-accredited correspondence-course PhD from the US entitles you, by the strictest letter of the law, to call yourself “doctor”: to me, nobody can be said to have a meaningful qualification in any biology-related subject if they make the same kind of basic mistakes made by McKeith.

Not an article by McKeith, but her entire career.

Just read and enjoy…

(via Mr Eugenides)

UPDATE: More detail here - http://www.badscience.net/?p=362

Apropos of my last post on Richard Buggs’ piss-poor efforts to promote Intelligent Design as a scientific theory over at Comment is Free (link in the previous post), one of the many comments on the article raises what I consider to be quite an interesting point.

If we do want to teach children and young people to differentiate between science and bullshit, then surely, so they argue,  we have to give them access to a sample of said bullshit as an aide to understanding the difference.

Now, to me, that actually makes a lot of sense and may well provide the sole reasonable justification for the introduction of the some measure of the study of intelligent design into the science classroom.

So far as one can tell from conversations with my 14 year old son, the general ethos of the teaching of science in schools has not changed substantially since my own days as a callow youth. Science, as taught at both secondary schools and in sixth forms, remains an overwhelming empirical subject. Its still taught now as it was in my day, more or less as a practical discipline in a manner that is heavy on the scientific method - which is no bad thing in itself - but rather too light on such matters as the historical development and philosophy of science.

By that, what I mean is that children may be taught, say, Newton’s first law of motion - a body remains at rest or in motion with a constant velocity unless acted upon by an external force - and, of course, they will be taught both the mathmatical equation that goes with that law (F=ma) and how to apply that equation to the solution of, at GSCE, relatively straightforward mechanical problems.

What they will rarely, if ever, be taught at that level is precisely why and what it is about Newton’s first law that actually makes it a scientific law, as distinct from a scientific theory - in case you’re in any doubt, a scientific law is a simple, general principle that is very well-supported by evidence and, more often than not (in physics), has a mathematical proof. Such distinctions may not be critical to the required level of understanding necessarily to pass a GCSE examination, but conceptually they are very important to the development of well-rounded understanding of science.

It seem to me that, overall, the teaching of science at GCSE and ‘A’ level would benefit considerable from the inclusion of a mandatory ‘module’ that adequately covered such key practical and philosophical concepts; the nature of and difference between scientific laws and scientific theories, the nature of evidence and how it derived by means of the scientific method, basic Aristotelian logic, falsifiabilty, the anthropic principle, cognitive bias, personal construct theory and, I’m sure, a few other key principles besides - the nature and causes of error seems an obvious one.

Not a difficult syllabus to write, you must agree, nor indeed one that would so complex or abstract as to render it beyond the capabilities of at least a reasonably competent 14-16 year old.

And within the context of such a module, there may be conceivably be a sound case for the inclusion of a study of intelligent design. After all, let’s face it, its claims to be scientific theory are so poorly conceived and constructed as to amke it also an optimum case study in the application of basic concepts, not least of which is falsifiability, in drawing distinctions between what might and mignt not reasonably be considered to be science.

One of the core arguments put forward by ID’s supporters is that we should ‘teach the controversy’ - and in the right context, such as that outlined above that may well not be such a bad idea, although it would rule out such a syllabus being written by ID supporter, such as the laughably named Truth is Science.

Mmm… What to do?

If the ID-ers are ruled out as possibly authors of such a syllabus, then where can we possibly turn?

I wonder… do you think that this guy Richard Dawkins might be interested. He seems to know what he’s talking about…

O/T footnote…

I noticed the other day that I missed out on the chance to join in the Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon (date already noted for next year - Dec 20th).

I was about the same as age as my son is now when I first discovered Sagan, through his wonderful television series, Cosmos: A Personal Journey, which made Sagan an unlikely but much imitated cult figure at my school thanks to his mellifluous voice and rather curious - to our ears - accent.

It not every scientist who can motivated a bunch of 14 year old lads to practice saying “th’ ooniverse is a wundiful place” for hours on end until the got the phrasing and intonation spot on, but Sagan did it and left a desperate physics teacher wondering quite how the hell he was going to interest his class in something so mundane as Boyles Law, when all they wanted to talk about was cosmology.

That’s impact!

This leave me with but two things to say - why has Cosmos not been repeated, not even on one of the satellite/cable channels (and why is Bronowski’s Ascent of Man not on permanant rotation as well, for that matter) and why is not available on DVD.

Someone, somewhere, needs to pull their finger out.

While the Groan’s policy of allowing a right of reply to articles posted on Comment Is Free is a good one, it does mean that they do occasionally end up giving space to articles that are no more than a complete pile of shite.

Over the weekend, it was this pile of sanctimonious twattery by Tobias ‘my head’s so far up my own arse I can lick my own oesophagus’ Jones, which was nicely given all the short shrift it deserves by both Fisking Central and B4L, and now its Richard Buggs, of the laughably named ‘Truth in Science’ (or as they should be called, ‘Bullshitting Creationists in Pseudoscience’) turn to pollute the intellectual airways with the claim that ‘Intelligent Design is a science, not a faith‘.

Fuck right off.

‘It is true that complex things in nature look as if they have been designed. Darwin knew this. But the sublime truth about his theory is that it explains how complex things can come about without design.” That was James Randerson arguing that Darwin refuted intelligent design - which, he says, has no place in school science (Here endeth the lesson, December 13).

Darwin made a massive contribution to science, and his ideas still suggest hypotheses today. These provide the starting point for my own research, published in journals of evolution. But despite the brilliance of Darwin’s work, it is overoptimistic to claim that his theory explains the origin of all living things.

Ah, now here the thing. Yes, Buggs has had four articles published in reputable scientific journals; two in Evolution, one in Current Biology and one in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society… none of which deal with ‘intelligent design’ in any way, shape or form. In fact, it would appear that all four articles were produced as part of his work towards a post-graduate degree (PhD) in plant ecology and evolution from Oxford University, which he completed in 2006, under the supervision of Dr J R Pannell, on whose staff page he is listed as a past member of the research group.

What Buggs has clearly not done is authored a paper on plant ecology which proposes inteligent design as an alternative to Darwinian evolution - at least not one that has been submitted for journal publication and subjected to peer review, and as such his academic record is immaterial to the matter at hand.

If Darwin had known what we now know about molecular biology - gigabytes of coded information in DNA, cells rife with tiny machines, the highly specific structures of certain proteins - would he have found his own theory convincing? Randerson thinks that natural selection works fine to explain the origin of molecular machines. But the fact is that we are still unable even to guess Darwinian pathways for the origin of most complex biological structures.

And your point is? Actually what we have here is no more than the tiresome ‘god of the gaps‘ argument which suggests that what we don’t currently understand or have a complete evidential record for must have been ‘designed’. This is, not to put to fine a point on it, a complete load of bollocks; one might as well suggest that until Newton formulated his law of gravity towards the end of the 17th Century, we were all held down by the invisible hand of god simply because Artistotle never got around to figuring out the existence of gravity.

Science has turned lots of corners since Darwin, and many of them have thrown up data quite unpredicted by his theory. Who, on Darwinian premises, would have expected that the patterns of distribution and abundance of species in tropical rainforests could be modelled without taking local adaptation into account? Or that whenever we sequence a new genome we find unique genes, unlike any found in other species? Or that bacteria gain pathogenicity (the ability to cause disease) by losing genes?

Who indeed? But then Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection never did make any pretence of predicting the exact course and sequence of the evolutionary process; it simply explains the mechanism that drives that process (natural selection).

Evolution by natural selection is not a design theory. It does not set out the predict the final outcome of the evolutionary process, all it does predict is that natural selection will favour those traits and characteristics that confer a survival advantage. However in that process there is both an element of trial and error - some evolutionary mutations turn out to be advantageous, some not, and natural selection sorts out the wheat from the chaff - and an element of imprecision - many of the evolutionary solutions found in the natural world are actually far from being optimal solutions to a particular surivival ‘problem’, they are merely effective enough to do the job sufficiently to ensure their survival.

Think about it this way - why don’t tigers have green stripes? After all, they live in an environment much of which is green in hue and the purpose of stripes is to provide camoflage to aid them in the act of hunting their prey, so its should be obvious that as successful as their existing tan, black and white arrangement has been, such an arrangement would be even more effective as camoflage if it included a few green stripes as well.

In other words, if some unknown being did, indeed, design the tiger, does it not stand to reason that this designer, knowing that tigers would live in a largely green-coloured environment, would include the colour green in their design. After all, they did just exactly that for insects, amphibians, reptiles and birds - so why not tigers?

In actually fact, for all that mammals are naturally to be found in areas chock full of green vegetation, there is not a single mammal on this planet that possesses green skin or fur. Is that not a bit of strange ‘design decision’ on the part of the so-called ‘intelligent designer’? Did they suddenly develop red-green colour blindness? Or did this designer just get a bit pissed off with green and decide suddenly that he/she/it fancied and change of pallete in much the same way that Picasso moved on from his blue period to his rose period?

For any creature living in a green environment, it stands to reason that the optimum design, in terms of camoflage, will incorporate some element of the colour green, and yet this colour is entirely absent in mammals?

But, whatever the limitations of Darwinism, isn’t the intelligent design alternative an “intellectual dead end”? No. If true, ID is a profound insight into the natural world and a motivator to scientific inquiry. The pioneers of modern science, who were convinced that nature is designed, consequently held that it could be understood by human intellects. This confidence helped to drive the scientific revolution. More recently, proponents of ID predicted that some “junk” DNA must have a function well before this view became mainstream among Darwinists.

This is complete and utter bollocks from start to finish.

Is ID an intellectual dead end? Of course it is - unless you can produce the designer so that we can a conversation with them and discuss aspects of their design methodology - like why aren’t tigers green and why do men have nipples, which are functionally redundant?

There is no greater scientific dead end than the argument that ‘god did it’ - if that were true of anything then why bother trying to investigate it and understand how and why it happened when the only answer you’ll arrive at is that ‘god did it’.

Such an argument is completely self-defeating.
As for what the ‘pioneers of modern science’ did or did not believe, that has little or no relevance here. It really doesn’t matter whether the progenitors of modern scientific thought set out, originally, to discover entirely naturalistic explanations of the world around them or whether, indeed, some of them set out on that particular intellectual journey in the belief that what they would discover was ‘the mind of god’, anymore than it matters that the medieval pioneers of medicine, biology and, particularly, chemistry set out to discover the secret of the ‘philosopher’s stone’ that would transmute lead in gold and grant immortality. What matters is what they actually found, a world whose existence, form and function can be explained in naturalistic terms that do not rely on a belief in an omnipotent (and fictional) supreme being.

At one time many cultures believed that ‘god’ made the sun rise every morning - now we know it rises every morning irrespective of the whether god exists or not and the very concept of god has been reduced to something that peeks out of the gaps in our understanding of the natural world. Does that not tell you something about the nature of the concept of god? That the more we understand and can explain in natural terms the less need their is for such a concept?

Its frequently suggested that it is impossible to disprove the existence of ‘god’ but in reality even that suggestion may be turn out to be completely wrong - it all depends on what, if anything, finally emerges from the search for a quantum theory of gravity and what physicists call ‘grand unification theory‘. If such a theory were to explain the ‘big bang’ in entirely naturalistic terms, i.e. remove from our understanding of the universe the very concept of ‘creation’ - and Stephen Hawking does suggest such a possibility towards the end ‘A Brief History of Time’, then where in the universe is their any scope for the existence of ‘creator god’? Nowhere.

But, according to Randerson, ID is not a science because “there is no evidence that could in principle disprove ID”. Remind me, what is claimed of Darwinism? If, as an explanation for organised complexity, Darwinism had a more convincing evidential basis, then many of us would give up on ID.

Oh, for fucks sake, this is pathetic. Randerson, in stating that ‘there is no evidence that could in principle disprove ID’ is referring, of course, to the concept of falsifiability, and as Buggs should know all too well, if he is any sort of a scientist at all, this principle relates specifically to the idea that for any theory to falisfiable, the theory itself must admit to the possibility of a contrary case. The possibilty of the existence of a proof that intelligent design is a false proposition must lie within the theory of intelligent design, itself, and not within a separate theory (i.e. Darwinian evolution).

If Buggs has had any reasonable scientific education then this is something he should know and understand perfectly well, in fact one cannot but think reasonably think that he does know this and, knowing that Randerson is correct is his assertion, has deliberately attempted to introduce the false idea that ID can be falsified by Darwinian evolution in order to obscure the argument, which is altogether a very unscientific act of sophistry and intellectual dishonestry.

Finally, Randerson claims that ID is “pure religion”. In fact, ID is a logical inference, based on data gathered from the natural world, and hence it is firmly in the realm of science. It does not rely upon the Bible, the Qur’an, or any religious authority or tradition - only on scientific evidence. When a religious person advocates teaching ID in science without identification of the designer, there is no dishonesty or “Trojan horse”, just realism about the limitations of the scientific method. If certain Darwinists also had the intellectual honesty to distinguish between science and their religious beliefs, the public understanding of science would be much enhanced.

Then, Richard, let me invite you explain, in purely naturalistic terms, the origins of the presumed designer? Where does the designer come from and how did they come into existence?

I’ve been through this argument on at least two previous occasions, but to quickly recap, if there is a ‘designer’ then there are but three possibilities that would rationally explain their existence.

One is that this ‘designer’ came into being by supernatural means or by means of an act of spontaneous self-creation - such a designer would be synonymous with the concept of ‘god’ and therefore remove ID into the realm of religion.

The second is that the ‘designer’ evolved elsewhere in the universe by means of Darwinian evolution - that option rarely, if ever, gets raised by proponents of ID simply because it places us a mere one more steps removed from Darwinian evolution rather than removing Darwinian evolution from the picture, which is their real objective.

The final option is that ‘our’ designer was, themselves designed by another designer, who was themselves designed… you get the picture.

Such a sequence, if not terminated either by a self-creating ‘original designer’ (god) or by a first designer who evolved by means of natural selection, can only result in a unending sequence of designers designing other designers stretching away into infinity.

Such a sequence is impossible.

It cannot exist in this universe, which we know is finite in size - being 13.7 million billion (sorry) years old, the universe must be a sphere with a maximum radius of 13.7 million billion (again) light years, this being the furthest distance that electromagnetic radiation from the big bang can have travelled in this time, given that, from Einsteinian relativity, nothing can travel faster that the speed of light.

It cannot, equally, exist even if we allow for the validity of ‘many universes’ theory, as such a sequence can exist only if there are an infinite number of universes all of which are capable of spawning life in which this infinite sequence of ‘designers’ can reside.

However, we can prove mathematically that our universe is but one of a limited range of possible universes in which intelligent life could originate, while there are many more possible universes in which cosmological conditions would make all life, let alone intelligent life, entirely impossible, such that there cannot be infinitely many universes in which life exists.

And again, the only way out of this bind is by postulating that this particular universe is the only kind that can exist, allbeit in infinite numbers, which is possible only by either creation (in which case were back to god, and ID is rooted in religion, not science) or if it emerges from grand unification theory that the big bang can only give rise to a universe of this specific type, and no other - in which case there is no act of creation and, consequently, no god.

This last proposition is, consequently, logical fallacy, which amounts to proof that such a designer cannot exist - its also why ID-ers try to stick rigidly to biology and evolution and keep as far away from cosmology and quantum mechanics as much as is humanly possible, because its there that their Trojan Horse, the suggestion that there might be a designer who is not a god, falls apart completely.

Buggs is, as the CiF article notes, a member of the ’scientific panel’ of ‘Truth in Science’, an organisation that in September 2006 issued a free ‘resource pack’ to the head of Science of every secondary school and 6th form college in the UK, a pack which includes a DVD promoting intelligent design and a ‘teacher’s manual’, which I’ve uploaded to MoT -tis_pack_teachers_manual.pdf

What makes this particular document interesting is that, like Buggs’ article, it relies very heavily on a highly selective use of ‘facts’ in support of the false contention both that ID is a scientific theory and that it should be considered an ‘alternative’ to Darwinian evolution.

For example, it suggests that pupils should, as a ‘learning outcome’, know that ‘domestic breeding is similar to natural selection’.

It isn’t, and what similarities there are, of course, entirely superficial. Natural selection takes place, of course, entirely with deliberate human intervention. It may, of course, arise as a consequence, today, of human impact on the environment but not in controlled manner and not by design - if anything natural selection acts to circumvent human ‘design’ as in the case of everything from warfarin-resistant rats to so-called ’super-bugs’ that have become resistant to antibiotics.

The very fact that humans can ‘engineer’ genetic change, whether by selective breeding or, more recently, by direct manipulation of the genome, neither refutes natural selection or support the idea of an ‘intelligent designer’ - it merely clouds the argument in the hope of making ID seem that little bit more plausible than it really is (i.e. not at all). It is and intellectually and scientifically dishonest proposition.

Under ‘What Darwin didn’t know’, it suggest that children should:

“Understand that in Darwin’s lifetime scientists did not appreciate the complexity of living cells.”, and

“Know that since the 1950s our knowledge of cells has exploded, and that they contain a huge variety of miniature machines.”

Again, this line of argument, which serves an introduction to the notion of ‘irreducible complexity’ is raddled with intellectual dishonesty.

That Darwin had no direct knowledge of genetics when he formulated his theory of evolution by natural selection has no bearing on the validity of his theory - in fact the development of the study of genetics has done nothing, whatsoever, to refute Darwin’s theory and has, indeed, given considerable support to the theory of evolution, the process of which we can increasing trace directly through the genome.

Skipping straight from Darwin to the 1950s, missing out the work of Gregor Mendel, which took place contemporaneously with that of Darwin, but whose importance was not realised until the turn of century, the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis and, who know, may be even Crick and Watson, is equally dishonest in failing to give due recognition to the manner in which our understanding of genetics developed hand in hand with that of evolution.

But then that’s precisely the point, isn’t it - to try and devalue Darwin’s work by concentrating on the information that was not available to him at the time he wrote ‘On the Origin of Species’ rather than on the extent to which his work played an influential and formative role in the development of the modern science of genetics.

Moving a little further, we find teachers being encouraged to ensure that pupils:

‘Understand that irreducibly complex structures cannot evolve by slight, successive, advantageous variations, because at certain points in their evolution they will lose function altogether’, but only after that to ,

‘Understand that Darwinian scientists dispute this, and that the theory of co-option (borrowing parts from other machines) is a possible solution to the problem of irreducible complexity.’

You’ll note that ‘irreducible complexity’ is presented, here, as a matter of fact (it is, in fact, anything but) albeit one that is disputed by Darwinians, thereby placing the cart firmly before the horse. It’s also not so much disputed by Darwinians as roundly dismissed, having been both solidly refuted in numerous peer-reviewed papers. It’s also not, in itself, proof of, or even an argument for design, merely a test for evolution and part of evolution’s ‘falsifiability’, as was identified by Darwin himself, who was certainly aware of its origins in Paley’s ‘watchmaker analogy‘ and yet more evidence that ID is no more than an attempt to insert a teleological argument in science by covert means.

In addition to throwing Michael Behe in the mix as one of its supposed ‘authorities’ for intelligent design - the same Michael Behe who was forced to admit in Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District that his arguments on irreducible complexity are both flawed and do not constitute evidence for intelligent design, Truth in Science also cite Prof. Dean H Kenyon as an authority, the same Prof. Kenyon who has, in the past, given evidence in court in favour of the teaching of full-blown creationism in science classes and whose textbook on ‘intelligent design’, ‘Of Pandas and People’ is most notable for having been drafted as a textbook on creationism that was only altered (replacing all references to creationism with reference to ‘intelligent design’) after the Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v Aguillard, which ruled that the teaching of creationism violated the US consitutional separation between church and state.

There can be no more conclusive evidence to demonstrate the theological origins of intelligent design or its real purpose as a Trojan Horse for creationism that the simple fact that the first major published work on the subject began life as a book about creationism and ‘became’ a book about ‘intelligent design’ only after the teaching of creationism in science classrooms was explicitly ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

I guess this part of Kenyon’s story is one that Truth in Science don’t include in their ‘resource pack’.

I think I’ll leave it there, although I should quickly note a couple of absolute gems from the last section things that pupils should ‘understand’, specifically:

“Understand that there is no known natural process to explain the origin of information” - bollocks, try chaos theory for starters, and

“Recognise that the inference of design makes sense of the world as a rational and comprehensible product of an intelligent mind” - but the inference of design is not proof of actual design and the psychology of this process is easily explained simply with a quick run through of Kelly’s theory of personal constructs.

Actually the refutation of this statement can be something as simple and straightforward as a photograph of a individual snowflake or the Giant’s Causeway - both ‘look’ designed but both an entirely natural phenomena - unless you think god spends his day making billions of individual fucking snowflakes.

As I’ve said before, and will continue to state, intelligent design is not a scientific theory in the slightest, it is theology that been badly-dressed up to look vaguely like science in the hope of sneaking creationism back into the science classroom via the backdoor.

Or, to put it more simply, complete and utter bullshit.

As a mountaineer knows, the problem with working in a rarified atmosphere is that you tend to end up being laid low with oxygen starvation.

Here’s Jonathan Derbyshire on the limits of necessary disrespect…

Dawkins’ attempt to explain away centuries of religious belief by comparing it with childish credulity, for instance, is deeply unsatisfactory. And if this kind of genetic explanation is laughably weak, Dawkins’ grasp of the phenomenology of religious belief is non-existent. Here Wood turns to Wittgenstein, who insisted that there are “grammatical differences between the use of religious language and ordinary language” (this is Wood’s gloss on some of the things Wittgenstein says in the notes collected as Culture and Value). Wittgenstein’s claim (anticipated by Kierkegaard and, interestingly enough, Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ) is that religious language is not referential (it’s not about some substantive reality) but modal – in other words, that it gives expression to a “form of life” or way of being in the world.

And his conclusion:

But despite the fact that some of Wittgenstein’s acolytes have wrongly supposed that the master’s doctrines relieved them of the need to justify belief in God, Wood is right to suggest that the “jauntily unphilosophical way in which most popular atheistic writing simply ignores the Wittgensteinian dilemmas is disappointing, and explains why its explanations of the sources of religious belief are so jejune.”

This is George… say hi!

Now, George is a born-again Christian of the variety that tends to consider The Bible to express the literal truth and despite doing fairly well for himself, he’s also not really renowned for being, shall we say, the sharpest tool in the box.

So, despite being fairly atypical in many ways, in some respects he is very typical of your average to below-average follower of an exoteric religion.

Richard Dawkins is a man who provoke a modicum of controversy with his views and the manner in which he expresses them. To some, he is not to their personal taste. Some find him a little too agressively polemical in his approach and some think him rather boorish.

One of Dawkins’ day jobs is that of holding the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University - note the operative words in that statement, ‘public understanding‘. His job is to talk to the public. That’s his primary audience.

So let’s imagine, for the moment, that you were having a conversation with George, a man whose understanding is very public, and you said to, quite casually:

“What relevance do you think Wittgenstein has to the public discourse on atheism and religion?’

Do you think George will reply?

A) Well, I think the jauntily unphilosophical way in which most popular atheistic writing simply ignores the Wittgensteinian dilemmas is disappointing, or

B) Wittgenstein? Mmm. Is that anywhere near Berlin? I think I went to a Bierkeller there once, while visiting that nice Mrs Merkel?

Dawkins’ arguments in the ‘God Delusion’ may well be philosophically unsatisfying, but then he is writing for an audience, some of whom may well own precisely two books - The Bible and (if they have children) The Children’s Illustrated Bible.

Either way, they’re unlikely give a toss about whether Dawkin’s ignores “the Wittgensteinian dilemmas” in his book, largely because many of them have never even heard of Wittgenstein, save for a few fans of Monty Python who may know that he played in midfield for the German Philosopher’s XI behind a front two of Heidegger and Nietzche.

I think the discontinuity here is, therefore, just that bit obvious.

UPDATE: Vistors arriving here by way of Tom Hamilton’s ‘defence’ of Joanthan Derbyshire’s comments, to which this post relates, might like to read this, which rather put matters in their proper context.

I’m basically a reasonable kind of person, which is why, following yesterday’s ructions with Nikkogen, I think its only fair that I explain in a little more detail why I’m rather skeptical about their proposed power generation system and the claims made for it, not least because, to fair to them, this also gives them a chance to respond in technical terms and demonstrate that they have overcome the technical limitations that are the cause of my own… err… uncertainties about the merits of their system.

Let’s set the parameters first - and don’t worry, I will try to keep out of the serious brain crunching physics as much as possible.

What Nikkogen are pitching is a sizeable power generation system in the 40-240 megawatt output range, which they claim will offer the following benefits:

# Zero Emissions – No harmful gases emitted from our Power Stations.
# Zero Carbon-Based fuel source – Does not use coal, gas or oil.
# Minimum ongoing costs – There are NO ongoing fuel costs only a small maintenance cost.
# Managed Power Generation – We can provide Zero-Emission Power Stations with Operating Staff, allowing non-utility companies into the power-generation industry.
# Modular design and low maintenance costs.
# Small physical “footprint” area for complete Power Station.
# No large storage yards and cooling towers are required.
# Location independent – can be built almost anywhere.
# Can be configured for grid or local electricity distribution – Where two or more nikkogen Power Stations are co-located.
# No heavy rail access required.
# Clean limited-noise operation.
# No dust or particulate emissions.
# No potentially harmful or dangerous gases or fluid storage required
# The whole power station facility is less dangerous than a Petrol/Gas filling Station– which we are happy to have located in our business and residential areas.
# Electricity generated available 24 hours, 365 days a year.

All very impressive, if it can be delivered.

What we also know, from communications with the company is this:

Our technology is not rocket science it’s a well proven system. What we have done is to apply the latest engineering technology to it. All I am prepared to say is that Its fluid based and it has an interesting flywheel mechanism. It provides enough continuous energy output to drive a single 3 phase electrical alternators sized between 40 Megawatts through to 240 Megawatts .

It’s not a perpetual motion machine as it’s not 100% efficient – what it does however is self regulate for increasing loads as the alternator output current increases.

So there’s a flywheel arrangement in there somewhere driven, in some way, by ‘fluid’ - quite how this is achieved or what the fluid actually is, is not made clear, but then with a patent pending you wouldn’t expect such detailed information anyway.

The last piece of information of relevance is that Nikkogen refer to this a ‘Prime Mover’ system, which unless they’re going to redefine the term as its currently used, refers to an electronic torque management system that’s already in use in conventional power generation systems (i.e gas turbine, oil, etc.) and which, from the technical information I’ve managed to trace, does indeed offer improvements in efficiency but at a premium in terms of capital costs - i.e. these systems are not cheap, by any means. but they do appear commercially viable so, somewhere along the line the benefits they provide must outweigh their initial capital cost.

Now for the science bit.

For the time being we’ll put the question of powering this system to one side and consider only what happens from the flywheel onwards.

A flywheel does not generate energy its, rather it stores energy (as kinetic energy) which can then be released to drive an alternator - and to be fair, a well designed and implemented flywheel can be a very efficient means of storing energy (anything up to 90% efficiency is possible), far more efficient, in fact, than a conventional chemical battery.

However, if you look at where flywheels are currently being used, what you find is that its pretty small scale stuff. Aside from cropping up in the area of electric cars, as in this patent - which, interestingly, describes a hydraulically driven electric motor that could be considered ‘fluid powered’ but at a much, much smaller scale than anything proposed by Nikkogen - the main uses of flywheel energy storage appear to be in some uninterruptable power supply (UPS) systems, but only as a shortlived last resort to enable an orderly emergency shutdown if everything fails, even the UPS, or as backup energy storage in wind-powered microgeneration systems, to keep the juice coming when the wind drops.

In terms of power output, the largest current project I’ve been able to find anywhere is a 50kWh system being developed by the Central Japan Railway Company, which aims to use a superconducting magnet to levitate the flywheel - giving near zero friction - for which the projected development costs are 1.1 billion yen. Now that’s not that badly priced for a high tech R&D project - a shade under £5 million at current exchange rates, but it does make for interesting point of comparison with Nikkogen’s proposed system. The Japanese system, according to its base specifications, will use a flywheel of approximately 2 metres in diameter, weighing 20 tons and rotating at 2000 rpm.

To get from this Japanese system to the kind of power output are promising from the smallest generation system necessitates an increase in the kinetic energy of the flywheel by a factor of 800, in fact more as the alternator will not be 100% efficient (this is impossible due to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) so to make matters easier we’ll assume 80% efficiency in the alternator, giving a nice round factor of 1000.

To increase the energy of the flywheel, you can increase its mass (actually you increase its moment of inertia, which is bit more complicated to work out as it depends on the shape and construction of the flywheel, but for our purposes here maas will do nicely) in which case the energy of the flywheel will increase in direct proportion to the mass - double the mass, double the energy.

Alternatively you can increase the angular velocity of the flywheel’s rotation - this is the more productive route as the energy increases in proportion to the square of the angular velocity - double the velocity means four times the energy, but this introduces massive stresses into the flywheel - and believe me, if anything were to go pear shaped with the 20 ton Japanese system while it was rotating at its full 2000 rpm, such a failure in the magnetic levitation system or the flywheel disintegrating under the stresses of its angular velocity, then you really don’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity when it goes. 20 tons at 2000 rpm is a hell of a lot of momentum to have suddenly flailing around the place.

To upscale the Japanese system to the 50 megawatt mark that Nikkogen would need, approximately, for its smallest generation system, would require a 20000 ton flywheel rotating at 2000 rpm or a 20 ton flywheel rotating at something of the order of 63,000 rpm or some combination in between.

So far as I am aware - and I stand ready to be corrected - a flywheel energy storage system at the scale suggest is beyond current engineering capabilities and materials technology - the small flywheels used in some UPS systems, which run at speeds up from 40,000-100,000 rpm, have to be made of spun kevlar to withstand the stresses. The underlying science is basically sound, but a 40-50 megawatt flywheel is, so far as I understand the technology, too much of an ask at the present time.

However, to pursue this further, lets assume for the sake of argument, that Nikkogen could produce just such a flywheel energy storage system with a 40-50 megawatt capacity. That’s still only half of the equation - before you can store 40MW of power in the flywheel you got to generate at least 40MW (actually 45-5oMX, assuming 80-90% efficiency) to put into the flywheel to begin with.

Now, remember, leaving aside the fluid issue, Nikkogen are promising zero emissions, zero carbon and no ongoing fuel costs, which rather limits your options.

Hydrocarbons are right out, as Nikkogen make entirely clear, and with no ongoing fuel costs we can also rule out hydrogen cells and nuclear energy (as the fuel certain does cost money, and plenty of it). The system is also location independent, so we can forget wave/tidal power, water power (as in hydroelectricity) and conventional geothermal energy (for which there’s no working system anyway).

Unless anyone can think of something I’m missing here (millions of hamsters?) this leave three main conventional possibilities, wind, solar and a Sterling engine, plus the mysterious fluid drive mentioned in Nikkogen’s patent.

Again we butt against problems of scale.

Wind power could drive a flywheel energy storage system - indeed such arrangements are used in wind-powered microgeneration systems which store energy in a flywheel as a hedge against the loss of direction should wind drop off. But… and its a big but, the largest current wind turbines max out at 6MW output and comes in at a stonking 186m (610ft) tall with a diameter of 114m (384ft) - for perspective, Britain’s tallest building, Canary Wharf Tower, is 235.1m tall. To generate the 45-50MW input to the system, you’d need 8-9 of those, and some extreme good fortune with the planning system. A more conventional wind power solution, using the 90m towers one sees in commercial wind farms, would require 25 turbines as these deliver 2MW output.

As for Solar energy, we can forget the photovoltaic cells that people are most familiar with. At 7-17% efficiency they’re just not up to the job and even the best current system, which used solar energy focussed by parabolic mirrors to drive a Sterling engine (a heat engine) delivers only 30% efficiency at 1KW per square metre.

That said, a solar-powered Sterling engine system could deliver the kind of power input needed, but to put these requirements into perspective Southern California Edison are currently constructing the worlds largest solar installation, using Sterling engines, which will deliver, when complete, 500MW. The downside to this is this installation will require 20,000 generation units covering an area of 4,500 acres (19 square kilometres), so scaling down to match the requirements of Nikkogen’s smallest proposed plant would still require 450 acres. Oh, and solar-powered Sterling engines don’t tend to work well in British conditions, in fact they don’t work at all if its overcast, which rather puts a dampener on that idea.

Which, at last, brings us to the mysterious realms of fluid power, and as much as I think about it, I just can’t ’see’ it, if you get what I mean. The generate energy from a fluid medium, other than by means of chemical reaction, you have to get it moving somehow, either under gravity (as in the case of hydro-electric power), pressurising it or by generating convection currents by applying heat.

In all cases, unless to take advantage of potential energy arising from natural sources, natural height differentials, river flows, tides, ocean currents, you have to put energy into the system to get the fluid moving and out dear friend the second law of thermodynamics comes into play - you cannot get more energy out that you put in.

This all a bit dry, to say the least, so its time for a comic song, if not the comic song of all-time, by Flanders and Swann, which coincidentally also explains thermodynamics.

[Michael:] Snow says that nobody can consider themselves educated who doesn’t know at least the basic language of Science. I mean, things like Sir Edward Boyle’s Law, for example: the greater the external pressure, the greater the volume of hot air. Or the Second Law of Thermodynamics - this is very important. I was somewhat shocked the other day to discover that my partner not only doesn’t know the Second Law, he doesn’t even know the First Law of Thermodynamics.

Going back to first principles, very briefly, thermodynamics is of course derived from two Greek words: thermos, meaning hot, if you don’t drop it, and dinamiks, meaning dynamic, work; and thermodynamics is simply the science of heat and work and the relationships between the two, as laid down in the Laws of Thermodynamics, which may be expressed in the following simple terms…

After me…

The First Law of Thermodymamics:
Heat is work and work is heat
Heat is work and work is heat
Very good!
The Second Law of Thermodymamics:
Heat cannot of itself pass from one body to a hotter body
(scat music starts)
Heat cannot of itself pass from one body to a hotter body
Heat won’t pass from a cooler to a hotter
Heat won’t pass from a cooler to a hotter
You can try it if you like but you far better notter
You can try it if you like but you far better notter
‘Cos the cold in the cooler with get hotter as a ruler
‘Cos the cold in the cooler with get hotter as a ruler
‘Cos the hotter body’s heat will pass to the cooler
‘Cos the hotter body’s heat will pass to the cooler

First Law:
Heat is work and work is heat and work is heat and heat is work
Heat will pass by conduction
Heat will pass by conduction
Heat will pass by convection
Heat will pass by convection
Heat will pass by radiation
Heat will pass by radiation
And that’s a physical law

Heat is work and work’s a curse
And all the heat in the Universe
Is gonna cooool down ‘cos it can’t increase
Then there’ll be no more work and there’ll be perfect peace
Really?
Yeah - that’s entropy, man!

And all because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which lays down:

That you can’t pass heat from the cooler to the hotter
Try it if you like but you far better notter
‘Cos the cold in the cooler will get hotter as a ruler
‘Cos the hotter body’s heat will pass to the cooler
Oh, you can’t pass heat from the cooler to the hotter
You can try it if you like but you’ll only look a fooler
‘Cos the cold in the cooler will get hotter as a ruler
That’s a physical Law!

Oh, I’m hot!
Hot? That’s because you’ve been working!
Oh, Beatles - nothing!
That’s the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics! 

Right, so that’s thermodynamics, which is enough of problem to be tackling, except that if we’re dealing with fluid systems that we also, very possibly, will have to deal with turbulence as well.

I’m not even going to attempt to explain turbulence in any great detail, and certainly not the maths, which legitimately frightens even the particle physics mob. Put it this way, there is a wonderful, if apocryphal, story regarding the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was reputedly askedwhat he would ask God, given the opportunity.

His reply was: “When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.”

You get the general picture. Turbulence is a flow regime characterised by chaotic stochastic property changes, i.e. a complete bugger to deal with.
However, there is a lovely little poem by Lewis F Richardson, which nicely illustrates the problem:

Big whorls have little whorls
That feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls
And so on to viscosity.

Turbulence creates drag, and drag dissipates energy, so a turbulent fluid flow in inherently inefficient. Throw turbulence into the mix, and it’ll turn up unpredictably and where you least expect it, and you’re again losing energy from the system and increasing the amounts of energy you have to put into the system to begin with to get your required output.

From what I can tell about Nikkogen’s project, some of it makes sense, in principle, particularly the flywheel and torque management system arrangement which could well provide a very efficient means of driving an alternator to generate power - and were I approached about this in the context of a microgeneration system that claims to offer zero emission and a small (or even zero) energy cost using an established renewable energy source then I’d certain give it very good look over.

But, at the kinds of power output being talked about, I have to be skeptical and we’re talking of a system that exceeds any other existing/prototype system that I’m aware of by some orders of magnitude - the flywheel alone would appear represent a major engineering feat akin to leaping straight from a Greek Trireme to the SS Great Britain, never mind that simply to get that flywheel moving with sufficient energy to deliver 40MW of electricity would require, in a best case scenario, an input of 50MW of free, no fuel, zero emissions energy.

That’s not to say that the patent is entirely without merit. We have a saying in the Black Country, ‘Yo’m eyes am bigger than yer bally’ (your eyes are bigger than your belly), which describes situations in which someone is being vastly overambitious or overreaching themselves, and it strikes me that this could well be the situation here - the science might stack up at the small scales required for a scale prototype or even a working microgeneration system - a fliud-based heat engine, like a Sterling engine or the hypothetical Carnot Engine, coupled with flywheel energy storage is possible and, with the right engineering, likely to be very efficient - but I just can’t see that the technology will scale to the degree that Nikkogen suggest, at least not within kinds of timescales that venture capitalists consider in looking for a return on their investment.

Tim Worstall will have a better view of the ‘investment potential’ of this system but from my own economic laymans perspective, one has to wonder quite what the underlying business model is here, whether it is the actual delivery of a working power generation system or a South Sea bubble model in which the primary objective is to sell the possibility of such a system all the way to an IPO on the promise that what look to be pretty insurmountable technological hurdles, at the moment, could be overcome in five or ten years time, and then get out before the bubble bursts.
Having said all that, the one truly troubling statement in all this, knowing the history of flywheel systems, is this one:

It’s not a perpetual motion machine as it’s not 100% efficient – what it does however is self regulate for increasing loads as the alternator output current increases.

I could be misreading this statement, but this looks a little too suspiciously like the holy grail of all past flywheel systems, most of which tended to suggest magnetism rather than fluids as a motive force, the creation of a self or near self-sustaining feedback loop to drive the system.

The idea sounds plausible enough if you don’t understand thermodynamics - you get the flywheel rotating up to speed and then tap just a little of the power output of the alternator, which you feed back into the system (usually in bursts or pulses) to keep the flywheel turning.

The classic interpretation of such a system generally proposes the use of magnetic repulsion to push the flywheel - a simplified version of this it that you mount a magnet in only location one the flywheel’s edge with the north pole facing outwards, with a correponding electromagnet housed in the casing surround in the flywheel in line with the its axis rotation. As the magnetic section of the flywheel passed the electromagnet, you briefly shunt a pulse of electricity from the output alternator to the electromagnet which gives the flywheel a ‘push’ to keep it turning at a constant velocity, while tapping off the alternator’s output for the rest of the cycle as ‘free’ energy to be sold.

It sounds incredibly plausible, because, like a flywheel-powered ‘friction’ motor in a child’s toy, you’re just giving it a bit of push to get it started and then it appears to retain retain energy for a relatively long time after that push…

But it still doesn’t work because you cannot get more energy out of the system than you put in - the electromagnetic force generated by the pulse taken from the output generator is not sufficient to sustain the flywheel at a constant velocity, it doesn’t push hard enough, and the flywheel will eventually run down, just as a ‘friction-powered’ toy car will come to a stop.
You see that’s the thing about entropy - it’ll get you every single time.

If ever the name of an organisation was a misnomer then its that of the latest peddlers of the unscientific snake oil of creationism, ‘Truth in Science‘, which, according to the Guardian, is currently claiming that its ‘resource materials’ are in use in 59 secondary schools in Britain despite the government having made it clear that:

“Neither intelligent design nor creationism are recognised scientific theories and they are not included in the science curriculum.”

Jim Knight, Minister for Schools, Department for Education and Skills (November 1 2006)

The article even quotes Nick Cowan, head of chemistry at Bluecoat school, in Liverpool, as having said:

“Just because it takes a negative look at Darwinism doesn’t mean it is not science. I think to critique Darwinism is quite appropriate.”

Nick is correct in his statement inasmuch as it is not wrong to attempt to critique Darwinian evolution and that the mere fact that a particular theory might take a negative view of the theory of evolution by natural selection does not, on it own, mean that they theory is not science, but where he is sadly mistaken to the point of calling his professional competence as a science teacher into question in, seemingly, implying that the so-called theory of ‘intelligent design’ is any way a scientific theory.

Intelligent design is not a scientific theory, it is a deliberately conceived and contrived attempt to introduce a teleological argument into the teaching of science where no such argument belongs; creationism re-drafted and re-modelled to fit into the cracks between extant scientific knowledge and understanding of the nature of the universe.

So, for the benefit of Nick and any other science teacher who might have a received these materials from ‘Truth in Science’ and have been taken in by the false suggestion that the supposed ‘theory of intelligent design’ is in any respect scientific, let me clarify matters for you and explain precisely why it is not science.

To begin at the beginning with a dictionary definition of science:

Science. noun.

(a) The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.
(b) Such activities restricted to a class of natural phenomena.
(c) Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study.

You’ll note the important qualification in point (b), ‘restricted to a class of natural phenomena‘, i.e. phenomena that can be explained and accounted for by entirely natural means. Any phenonmenon that relies on a supernatural explanation, whether this is a god (or gods), fairies, pixies, elves, goblins, leprechauns, Gandalf, Harry Potter or an infinite number of precariously balanced turtles, is not science.

That, at least, should be fairly simple to understand - and if you’re a science teacher and you cannot understand that then, frankly, you have no business calling yourself a science teacher.

Why is ‘intelligent design’ not science? Well I’m glad you asked.

The first reason why it is not science is that it cannot be tested experimentally; one of the so-called theory’s main proponents, Michael Behe has conceded precisely that point.

There is no experiment one can conceive of that can be used to test the supposed theory of intelligent design. The only possible empirical proof would be to observe the designer at work and in the actual act of ‘designing’ an organism - ‘god’ would have to provide proof of his/her/its existence in order to prove the validity of intelligent design, which, were it to happen, would negate entirely the concept of faith - one has no need to believe in the existence of supernatural being if that being provides absolute proof that they exist.

Second, the supposed theory of intelligent design makes no predictions, in fact it is impossible to predict in advance the actions of the supposed designer.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection does, by complete contrast, make predictions. It predicts that for given species the process of natural selection will, over time, serve to encourage, support and reinforce those traits and characteristics that are most advantageous to the survival of the species. A tiger has a striped body because in its natural environment that colouring confers a survival advantage. A striped tiger is better camoflaged than one with a plain colouring, similar to a Lion, and therefore better able to get in close to its prey without attracting the prey’s attention, making it more successful in hunting its prey; eating being one of life’s little prerequisites for survival.

Darwin’s theory provides both a rational explanation for why tigers have striped and an explanation as to how that particular colouring evolved to become the ‘natural’ colouring of tigers - it also explains precisely why different species of tiger, living in different environments, have different colourings, variations on the basic theme of stripes.

Intelligent design makes no such predictions and offers no such explanations, it merel proposes that tigers were specifically designed to suit their environment, but there is no fundamental reason why that should be case; the hypothetical designer could just have easily have designed the tiger to be bright blue with orange sport, purely as a matter of whim.

Third, intelligent design propose no new hypotheses of its own. In fact intelligent design has only one hypothesis that it applies to anything and everything - the ‘designer’ did it - and as has already been shown such a hypothesis is incapable of being tested experimentally and make no predictions against which the hypothesis could be tested.

Taken together, these three faults demostrate that intelligent design in not falsifiable, it does not admit to the possibility of a contrary case and is, therefore, not science.

On its own, this is sufficient to rule out the suggestion that intelligent design is in any material or abstract sense a ’scientific theory’, however there is one further flaw in ‘intelligent design’ that logically and conclusively demonstrates that it is not a scientfic theory, a flaw that resides in the central concept of the ‘theory’, that of the suggested existence of a designer.

Who is this supposed designer, and where did they come from?

Remember, a scientific theory cannot rely on explanations derived from the supernatural - a phenonmenon that can only be explained in supernatural terms is not scientific but theological and, therefore, has no place in the science classroom. We can, therefore, immediately rule out any consideration of any view of ‘intelligent design’ predicated on the concept of ‘Theistic Realism‘, as proposed by Phillip E Johnson (another key figure in the promotion of ‘intelligent design’, which holds that all true knowledge must begin with the acknowledgement of ‘god’ as creator because he believes that the unifying characteristic of the universe is that it was created by ‘god’. Such a view is in no way either empirical or naturalistic, rather it is an attempt to redifine science outside of naturalistic constraints.

As a final ‘clincher’ Johnson’s ‘authority’ for this worldview is based solely on scriptural references, thereby demonstrating conclusively that this is theology and not science.

If one rules out the possibility of ‘god’ as designer, this being thoroughly and obviously unscientific, one is left only with the concept that the alleged ‘designer’ must be something other than a ‘god’, a being of some desciption (and of considerable intelligence, far beyond the present capacity of the human race) but nevertheless one whose existence in fintie in space-time and who in neither entirely omnipotent nor omniscient.

The possibility that such a designer could, hypothetically, be a corporeal being, an extra-terrestrial or extra-dimension entity of near unimaginable intelligence - but not ‘god’ - is the Trojan Horse that proponents of ‘intelligent design’ have used to weedle their way into the classroom, despite the fact that, as in the case of Phillip Johnson, if you push the issue hard enough then what you find is that they what they really mean when they talk about a ‘designer’ is ‘god’.

In fact, neither the term ‘intelligent design’ in its current usage, nor the present ‘theory’ came into use until after the US Supreme Court ruled, in 1987 (in Edwards vs Aguillard), that a Louisana State law requiring the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in state schools was unconstitutional as it was intended to advance a particular religion in violation of the US First Amendment. Crucially, in its ruling in this case, the Supreme Court stated that the:

“teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction”

As a matter of no great coincidence, Stephen C Meyer, the founder of the Discovery Institute, the best known organisation dedicated to the promotion of ‘intelligent design’, claims that the term ‘intelligent design’ emerged at a conference in 1988 called Sources of Information Content in DNA, and was been coined by Charles Thaxton, the editor of Of Pandas and People, which was published in 1989 and is generally consider the first book on ‘intelligent design’, although as has since emerged, early drafts of the book used the term ‘creationism’ throughout, only for this term to be replaced, almost entirely, by the term ‘intelligent design’ in the final, published’ version of the text.

This, if it demonstrates anything, shows that ‘intelligent design’ is not more than creationism repackaged to fit the Supreme Court’s ruling in Edwards vs Aguillard.

But getting back to the designer, the question one must ask, if the hypothetical designer is not ‘god’, is where exactly did this designer come from?

Did they perhaps evolve elsewhere in the universe/multiverse, in which case their supposed intervention in our own existence serves only to place us one, step (or more) removed from evolution. It would not, however, invalidate Darwin’s theory of evolution, defeating entirely the primary objective of the proponents of ‘intelligent design’.
Was there, perhaps, another designer who designed the designer who designed us?

Such a hypothesis can lead only to one of two conclusion, each of which is self-defeating. Either the chain of designers must resolve itself to an ‘ultimate designer’ who ‘popped’ into existence from nothingness in an act of spontaneous self-creation - this would, again, make this designer a ‘god’ and negate any possibility of ‘intelligent design’ being anything other than theological in nature - or one must postulate the existence of unending sequence of designers stretching away to infinity.

This latter possibility is called, in formal logic, a reductio ad absurdum (in English, a ‘reduction to the absurd’) - the proposition that each designer must themselves have been designed by another superior designer in strict hierarchical sequence leads one to an absurd outcome of an infinite series of such designers, each superior to the last (or inferior if one moves down the chain). That the original premise leads to an absurd outcome is considered to be logical proof that the original premise is false.

It is, therefore, not possible that a hypothetical ‘designer’ can be anything other than a ‘god’ - although this is not necessarily the Christain ‘god’ either - irrespective of whether that designer is the one with a supposed immediate responsibility for the design of life in this universe, or an ultimate designer removed by an unknown number of steps from that which is supposedly our our designer.

One cannot logically postulate the existence of an intelligent designer who is not, in addition, a ‘god’, such that it follows, logically, that the supposed theory of ‘intelligent design’ is one entirely dependent on a supernatural explanation of the nature of the universe and, therefore, wholly unscientific.

(Hat Tip for the Guardian story to Labour Humanists)

In today’s Indy (behind the PPV firewall as usual, dammit!) Phillip Hensher has a sorry tale to tell of dinner conversation with Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal.

Rees, as he tells the story, was speaking to a senior figure at the Smithsonian Institution and having first complimented them on the Smithsonian’s contribution to the cententary celebrations of Einstein’s annus mirabilis (1905), during which he published three seminal papers, the second of which proposed the special theory of relativity, and their work in general during 2005, which had been designated the international year of physics, he moved the conversation on to note that in 2009 there would be two equally important anniversaries; the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th Anniversary of the first publication of ‘The Origin of Species’.

Naturally, for an eminent scientist, Rees was curious as to what plans the Smithsonian had in train to mark these two anniversaries and was rather perturbed to be told that the Smithsonian were having difficulty in mounting any kind of celebration at all and that it was very likely that the smithsonian would be unable to publicly mark either anniversary; not because they didn’t want to but because of difficulties in obtaining any funding to increase awareness of Darwin and his work.

As Hensher points out, this is a dinner conversation and therefore chit-chat rather than an official announcement, nevertheless one would not generally consider that a eminent scientist of Rees’ position and stature would be prone to exaggeration on such matters, so one has to take seriously the prospect that the world-renowned Smithsonian Institute, which more than any other institution in the US is charged with promoting the public understanding of science, may well find itself unable to adequately mark the anninversaries of Darwin’s birth and of the Origin of Species.

Should we be concerned with this in Britain? After all one would expect that both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum will have little difficulty in securing funding for an appropriate celebration of Darwin and his contribution to our understanding of evolution.

Well, yes, I think we should. Not only would a failure to mark these anniversaries damage the credilbility of one of world’s great scientific institutions, but to allow a situation to develop in which the Smithsonian finds itself unable to celebrate Darwin and his work would be an appalling capitulation to the superstition and mummery of creationism and its bastard progeny, so-called ‘intelligent design’ theory, one which clearly demonstrates the real agenda of ID’s supporters, which is not about having a rational public debate - a debate that ID and its supporters would certainly lose - but about the wholesale suppression of Darwinian ideas.

Disturbing as the idea of a major institution finding itself unable to mark Darwin’s anniversary might be, towards the end of his article, Hensher alludes to an even more worrying prospect, that the Smtihsonian may be funded to commemorate Darwin but only on condition that such an event must be ‘balanced’ by an ‘explanation’ of creationism/ID, treating it a legitimate alternative to evolution - no credible scientific institution could, of course, accept such a condition, which is precisely what would make it so attractive to ID’s supporters as, faced with such conditions, the Smithsonian would surely choose to have no celebration than one debased by theological pseudoscience.

There is categorically no place in science for creationism or intelligent design nor should either of the latter be ‘debated’ or discussed in a science classroom in anything other than the context of demonstrating how superstition has been superceded by rational inquiry and scientific method - if such ideas are to be discussed in the classroom, as seems to be the case as the new GCSE biology syllabus requires that:

pupils should be able to "explain that the fossil record has been interpreted differently over time (eg creationist interpretation)

Any such discussions should place creationism/ID entirely in its proper context, alongside such beliefs as that which held that the earth was flat, that the universe revolved around the earth and that sperm cells were, in fact, homunculi - and backed up by a strict marking regime that treats any effort by a pupil to cite religious texts as scientific authorities or to suggest that creationism/ID is either a valid scientific theory or, worse still, true, as an automatic zero mark on the question. Similarly, if creationism/ID is to be dealt with in science in any way, it should not be confined merely to the realm of the biological sciences, but should be dealt with across the board, not least in Physics, where the best of efforts of its supporters have still failed to deal with obvious problems in their ‘theory’ such as that of creation ex nihilo, thermodynamics, and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle - how does one ‘design’ anything at the most basic level when one cannot simultaneously determine both the position and momentum of sub atomic particles and, worse still, the better the position is known, the less well known its momentum is? Only by resorting to superstitious belief in a non-corporeal supreme intelligence that exists outside the realms of physics, he existance of which - or otherwise - is a fundamentally unscientific matter.

In short, the sole purpose of allowing discussion of creationism/ID in a science classroom must be to explain precisely why neither is a scientific theory at all, a purpose for which both are ideally suited, even if this is not made explicit in the requirement of the GCSE syllabus as it should be.

I’ve drifted a little, for good reason, but getting back to the original point, it is important that we support any efforts by the Smithsonian to mark the Darwin anniversaries in 2009 in true scientific fashion, which means in the absence of any discussion of creationism/ID that does not make it explicit that neither can be considered a scientific theory, much as any classroom debate on the subject arising out of the new GCSE biology syllabus should make the very same point.

The job of scientific institutions, and of science teachers, is to debunk superstition, not support it.

Nice of the Torygraph to give a platform to Stephen C Meyer, one of the leading proponents of the supposed ‘theory’ of intelligent design, as his article nicely illustrates everything that is wrong with this unscientific piece of crap and its supporters.

That life evolves is a matter of fact. More than that it an observable fact as anyone working in the field of virology or bacteriology will happily explain. Viruses mutate and evolve, which is where we get everything from nasty new strains of bird flu to hospital superbugs to rats that are immune to warfarin from.

Evolution by natural selection is a scientific theory inasmuch as it explains how things evolve in response to environmental pressures. Again this can be observed and tested in the real world, and has so far stood up to every test put to it. It’s not difficult to understand; if we take the humble rat and alter its environment by laying poison for them, then they die; and they keep on dying until a minor genetic variation results in a rat that survives the poison through having developed a resistance or immunity to its effects. That rat breeds with other rats, passing on its genetic code and, hey presto, we have a whole bunch of evolved rats who don’t die when we try to poison them.

The same process applied to bacteria and antibiotics and to viruses and anti-viral agents.

Frankly, were I a doctor and there really was such a thing as an intelligent designer, then I’d be wanting to know who they are, where they are and, most inportantly of all, what it would take to get them to piss off and stop fucking designing all the nasty, shitty illnesses that keep making people sick and messing up my nice orderly hospital.

Alternatively, I suppose the drug companies would be paying them to keep right on designing away as this whole new illness things gives them a nice steady stream of profits.

But all that it by the by - there is no intelligent designer, its all a bullshit hoax anyway.

There are many things I could pick on to show why ID is a pile of crap, but the one thing I want to pick up on here is its proponents claims that it is evidence-based.

Scientific methodology is based on a very simple principle - you take a question to which the answer is unknown or incomplete, you examine the evidence, derive a hypothesis from that evidence and then use more evidence, derived from experiment and observation to test that hypothesis - and you keep right on testing against new and more detailed evidence over and over again. If you then fail to find evidence to contradict your hypothesis, your theory stands up - at least until the next test and the next batch of evidence.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has been tested in this way for more than 100 and has stood up to every test, hence it is treated and taught as science.

ID, on the other hand, commits one of the cardinal sins of scientific enquiry inasmuch as it is selective in its use of evidence - it doesn’t test the theory against evidence, it mere chooses evidence to fit the theory and ignores everything else. Meyer actually does this right from the outset of his article by citing the apparent ‘conversion’ of philosopher Anthony Flew to deism:

In 2004, the distinguished philosopher Antony Flew of the University of Reading made worldwide news when he repudiated a lifelong commitment to atheism and affirmed the reality of some kind of a creator. Flew cited evidence of intelligent design in DNA and the arguments of “American [intelligent] design theorists” as important reasons for this shift.

Of course what Meyer neglects to mention is that Flew, in 2005, went on to reject both the fine-tuning argument and his earlier claims that DNA could not be explained by naturalistic theories, both of which are essential to the workings of Intelligent Design - Flew remains a deist, so far as I know, but one who’s conception of a supreme being is strictly non-interventionist after the point of creation (the big bang), a view which rules out a belief in intelligent design or an intelligent designer in the form supported by Meyer and others.

I’ll pass over the matter of ‘irreducable complexity’, which used to relate to the eye until it was debunked, and now rests on the flagellum bacteria, which has also been solidly debunked as well, much as Meyer and others desperately cling to this idea, and move on to this statement:

DNA functions like a software program. We know from experience that software comes from programmers. We know that information - whether, say, in hieroglyphics or radio signals - always arises from an intelligent source. As the pioneering information theorist Henry Quastler observed: “Information habitually arises from conscious activity.” So the discovery of digital information in DNA provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a causal role in its origin.

Information may well habitually arise from conscious activity but as any physicist worth their research grant can tell you the universe is full of information which does not rely on conscious thought - information does not always arise from an intelligent source, that is mere anthropic conceit on Meyer’s part. It is perhaps no great surprise that Meyer avoids this topic and merely makes his unsupportable and entirely false claim about information, the physics of information derives primarily from quantum theory, which the ID lobby tend to studiously avoid, due in no small measure, to their inability to take on and refute Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle - there being no room for a designer in a universe that is intrinsicly random at the sub-atomic level.

In short, Meyer’s contention here is utter nonsense.

Not much more to say really, other than to note that Meyer’s Phd is in the philosophy of science and its to philosophy that one must turn to refute his contention that ID is not based on religion.

Let’s us take, for a moment, the hypothesis that there is such a thing as an intelligent designer. Now ask yourself this - where did this designer come from? Who designed the designer?

There are only two possible answers to this question. Either it is no one, that the supposed designer has always existed or came into being by a process of spontaneous self-creation and, therefore, exists outside of the confines space-time - in which case the designer is god and ID is based on religion, or there must be an infinite series of designers, all of whom are out there in an infinite universe designing new designers - in which case you have a reductio ad absurdum.

AS far as I can see Meyer has yet, as a philosopher, to attempt to tackle this question - perhaps he should before continuing to claim that intelligent design is based on scientific evidence.