This piece appeared in the 2003 issue (Issue No. 7) of the Skeptical Adversaria, the newsletter of ASKE. It will be replaced by a different piece every three months.

FROM THE ASKE CHAIRMAN

Michael Heap

Creationism and Evolution

I suppose it’s an advanced sign of aging when one increasingly finds oneself looking back and asking why so many things that didn’t appear to be broken at the time have since been ‘mended’. This insight came to me when it was announced that a school in Gateshead is supposedly teaching the biblical account of the universe’s origin as part of its Biology syllabus.

When I was at school we too were taught this, but only as part of our religious education, or as we called it then ‘Scripture’. We were also taught the same at Sunday School. Actually, I myself and many of my schoolmates were never formally taught Darwinian evolution at all; I dropped Biology at the age of 14 years as it was so badly taught. I assume that evolution was on the O-level or A-level syllabus. Most of my own knowledge of evolution has been derived from hearing other people talking about it, reading about it for myself, watching television programmes, and so on.

I can’t see why children cannot still be taught biblical accounts of the origin of the universe and humankind in their Religious Education classes and evolution in their Biology lessons. At least, I do not see why people committed to science should have any objection to this arrangement. I can well understand, however, why it doesn’t suit the creationists. It certainly doesn’t suit Sir Peter Grady. Nor does is suit him that he has apes for ancestors. ‘I don’t believe my ancestors were monkeys’ he protests. ‘Where do monkeys come from? If we come from monkeys – where did they start?’ Well, if he read about evolution he would have his question answered. Of course he’s got a right to believe whatever he wants, but he’s also got something the rest of us don’t have. He’s got £75 million. And £2 million went to the school in Gateshead.

I suppose there was a time when, in a way appropriate to my age, I ‘believed’ the story of Adam and Eve. The second stage in my relationship with this story was to believe that whoever wrote it must have been some kind of half-wit; why seemingly intelligent people were willing to give it the time of day was beyond my understanding. It was only much later that I entered a third stage; namely astonishment that some thousands of years ago a person was inspired to write this story that, even today, raises profound questions about morality, the relationship between man and woman, humans and animals; about sex and sin, the power of knowledge to corrupt, and so on. The story can only convey the power of its message if it is interpreted as a fable and not a as literal account of the creation of the universe.

From the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine

Every month I receive the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and most of its contents are unintelligible to me, as, as I have already stated, I do not even have an O-level in Biology. I have noticed that the term ‘evidence based’ is making an increasingly frequent appearance in the Journal’s pages. ‘Evidence based’, though a worthy aspiration for any treatment offered to the public, should not be interpreted as the sole justification for the promotion of that treatment. Nobody would buy a car solely on the basis that ‘it has passed its MOT’.

The risk is that this particular selling point will in due course come to serve more the interests of the supplier than the consumer, rather like ‘holistic’ and ‘natural’ in the case of alternative medicine and ‘organic’ and ‘low fat’ in the food industry.

Amongst the papers in the latest issue of the journal is a study of dowsing in homeopathy. (As an aside, this set me thinking what could be the sceptic’s ‘headline from hell’ – e.g. ‘Astrologer’s psychic pet in past-life mystery’ or ’Uri’s UFO crop circle drama’). I had not realised that some homeopaths claimed to be able to distinguish homeopathic from dummy preparations (the paper’s authors use the term ‘placebo’ which I do not like in this context) by dowsing. In this particular study six dowsers attempted to distinguish Bryonia in a 12c potency (a dilution of 10^-24 and therefore unlikely to contain a single molecule of the starting material) from a dummy preparation prepared in an identical manner using distilled water as a starter. The trial was double-blinded. None of the six homeopaths performed better than random selection on 26 trials, despite the high level of confidence in most cases.

Another paper of interest to sceptics is entitled ‘What’s the Point of Rigorous Research on Complementary/ Alternative Medicine?’ by Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter. Professor Ernst lists eight arguments that he has encountered against applying the principles of science to complementary or alternative medicine. I shall not list them here, but suggest that you guess what these are.

Skipping the paper on ‘Psychiatry, Post-Modernism and Post-Normal Science’ by R. and J. Laugharne, which I have yet to get round to reading, I must mention ‘The Dangers of Wearing an Anorak’ by six ophthalmologists from the Birmingham and Midland Eye Centre. This is not the cryptic title of a speech at a conference of train spotters or UFO buffs. It is a serious analysis of the visual field restriction caused by the anorak hood and thus the ‘theoretical’ increased danger of the wearer’s being knocked down by a vehicle whilst crossing the road. The article concludes, ‘Anorak wearers should turn their heads to look sideways when crossing the road’. Ah yes! But the anorak hood that the authors studied could be drawn tightly around the face. The anorak I wore until last year had a very roomy hood with no such facility. Whenever I turned my head, all I saw was the inside of the hood, since it stayed in the same place. I eventually gave the anorak to a jumble sale, but maybe I should have had it incinerated.

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