For some time, psychologists and neuroscientists have made attempts to explain religion, ranging from the ill-fated ‘God Helmet‘ (the idea that religious experiences might be a form of temporal lobe epilepsy) to ideas about how religions bind us into communities, to approaches involving hypothesised psychological mechanisms such as the hyperactive agent-detection device (HADD; an evolutionarily advantageous ability which would see us ascribing ‘human-like agency [to the] environment that might not actually exist’ (p. 31), and misinterpreting, say, the rising of the sun as an intentional act which must therefore have some kind of supernatural actor). None of these theories are necessarily mutually exclusive – it’s clear a future psychological theory of religion will need to explain evidence from a wide variety of perspectives.

Of course, to many people, any attempt to scientifically explain their deeply-held beliefs will be highly offensive, but probably the most controversial research in this area has involved IQ. A wide range of recent studies have looked at connections between cognitive ability and religiosity. To take just three examples: this study found that atheism rates in 137 countries correlated highly (r = .60) with the country’s average IQ, while this one showed in a sample of students that high-IQ individuals are more likely to question religious beliefs, and this one found that atheist adolescents had higher IQs than their moderately religious peers, who in turn were higher in IQ than religious fundamentalists. There are plenty of other studies, too.

Could your score on tests like this predict how religious you are? (Yes!)

A common response to this kind of research is summed up by atheist blogger extraordinaire, PZ Myers, in this rather unhelpful and misguided post. Myers seems to misunderstand why we bother collecting scientific data when he says: ‘I’ve known lots of religious people who really are brilliant, and I also know lots of atheists who were sincerely religious once upon a time…’. Ironically, given he often criticises pseudoscientists for basing their arguments on anecdote, Myers seems to be saying that his personal experiences invalidate several statistical studies on large samples. Huh. Not so impressive.

What is impressive, to get back to the studies, is the consistency of the data. In every study to date (that I’ve seen), higher religious beliefs have been found to be associated with lower scores on IQ tests. Now, I know some people, like Myers, just hate IQ tests, possibly because they’ve read The Mismeasure of Man (which, as an aside, is looking less and less credible as time goes on), but IQ really is a part of mainstream psychological science, and I can assure you you’d find it very difficult to make an evidence-based argument against it having validity (I always like to point IQ-skeptics – and the far more irritating IQ-deniers – towards this Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper, which I think makes a pretty convincing case that IQ is both real and useful).

While those previous studies on religion and IQ are consistent in their results, they do have a number of limitations, outlined in our paper. For instance, we now know that religion isn’t a binary value (it isn’t just that people are religious, or they aren’t). Papers using the statistical technique of factor analysis have found that people vary on several different facets of religiosity, some reflecting the more fundamentalist, literal-minded types of religion, and others reflecting more ‘spiritual’ elements. Most IQ-religion papers don’t examine these. Others have used relatively small sample sizes, or – like one of those linked above – rely on aggregate data, which can be inaccurate. Finally, IQ isn’t the whole picture – no previous studies have looked at how personality factors, like openness to experience (which does seem to be linked to religion) might mediate the relationship between IQ and religious belief.

To get around these problems, we – that is, Gary Lewis, Tim Bates, and I – used data from the MIDUS, a huge-scale survey of thousands of adults in the US which asked them questions on almost everything, from their socioeconomic status to their occupational information, from their health behaviours to how well they sleep, and also included IQ and personality tests (it really is a goldmine). Thus, our study had the advantages of a large sample size (around 2300 people), and a wide range of sub-scales of religiosity (specifically: religious mindfulness, spirituality, religious support, religious identification, private practice, and fundamentalism – see the paper for definitions and sample questions). Controlling for level of education, trait openness to experience, age, and sex, we looked at the strength of the relationship between IQ and each of the religious variables in turn.

It turned out that higher IQ scores were significantly associated with lower scores on five of the six measures of religiosity – all of them except spirituality. Thus, the more intelligent you are, the less likely you are to be religious – except if you’re just ‘spiritual’. Higher IQ was most negatively associated with fundamentalism (the tendency to agree with statements like ‘the Bible is the word of God’).  The other associations were interesting, too – education level related very negatively to fundamentalism, while people high in openness were much more likely to report being ‘spiritual’, but less likely to be fundamentalists. Older people were more likely to report higher instances of prayer and identification with a  religious in-group, while females were more likely to be spiritual, but no more likely to be fundamentalists, than males.

How do we explain the IQ-related results? We think it’s most likely that higher-IQ individuals will tend to question the stories and claims of religions, which is perhaps why they’re particularly unlikely to believe the Bible is the final word. For skeptics, familiar with ‘New Age’ spirituality, our results might make some sense, too; those of average intelligence, but very high (some would say too high) openness to new experiences, might get involved with quasi-religious practices we’d characterise as ‘woo’ – crystals, distance healing, that sort of thing (maybe our paper is empirical confirmation of the old adage that if you’re too open-minded, your brain will fall out…). A future study we’re planning will look at how IQ and openness relate to beliefs in alternative medicine.

So, think of it this way: A set of basic cognitive tests which include ‘repeat back this list of numbers/words from memory‘ and ‘how many words can you think of that start with the letter B?‘ are a statistically significant predictor of what someone’s beliefs will be about the meaning of life and the origin of the universe. I think that’s a pretty fascinating finding, and worthy of further investigation, with the following two caveats. First, our study was almost entirely on Christians, meaning that one should be cautious in generalising the findings to other religions.

Second – and this isn’t really a caveat, but an important finding from the study – only a small part of the variance in religious belief was explained by IQ. That is, as mentioned above, we’ll have to look further than just IQ for our future super-theory of religious belief, and shouldn’t expect such a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon to be explained by intelligence alone. Our study provides new insights about which particular forms of religious belief are related to IQ, bringing us a teeny bit closer to an understanding of the psychology of religion.

‘Porn’, to quote journalism professor and anti-pornography activist Robert Jensen, ‘is what the end of the world looks like’. I must admit that, until I read this statement (from this book), I rather thought that the apocalypse would be more of the meteor-striking, sun-exploding, fiery-death kind. Instead, Jensen seems to think armageddon will come in an avalanche of breast enhancements, fake grunting, and peroxide.

Get your Ragnaröks off! 'Porn is the end of the world'.

To be fair to Jensen, what I think he meant was that porn is the end of the world because it epitomises uncaring, unfeeling interactions between men and women, and will eventually erase loving relationships from our society. Or something like that. He’s certainly not alone in this viewpoint – I recently read Pornland, by sociology professor Gail Dines, an attempt at an excoriating critique of the porn industry, replete with descriptions of some of the more insalubrious websites Dines has discovered on late-night Google sessions, and tragic anecdotes of people’s lives wrecked by their involvement with, and consumption of, pornography.

I don’t doubt for a second that these anecdotes are mostly true, though one has to wonder if the ‘people who came up to me after one of my lectures’ really worded their stories in quite the perfect, argument-supporting way Dines describes. There are, of course, disgusting and degrading pornographic websites out there, and I’m certain that a significant number of women  - and men –  are exploited and abused by pornographers each year (it would be nice to see some proper studies into this, however). These aren’t really arguments against pornography, though, any more than saying ‘some prostitutes are abused by clients’ is an argument against prostitution. They’re arguments against the way we currently police and regulate the pornography industry (if there is indeed such a thing), and they’re more of legal than scientific interest. As for people who just use porn, the stories Dines provides are next-to-useless, as they aren’t from a large, representative sample, or properly recorded, or linked to any demographic information. There’s a devastating review here in the journal Violence Against Women, which shows Pornland for the unscholarly hatchet job it is.

While Dines isn’t afraid to compare the porn industry to Nazi Germany (p. 65), or claim – without evidence – that porn users are slowly turning, werewolf-like, into pedophiles (the penultimate chapter in the book, and a lecture you can see here), she does make a big deal of rejecting the simplistic argument that ‘porn causes rape’. This claim has been around for a long time (radical feminist Robin Morgan once famously stated that ‘pornography is the theory and rape is the practice’), and actually, though she distances herself from it, it’s near-impossible to know what Dines is talking about other than ‘porn causes rape’. For instance, in the video I linked above, she can be seen stating that ‘porn gives men a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies. What is rape, if not a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies?’ Thus, her opinions don’t seem to have moved on from the old Morgan dictum. We’ll see below how well that argument holds up when one looks at the evidence.

And so, skipping daintily over three aspects that have bedevilled previous discussions – a rigorous definition of pornography, boring debates about the difference between ‘pornography’ and ‘erotica’, and the impossible task of working out how much pornography is worth – I’ll make one important point before getting into the science: I’m not going to discuss moral arguments. If you think that porn is by definition degrading, that it’s never okay to have sex on camera, or that getting sex involved with money is always exploitative, that’s fine. There’s nothing I can do for you here. Of course, we should use the data to inform our morals, but there will always be those who are too disgusted (and it’s very clear from recent psychology experiments that disgust influences morals) by the whole idea of pornography to have a science-based argument about it.

There are, broadly speaking, four different kinds of studies which have looked into the effects of pornography. Here’s a mini-summary of each:

1) Experimental studies

In this type of study, researchers show willing participants porn, and quiz them on their attitudes afterwards. These appear to be quite contradictory, and sometimes strangely reported. For instance, Malamuth and Ceniti claim in the abstract to their 1986 study that watching violent and nonviolent pornography increased aggression in their sample of college students. However, no such result is to be found in the actual paper itself. How odd! Other studies have found a wide variety of effects, and are reviewed by Christopher Ferguson here.

There is, of course, a huge flaw in experimental research of this kind. Think about it: when was the last time you used pornography that was forced on you by a psychologist (by which I mean it wasn’t your choice of movie), all the while in the knowledge that you’d be quizzed afterwards? These problems of ecological validity are pretty devastating when it comes to studies of an everyday activity like using porn. In addition, it’s not at all clear that the ‘aggression’ and ‘likelihood to rape’ measures in these studies actually relate to real-world aggression or likelihood of rape (this is compounded by the fact that a wide variety of measures were used, reducing our ability to compare apples to apples).

Ferguson concludes that porn’s ‘…effects appear negligible, temporary, and difficult to generalise to the real world’. (p. 4). From a good look at the literature, it’s hard to disagree.

2) Survey studies

‘Aha!’ Thought I, as I started looking for non-experimental survey-type studies into pornography. ‘Here’s a recent meta-analysis, where some authors have collected all the relevant studies, and done my job for me!’. And indeed, there is a recent meta-analysis on this topic by Hald, Malamuth, and Yuen. Looking at nine studies which asked people ‘how much porn do you watch?’ and then ‘what are your attitudes to women?’, these authors found that there was a correlation between porn use and attitudes supporting violence against women. The correlation is pretty small for non-violent pornography (r = .13) and somewhat larger for violent pornography (r = .24). Solid, right? Wrong. First off, as noted above, only nine studies were included. Surely more survey studies have been done? Well, turns out they have, and there are at least two glaring omissions from this meta-analysis.

The first one I found was by Garos and colleagues from 2004 (this was mentioned in a recent Scientific American article). In their study, they asked a couple of hundred students about which kinds of porn they used, and measured their attitudes on a wide variety of sexism scales. As far as negative sexism goes (e.g. ‘I hate women’), they found that the more porn people used, the less sexist they were. There was, however, an association with positive (or ‘benevolent’) sexism (e.g. ‘women need to be protected’) and porn use. This type of sexism can, of course, be very damaging (imagine failing to get a job because the interviewer thinks you aren’t up to it as you’re a woman), but it’s not the same kind of hatred that activists like Dines predict porn would engender.

Secondly, McKee managed to contact 1023 users of pornography in his large-scale study (much larger than any of the studies in the Hald et al. meta-analysis), by post and online. He failed to find any association between the amount or type of porn people watched and their attitudes towards women (the negative attitudes to women were associated with more predictable things – being old, voting for a right-wing political party, etc). A big advantage of this study is it breaks out of the usual ‘convenience sampling’ problem in social science research, and doesn’t just focus on students (the studies in the meta-analysis tend to).

Hald and colleagues may have not included these studies in their meta-analysis because they included information from women. They note that most of the problem with sexism comes from men, so studies which asked women about their attitudes towards their own sex would be muddying the waters. I’m really not sure this is a great reason for not including these studies, especially considering that the results for males are easily separable from the results for females (and even if they aren’t, you’re doing a meta-analysis! Email the study authors and ask for just the male data!).

Now, the inclusion of these two studies might not wipe out the correlation between porn and negative attitudes from the meta-analysis entirely, but it would certainly weaken it. In all, we don’t appear to have found much of an effect of porn here, either.

3) Criminal studies

Ted Bundy had a nasty little secret. Well, quite a few; he was a serial killer, rapist, and necrophiliac who murdered over 30 people. But he was also addicted to porn. You can find unpleasant, homophobic, sterile little Christian websites such as this one who quote interviews with Bundy, and more or less claim ‘if you don’t stop masturbating to porn, you’ll end up just like him!’. Since we all (well, maybe not Gail Dines) know that anecdotes aren’t data, it’s better to take a look at the empirical research into sex offenders and their use of sexually explicit materials.

As discussed here (p. 4), the majority of studies into sex offenders and porn use are counter-intuitive in their results. In general, they find that sex offenders use just as much, or sometimes less, porn than the average person. This review briefly discusses evidence that sex offenders may be more likely to have had a repressive religious upbringing than non-sex-offenders.

Perhaps, then, it’s time to move beyond unsupported situational explanations of sex crimes. If sex offenders and the average citizen use the same amount of pornography, but only one sexually assaults someone, there must be something else going on – either innate to that person, or in their background. The lack of effect of pornography on offending does fit into the general trend of evidence of negligible media effects on violence – see Ferguson’s publications for loads of really great reviews in this area. There are definite echoes in the porn debate of the purported videogame-violence link (which as far as I can see, either doesn’t exist or is teeny-tiny).

4) Aggregate studies

These are, I think, the most interesting – and the most consistent – studies in the area. Starting with Berl Kutchinsky’s investigations of what happened in countries like Denmark when porn was legalised, we have a raft of studies which look at country- or state-level data, and try to discern the relationship between pornography consumption (by the way, don’t you just love the idea of someone consuming pornography? Delicious!) and the rate of sexual assaults and rapes. The most recent studies have been carried out by Milton Diamond at the University of Hawaii, who started off by looking at Japan in 1999. We all know that Japanese pornography is particularly fetishistic, and much of it could clearly be seen as degrading to women. So what happened as the availability of pornography rocketed in the latter half of the 20th Century? Take a look at the paper: rape and sexual assault rates plummeted in the same time period.

Hardcore porn availability and the US rape rate, from Ferguson (2009), Journal of Aggressive Behaviour.

More recently, Diamond studied an utterly different culture, that of the Czech Republic. Back when it was Czechoslovakia and run by those killjoy communists (the Party ruled from 1948-1989), pornography was completely prohibited. In the paper, Diamond and colleagues document how the crime rates changed after the fall of the regime, and the associated upswing in porn availability (a lovely little natural experiment, one could say). Check out the graphs: in the period of instability after the fall of communism, crime in general increased. But while non-sexual crimes such as murder continued to climb upwards, rape rates returned to similar levels as those under communism after a few years. If you split up the murder data, those murders with something to do with sex in general decreased, while those unrelated to sex increased massively. It’s worth pointing out that these sorts of results are found in a wide variety of other societies, too – see here for a review, and also the graph to the left for a summary of what happened to the rape rate in the US as porn availability increased – spoiler: it’s the same pattern again.

These studies are, of course, vulnerable to a variety of criticisms. First off, correlation doesn’t prove causation. Anybody claiming that these decreases in sexual crimes are caused by pornography is incorrect, because we don’t know that the crime rates wouldn’t have decreased faster if porn hadn’t been in the picture. But what these studies do show pretty convincingly is that there’s no linear association between porn and sex crimes. It seems we’ll have to look elsewhere to explain sex offences.

Another criticism is this: rape is notoriously under-reported, and conviction rates for it are extremely low, so how do we know these rape rates are accurate? Well, There’s a genuine debate over whether people would be more or less likely to report rape in a society with more porn availability. However, in Japan study cited above, Diamond provides evidence suggesting that, as Japanese society became more liberal (with the associated increased in porn), more rape counselling centres and public awareness campaigns were set up, raising consciousness of the problem. It stands to reason that other countries have had similar changes, though this remains an important criticism of the aggregate studies. To close, though, it’s worth remembering that this increase in porn and decrease in sex crimes has been found in pretty much every country/state ever studied; the consistency of the data is impressive, and seems to go beyond any culture-specific changes in rape victim support or attitudes towards rapists.

So that’s it for our tour of the Science of Porn. What can we conclude? Well, while there’s a wide variety of not-so-informed opinion on porn, there is rather a lot of evidence. Some of it is contradictory, but on taking a step back we realise just how difficult it has been for researchers to show a connection between porn use and, well, any negative outcomes. If effects have been found, they’re generally weak, and there are methodological issues with many of the studies. On the basis of the above evidence, then, you might think that we should go easy on porn. I’d agree with you, to some extent. But of course, this isn’t the end of the story; a wide variety of other questions remain relatively unanswered:

• Perhaps pornography decreases sexual satisfaction? Well, according to the small amount of research I could find, probably not.
• Perhaps it makes women view themselves differently? I couldn’t find any studies directly looking at this, but I’d caution that media effects on female self-perception aren’t necessarily as strong as one might think.
• Perhaps, as suggested in Pornland, porn perpetuates racist stereotypes, encouraging us to view, say, Asian women as subservient and Black men as animalistic? I think Dines may have a point here, but there’s no hard evidence of the effects on porn consumers. Possibly, however, this reflects the ‘underground’ nature of porn. If these stereotypes were in regular films or TV, there’d be dozens of complaints to the producers. Another argument, maybe, that better regulation of the porn industry might help.
• Perhaps porn actually has positive effects, such as being a kind of substitute sex education? Well, there isn’t really any direct research on this, either, but evidence so far isn’t impressive.
• Perhaps newer, more rough and violent ‘gonzo’ porn might have effects that the studies discussed above didn’t pick up? Only time will tell if this is the case, but as described above, other studies of violent porn vs. non-violent porn haven’t shown a great deal of difference in effect, and it isn’t all that clear that mainstream porn is becoming more violent anyway.
• Lastly, it’s worth pointing out that arguments that porn is ‘taking over the internet’ have been addressed here, and shown to be false.

But what does any of this matter? In Pornland, Dines states: ‘The studies provide some indication of effects, but what I find most compelling are the stories I hear from women who have been raped by men who use porn’ (p. 95). Clearly, Dines’s mind is made up. And yet, she must know that anecdotes are unconvincing to anyone with a bit of scientific or sociological training.

In the end, it’s a bit like the whole ‘Intelligent Design’ thing. Just like the Discovery Institute, anti-porn campaigners have money (from book sales, if nothing else), and they must know in their heart of hearts that scientific studies are the most convincing way to change people’s minds about topics like this. So why aren’t they funding any research? Why aren’t they suggesting any particular research designs? It’s deeply patronising to your audience to imagine they’ll be satisfied with anecdote after anecdote and little by way of peer-reviewed hard data.

…argh, I said it. ‘Hard’ data. I’ve been constantly fighting against adding puerile sex-and-masturbation innuendo to this post, and now I may have reached the limit of my inhibitory abilities. To sum up: it’s important to discuss the effects porn might be having on us, but it’s equally important to stick to the empirical data that’s been gathered. This has been, and remains, a serious problem for anti-porn campaigners. Until more solid evidence appears, we can only conclude that porn really isn’t the end of the world.

Don’t get your flagellum in a knot, but here’s another post about creationism. As promised in a previous post, some friends and I visited Glasgow Caledonian University to see Michael Behe’s talk, ‘Darwin or Design?’, hosted by our dear friends at the Centre for Intelligent Design. It was, in a word, appalling. Here’s why.

Depressed to see that the lecture theatre was full, but heartened by the fact the audience mostly comprised elderly couples and awkward, spotty, young mouth-breathers (ID, thank the Designer, is clearly not a mainstream phenomenon), we took our seats. After some fawning introductions, Behe took the stage, and summarised the five simple points of his argument. Here they are (possibly slightly paraphrased):

1. Design isn’t mystical or spooky. We can deduce it from the attributes of a system.
2. Everyone agrees that biological systems look designed.
3.  There are structural obstacles to ‘Darwinism’.
4. The claims of ‘Darwinists’ are just-so stories.
5. Bottom line: little evidence for ‘Darwinism’, lots for design.

Well! Let’s hope he has some new arguments, then, because that stuff looks like the same old bollocks he’s been churning out since Darwin’s Black Box in 1996. With bated breath, we awaited a feast of new evidence, but Behe simply regurgitated the partially-reheated leftovers of dead arguments. Entering this intellectual graveyard is frustrating, but worth doing nonetheless. I’ll respond to his points in turn.

1. & 2. Design – it’s just obvious!

Spot the flaw in the following argument, which was Behe’s opening gambit. If a friend asked you where a mountain came from, you’d rightly say ‘geological forces’. But what about the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire? Well, it sort of looks like a face, but it’s not very complex, so probably just good ol’ geological forces again. How about Mount Rushmore? Well! Look at how complex it is! It contains information – these carvings are Presidents of the USA. It’s very detailed and specific. It must’ve been designed!

Look, Prof. Behe! Evidence for design!

Oh, for heaven’s sake. We don’t come to the conclusion that things are designed because they look designed, but because we saw someone design them. Anyone with half a brain can tell you that things aren’t always how they appear (no matter how many times Behe uses the ‘if it walks like a duck…’ argument). The reason we think cars are designed is that we can go and visit the car-designing offices and the car-making factories. The reason we think Mt. Rushmore was designed is, well, look at the picture on the left. When was the last time you saw someone design or make a tree? Or a bird? At this point, the analogy absolutely breaks down, and Behe – not to mention seemingly every other creationist on Earth – just can’t get his head around this basic point.

We were then shown a slide with lots of titles of biochemistry papers which use the word ‘machine’. See, other people think biochemical systems are machines, too! Astonishingly, this part was the only point at which Behe referenced peer-reviewed scientific literature. For a ‘scientist’ giving a ‘scientific’ talk, this is highly unusual – backing up your points and making careful, evidence-based arguments is crucial. If nobody else has the evidence you’re looking for, you should do the research yourself, and get it published somewhere respectable, before making any public claims – isn’t that just basic scientific responsibility?

But Behe hasn’t published any peer-reviewed papers providing evidence against the theory of evolution. What the hell does he do all day long? ‘My name is mud’, he explained to me when I chatted to him after the talk, as I felt a pang of sympathy (of which more later). ‘I try to publish articles, but nobody accepts them’. Isn’t it amazing, though, that not a single other biologist has found any evidence to suggest that the foundational theory of biology is false? Isn’t it funny that no independent groups are confirming his theory, if it’s so obvious? But wait – what exactly is his theory? This leads us nicely to…

3. & 4. Irreducible Complexity and Just-So Stories

You’re not gonna believe this, but he’s still talking about the bacterial flagellum and how ‘irreducibly complex’ it is. The man certainly has a lot of nerve, given how many times his argument’s been refuted. Nevertheless, let’s lay it out again. Here’s his definition, from Darwin’s Black Box:

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

OK, but what exactly does ‘effectively cease functioning’ mean? Maarten Boudry and colleagues, in a paper about to be published in Quarterly Review of Biology, point out that Behe has a history of changing his definition of irreducible complexity to evade criticism. Firstly, there are two ways you could take the statement above: 1) If you take a part away, the system can’t do the job it does now, but it could potentially do other semi- or un-related jobs. This is a weak and trivial claim, obvious to evolutionary biologists. 2) If you take a part away, the system can’t do anything at all, even jobs unrelated to the job it does now. This is a strong, mad claim, with no evidential basis.

Boudry et al. document how, when Behe’s critics show that definition 2 is patently false, he dodges and accuses them of ‘building a straw man’. He then reverts to definition 1, which is no problem for the theory of evolution: a part which has one function now might have had completely different functions in the past – just think of the parts of our reptilian ancestor’s jaw, which are now our ear bones. In front of our audience, Behe expounded definition 2, but when questioned performed exactly the type of evasive manoeuvres Boudry et al. have outlined. Indeed, when pushed, Behe admits he accepts that common descent is true. But to accept that, one has to go with definition 2, not 1, for reasons outlined by Nick Matzke in an email to me:

…if complex biochemical system A has genes ABCDF and complex biochemical system B has genes CDFEG, then there was a common ancestor system that had at least genes CDF.  When one is, like Behe, claiming that system A is “irreducible”, and couldn’t function without all of its parts, the proof of the existence of a system that existed and presumably functioned with just parts CDF is pretty crashingly obviously pertinent information that shouldn’t be ignored.

Take evasive action!

Irreducible complexity is erroneously held up as killer for the theory of evolution in principle. That is, there’s no way you could build a plausible evolutionary account of, say, the bacterial flagellum, because it must be impossible to evolve. But when a plausible evolutionary pathway for such a system is outlined (as Pallen & Matze do here, in a must-read paper), Behe and the creationists perform another evasion, asking instead for every single detail, mutation by mutation, of how the system was evolved (in other words, they move from asking for a plausible scenario to the actual scenario). Imagine a jury, when faced with highly compelling evidence that a defendant was guilty, asking to see details of every single neurotransmitter firing through his brain before they came to a decision – clearly this would be irrational, irrelevant, and unfair. Sure, everyone would be interested to see that stuff, but it’s not likely we’re ever going to have such information. Someone tell that to Michael Behe.

In any case, a huge amount of progress has been made on the evolution of the bacterial flagellum, and the other systems Behe claims are irreducibly complex (such as the immune system; see here). Nobody’s suggesting we know everything there is to know about these systems – there’s still a host of unanswered questions. But in the face of all this active science, Behe is left looking like a madman standing in the middle of a busy motorway, ranting and raving that the internal combustion engine could never work.

5. The bottom line

According to Behe’s lecture, there’s very little evidence for Darwinism, but loads of evidence for design. What I hope I’ve shown in this post is that, a) if one wants to make such claims, one had best back them up with solid evidence; b) there’s plenty of evidence, both plausible and actual, for Darwinian evolution of even complex systems; c) Behe’s ‘evidence’ for design is not evidence, but supposition – supposition by an idiot, signifying absolutely nothing.

One last insult remains to be mentioned. Behe claimed that the two main parts of Darwin’s theory  - common descent and natural selection – are ‘trivial’, and really not of much importance to biology. Reader, I ask you to compare the majestic, evidence-filled Origin of Species and Descent of Man to the pitiable, weaselly, thoroughly-refuted, disingenuous works of Michael Behe. Who comes off best?

Epilogue

Interestingly, my fellow skeptics and I weren’t the only ones disappointed by the talk. Afterwards, as I was trying to get Behe to answer a straight question, a wide-eyed woman with a Virgin Mary necklace pounced on the good professor, and brashly asked him: ‘WHO IS THE DESIGNER?!’. A clearly discomfited Behe responsed with ‘um… well… it’d have to be someone very intelligent, who’s been around for a long time…’. The woman nodded her head, staring at Behe, and said ‘yes, eternal and all knowing – like GOD. I was disappointed you didn’t mention GOD in the talk’.

Utterly irrelevant to working scientists, too pussy-footed to please creationists and the religious, the lonely and pathetic professor from LeHigh University will return home to continue to be alienated in his own biology department

In opening his NY Times review of Behe’s The Edge of Evolution, Richard Dawkins states: ’I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him’. Professor Dawkins, you are not alone.

As you no doubt already know, Glasgow has recently become the victim of a new and particularly unpleasant infestation – creationism. I say ‘new’, but the positions of the group in question, the ‘Centre for Intelligent Design’, appear to be almost entirely based on worn-out arguments dragged from the dog-eared pages of Intelligent Design books of yore, like William Dembski’s ‘No Free Lunch’ and Michael Behe’s ‘Darwin’s Black Box’.

Which brings me back to that delightfully punnably-named Intelligent Design celeb, Prof. Michael Behe. He’s coming to Glasgow! And he’s giving a talk on ‘what the science really says’ about evolution. So he must be going to say ‘evolution is a scientific fact, the basic mechanisms of which are not doubted by any non-perverse human being’, right? Right? Oh.

ID websites often use pictures of DNA to make their bullshit look more scientific. In that tradition, here's a picture of DNA.

The website of the new centre can be found at http://www.c4id.org.uk. What a quaint little web address! ’4′ instead of ‘for’ – I see what you did there! Down with the kids, keeping it ‘real’, I see. Real like Intelligent Design. Real like Jesus. Real like your ultraconservative theotwattic agenda. Incidentally, I know quite a few people who’d just love to C4 Intelligent Design (metaphorically, of course. Let’s try and avoid a repeat of the Twitter Joke Trial, shall we?).

Anyway. Let’s explore the Centre ’4′ Intelligent design in a bit more detail. In a series of short, boneheaded articles, the Director of the Centre, Alistair Noble, sets out the main claims of Intelligent Design. Now, in this blog article, I wanted to get into the real science of Intelligent Design. I wanted to look at the data they’re providing for their unconventional (to say the least) position. But as I read through the articles, no such evidence was forthcoming. It’s not like they don’t realise this themselves – article #11, ‘ID is Science’, makes some desperate, pathetic excuses for the lack of data forthcoming from ID supporters:

A further objection to the scientific status of ID is that its theorists do not undertake research and publish in the peer-reviewed literature. In fact, this is quite false. The work of, for example, William Dembski on the design hypothesis and Steven Meyer on the Cambrian fossil record are some of a dozen or so papers and articles on research which point to ID and which are in the current scientific literature. And further work is being done in a number of laboratories around the world.

Wow, really?! They’ve actually provided new data which supports an ID hypothesis?! Er, nope. The papers are largely theoretical, or attempts at reinterpreting small, insignificant parts of the literature. Also, in several of the (really pathetic number of) papers, the word ‘design’ isn’t even mentioned. You can find information on (and links to rebuttals of) these papers here.

ID is essentially an interpretation of the data that already exists. There is not much point in gathering more information if you already have enough on which to base your hypothesis.

Wait… so, wait. You’re telling me all the published studies which support the theory of evolution are in actual fact evidence against the theory? Sure, it’s a common thing for scientists to reinterpret the data of others in the light of an alternative theory, but instead of this…

Theory 1 is wrong, for the following reasons, which I’ll set out in my peer-reviewed article. Theory 2 fits the data better, for the following reasons, set out in my peer-reviewed article. Theory 2 may even be slightly amended in the light of the new data, but it still fits the data better than Theory 1.

…which is the usual way, we get this…

Theory 1 is wrong, for the following dodgy reasons which I’ve pulled out of my arse. Since Theory 1 is wrong, Theory 2 must be right. What? You want reasons? Oh. Well… isn’t it obvious? Theory 2 ‘just feels right’.

…which is bollocks. The rest of the claims in the series of articles have been dealt with so many times it doesn’t even bear repeating (though I will rebut them at length on request, in the pub, if given enough Red Bull, and my good friends over at The 21st Floor do a splendid job here). This is perhaps the most shameful thing about the C4ID – there’s nothing new brought to the table. At least the Intelligent Design movement in the US brought us some new, if ludicrous, terms like ‘irreducible complexity’ and ‘specified complexity’ and ‘Casey Luskin’. Flogging a dead horse is bad enough, but given that the horse is one of the paradigm examples of evolution in the fossil record, the C4ID’s mumblings seem tragically ironic.

Now, it isn’t just the big guns like Behe who side with the C4ID. On their FAQ page, they list some ’established scholars in the scientific community’ who support Intelligent Design. Before we look at it, let’s just think about what ‘established scholars in the scientific community’ might mean. Surely that statement implies a group of scientists who currently publish peer-reviewed papers on some relevant subject? Yes indeed, and don’t call me Shirley. Look – I made a helpful table of all the associated names from the UK:

Not a single biologist. Not one! We find ourselves, then, in the absurd situation of being asked to accept the word of a motley collection of engineers, medical doctors, and non-scientists on a subject they have no authority on whatsoever. How likely do you think it is that these guys (and it’s always guys, isn’t it? Creationism is a proper sausage-fest) have noticed something that 150 years’ worth of specialist biologists haven’t? And it’s worth reiterating that none of these people have published any peer-reviewed scientific papers in proper journals providing evidence against the theory of evolution.

On the one hand it’s pathetic, but on the other, I feel a certain irriation. Just who do these people think they are? What right have they to tell us the fundamental theory of biology is incorrect? I wouldn’t dare wander into, say, an architecture class and tell them triangles are in fact not the strongest shape, nor would I pop into the Informatics department of my university to tell them silicon can’t carry a charge.

One last worrying thing about these individuals – while Intelligent Design is generally seen as milder and less anti-evidence than full-blown Young Earth Creationism, the vast majority of the people in the above list are… full-blown Young Earth Creationists (just google their names to find their pages on the Answers in Genesis website, for instance). While the website claims that they’re not necessarily 100% opposed to evolution, and there’s no mention of Jesus or Genesis or Adam & Eve or Original Sin or Yahweh or Noah’s Ark, I suspect they’re being disingenuous.

So, given this rather sad showing, one can see why they have to rely on that more famous species, the American Intelligent Design Proponent. Cited are names such as Michael Denton (who has recanted his anti-evolution views and now accepts the science), Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini and Jerry Fodor (who state at the start of their Darwin-criticising book that they accept common descent and that they are ‘outright, card-carrying, signed-up, dyed-in-the-wool, no-holds-barred atheists’), and of course Michael Behe, the sole, sad, biologist in the bunch, whose own Biology Department put a special disclaimer on their website, stating:

While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.

Heartrending, isn’t it? He can’t even convince the people in his own lab. The likelihood of his having stunning, knockdown proof of Intelligent Design is looking rather tiny.

What can be said of our new Scottish creationist pals, then? At least they’re not hiding their motives behind a front this time, as with the last British creationist attempt, ‘Truth in Science‘. Happily, TiS appears to be defunct (it has had just one news update in the past 13 months), but does this mean the C4ID will just take up the mantle? Of course, this might actually be a good thing, given that TiS appeared to get absolutely nowhere.

I might do a bit of investigative journalism and attend the Behe talk, if I can’t think of anything better to do. What will I expect to see? Tons of creationists lapping up every word? Or an empty lecture theatre? Who knows, but either way, it’s bound to Behe-larious. Watch this space.

It’s every parent’s dream – those video games your kids spend all their time playing could be harnessed to improve their brains and make them smarter! Just 20 minutes of ‘brain training’ a day could help their mathematical skills, with a boost in self-confidence to boot! At least those are the findings of a recent study in the British Journal of Educational Technology by David Miller and Derek Robertson.

This is Dr. Kawashima. He is real, and he's done some real research! Just... not into brain training.

Their experiment involved 3 classes of primary school kids, aged 10 or 11, each from a different school near Dundee. They were all tested on a ‘Number Challenge’ test, assessing their computational skills, as well as surveyed for self-esteem levels. Then, the first group all got a Nintendo DS Lite along with the well-known Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training game, which they used for 20 minutes at the start of every school day for 10 weeks. The unfortunate second group didn’t get a Nintendo, but did get a programme of the notorious Brain Gym, the set of bizarre, pulled-out-of-the-inventor’s-arse exercises purported to do wonderful things like ‘increase circulation to the frontal lobe for greater comprehension and rational thinking’ and ‘facilitate whole-brain learning’ – whatever that is. Every morning for the 10 week period, these poor kids contorted themselves into daft positions for 20 minutes, in the name of science. The third group, the controls, didn’t get a cool Nintendo, but weren’t punished with silly old Brain Gym either – silver linings and all that. They continued with their normal school activities. After 10 weeks, all the groups were tested on the Number Challenge and the self-esteem test again.

It turned out that the gaming group had a significant increase in their accuracy on the Number Challenge – an average of 10% better! Wow! But wait – so did the control group, which was an average of 5% better. In contrast, the Brain Gym group showed no significant change in accuracy (wait, doesn’t this mean that Brain Gym is detrimental to kid’s maths learning? Ha!) From this, the authors concluded that, since the score increase was bigger in the gaming group than in the controls, Brain Training really did make a difference to the kid’s computation scores.

Just a second. Almost unbelievably, and as was pointed about by Sergio Della Sala in a letter to the journal, the authors didn’t perform a comparison across the groups. The whole idea of doing scientific experiments, then subjecting them to statistical analysis, is to make sure your results haven’t just appeared by random chance (i.e., they are statistically significant). The question is this: what if it was mere chance that made the gamers’ scores larger than the controls’? The authors simply can’t answer this on the basis of their study, because they forgot to test for it.

What about self-esteem? On one of the measures of the self-esteem questionnaire, the gaming group showed an increase.But is it really a surprise that a group of kids who were given a cool games console – which the authors admit was ‘at that time widely advertised in the media’ – felt better about themselves?

It’s been known since the 1950s that people’s performance in an experiment can increase simply because they’re being studied – a variant of the placebo effect known as the Hawthorne effect. How do we know that this didn’t occur in this experiment? To really equalise the conditions, the control group should have been allowed 20 minutes per day on a different Nintendo DS game. Then, while removing variation caused by one group having a desirable item and one group going without, we’d see if it’s really Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training that’s making a difference, here.

How old is your brain? How crap is your research?

So, not really the stuff of dreams after all. But now it gets even worse for brain training games. Instead of a crap study apparently showing that they work, a really good study has been published showing that they are useless. In conjunction with the BBC’s pop-science programme, Bang Goes the Theory (which, yes, I did pan in my first ever blog post), Adrian Owen and colleagues were able to recruit a massive 11,430 participants to do some online brain training.

All the participants were given a battery of cognitive tests, looking at skills like verbal short-term memory, reasoning, and spatial working memory. They were then split into three groups, the first of which did some regular planning and problem-solving tasks, the second of which did some regular ‘brain training’-type tasks (similar to those in Dr. Kawashima’s…), and the third of which regularly answered a bunch of general knowledge questions (this latter group were the controls). After 6 weeks, they were all given the cognitive tests again.

Guess what? The brain training group got better at the tests… and so did the problem-solving group… and so did the controls. Everyone improved to just about the same level, no matter what sort of training they had done. They did, however get better and better scores at the training tasks (and the controls got better and better at general knowledge questions). So here we have a study with a huge sample size showing that brain training games make you better at brain training games, and nothing more. Not really much of a surprise there, I hope you’ll agree.

So it seems that if you’re an adult, you’ll get no benefits from an expensive ‘brain training’ game that you won’t get from playing the quiz machine down the pub every so often. If you’re a parent, there’s no convincing evidence that the games will help your kids learn. After the abject failure of fish oil pills, the arrant nonsense of Brain Gym, the tragic story of ‘learning styles’ and now the dodgy claims of brain training, the quest for a magic bullet for learning and education continues. When will they learn…?

_______________

Miller, D., & Robertson, D. (2010). Using a games console in the primary classroom: Effects of ‘Brain Training’ programme on computation and self-esteem British Journal of Educational Technology, 41 (2), 242-255 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2008.00918.x

Owen, A., Hampshire, A., Grahn, J., Stenton, R., Dajani, S., Burns, A., Howard, R., & Ballard, C. (2010). Putting brain training to the test Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature09042

Part 3: The medicalisation of rape? (with apologies)

The DSM-IV makes an interesting definitional decision which may seem a bit peculiar at first. A mental condition is normally only defined as a ‘disorder’ if it causes the sufferer ‘clinically significant distress’. Normally at the end of each list of symptoms, this proviso is mentioned – if it doesn’t cause distress, it’s not a disorder. There’s an interesting philosophical argument to be had on this issue – what exactly IS a disorder? – but for now we’ll look at one specific example.

A paraphilia, defined as ‘recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviours generally involving 1) nonhuman objects, 2 ) the suffering or humilation of oneself or one’s partner 3) children or other nonconsenting persons’. That proviso is here, too – if you haven’t acted on these, or they’re not causing you any distress, they’re not paraphilias. This does seem absurd to some psychologists – Kenneth Zucker, chair of the DSM5 Work Group on sexual disorders, has noted:

A distinct but harmless paraphilia cannot exist, by definition. A man cannot be a fetishist, for example, even if he masturbates into rubber boots on a regular basis, unless he is bothered by this behavior or is impaired in his psychosocial functioning. In DSM-IV-TR, there is no such thing as a well-adjusted paraphile; such people are defined out of existence.

The DSM5 group, then, make the distinction between ‘paraphilias’ and ‘paraphilic disorders’, the latter being the ones which cause distress. One would assume that paraphilias, as opposed to the disorders, wouldn’t be acted on in the same way by psychiatrists.

Shiny, shiny... all this talk of boots, I just had to get a photo.

In the 1980s, it was suggested that DSM-III should include a category of ‘Coercive Paraphilia’, a particular subset of rapists who have a disorder which causes them to become aroused at the coercive (but not necessarily the sadistic) element of their crime. At the time, the evidence wasn’t judged sufficiently strong enough, so there’s no such category in the DSM-IV. However, the science has moved on, and there are now repeated calls for the inclusion of Coercive Paraphilic Disorder in DSM5.

We need to be careful to separate moral judgments from empirical facts on this issue which, of course, is an incredibly sensitive one. Allen Frances, chair of the group who wrote the DSM-IV, gives a harsh criticism in this article:

Paraphilic Coercive Disorder would expand the pool of sex offenders who are eligible for indefinite civil commitment because they have a “mental disorder” to include cases of sexual coercion. … Given the facts…that most rapists are savvy enough to deny sexual fantasies and the unreliability (and unavailability) of laboratory testing, the diagnosis will inevitably be based only on the person’s behavior, leading to a potentially alarming rate of false positives with consequent wrongful indefinite commitment.

While this argument seems quite appealing on the surface, you must note that it is moral/political, and not scientific. It could be the case that the inclusion of Paraphilic Coercive Disorder in DSM5 might cause more  indefinite civil committment (he is thinking, by the way, of the sort of indefinite commitment the sex offenders Louis Theroux met in a recent documentary were undergoing). In other jurisdictions of course, it may go to the other way – lawyers can argue that their rapist client is disordered and therefore warrants a reduction in punishment severity. However, this has no bearing on the reality of Paraphilic Coercive Disorder, if it does in fact exist. I would argue that, whatever the consequences, it is important to know if a subset of rapists are indeed acting on a compulsion to coerce their victims into sex, and we should research such matters thoroughly. So where does the evidence currently point?

The argument hinges on two theories, which we have to decide between. 1) Some rapists have a brain problem, related to psychopathy, in which the screams, struggling, and resisting of the victim don’t give the rapist’s brain the ‘stop’ signals they would give to you or I, so they can get aroused by pretty much any sexual situation. In other words, the rapist has a failure of normal sexual inhibition. 2) Some rapists have a brain problem which gives them extra positive feelings and sexual arousal when they experience screams, struggling, and resisting. This is what would be called Coercive Paraphilic Disorder.

Theory 1 is the view of Raymond Knight, who, in this paper, concludes that:

The empirical data do not… support the hypothesis that a distinct syndrome exists that comprises males who are sexually aroused by the coercive elements of rape per se. … In addition, sexual fantasies about forcing sex and about struggling victims are highly correlated with sadistic fantasies and have not been shown to identify a syndrome that can be discriminated from sadism.

However, he may be missing something. David Thornton, here, points out that Theory 1 doesn’t necessarily fit with all the evidence. He points to some studies, including two recent ones from 2009, which were specifically set up to disentangle the sexual responses of rapists (measured, admittedly, by the slightly dodgy penile plethysmograph):

Taken together, these results are not consistent with the idea that preferential sexual arousal to rape is simply an expression of more general sexual sadism. Rather, there seems to be more than one paraphilic focus that is relevant here.

Clearly, this is an area which needs substantially more research. However, it seems there might be some utility for the construct of Paraphilic Coercive Disorder, despite the criticism. Since DSM5 is delayed, we should focus our research on trying to work out if constructs like this, which are genuinely ambiguous, are worth our time.

(Disclaimer: you must note that everyone proposing that this disorder should be included in the DSM5 is saying that it will only apply to a small subset of rapists. This is not about psychologists excusing rape, or anything like that. If it’s ‘medicalising’ rape, it’s only medicalising some rape, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Think of it this way: just because some people start fights because they’re dicks, doesn’t mean there aren’t also people who start fights because they have a brain disorder.)

So. Here ends our tour of some of the DSM5 issues. There are many more, of course, which I may return to in future. Are disorders like hoarding and skin picking disorder real? We’ll see. But for now, take this lesson: everyone benefits from an evidence-based approach, whether it’s teachers and their students, politicians and their voters, or psychiatrists and their patients. Received wisdom, even if it seems obvious (think Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) should always be questioned, and should always be tested. The alternative would just be… crazy…

FIN
_______________

Knight, R. (2009). Is a Diagnostic Category for Paraphilic Coercive Disorder Defensible? Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39 (2), 419-426 DOI: 10.1007/s10508-009-9571-x

Thornton D (2010). Evidence regarding the need for a diagnostic category for a coercive paraphilia. Archives of sexual behavior, 39 (2), 411-8 PMID: 19941047

Part 2: Post-Traumatic Stress… Disorder?

Everyone knows about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Surprisingly for something so widely-known, it’s only been around in the psychiatric manuals since 1980. In a major difference from many other psychiatric disorders, we know precisely its cause – ‘an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others’ (as the DSM-IV states). The symptoms include recurrent memories or dreams of the event, the feeling that the event is happening again and again, and ‘intense psychological distress’. The question, however, is this: how valid is PTSD as a distinct disorder, aside from anxiety, depression, phobias, and other problems we already know about?

There are several reasons, detailed in this article by Gerald Rosen and colleagues in the British Journal of Psychiatry a couple of years ago, we might think the answer is ‘not so valid’. Unfortunately, it’s all much more complicated than a simple ‘bad event happens, get distressed, get PTSD’ timeline. People who encounter events which, though distressing, are far from the ‘actual or threatened death (etc)’ DSM criteria often experience symptoms of PTSD, and people who have phobias do, too. Does this mean PTSD could just be an umbrella term for other specific disorders we should perhaps pay more attention to? Rosen et al. give the following hypothetical example:

…a boat captain whose fishing vessel is lost at sea, resulting in the death of several crew. Though not physically injured, the captain starts feeling ‘on edge,’ suffers from insomnia and begins to withdraw from usual activities. Most alien to the fisherman’s self-concept, he becomes anxious when considering a return to his usual occupation.Consequently, he turns down offers to work on other vessels, and he becomes isolated from the fishing industry. Without income, this man becomes increasingly anxious and depressed.

Before the invention of PTSD, psychiatrists and psychologists would have said the fisherman had a normal grief reaction to the death of his friends and a phobia of boats caused by the incident, followed by a depressive episode. Giving all these separate problems one name (PTSD) doesn’t seem to do enough justice to the complexity of the fisherman’s problems.

This is the sort of picture people put in articles about PTSD. Who am I to break the mould?

Rosen and colleagues note that the psychology/psychiatry literature on PTSD has gone a little overboard (with apologies to our poor fisherman on the use of that word) recently. Papers abound on such far-fetched topics as children developing PTSD after watching TV, and people getting some form of Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder after overhearing a rude comment in the workplace. Surely, say Rosen et al., these things are not all the same, distinct disorder, and we’d be better off looking at each instance separately.

Sadly, the DSM5 draft reveals that the criteria for PTSD have changed, but not really in the right direction. The list of events which may cause the disorder has expanded to include sexual abuse, and now it’s accepted that you can get PTSD by hearing that a traumatic event has happened to a friend, or seeing things that remind you of the event (like when people get abuse-flashbacks in movies from finding their old teddy bear). Fair enough, but is this really addressing the issue, known in the jargon as ‘co-morbidity’, of one disorder sharing loads of features with several other disorders, to the point where the lines between them become terribly blurred?

I would suggest not. The idea of PTSD is an attractive one – in a world of hideously distressing and baffling mental disorders which usually appear without rhyme or reason, it’s nice to have one with a concrete cause that one can trace back to one particular event. However, sweeping a pile of varied symptoms under the PTSD rug may simply confound diagnoses, and we mustn’t forget that we should be taking the time to research the kinds of factors (genetic, social, or otherwise) which may predispose people to certain forms of reaction to adverse events.

Coming up in Part 3! We conclude with Coercive Paraphilic Disorder and the medicalisation of rape. Fun for the whole family.

TO BE CONTINUED…

____________

Rosen GM, Spitzer RL, & McHugh PR (2008). Problems with the post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis and its future in DSM V. The British journal of psychiatry : the journal of mental science, 192 (1), 3-4 PMID: 18174499

It’s nice to be able to speak in the same language. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its 4th Edition (DSM-IV), gives psychiatrists and clinical psychologists the chance to do just that, being as it is a list of every psychiatric disorder currently known, categorised into useful diagnostic criteria. Well, I say ‘useful’.

Each time a new version of the DSM is in production, a tsunami of controversy rolls across the brain sciences, as researchers into particular mental disorders battle to have their particular interpretations included in the ‘official’ text, which clinicians will then use to diagnose their patients. Now is one of those times – the 5th Edition (DSM5) is on its way, drafted here, and a movement to fill it with rigorous, evidence-based disorders which are more than merely psychiatrist’s figments. Past embarrassments, such as the inclusion in previous editions of homosexuality as a disorder (now thankfully expunged from the manual), constantly come back to haunt the DSM’s writers, and as you can see from articles such as this one decrying the new draft, you can’t please all of the psychologists, all of the time.

There is legitimate criticism of some of the DSM criteria, and there is nonsense. In this 3-part post I’ll first sort the scientific wheat from the desperate, bizarre, anti-psychiatrist chaff. In parts 2 and 3, I’ll discuss a couple of pertinent issues for the DSM5 writers – the validity of a syndrome everyone knows about (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), and the validity of an entirely new creation (Coercive Paraphilic Disorder).

Calm yourself. It's only the deeply exciting DSM-IV front cover.

Part 1: Those mad old anti-psychiatrists

First, we have to distance ourselves from the anti-psychiatrists. This infuriating movement was really big in the 1960′s-70′s, and doesn’t get a huge amount of press these days. One the big players is Thomas Szasz, himself a psychiatrist(?!), who wrote a book in 1961 entitled The Myth of Mental Illness. In it, he argued that our ideas of mental illnesses are simply our societal judgements on people who are, well, a bit different. Utterly ignoring the fact that maybe, just maybe, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists entered the field because they want to help people, Szasz goes on to argue that categorising someone as ‘mentally disordered’ is just a way for The Man, in this case the dark forces of psychiatry, to control deviants. They extend this control by using powerful drugs and electroshock treatment, all the while writing books and manuals which categorise certain arbitrary patterns of behaviour as disorders – disorders which have no objective physiological correlates and can’t be physically measured in the same way as, say, a cancer can.

Szasz, Szasz, Szasz. Just because we don’t understand a disorder doesn’t mean we can’t treat it. We’re actually quite good at using mysterious things in medicine. Look at anaesthetics, for instance – to this day, there’s still debate over what exactly it is that’s putting you to sleep. Equally,  it’s completely disingenuous to make an argument along the lines of ‘there is argument over this disorder, therefore it does not exist’ (it’s the sort of thing creationists say about arguments among evolutionary biologists). Indeed, the fact that psychiatrists can’t agree over some disorders – as we will see below – is surely evidence against an evil conspiracy on their part to control the masses.

It’s also true that some psychiatrists have committed abuses of power over their patients (it would be bizarre if this hadn’t happened), but to say, as the anti-psychiatrists do, that this somehow discredits the entire field makes just as much sense as the hyper-feminist argument that ‘some sex is rape, therefore all sex is rape’.

Here’s where the anti-psychiatry movement gets creepier: a certain L. Ron Hubbard gets involved. Hubbard, founder of the Cult Church of Scientology, hated psychiatrists. Apparently he had a few bad experiences with them himself, and projected his bad feeling into his writings, indoctrinating his followers into the belief that psychiatrists are part of a global conspiracy, and were in fact (I kid you not) responsible for the Holocaust. He also created the Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights, an anti-psychiatry lobbying body and front for Scientology which produces scaremongering leaflets and exhibitions. The irony of Scientology, not exactly an organisation known for the healthy mental state of its members, creating such a body hardly needs underlining. Szasz, though not a Scientologist himself, is a co-founder of the CCHR. Need I say more? Guilt by association is not a logical argument, but it’s an argument I’ve no problem using here.

You will be glad to hear that I’ve devised new diagnostic criteria for the DSM5, describing Psychiatry Denial Disorder, Lifelong Type:

A. A pervasive pattern of unreasonable criticism of a perfectly legitimate branch of medicine, often with ravings about a ‘conspiracy of control’ and a bizarre focus on ‘abuses of power’.
B. Two (or more) of the following signs:

-A ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude to those with debilitating, life-destroying mental disorders
-A desperate need to be contrarian
-Utter ignorance of the scientific method
-A belief in Lord Xenu and volcano-thetans

C. These symptoms are not due to a general medical condition, or a sharp whack upside the head.

It’s worth mentioning that, on the other – far more reasonable – end of the anti-psychiatry spectrum, we find groups such as the Hearing Voices Movement, who campaign against auditory hallucinations being viewed necessarily as a mental illness, and the Neurodiversity movement, who argue that one day our current classifications of ‘disorders’ like autism will go the same way as ‘disorders’ like homosexuality: embarrassing secrets in the DSM’s past. I don’t wish to wade into such controversy here; suffice to say that there are convincing arguments made by some proponents from these groups, but they must be tempered by an understanding of just how poor a quality of life some people with these conditions have.

There are good, scientific points to be made about psychiatric diagnosis. However, we’ve seen that there are large critical movements which are entirely unrelated to science, so one must tread carefully. In Part 2, we’ll take a look at Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Those slavering, lonely sad sacks among you who are familiar with creating characters in this role-playing, roll-dicing game will know that, when you generate your in-game avatar, you are confronted with a list of attributes (such as Strength, Wisdom, and Charisma) from which you choose if you’d like to be a charmingly pathetic weakling, a musclebound oaf, or anywhere in between. You then pick a class (such as Fighter, Wizard, or Thief), which describes how you’ll deal with your exciting adventures – hack ‘n’ slash with a big axe, or cower at the back with Magic Missile.

So the overall message is this: people vary a lot, but you can still put them into a taxonomy of ‘classes’, ways in which they’re comfortable with dealing with the world. And now, as I hit rock bottom in the ‘tortured metaphor to open a blog post’ stakes, I will assess how close  a fit the D&D system is to real human psychology.

Here is a dungeon.

First, let’s have a look at those attributes. Surely it’s silly and insulting, since we know that people are fickle and changeable, to try to classify them on spectra of arbitrary traits? Some people think it is. There’s a school in psychology known as the ‘idiopathic’ approach to personality, which states that people’s behaviour comes from random, ever-changing, and unknowable causes, and we shouldn’t try to wrestle such a morass of complexity into little boxes. But is that really the case? Surely everyone admits that there are underlying aspects of personality, upon which you can make predictions about behaviour? Your worrisome friend, for instance, is going to go into meltdown every time he has a job interview, whereas you, much more phlegmatic, take it in your stride.

Most psychologists in the field of Individual Differences accept this is true, to differing extents. Back in the 1930s, the wonderfully-named psychologists Allport & Odbert collected all the terms in the English Language that they could find which described people’s personality. They found a whopping 18,000(!). Grouping these into themes, making them into questionnaires, and asking people to rate themselves on each term, formed the basis of the science of personality.

Once you have a big load of data showing how people rate themselves, you can do some statistics. A technique called factor analysis is used to draw out underlying correlations between all the terms – in other words, finding which descriptive words tend to stick to other ones in people’s personalities. These bunches of terms can then be given names, and classified as factors. The current consensus (though by no means accepted by all psychologists) is that 5 factors come out. These are (with descriptors taken from here):

1. Openness -appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience.
2. Conscientiousness – a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behavior.
3. Extraversion – energy, positive emotions, urgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others.
4. Agreeableness – A tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
5. Neuroticism – A tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability.

So, once you’ve got your factors, on which people may rate very high, very low, or anywhere in between, are there objective ways of assessing how close a fit they are to reality? Indeed there are – if you can make predictions about people’s lives on the basis of their personality traits, you’ve got a good case that they aren’t just imaginary.

In a review in 2007, Brent Roberts and colleagues analysed a mountain of data from personality studies, and concluded that you can indeed make successful predictions about major life events such as divorce, employment, and even mortality, on the basis of some of these personality factors. People high in conscientiousness, for instance, have a lower chance of divorce than people high in extraversion, and those high in neuroticism and agreeableness tend to keep their jobs for longer. While this stuff may seem obvious, it’s actually critically important – showing that the science of personality has a firm grasp on reality.

There is, of course, a lot more work to do. For example, psychologists have begun to link these factors to genetics. An interesting new idea is to rephrase the 5 factors in terms of reward-responsiveness (for instance, high extraversion could be a tendency to see interaction with others as a reward in and of itself). Another major question regards why these personality factors evolved in the first place. Personality psychologists clearly have their work cut out.

The future looks bright for personality psychology, and at least the idea behind the Dungeons & Dragons attribute system (though definitely not the names or concepts of the D&D attributes themselves) is vindicated. But what about the class system? Can we reliably put people into groups based on the strategy they use to interact with the world?

Ask most schoolteachers, and they’ll say yes. This is because the concept of ‘learning styles’ pervades teacher training courses, and it goes almost unquestioned that it is possible to group children into a taxonomy of ‘visual’, ‘auditory’, ‘kinaesthetic’ (and so on) learners, and that specific types of learning will work only for each specific subtype of child.

There are dozens of different versions of this idea, some more pseudoscientific than others. The worst types will include bullshit about  neuro-linguistic programming (the only stuff you’ll hear about NLP that isn’t bullshit is people telling you ‘it doesn’t work’) as well as nonsense about ‘right brain’ and ‘left brain’ personalities (you know, the pervasive myth that you can ‘unlock’ your right brain’s creativity). For now though, we’ll look only at the basic taxonomic theory.

If this claim were correct (or even approaching correct), it would be A Big Deal, and so the Association for Psychological Science tasked a group of neutral researchers, led by Harold Pashler, to assess the evidence. Their report, published in the excellent journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, won’t exactly thrill proponents of the ‘learning styles’ hypothesis. Its conclusion?

The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing. If classification of students’ learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated.

Ouch. So what was it that made up their minds?

Here’s a hypothetical experiment. Take a group of 100 kids, and split them into two groups, depending on whether they’re ‘visual’ or ‘kinaesthetic’ learners. We can do this on the basis of criteria outlined by whichever ‘learning styles’ proponent we’ve picked, but it’s important we don’t tell the teachers, or the kids themselves, which group is which – let’s keep our experiment double-blinded. We’re going to teach the kids some basic maths – addition and subtraction. In week 1, give the ‘visual’ group an old-school (no pun intended) lesson with chalk and blackboard, and the ‘kinaesthetic’ group wooden blocks which they’re taught to pile up, physically doing the maths, hands-on. Then, give them a maths test. In week 2, give the kinaesthetic learners the blackboard lesson, the visual leaners the blocks, then test all them again.

Imagine we got the following results: both groups learned amazingly well in the first week, and abysmally in the second. The graph of their performance, then, looks a bit like this:

Test score with different learning styles

Here’s the problem: no such results exist. Pashler and colleagues note that not a single study fits this criteria: showing that a particular subset of kids learn better with their own method, and worse with another. This is the type of evidence that we’d need to really recommend these ‘learning styles’ ideas, and it simply isn’t there.

Here is a dragon.

The authors hasten to point out that they’re not saying that people don’t have preferences. Those kinaesthetic kids might have hated the visual lesson, for example. But the important thing is how these children have learned. And nobody has yet shown that you can assign kids taxonomic groups which correspond in any way to the reality of their brains’ handling of new information.

So – sorry, Dungeons & Dragons. You might have made a good call about the attributes, but the class thing is a bit off. Sure, people have professions in their lifetimes, and some people are good at some things others aren’t. But when it comes to psychology, our strategies for learning things aren’t so personalised. It’s nice to think that our kids might all have individualised styles of learning, and that every child has a chance to be clever in their own way, but the reality is that learning seems to be unitary, and it seems to be based on one spectrum: that of IQ. Inventing pleasant-sounding but evidence-free systems as ‘learning style’ proponents do is definitely not helping. What are needed are improved teaching methods across the board, teaching useful, applicable knowledge in ways appropriate to each individual subject, not to each individual pupil. Pashler et al. again:

Given the capacity of humans to learn, it seems especially important to keep all avenues, options, and aspirations open for our students, our children, and ourselves. Toward that end, we think the primary focus should be on identifying and introducing the experiences, activities, and challenges that enhance everybody’s learning.

Now, where did I leave my d20…?

________

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, B. (2009) Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9 (3), 106-116.

Roberts, B. W., Kuncel, N. R., Shiner, R., Caspi, A., & Goldberg, L. R. (2007) The power of personality: The comparative validity of personality traits, socioeconomic status, and cognitive ability for predicting important life outcomes. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2 (4), 313-345.

It’s a strange fact, however, that sometimes the knuckles of these bullshitters appear entirely unscuffed – that is, even the cleverest of writers can occasionally throw out an opinion of such shocking absurdity that one must step back in disbelief. This has, I am sad to say, recently been the case with critic and essayist Clive James, who has converted to the church of climate change denialism. Here, I’ll attempt to chop down the gnarled and pathetic-looking tree which James is barking up.

But that’s not all. Last Saturday I encountered a species of anti-sciencer rather more, shall we say, gauche and unlettered than Clive James. A mighty twenty-five of Edinburgh’s most indefatigable anti-vaxxers converged on the Scottish Parliament to express their opinion that ‘SWINE FLU IS A HOAX!’.

So which is the biggest hoax – climate change or swine flu? There’s only one way to find out – FIGHT!!!

The Clive James denialism story, such as it is, so far: James writes a dunderheaded piece on global warming, ‘In Praise of Scepticism‘, in which he claims that he ‘still can’t see that there is a scientific consensus’ on climate change. George Monbiot responds with an article which is equally daft in its own way, accusing James and other denialists of being so old and afraid of death that they react harshly to anything that reminds them of mortality. While I normally rather like Monbiot, this piece should be nominated for some kind of ‘Worst Amateur Psychology’ award. There are myriad reasons people become science-deniers, and there’s no compelling evidence that age is particularly important amongst them.

In any case, James is entirely unabashed. Last Friday, he was heard on BBC Radio 4 and seen in the BBC Magazine ‘responding’ to Monbiot with another well-written but utterly vacuous essay. Once again, the claim about a lack of consensus is made:

…from my own layman’s background reading I thought the reported scientific unanimity that global warming is man-made, and likely to be catastrophic, was always a more active area of scientific debate than you would have guessed from the way the media told the story.

This is exactly the sort of nonsensical claim one hears from idiot creationists, along the lines of ‘Steven Jay Gould didn’t agree with Richard Dawkins about evolution – this calls the reality of evolution into question’. This is so illogical it hardly bears dealing with, but it’s worth pointing out again that just because scientists disagree about how something happens, it in no way means that they disagree that it happens in the first place. Only someone with a gross misunderstanding of how science works would make a claim like the above. Sure, scientists disagree about climate change, but as pointed out here, it’s about esoteric stuff like ‘precisely how much stratospheric cooling can be attributed to ozone depletion rather than an enhanced greenhouse effect.’

This doesn't even need a caption.

The fact is that the overwhelming evidence published in the scientific journals suggests that man-made climate change is an unassailable fact. You can find a huge amount of that evidence, in the form of responses to sceptical questions, here. Not that James is bothered about things like evidence – he doesn’t give us any indication of where he’s been doing his ‘layman’s background reading’. The ExxonMobil site, maybe?

Onwards:

One of these few [denialist scientists I watched] was Prof Lindzen of MIT. I never could convince myself that the professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology knew less about the earth’s climate than I did, so I started to watch him. Hopeless on the media, Prof Lindzen is the sort of pundit with a four figure IQ who can somehow never figure out that you are supposed to talk into the microphone.

Here, James is trying to say that the denialist scientists are bumbling absent-minded professors who are being unfairly put down by the media-savvy alarmists in the environmentalist movement. In reality though, it appears Richard Lindzen has had a very successful media career, getting publicity for his denial of second-hand smoking, and writing loads of articles in top publications like the Wall Street Journal about his climate change scepticism. And, as an interesting aside, it appears that coal and oil companies are very happy to pay him lots of money to tell them nice things, possibly like ‘you’re not causing global warming’…

The number of scientists who endorsed the orthodox view increased also, but the number of those who didn’t went up instead of down. I couldn’t do the calculus, but I could count heads.

There were scores of eminent scientists who signed the 2007 open letter to the secretary general of the UN, and then later on there were hundreds quoted in the US senate minority reports.

It could be said that few of them had expertise in climate science, but that argument looked less decisive when you considered that climate science itself was exactly what they were bringing into question.

In another trick he appears to have learned from the Intelligent Design movement, James wants us to believe that totting up the numbers of scientists for and against an idea will uncover its truth or falsehood. Once again, it’s not the scientists, but the published evidence that matters. James points to none of this. Lists of names will not do. Unlike, say, scientists who may think things like theology are stuff and nonsense, anyone ‘bringing into question’ climate science has an Everest of evidence to block out.

It’s not even clear that ‘the number of those who didn’t [support the orthodox position]‘ increased at any point. This bald assertion (apologies, Clive) is made with no evidential support whatsoever. And you know what? ‘No evidential support whatsover’ could be Clive James’ new catchphrase. We can only hope he realises he’s in the wrong and goes back to being the loveable and intelligent critic we once knew.

Look on their banners, ye mighty, and despair.

We move now from shooting fish in a barrel to taking a large amount of TNT and blowing up the fish packaging factory. A few days ago it became apparent that anti-science was hitting my own dear Edinburgh in the form of a swine flu vaccine protest. Keir has covered the lead-up and the aftermath, Mike has slagged the anti-vax website, and Alex has provided some extra info. What else can I add? Well, the anti-vaxxers gave us a couple of absolutely hilarious leaflets – including one of the most insane, paranoid and delusional things I’ve ever read. Here are a few choice quotes from a densely-typed double-sided sheet of A4 they were handing out (all the random capitalisation, underlines, bold type, and poor grammar is [sic]):

VACCINATION TRUTH

All Vaccines Contain These Unlisted Ingredients, which the drug industries worldwide keep hidden … GM tissues from diseased sheep, monkey, mouse, cow, guinea pig, goat, horse, calf, chick, rabbit, dog, etc; … blood from infected HIV positive homosexuals; microchips, for tracking & monitoring via satellite, controlling, dumbing down, causing time-release cerebral haemorrhaging, mood changing & killing; … AVOID ALL VACCINES AND INJECTIONS!

…

Fact#1 Vaccines DO NOT PROTECT !!!
Fact#2 All Vaccines Cause diseases
Fact#3 All Vaccines Spread the diseases that people are injected with
Fact#4 All Vaccines Destroy the immune system & nervous system
Fact#5 All Vaccines Can Kill within 3 hours
Fact#6 Vaccine toxins, remaining from childhood, cause serious diseases in adults
Fact#7 All vaccines, including mercury-free ones, are toxic, & can cause autism
Fact#8 Vaccination is the number one cause of cot death
Fact#9 HEALTH is the only immunity!

…

Epidemics of smallpox, all types of flu, AIDS, measles, etc., are all caused by vaccination… Evil has always been here to destroy the good. The only way to stop annihilation, is to unite & love one another as one family worldwide… With Israel wanting to remain world conquerors, as they have been for over 2000 years, they continue to pay £billions to fund global destruction… the target is to, therefore, destroy populations globally. Debilitating and deadly viruses & chemicals, created in laboratories, are constantly dispersed by planes as ‘chemtrails’… New York’s mayor flouridated the city the day before 9/11 to cause confusion.

…

Campaign against and stop evil dictation… Oust evil rulers! This is your Spiritual right!

Holy shit. It was like a visit to David Icke’s website, but in real life! It would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic. Oh no, wait – it is hilarious. The pamphlet is an absolute goldmine of wide-eyed, tinfoil hat craziness (I especially love the bit about ‘evil dictation’. TAKE THIS DOWN, NOW! MUAHAHAHA!). Clearly this stuff is just ravings, but what about the other antivax literature? The more sober leaflet I was given contained some stuff we can actually get our teeth into:

H1N1 MADE IN A LAB?

Virologist, Dr Adrian Gibbs claims ‘the consistent link with pig virus’s [sic] suggests that human activity was involved‘. Former US Naval Intelligence Officer Wayne Madson supports this claim saying that a top UN scientist suggested the strain had been genetically manufactured as a military biological weapon.

Zounds! But wait – on the other side of the leaflet…

Recently published research from the Health Protection Agency (HPA) is damming [sic] of the NHS Swine Flu Hotline stating that just 1 in 5 diagnosed with the illness actually had it, falling to a shocking 1 in 20 in the summer months. GP’s fared badly too, correctly assessing just 50% of cases. In just one week 36,000 of 40,000 Tamiflu prescriptions were wrongly prescribed needlessly raising the chance of virus mutation as well as hugely over-inflating official figures.

My diagnosis? These ignorant Luddites know they don’t like modern medicine, and they certainly know they don’t like vaccines, but they are so indiscriminate in their choice of paranoid attacks that they’re not bothered if it actually makes any sense. The first quote suggests that the virus was specially created to cause a pandemic for some shadowy greater purpose – ‘a corrupt global elite’s plan to vaccinate our nation’. The second suggests that the virus isn’t actually present in most cases. Doesn’t sound like this corrupt global elite are particularly, well, elite at spreading viruses, does it? They even end with a quote from Prince Philip:

‘If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.’

So, er, wait. Are viruses bad or not? If it’s going to lower population levels, should we not vaccinate against it? But I thought vaccines were evil! What the hell!?

This is the swine flu virus. It is not a hoax.

As you may expect, looking at what the virologist quoted above actually said reveals he’s been almost sue-ably misquoted. The paper, available here (open-access, hurrah!), in which the remarks are made actually suggests two hypothetical origins for the sudden appearance of the current H1N1 strain: 1) It didn’t actually appear suddenly, it evolved in the usual way in pigs and we didn’t notice because we haven’t been sampling them for viruses properly, or 2) it didn’t actually appear suddenly, it appeared during a particular process of pig vaccination which wasn’t sterilised properly, and nobody noticed until it spread to humans. Nowhere is the idea that the virus was deliberately ‘made in a lab’ even hinted at. This is simply an example of quote mining at its finest.

Before we scrunch the leaflet up and cast it into the furnace, let’s have a look at the HPA report mentioned in the second quote. Are these morons seriously suggesting that there was some kind of conspiracy to over-diagnose swine flu so that Evil Big Pharma could vaccinate more people? From the sounds of it, the NHS was in a state of serious confusion (understandably, since swine flu symptoms aren’t always noticeably different from those of seasonal flu, and they were diagnosing over the phone), not under the control of cackling Pharma puppet-masters. This conspiracy theory falls in the same way as scores of others – it posits an utterly implausible level of organisation on the part of the conspirators. The ultimate rejoinder – Watergate. The fact that the US government couldn’t properly hush up a small burglary entirely discredits vast, arcane conspiracies like ’9/11 was a controlled demolition’ or indeed ‘Big Pharma are controlling the NHS’ on the basis of mere probability.

While Clive James would be utterly appalled at my comparison of him to these anti-vax loons, there are clear similarities. A baseless distrust of scientific evidence staring them in the face? Check. A smug, arrogant ‘I know better’ attitude? Check. The spinning of tales about faceless authorities manipulating people? Check. The quoting of heroic figures battling against a corrupt elite? Check. All these qualities and more are there in climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers.

What can we do about it? Showing, as I hope I have above, that their ideas are frankly barking is only half the answer. The problem of psychological contagion rears its ugly head – the mere suggestion that a) climate change might be a load of old rubbish or b) vaccines could harm your children inherently makes people suspicious and less likely to follow the advice of authority figures to do anything about them. How can we possibly get people to trust evidence-based advice? I’m afraid that, my friends, is a subject for another post.