Discursive Trust

Before I go any further; it cannot be emphasized enough how hideously arrogant and un-Christian the idea of prayer-healing is. Let's assume for a moment that we all believe in God, and we all agree that he is generally awesome and has the ability to heal sick people if he so chooses.

The implication of prayer-healing is that special people can demand that God heals someone, and he'll just do it. That only makes sense if you believe that a) God is a bit absent-minded and doesn't really notice all the sick people until some clever human points them out to him, or b) God is the fourth emergency service (the AA come fifth in this world-view), and we're entitled customers who pay with prayer and should damn well get some service. Either way, the message from faith-healers - and the hapless morons who support them - is clear: "Fuck God's plan, He's our bitch." I'm not a Christian myself, but if I were, I think I'd be pretty frustrated with this sort of selfish, arrogant attitude, and I'd laugh in the face of people who claimed to have some divine right over His powers.

A second point worth making is that the Advertising Standards Agency are, pound-for-pound, one of the best public institutions ever created when it comes to dealing with scientific evidence. Just a quick scan of their past adjudications shows the dizzying array of evidence-based issues they've had to rule on, from bogus cosmetic claims to alternative medicine. MPs should be publicly supporting them for the work they do protecting consumers, not putting political pressure on them to alter their code of practice.

Bearing all that in mind, let's look at the letter the three MPs wrote:

"We are writing on behalf of the all-party Christians in Parliament group in Westminster and your ruling that the Healing On The Streets ministry in Bath are no longer able to claim, in their advertising, that God can heal people from medical conditions."

Christians in Parliament are a somewhat scary group at Westminster who campaign for the special treatment of Christians in law. Earlier this year they released a confused report on Christianity in the UK which concluded that, "There is a high level of religious illiteracy which has led to many situations where religious belief is misunderstood and subsequently restricted." I would humbly suggest that campaigning for faith healers and against gay rights may not the best way of helping their PR situation.

Like many groups supposedly campaigning on behalf of Christians, their claims of representation ring a little hollow – think-tank Ekklesia accused them of 'muddying the waters', suggesting that they created conflict and made assumptions about the views of most Christians that were not accurate.

"We write to express our concern at this decision and to enquire about the basis on which it has been made. It appears to cut across two thousand years of Christian tradition and the very clear teaching in the Bible."

Slavery. Women not being allowed to vote. Yes it's a boring and obvious response, but it's such a boringly obvious argument that you have to ask why people are still putting forward appeals to tradition when It. Is. So. Obviously. Moronic. Doing something for centuries doesn't make it a good idea!

"Many of us have seen and experienced physical healing ourselves in our own families and churches and wonder why you have decided that this is not possible."

Many people claim to have been abducted by aliens, or cured by homeopathy, or been in touch with the dead. It's shocking that we have decided that this is not possible, and speaks to the profoundly undemocratic and fascist nature of 'scientific' 'progress'.

"On what scientific research or empirical evidence have you based this decision?"

None. People advertising a claim are required by the advertising code to provide good evidence for it, and in their adjudication against "Healing on the Steets – Bath" the ASA note that none was provided. You would think the MPs would know this if they had taken the time to familiarize themselves with the case.

"You might be interested to know..."

...I have a feeling you may be wrong on this one...

...that I (Gary Streeter) received divine healing myself at a church meeting in 1983 on my right hand, which was in pain for many years. After prayer at that meeting, my hand was immediately free from pain and has been ever since. What does the ASA say about that?

Again I find myself wondering if the MPs actually read the judgement, in which this question was clearly answered. The ASA quite rightly say in their ruling that "testimonials [are] insufficient evidence for claims of healing." To which I would add, "...and I am never going to vote for you, Gary Streeter, you utterly gullible buffoon."

"I would be the first to accept that prayed for people do not always get healed...

No shit.

...but sometimes they do. That is all this sincere group of Christians in Bath are claiming."

Yet again the MPs' description of the ruling deviates from actual reality, since this isn't what the group claimed at all. What they claimed is that 'God can heal you today', with a list of conditions that could be treated and a series of testimonials. That is not the same as saying "sometimes prayed for people get healed," which of course is trivially true. It also raises a question: if these MPs genuinely believe in faith healing, why are they so gutless about backing it?

"It is interesting to note that since the traumatic collapse of the footballer Fabrice Muamba the whole nation appears to be praying for a physical healing for him."

The 'whole nation'? Which nation is this please? Personally I'd put my faith in medical expertise. That aside, I can't help but marvel at how classy and 'Christian' it is to use somebody fighting for their life in hospital as a publicity hook to score cheap political points.

"I enclose some media extracts. Are they wrong also and will you seek to intervene?"

What a weirdly obtuse thing to say. The ASA are an advertising regulator, so why on Earth would the ASA seek to intervene in people choosing to pray for someone? It's as if Christians in Parliament are deliberately trying to confuse personal choice with advertising regulation in some sort of misguided attempt to make this an issue about freedom of religious expression, rather than a straight-forward example of consumer protection in action.

"We invite your detailed response to this letter and unless you can persuade us that you have reached your ruling on the basis of indisputable scientific evidence, we intend to raise this matter in Parliament."

It's always classy to end correspondence with a bullying threat. What makes it so laughable in this instance is that the MPs apparently lack even the most basic understanding of the advertising codes, not least the fact that the ASA don't make them up – they're the responsibility of the Committee of Advertising Practice.

At the top of the CAP Code's special section on health comes rule 12.1: "Objective claims must be backed by evidence." This seems like a pretty fair rule to me, and quite rightly puts the onus on the advertiser to back up the claims they make. It's not up to the ASA to make the case for them; certainly not under intimidating threats from politicians who should know better.

So I'll finish with three questions for the three MPs: 1) what is wrong with section 12.1 of the CAP Code; 2) did you understand that the ASA aren't responsible for the code when you wrote your letter; and 3) do you honestly believe that fighting the corner of faith-healing charlatans is the best way to represent British Christian interests in 2012?

Organized research into ESP and related phenomena began in the late 1800s, coinciding with the explosion of spiritualism (contact with spirits of the dead, usually by mediums) in the U.S. and Europe. In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research was formed. This London-based group performed the typical paranormal research of that era, which consisted primarily of testing self-proclaimed mediums under controlled conditions and collecting anecdotes of "spontaneous" ESP.

A similar effort was undertaken in the U.S. by the Seybert Commission. Henry Seybert was a huge fan of spiritualism, and he left a pile of money to the University of Pennsylvania so they could form a commission and prove how awesome and true spiritualism was. They investigated several phenomena typically performed by mediums of the day. In the case of slate writing (ghostly writings on seemingly inaccessible slates held in the medium's lap), they found nothing but fraud. Spirit photography they found so ludicrous they didn't even bother testing it.

The Seybert Commission developed an ingenious method of testing mediums who claimed to produce ghostly rappings and other loud noises. Many mediums were female, and the decorum of the day made it difficult for the commission to directly monitor all the parts of a woman's body to make sure she wasn't making the rapping sounds herself. Instead, the commission let the medium do her thing. They would then intermittently make their own rapping noises, indistinguishable from those made by the medium. A startled medium meant she wasn't expecting to hear noises she hadn't made herself.

The commission ultimately declared that every tested instance of psychic ability was in fact fraudulent. Luckily, Henry Seybert was unable to communicate his displeasure with them from beyond the grave.

Some of the earliest laboratory experiments into ESP were conducted by John Edgar Coover at Stanford University, starting in 1911. Coover used wooden blocks with numbers on them, which he called Lotto Blocks. The experimenter sat behind the subject, drew a block from a bag, and either focused on visualizing the number or didn't. The subject tried to guess the number. Coover found that the results did not differ appreciably from random chance in either condition, and in fact in several trials the subjects did better when the experimenter was not thinking about the number.

Coover's writings on the subject were indicative of the zeitgeist for paranormal research at the time:

"The research is undertaken with a zeal for Truth, and is projected and controlled with an anxiety for the strength of the bridge it is building, which must bear the strain of the passage of men of learning, men of influence, men of science, from the shore of accepted knowledge to the island of the not-yet-recognized."

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A landmark in ESP research came in the 1930s, when Duke University opened a lab specifically for the study of the paranormal. Karl Zener and Joseph B. Rhine conducted the most famous experiments, using special cards designed by Zener. These white cards depicting either a circle, square, plus, star or wavy lines are today known as Zener cards. They were developed because standard playing cards presented a series of problems and added complexity when used in experiments. Zener cards made it much easier to determine probabilities and to control the distribution of cards within a given set of tests.

At first, Rhine found subjects with incredible abilities, able to guess the symbol on the card far more often than chance would predict. Then they noticed that people could see the symbols through the thin paper of the cards. This would be a recurring problem throughout the history of ESP research: poor experimental design. Over the years, Rhine found several subjects he claimed showed paranormal abilities, but his results could not be duplicated by other researchers. Critics claimed his subjects were cheating and that Rhine simply didn't report many tests that came up negative for ESP.

Rhine established the Parapsychological Association in 1957; it was accepted into the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 12 years later, which gave parapsychology an aspect of respectability. A number of journals devoted to paranormal research also sprung up during this period, including the Journal of Parapsychology and the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. This brings up another recurring problem with scientific psychic research: virtually all papers in the field are published in journals exclusive to paranormal research. To the extent that they are peer-reviewed, those peers are also engaged in paranormal research, and the journals are not considered as rigorous or prestigious as more mainstream peer-reviewed journals.

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This seemed to open the floodgates, as paranormal investigation societies proliferated throughout the 1970s. The Institute of Noetic Sciences, Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine, the International Kirlian Research Association, the Institute of Parascience, and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory were all formed during this period.

The Princeton lab is a good example of how these groups tended to rise and fall. Founded by Robert G. Jahn in 1979, it was funded entirely by private donations and published almost all of its papers in its own journal, the Journal of the Society for Scientific Exploration. Professors at Princeton (none of which joined the lab or conducted research there) tended to view it as an embarrassment, but generally supported Jahn's academic freedom to pursue his research as long as he could get his own funding. Still, serious journals refused their studies. According to the New York Times, "One editor famously told Dr. Jahn that he would consider a paper ‘if you can telepathically communicate it to me.'" (This may be apocryphal – I was unable to find the original source of the quote).

A typical PEAR lab experiment used a random number generator that would crank out numbers close to 100, either just above or just below. Subjects sat at the machine and thought, "High" or "Low" to see if they could shift the machine's results away from pure chance, even by slight amounts. In 2007, Jahn finally gave up and shut down the lab. The results? Over a huge number of tests, Jahn claimed humans could affect probability by a few hundredths of a percentage point. He felt this proved that mass positive thought by humans could create measurable change in the world.

Psychic research in the last decade or so has taken a decidedly more skeptical approach, at least where official university sanctioned research is concerned. Papers showing evidence of ESP mostly remain confined in the "psychic ghetto" of journals expressly devoted to the paranormal. That makes the exceptions particularly notable. Case in point: Daryl Bem's studies on precognition were recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. That journal is most certainly not a fringe rag – it's one of the more highly regarded psychology journals.

One of Bem's experiments showed that subjects could remember things that hadn't happened yet. In a standard memory experiment, the subject sees a list of words, then is asked to type half of them. Later, when asked to recall as many words as possible from the full list, the words that were typed are remembered much more frequently. Bem started with the list as usual, but then went right to the, "remember as many of those words as you can" step. Only later was the subject asked to type half of the words on the list. Since the subjects "remembered" the words they would later type better than the words they would later not type, Bem theorized that future events can somehow influence the present.

There are certainly critics who claim the paper should never have made it through the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology's peer review. Bem's statistical analysis is the basis for most criticisms, but in any case, the results have yet to be duplicated by other researchers.

That leaves us with more than 100 years of scientific examination of ESP and not much to show for it.

Sources:

Carey, Benedict. "A Princeton Lab on ESP Plans to Close Its Doors." New York Times, Feb. 10, 2007.

Coover, John Edgar. Experiments in Psychical Research. Stanford University, 1917.

Society for Psychical Research. "Overview of Psychical Research."

The result of the meeting was that the County Council were called to hold an inquiry into the matter. Accordingly an inquiry was held by a committee appointed by the County Council, the defendant conducting the case against Miss Gould. This committee held there had been no infidel teaching, though possibly the teaching of evolution was too advanced for the children. Miss Gould was completely exonerated, but the defendant was not satisfied, and took an opportunity of referring to the matter from the pulpit, and sent letters to two Doncaster newspapers referring to "the injury done to the poor children of Fishlake."

After evidence had been given by several children from the Fishlake School, Mr George Dunstan, a county councillor, said that if he had thought that Miss Gould had taught that there was no God she would not have got his vote. He had visited the school and attended the Scripture lessons, with which he had been perfectly satisfied.

The Rev. E. Flecker, vicar of Fishlake, the defendant on his own behalf, said that the plaintiff used to attend the church choir, but tired, and afterwards attended neither church nor chapel. This, however, did not cause any unpleasantness or friction between them. Some of the villagers were distressed by the teaching in question, whilst others jested over it, saying to each other, "Where's your tail?" He thought it was his duty to take up the matter. The plaintiff had suffered no loss through the steps taken, and she still retained her position. A quiet talk with her would not have satisfied the people, and he regarded a meeting as necessary.

In answer to a question defendant, after some hesitation, admitted that he looked upon the teaching of the Darwinian theory as infidel teaching.

This all unravelled last week when someone noticed. A long time ID watcher known online as "sparc" saw that the German publishers, Springer-Verlag, announced a book edited with the title Biological Information: New Perspectives. The editors of the book were well known names: Robert Marks II, Michael Behe, William Dembski, Bruce Gordon, and John Sanford. Despite clearly being an ID book (more on that below), it was being published in the "Intelligent Systems Reference Library" series in Engineering and Applied Science, i.e., not in biology. The more cynical (sensu Sir Humphrey) suspected this was an attempt to get the book through the Springer review process by sending it to an editor less likely to understand the context of the book and its proposal. The senior editor (Marks) is a computer scientist, who apparently is well respected in his field, and it may be that his reputation helped steer the book proposal through the publisher.

After some digging around by ID watchers, the following story has emerged. The book is a collection of papers presented at a meeting held on the campus of Cornell University, in the School of Hotel Administration(!). About 120 people were invited, including roughly 27 speakers. Presumably this was arranged by John Sanford, who is a "courtesy professor" at Cornell (meaning, he was a professor, but retired in 1998, evidently to spend more time with his gene gun).

But what is the book about? This is how the book's blurb described it:

In the spring of 2011, a diverse group of scientists gathered at Cornell University to discuss their research into the nature and origin of biological information. This symposium brought together experts in information theory, computer science, numerical simulation, thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, whole organism biology, developmental biology, molecular biology, genetics, physics, biophysics, mathematics, and linguistics. This volume presents new research by those invited to speak at the conference.

The contributors to this volume use their wide-ranging expertise in the area of biological information to bring fresh insights into the explanatory difficulties that biological information raises. Going beyond the conventional scientific wisdom, which attempts to explain biological information reductionistically via chemical, genetic, and natural selective determinants, the work represented here develops novel non-reductionist approaches to biological information, looking notably to telic [sic] and self-organizational [sic] processes.

Several clear themes emerged from these research papers: 1) Information is indispensable to our understanding of what life is. 2) Biological information is more than the material structures that embody it. 3) Conventional chemical and evolutionary mechanisms seem insufficient to fully explain the labyrinth of information that is life. By exploring new perspectives on biological information, this volume seeks to expand, encourage, and enrich research on the nature and origin of biological information.

The clear themes sound pretty much like biology to me, only loosely linked to intelligent systems. It also differs somewhat from how the meeting was described by its organiser, John Sandford (starting at 30:08 here, transcribed by me):

Well, it turns out that Darwin's theory is coming down. And there was a really exciting symposium at Cornell organised by myself and some associates, and it was entitled 'Biological Information: New Perspectives'. And basically it was over 120 people gathered, about half of them PhDs, 25 speakers were PhD scientists [who] talked about the reality [of] number 1: biological information in living systems is astounding, wonderful, beautifully [?] and wonderfully made and number 2: it is coming undone. And this conference had people from every field, from physicists, bio-physicists, chemists, biochemists, mathematicians, geneticists, molecular biologists, computer scientists. All these people came together. We were agreed one one thing, and that is that Darwin was wrong.

So "Darwin was wrong" somehow is transmuted into "conventional chemical and evolutionary mechanisms seem insufficient to fully explain the labyrinth of information that is life" (this is Science Communication [tm] at its finest). An analysis of the titles of the talks at the meeting definitely identified co-authors for 10 of the chapters in the book, and provide good guesses for the identities for 10 more authors. Almost all are either YECs, young earth creationists (Sanford is a YEC), or part of the ID crowd, associated with the Discovery Institute in Seattle. The titles suggest the usual creationist nonsense, claiming that evolution can't create the complexity we see (but remaining almost uniformly silent on how this complexity arose).

As the contents of the volume are the typical ID/creationist subjects, how did this book get accepted by Springer-Verlag? Presumably the proposal to have the book published didn't mention ID (nor creationism), but what did it say? Presumably, it would have been more detailed than the book's blurb, and would probably have listed the proposed chapters and authors. I think this would have been spotted rather quickly by biologists, so sending the proposal to an engineering/computer science editor makes sense. But who were the reviewers? Marks II & co. would have provided some suggestions (presumably their friends), but did Springer ask anyone else? And did they query the book's suitability for their Intelligent Systems section?

A couple of days after the book was noticed, the announcement on Springer's webpages disappeared. The editors decided that "additional peer review would be necessary", according to their executive vice president of corporate communications, which sounds like there was a collective "oh bugger" when Springer realised their mistake, so they've bought themselves some time to sort out the mess. Of course, this may not mean that they won't publish the book anyway: they may decide that the extra sales to creationists is worth the hit to their credibility (especially if they reduce the price from the $179 it was originally listed for). This would also avoid the inevitable accusations of suppression of creationist viewpoints, recriminations that don't impress proper scientists. Perhaps Springer may try to have the best of both worlds by publishing it in their Design section, alongside titles like Functional Aesthetics, Emergency Design, and Max von Moos' Surrealistic Depiction of War [Das surrealistische Kriegsbild bei Max von Moos].

This is just the latest chapter in the normal fun-and-games saga that is the ID circus. But, bizarrely, the ID crowd hasn't come out to play this time. Since the withdrawal of the book announcement, all that we've seen has been a couple quotes in an article online, and a post on the Discovery Institute's blog, which was quickly taken down. This is surprising, as the Disco Institute is usually quick to leap up and down complaining that they're being oppressed. So why has there barely been a peep out of them? Don't they care any more? Are they too busy doing more Sooper Top Seekrit Science? Or are they being oppressed by their lawyers?

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Thanks to the netizens at The Panda's Thumb and After the Bar Closes for their research.

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Bob O'Hara is a biostatisician who conducts research at the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Germany. In his free time, he writes the blog, Deep Thoughts and Silliness at Nature Network and he tweets from his twitter account @BobOHara

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