Is Primary School Attendance Obsession Likely to Kill Children ?

Last year my five year daughter caught chicken pox. We kept her off school until the point at which she was no longer infectious, which is when all the spots had scabbed over. That took ten days. Then we received a letter form the school insisting we meet personally with the headmistress because our daughter's attendance had fallen below their target for all children. A visit to the school sorted that out, but then three weeks ago we received another standard letter - threatening us with consequences unspecified -  after we kept her away from school for three days because she vomited in the classroom and we were asked to collect her. The reason for the second letter - she had been out of school too long when those three days were added to the earlier ten! The morning of the vomiting episode she had complained of a painful tummy. We sent her into school  because of the school pressure and because she was not rolling around in apparent agony.

Here is just one example of the obsession with attendance in primary schools - this is not my daughter's school - but the thinking is the same - Example.

Done for all the right reasons, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

It seems to me that this is a recipe for disaster. Surely this obsessive policy is likely to lead overambitious, or fearful, good parents to send in a poorly child to school who may be in the first stages of flu, meningitis or heaven knows what other highly contagious illness leading to the unnecessary death of theirs and other children!  Does that have to happen before this ridiculous unthinking obsession with attendance is bought to a summary halt by government policy?

New Data Makes Richard Dawkins Look Very Silly

Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution by Rebecca Stott

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This review is from: Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists by Stott. Rebecca ( 2013 ) Paperback (Paperback)
This is a very compelling read and provides a reasonably good synthesis of the known literature regarding Darwin's precursors. I see other reviewers, on Amazon, of this book, have identified that Stott has just made some things up in 'Darwin's Ghosts'. I can't comment on that with any degree of qualification. But there is a massive concern on my part about this book being passed-off as non-fiction, because, most unfortunately, Stott, weirdly, creates a brand new myth in her book where she writes the outrageous falsehood on page 12 that Patrick Matthew "...had conceded the throne..." of natural selection to Darwin, and that his final word on the matter was published in the Gardener's Chronicle of 1860. Where on Earth did she get such an idea? I think its possibly a unique falsehood of her own making. Hopefully she will retract this utter un-evidenced claptrap!

We know authors read these reviews so here is some news for Stott and her Editor and Darwinist advisers from a self appointed champion one of Darwin's ghosts, news that she obviously missed by not looking at original sources:

In 1864 Matthew published a political pamphlet that proclaimed him as "Solver of the Problem of Species. That was an act of defiance, one that we know, from his personal correspondence on the Matthew problem, really got under Darwin's skin.

As a matter of fact, all of Matthew's actions following his Gardener's Chronicle revelation of 1860 hardly constitute those of a man conceding the throne to Darwin.

Having been earlier snubbed by the Dublin University Magazine in February 1860, Matthew wrote back to the editor demanding an apology (see pages 717 to 718 of that publication). He demanded that apology in light of the fact that Darwin had, in the Gardener's Chronicle, accepted that Matthew had fully enunciated the theory of natural selection. What followed was typical Darwinist rank closing: David Anstead (FRS) , Lecturer for the East India Company, fellow graduate of Cambridge, personal correspondent of Darwin, fellow member of the Royal Society, former Vice Secretary of the Geological Society - taking up office on Charles Lyell's departure - authored a paper on the subject of Palaeontology where he fully supported Darwin's Origin and in a lengthy footnote replied on behalf of the magazine to blatantly refuse to accept that Matthew had written anything at all that was original.

By way of another example of Matthew's futile fight for recognition against the Darwinists, in a footnote to his letter to the Farmers Magazine, he wrote (Matthew 1862):

`The writer has not been has not been much used to speak of what he has done. For more than thirty years after the publication of "Naval Timber and Arboriculture" he never, either by the press or in private conversation, alluded to the original ideas therein brought forward, knowing that the age was not suited for such. And even now, notwithstanding the great teaching influence of our cheap daily press, such is the power of sham, bigotry and prejudice over the editors of these, directly by perverting their own minds, or indirectly by perverting their candour, honesty and truth in accommodation to the reader's prejudices, together with the subservience of the Editors to power and place that he is not sure the age is yet ripe. He was so far of this opinion, that he did not speak of these original ideas till driven to do so in protecting them as his.'

And we can see even further through the Darwinian myth-smog by way of another example. This one is a recollection by

Darwin's son Francis (Darwin 1887. p.302):

`Mr. Matthew remained unsatisfied, and complained that an article in the 'Saturday Analyst and Leader' was "scarcely fair in alluding to Mr. Darwin as the parent of the origin of species, seeing that I published the whole that Mr. Darwin attempts to prove, more than twenty-nine years ago."--Saturday Analyst and Leader, Nov. 24, 1860.'

Interestingly, years earlier, Darwin's wife Emma (Darwin 1863) used the same parent metaphor in a letter she wrote on Darwin's behalf to reply to a letter from Matthew that is - once again - unfortunately lost, which renders what follows rather cryptic:

`With regard to Natural Selection he [Darwin] says that he is not staggered by your striking remarks. He is more faithful to your own original child than you are yourself.'

Despite Darwin's defensive platitudes, Matthew had sufficient self-regard to continue asserting the truth for the publication record. In 1865, then 75 years old, he wrote to the German scientist Ernst Hallier to let it be known that natural selection was his discovery and concept and not Darwin's (Hallier 1866 p.382):

`Matthew himself wrote me about it in a letter of 6 October 1865, in which he first brought to my attention his book on naval timber and arboriculture, published on January 1st 1831, by Longman et Co London and Adam and Charles Black Edinburgh . He wrote: "I fully brought out the theory of competitive natural selection. This was about 30 years before Darwin brought out the same. In his preface to the edition of his work on the origin of species, Darwin states that I anticipated him by many years, and apologizes for his unintentional blunder. The fact is my work did appear before its time, when bigotry and prejudice were in the ascendant."'

The publication record therefore proves that, despite the most embarrassing lack of genuine expert knowledge among all the leading Darwinian authors on this subject - Stott being their mere toady - Patrick Matthew never ever gave up on letting the general public and other scientists know that natural selection was his original discovery!

in 1874 Patrick Matthew went to an unmarked grave, somewhere in Errol churchyard in Scotland, having fought all his life, without success, for the recognition he deserved for discovering natural selection many years before Darwin and Wallace. For example, at the 1867 British Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Dundee, Scotland, which was attended by Darwin's friends Charles Lyell, Robert Chambers and Alfred Wallace - Matthew (1867), then aged 77 years, was platform blocked! He complained in the press that he was strategically prevented from speaking about his discovery. No one listened then, because Darwin and his adoring Darwinists had so cleverly, yet fallaciously, portrayed Matthew as a deluded crank.

So much for Stott's research. The literature she failed to read and synthesise on Matthew reveals many other examples of how the Originator of natural selection complained in the press and to other naturalists that Darwin was getting all the credit for his idea.

Had Stott researched and addressed the rank mythology that Darwinists have spun to fill the knowledge gaps regarding what naturalists really did with the great breakthrough that Matthew published (not just in the appendix), pre-1868 she would have produced a text worthy of the classification 'non-fiction' - as it is one has to wonder why on Earth she created the Happy Handover Myth?

Matthew, who was in 1860 bankrupt and impoverished when he wrote to the Gardeners' Chronicle to lay claim to his prior-discovery of the 'natural process of selection'. Incidentally Darwin uniquely four-word shuffled Matthew's unique name for his discovery into 'process of natural selection' (Darwin does that 9 times in the Origin 1859!). This and numerous other instances of clear plagiarism have now been discovered. Had Stott done any original research she might have discovered this for herself.

Today Matthew's ghost has returned from his unmarked grave to prove that he did influence both Darwin and Wallace.

Just Google: "Internet Dating with Darwin" to discover newly discovered facts - which always trump old rhetoric, no matter how eloquently written - The newly discovered facts prove why it is always best to search in original sources rather than replicate dreadfully biased Darwinist secondary sources. And as for just making stuff up. Surely no no-fiction writer expects to get away with that. Do they? Did Stott and Bloomsbury get their genres crossed?

By the way, I wrote to Stott's editor at Bloomsbury to inform them of the above facts, so that they might know that they are publishing complete fallacies. Unsurprisingly, they never even bothered to respond. Perhaps they intend to specialise in pseudo-scholarship?


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Alfred Russel Wallace's Great Science Fraud

A Bombshell Lands in the History of Scientific Discovery

Yesterday I made my first foray into the history of science by announcing the discovery of the World's greatest science fraud. You can read my blog and the comments it received over on the Best Thinking Website: Here

Wikipedia is underpinned by pernicious self-serving policy of institutional stealth plagirism

Wikipedia is trying to improve its notorious reputation for unreliably by deliberately plagiarizing my work, and that of other myth busters, under the officially published Wikipedia 'master editor' policy that "experts are scum". Read the shocking story here.

Internet Dating for Academics Produces Some Very Disturbing Mismatches

Twenty First Century Knowledge Flux: The Impact of Internet Dating as a Research Technique to Determine the Veracity of the Knowledge Claims Regarding the Provenance of Words, Phrases and Concepts

Over the past few days I used freely available internet search engine technology to bust two myths that are credulously disseminated in numerous scholarly articles and books. Both myths were universally believed to be veracious academic ‘knowledge’. In effect, I used the internet simply to check whether the respective phrases “moral panic” and “self fulfilling prophecy” really were coined by the esteemed sociologists who are credited with coining them. They were not. You can read the two short essays that prove this beyond doubt (see Sutton 2013a and 2013b).

As a result of this research and its published results are on the Best Thinking web site, the phrase ‘internet dating’ now has two meanings, as does its equivalent ‘online dating’ (1) to use the internet to connect romantically with others - either solely online or else with an aim to meet potential partners face-to-face or else (2) to use the internet to check the veracity of claims made regarding the published provenance of words, phrases and concepts by researching whether others have in fact published earlier. As can be seen by these two inherent meanings of ‘internet dating’, the phrase is the concept. In this particular case the concept is either social dating or else dating the age of published words and phrases.

If the phrase is the concept, at least the most basic concept, as it is in the case of ‘moral panic’ and ‘self fulfilling prophecy’ then new discoveries that phrases such as these have an earlier provenance than purported by existing knowledge claims (see Sutton 2013a; 2013b) will undoubtedly open up new avenues of research into the work of previously neglected authors, events and themes. In the case of moral panics, for example, the use of this phrase in 1831 to describe potential problem escalation in the garrisoning of towns and cities during cholera epidemics reveals a whole new area for scholars to examine. Given the predicted certainly for a future flu pandemic this may be an extremely important discovery that will enable us to learn from the past – or at least to reflect upon what we have learned from it form a different perspective.

As more historical documents are scanned and uploaded, the latest knowledge regarding the provenance of words, phrases, concepts and the variety of concepts associated with particular words and phrases will be extremely unstable and short-lived.

Interestingly, internet dating as a veracity checking research method reveals that the phrase “internet dating” was first coined at least as long ago as 1994 on page 51 of Mindi Rudan’s book “Men the Handbook”, where it was used to explain the concept of using networked computers to arrange to meet potential love partners. Similarly, the internet dating method reveals that the term ‘online dating’ may have been first published in 1995 by David Fox in the title of his book Love Bytes: The Online Dating Handbook. However, this finding is limited to books and documents that have been uploaded onto the Internet and it may yet prove to be the case that these terms were in fact coined and/or published earlier and perhaps by different people. Only time will tell.

References

Fox, D. (1995) Love Bytes: The Online Dating Handbook. Waite Group.

Rudan, M. (1994) Men: the handbook Cool Hand Communications.

Sutton, M. (2013a) The British Moral Panic Creation Myth is Bust. Best Thinking.com:http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/social_sciences/sociology/the-british-moral-panic-creation-myth-is-bust

Sutton, M (2013) The Merton Myth is Bust. Best Thinking.com: http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/social_sciences/sociology/the-merton-myth-is-bust

On Supermyths

What do we know about the impact of modern myths on society by way of their misinforming and therefore misdirecting central and local policy making, professional practice, teaching, learning and the media?

The above question is of core importance in a topical area that is likely to grow in popularity, not least because international recognition of the importance of veracity in a wide variety of areas is reflected in a growth industry of recent publications that both inform and reflect the increasing number of experts and the international growth of interest groups promoting anti-quackery and skeptical inquiry in the natural and social sciences.

What is a supermyth?

The modern myth is defined simply as a widely believed falsehood, which sets it apart from the older notion of myths as stories that are understood at some level to represent deep and enduring truths about social, spiritual or other psychological conditions of mankind. I hypothesize that the supermyth is a most powerfully influential sub-type of the modern notion of myth.

The starting point of a supermyth is when an orthodox expert in its subject area publishes a statement of purported fact that is based upon an error in reasoning (fallacy) or else upon a factual error. That published claim then takes on a life of its own as it is credulously reinforced as veracious by numerous orthodox respected sceptics who each cite it unquestioningly in their own scholarly publications, in news paper articles, on television and websites.

According to my thesis, what sets my idea of supermyths apart from other fallacies and myths serves as a unique and timely warning for those promoting the virtues of skeptical inquiry, because the great irony is that, unlike ordinary myths, what I have named supermyths are created by respected orthodox scholars and then credulously disseminated by other experts distinctively in the spirit of promoting skeptical enquiry.

As if the existence of supermyths is not enough to be sceptically concerned about, I have refined the concept further by way of the identification of what I call braced myths. Braced myths are supermyths that have been reinforced by other scholars in that they have not just been disseminated by but also been utilised by credulous experts who have erroneously deployed them as ‘argument winners’ to bust other myths. By using a myth to bust a myth, I argue, these experts have braced the supermyth by dint of such powerful association with expert myth busting verity. Put simply, a braced myth is influential counterknowledge (misinformation packaged to look like fact) that is created by an expert authority and then believed by credulous yet highly influential skeptics, who not only fail to adequately check its accuracy by way of primary data sources and/or fail also to question the rationality of its premises. They then promote it as veracious ‘knowledge’ and, with unintended irony, ignorantly deploy it as an intellectual myth busting weapon targeted at specific knowledge claims made by others.

The Spinach Myth is not only the first supermyth discovered it is also the first braced myth. This widely believed myth goes as follows: A published 19^th century decimal point error in the iron levels of spinach led bio-chemists to reprint the error without checking the iron levels of spinach for themselves leading to generations of children being forced to eat unpalatable spinach, above other tastier leafy vegetables, for no good reason and this ten-fold error is the reason that Popeye ate spinach for strength.

The Spinach Myth was finally busted after I was kindly assisted by clues provided by a friendly US skeptic who emailed me after reading my initial publication of a primary research paper that first bust the Popeye part of the myth. Further research led me to discover that it was firstcreated by Professor Arnold Bender (an orthodox nutrition expert) at his inaugural lecture at Queen Elizabeth College, London in 1972 and then spread  by many other respected academics, who, believing it to be true but not checking the facts, used it unwittingly in what ironically turns out to be a number of deeply embarrassing, hypocritical and self-defeating exhortations of the general need to be healthily skeptical by always checking the primary sources of claims made by others.The myth was then braced when a number of other credulous 'skeptics' portrayed it as an exemplar of veracious knowledge to criticize various specific research findings.

I have written several articles on the Spinach Myth: the first one as a primary research paper on the importance of adequate citation and the second, which completely busted the myth here on the Best Thinking site.

Other Supermyths

The second braced myth that I have discovered is the only other known example of the braced myth sub-type identified to date. I named the Zombie Cop Myth, and this one is a widely believed myth about beat policing. You can read about it here on the best thinking site.

Unlike the Spinach Myth, which is solely based upon an error of fact, the Zombie Cop Myth is based upon a combination of unrealistic assumptions about the nature of foot patrol beat policing that informed an exercise in arithmetic ‘on the back of an envelope’ - to demonstrate the lack of efficiency of beat policing - and an error of fact concerning the widely held belief that the origin of the findings of such lack of efficiency lay in an empirical study of real police officers on the beat. My jointly authored paper on this myth explains in detail the origin of the myth, where and how often it has been perpetuated, how it has been used, and most curiously how it has begun to mutate.

The third supermyth that I have identified is the myth that the widely accepted Routine Activities Theory and Situational Crime Prevention Theory notion of opportunity can be a cause of crime. Myth busting Crime Opportunity theory with logic reveals precisely how the widely accepted criminological notion of crime opportunity is based upon a simple error of reasoning. In a number of papers on the subject I have discussed the harmful implications for society of basing such theories upon irrational premises, or within irrational frameworks for theory building. I would recommend my paper Opportunity Does Not Make the Thief as a useful place to begin reading abut the Crime Opportunity Myth.

Conclusion

Here on Best Thinking, I have revealed several cases, which I have so far discovered, where highly respected experts - whose work is in turn supported by respected scholars in the same field - all failed to check the evidence and have been found to have accidentally created what appear to be influential supermyths. More research is required to seek likely causes and to understand the nature, known progress and impact of such myths.

It is my hypothesis that supermyths are particularly deeply socially and academically embedded and harder therefore to limit than other modern myths. Furthermore, supermyths remind all who promote themselves as experts in their field to pay more attention to fact checking primary sources, providing adequate citation to statements of fact and to consider more thoroughly the premises upon which accepted theories and approaches are built.

I began this brief article with a question and so it seems fitting to end it with another. The particularly telling question I would like to ask here is designed in part to serve as an embedded warning of the dangers of failing to check primary sources and of taking for granted the premises of theories. It is this: Might braced myths, such as the Spinach Myth and the Zombie Cop Myth, rank among the most exquisitely ironic discoveries of the unintended consequences of mankind’s purposive action?

Cambridge Empirical Study Adds Support to My Theoretical Criticism of Crime Opportunity Theory

A new book released by Oxford University Press - Breaking Rules: The Social and Situational Dynamics of Young People's Urban Crime   , by Per-Olof H. Wikström, Dietrich Oberwittler, Kyle Treiber, and Beth Hardie - reports on the findings of a study that followed the lives of 700 English teenagers for five years.

The study, which is hailed as providing findings that will be of major importance for crime reduction policy and policing, reveals that a mere 4 percent of teenagers were responsible for half of all youth crime in the cohort group studied.

Head of the study, Cambridge Professor Per-Olof Wikstrom, is quoted in today’s Independent on Sunday newspaper    (p.6):

“The idea that opportunity makes the thief – that young people will inevitably commit crime in certain environments runs counter to our findings.”

Here, then, is important and solid empirical evidence that supports the theoretical arguments - published as a peer-to-peer article on the excellent Best Thinking website in “Opportunity Does Not Make the Thief”. In that article I present a logical case for why Crime Opportunity Theory is irrational and so cannot be a cause of crime. Moreover, I produced an earlier and identical argument, to that made by the authors of the Cambridge 700 Study, that current USA and UK policing practice and crime reduction policy, based on Crime Opportunity Theory, results in ineffective crime reduction methods.

While Crime Opportunity Theorists are notorious for paying scant regard to dis-confirming evidence, hopefully, police and policy makers will now begin take notice.

Higher Superstition Posing as Science

Natural scientists Paul Gross and Norman Levitt (1994) are authors of a biting critique of the claptrap that many postmodernist social scientists have published on science. Yet, like so many writers on the so called academic Right they have paid scant regard to the claptrap published from those claiming to be among their own ranks. Here I refer to the self-proclaimed crime scientists, who claim to be natural scientists, and yet seem to understand nothing of the lessons that science teaches of:

1.       The need to seek disconfirming evidence for your own hypothesis,

2.       the meaning of causality,

3.       the need to keep scientific explanations separate from the data you are seeking to explain and

4.       the need for explanations that are both refutable and difficult to vary.

Crime Science, Crime Opportunity Theory, Routine Activity Theory (RAT) and Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) each breach the 4 points above because all of them are founded upon the RAT ‘Crime Opportunity’ (ratortunity) premise that the three essential components of a successful crime in commission (which can only be known to exist after the crime has been successfully completed (Sutton 2012) combine to create an essential causal opportunity for the commission of any crime.


For those unfamiliar with Crime Opportunity Theory (ratortunity): the three components of a so called crime opportunity are: (a) a capable offender in the presence of (b) a suitable target and (c) an incapable/absent guardian, which are said to jointly comprise the most important cause of crime. The logic of such a claim that these three elements represent an ‘opportunity’ can only rest on the irrational premise that every successfully completed crime and every failed attempt somehow caused itself to happen (see Sutton 2012    for an exhaustive explanation of the complete irrationality of this claim).

As a useful critical exercise let us consider a powerful and valid criticism of postmodernist criticism of science from Gross and Levitt (1994: p.104) - with the word postmodernism adjoined by [ratortunity]. Readers familiar with the prolific work of the ratortunists and ratortunity's significant, yet weird, impact upon credulously supportive and unquestioning academic publications, policing and policymaking may find this exercise particularly intriguing:

‘…such solecisms as we find in these writings are confidently put forth as scholarly discoveries, with every assurance that something profound is being uttered, one must wonder about the system – and the ideology – that nurtures and rewards them. Whence we must ask, does such grossly misplaced intellectual self-confidence come? The smug hermetic, self referential atmosphere of politicized academic postmodernism [and ratortunity] obviously has a great deal to do with it. In this milieu, there is not much thought given to simple scientific accuracy. The caution and scrupulousness that working scientists are conditioned to expect are swept aside, because in the final analysis, postmodernism [and ratortunity] is in great measure prophetic and hortatory, rather than analytic; it announces and cheers on a sweeping “paradigm shift” within our civilization, a change that is supposed to liberate us all.’

Readers may wish to draw their own conclusions. Those who are credulously teaching ratortunity principles to students, publishing them in student text books and the wider peer reviewed academic press, government policymakers and police services might wish to question the implications of what they are doing for both knowledge progression and the moral obligation to at least seek to spend scarce public resources on crime reduction measures that are most likely to be most effective at reducing crime rather than nurturing and rewarding pseudoscientific claptrap and those who propagate it.

References

Gross, P.R. and Levitt, N (1994) Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. The John Hopkins University Press. Baltimore.

Sutton, M (2012) On Opportunity and Crime. Dysology.org: http://dysology.org/page8.html   

Ratortunity Theory Is Based on the Notion that Wizards Cause Crime

If the title of this blog post appears odd it won't if (1) you know that Crime Opportunity Theory is based on the infinitely variable and impossible to refute Routine Activities Theory notion of crime opportunity and (2) After you've watched this excellent video on what makes a good explanation in science - and what makes a bad one - by the remarkable Professor David Deutsch:

THIS VIDEO SHOULD BE COMPULSORY VIEWING FOR ALL UK CRIME SCIENTISTS

The Eleventh Principle

Crime Opportunity Theory is wrong: Because it's (a) not about opportunities at all - only truisms (b) it's not a theory (c)   it does not explain causality (d) its just a description of the elements of a successful crime being committed - something that cannot exist in advance of itself happening, which means it cannot be an opportunity (e) that means its an irrefuatable truism, which means its pseudoscience.


The figure below  does not, as its originators claim, represent an opportunity. It's a Ratortunity because the event is over by this stage if the offender  is KNOWN to be more capable than the guardianship. As every dictionary definition will tell you, an opportunity exists before the event - not after it. And yet Crime Opportunity Theory tells us that ratortunity is not only a cause of crime, but the most important cause.

Spoof on Crime Science faith in ratortunity as a cause of crime reveals that many a true word is written in jest: visit the Crime Science blog: click here to check out the all important eleventh principle.

Pragmatism or Quackery?

• 
  

  Dysology

  TOWARDS A SCIENCE OF VERACITY THROUGH REVEALING MYTHS AND FALLACIES AND UNDERSTANDING REASONS FOR BAD SCHOLARSHIP, WEIRD BELIEFS AND STRANGELY UNEXPLORED AREAS OF RESEARCH

Opening topic:

Pragmatic quackery or a rational way to proceeed?

When practitioners in any field – be it economics, ‘self-improvement’, medicine, nutrition, policing or crime reduction say that they are less concerned with problems with the theory that underpins their practise than with the pragmatic need to tackle a particular problem in way that they ‘know’ is effective should our sceptical alarm bells start ringing?

Why Not Join the Dysology dscussion group at Linked[in} today: http://www.linkedin.com/groupsDirectory?results=&sik=1335182640833

 

There is a very useful debate among police, professors and students regarding my argument that ratortunity (the Routine Activities Theory) notion based upon the RAT crime triangle is a harmful  criminology and crime science myth because it cannot possibly be a cause of crime and is diverting our endeavors away from understanding crime causality in favour of over complicating truisms in order to dress them up as causal explanations. 


If you are not already a member of Linked[in] you will need to sign up to see it. The debate is among those in the American Society of Criminology group in Linked[in]. If you are a member and signed in to Linked[in] then the link to the debate is here.

Official Quackery

The Vitamin C and Iron Myth: Death by Quackery?

Research across the board shows that the evidence is at best inconclusive regarding whether or not vitamin C can help us to better absorb iron from non heme iron sources such as spinach and other plants (see Sutton 2011).

Official advice that vitamin C is known to enhance the iron absorption from plant and other non heme sources is wrong. This advice is wrong because the overall evidence, from the results of many properly conducted trials is that we have a mixed bag of disconfirming and confirming research findings. In sum, evidence of the iron absorbing benefits of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) in our diet is at best inconclusive.

Unfortunately, the websites promoting vitamin c in this way ignore all the disconfirming evidence.

In light of the facts revealed in a paper published by Best Thinking (Sutton 2011), I am grateful to the USDA for deleting their misleading spreadsheet from the Internet, which claimed that drinking Florida grapefruit juice would help humans to absorb two to four times as much iron from spinach as would otherwise be possible.

Unfortunately the US Government Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS) continues to claim that vitamin C will increase the iron absorption form non heme iron sources, such as spinach, as (ironically) does the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) and prevention: http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/basics/vitamins/iron.html. Unsurprisingly Wikipedia makes the same erroneous claims.

Many other websites - including one run by MIT (http://web.mit.edu/athletics/sportsmedicine/wcrminerals.html) also continue to boldly claim that vitamin C helps with iron absorption.

Since low iron levels - linked to poor diet - kill people in large numbers (see http://www.bestthinking.com/thinkers/science/social_sciences/sociology/mike-sutton?tab=blog&blogpostid=9942,9942 ) there should be more care taken to get the facts right.
Here are just few of the very many web sites that still promote the fallacy (or at least to promote vitamin C in this role when the evidence is inconclusive) some are giving advice on cancer - other are for children's diets.. Just Google ‘iron vitamin c’ and the list seems endless:

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  http://www.parentingscience.com/iron-absorption.html
  http://www.ehow.com/list_7165582_foods-block-iron.html
  http://coloncancer.about.com/od/nutritionanddiet/a/irondefanemia.htm

If poor nutrition directly kills, and in other cases takes years from life spans, it seems reasonable to speculate that erroneous nutrition advice, if relied upon, might do likewise.

We can only hope that not a single one of the tens of millions of lost years of life globally - and the many hundreds sometimes thousands of deaths that happen as a direct result of iron deficiency each year in the USA - are due to that earlier bad science promoted by the USDA. And we can only hope that the hundreds of thousands of deaths occurring each year on Earth (Stoltzfus 2003) from iron deficiency are not due to current US Government and private sector bad science promotion of vitamin C as a miracle way for humans to better absorb iron non heme iron sources, such as spinach. Because,surely, that should be 'criminal' quackery.

References

Stoltzfus RJ . (2003) Iron deficiency: global prevalence and consequences. Food Nutr Bull. 2003 Dec;24(4 Suppl):S99-103

Sutton, M. (2011) SPIN@GE USA Beware of the Bull: The United States Department of Agriculture is Spreading Bull about Spinach, Iron and Vitamin C on the Internet: http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/chemistry/biochemistry/spin-ge-usa-beware-of-the-bull-the-united-states-department-of-agriculture-is-spreading-bull-about-spinach-iron-and-vitamin-c-on-the-internet

Pareidolia

We humans are pattern recognising creatures. Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon where the watcher or listener perceives an image or sound to be significant.



In this video that I took while on holiday in Jamaica this year, it looks like a demon appears in the window glass. In reality it is no more than a weird looking random stain left by condensation. The 'demon' first seems to appear because the light refracting through the glass renders it invisible until I walk around to capture it at the right angle with my handy HD camera.

The Skeptick's Dictionary has more information on pareidolia

For more Dysology you might like to visit my website: Dysology.org

Dysology the Blog Site of Dysology.org

What is Dysology?

Dysology is the study of orthodox bias, academic blind spots, irrationality, pseudo scholarship and fraud influencing bad social science research, bad science, bad policymaking, quackery, counterknowledge, 'voodoo histrories', 'voodoo criminology' 'flat earth news' and other ignorance.

Visit dysology.org to learn more.

On the dysology web site I am exploring the usefulness of developing a multidisciplinary approach to the discovery and understanding of bad research and strange lack of research in some key areas of scholarship and policymaking.