Tuesday 16 October 2007

The myth of stressed and depressed schoolkids

If we’re not careful, claims that young people can’t cope with the ‘intense pressure’ of exams could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A report titled Community Soundings, published by Cambridge University’s Primary Review Group last week and hailed as ‘the first major investigation into British primary schooling since the Plowden report [of 1967]’, claims there is a ‘deep anxiety’ today about children and childhood. Unfortunately, the report remains at the level of feelings - it doesn’t tell us anything concrete about the state of modern childhood.

The report’s findings, published on Friday 12 October, generated alarming headlines in the UK media. ‘Pressure of tests “means primary school pupils lose their childhood”’, reported The Times. ‘Study reveals stressed-out 7-11 year-olds’, said the Guardian. ‘UK youngsters “stressed and depressed”’, said ITN News. The London Evening Standard painted a particularly scary picture: ‘Family breakdown, exam pressure, celebrity culture and crime… all are robbing children of their innocence, according to a major report released today.’

In truth, the study did not show that children are ‘stressed out’ or ‘depressed’. It did not investigate family breakdown, the prevalence of crime, or any other objective measure of the quality of modern childhood for that matter. All that Community Soundings investigated were the views of 757 subjects in 87 ‘witness sessions’ - commonly known as focus groups - in different parts of England. The participants included community representatives, employers, religious leaders, parents, governors, headteachers, teachers, teaching assistants and children.

Robin Alexander, who oversaw the research of Community Soundings, said: ‘What struck us was that the overall message everywhere was the same. People are very worried about childhood.’ The report stated: ‘We were frequently told children are under intense and perhaps excessive pressure from the policy-driven demands of their schools and the commercially-driven values of the wider society; that family life and community are breaking down; that there is a pervasive loss of respect and empathy both within and between generations; that life outside the school gates is increasingly insecure and dangerous.’

It continued: ‘Parents felt that they had to keep their children under close supervision in order to secure their safety, yet were unhappy that this was necessary… They were nostalgic for the childhood freedoms they themselves had enjoyed.’

Given that Community Soundings was based on witness sessions - that is, on the views and feelings of fairly small focus groups - might the respondents have been influenced by something other than hard facts and evidence about childhood? It’s worth noting that the witness sessions took place early in 2007, following months of daily warnings about how modern life is damaging kids. Indeed, in the middle of the data-gathering process - February 2007 - UNICEF published its scary-sounding report on child wellbeing. As has been repeated ad nauseam across the national press, the UK ranked bottom out of 21 industrialised countries in the UNICEF league table for the wellbeing of children.

Bombarded by a daily diet of headlines about British children being too fat, too inactive, and under threat from criminals, bullies and strangers, and claims that Britain is lagging behind the rest of the developed world in the wellbeing stakes, it is not surprising that a survey of opinion found people expressing concern about kids being stressed and depressed.

It should be noted that, contrary to all the claims made in the media earlier this year, the UNICEF report did not conclusively reveal that the UK is the worst country in the Western world to grow up in. In fact, it didn’t contain many conclusive insights at all. It did bring together lots of interesting material that compared and contrasted children’s different experiences in different countries, but the data can be interpreted in various different ways. When it came to more objective measures of the state of childhood - such as health and safety in relation to children - Britain ranked higher than most other Western countries. Britain comes second only to Sweden as the country with the lowest rate of deaths from accidents and injuries amongst young people under 19 years of age.

Yet good news stories about children’s lives - such as UNICEF’s findings on health and safety - are often subsumed by a titillating focus on the alleged dangers facing our kids. Some aspects of the new Community Soundings report could be interpreted positively. For example, it’s reassuring and encouraging that ‘children were by far the most optimistic of our witnesses’, suggesting that young people have a more positive view of their lives than the adults who panic and fret about them. Alas, this sentence was buried in the report - neither the Cambridge Primary Review Group’s overview of the report, nor the press release that accompanied it, drew attention to the finding about young people’s optimism.

Instead, the overview stressed that the outlook of the participants ‘as a whole’ was ‘pervaded by a sense of deep pessimism about the future’, and said that ‘children themselves were not immune’ to such an outlook. Sadly, it is true that children are not immune to society’s rising sense of doom and gloom; for example, a study earlier this year found that many school-age British children have sleepless nights or nightmares about climate catastrophe. Likewise, many of the children’s responses to Community Soundings come across as simplistic regurgitations of contemporary politics and fads. ‘America consumes, Africa wants’, was one child’s view of the world.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that children unquestioningly internalise the miserabilist culture of contemporary society. Media reports said Community Soundings found that children are ‘stressed out’ about exams. In truth, ‘the children were a lot more ambivalent about SATs than any other constituency’, the report says. Some of the young respondents did describe SATs as ‘scary’, and said that sitting exams ‘puts them under pressure’. But they could also see the positive side of testing: ‘Tests tell teachers, and us, how we are doing.’ Nothing in the children’s responses suggested they were seriously ‘stressed out’ about exams. Instead it was the teachers who were surveyed for the report who described SATs as ‘highly stressful’ and claimed that they ‘put children and teachers under intolerable pressure’.

Teachers have made many legitimate criticisms of the National Curriculum since it was first introduced under the Conservative government in the late 1980s. Its net effect has been to undermine teacher autonomy and quash creativity in teaching. So in the witness sessions for Community Soundings, teachers complained that the curriculum was ‘over-structured and rigid’ and ‘subverted the goal of learning for its own sake’. Headteachers complained that ‘bureaucratic pressure’ was supplanting the ‘proper task of educating children and providing educational leadership’. Yet teachers’ arguments about exams being stressful are entirely unconvincing. I myself have been a primary school teacher, and will readily admit that it can be a challenging job. But I cannot see how teachers can claim to be under pressure more than other public workers - plus they have the bonus of nice long holidays.

Teachers are using the ‘children are stressed’ line to avoid having the hard argument about the content of the National Curriculum and the focus of their working lives. They should oppose government meddling in the nitty-gritty of what they teach, and stand up for their professional autonomy, rather than hiding behind the children, and effectively saying: ‘Things need to change otherwise the poor little mites will become depressed…’ 

One of the more worrying aspects of Community Soundings is what it reveals about teachers’ and teaching assistants’ views of parents. Apparently, many teaching assistants judged most people’s parenting skills to be ‘inadequate’, and recommended encouraging mums and dads to take ‘remedial parenting classes’. Teachers similarly raised concerns about ‘low parental aspirations’, ‘unsettled home backgrounds’, ‘parents passing the socialisation buck to schools’, and ‘parents’ unwillingness or inability to provide educative experiences for their children’.

Community representatives - including local authority officers, statutory agencies, voluntary agencies, police and magistrates, and local projects of various kinds - ‘were also ready to pinpoint poor parenting as a major problem’, says Community Soundings. ‘The familial inadequacies’ that the community witnesses deplored are apparently ‘a reflection of prevailing values and trends in society as a whole: selfishness, materialism, disregard for the needs and rights of others’.

For me, the main lesson of Community Soundings, which is the first in a series of 32 reports that will be published by Cambridge University’s Primary Review, is the urgent need to counter today’s doom-mongering about children’s lives and the state of the family and society.

At the end of Community Soundings, the researchers list questions ‘arising from this strand of the Primary Review’ which they propose to take forward to the next stage of the research. The questions include: ‘If, as witnesses tell us, there has been a loss in recent years of social cohesion, community and concern for others, and a growth in selfishness and materialism, how might primary schools both help children to cope with the adverse consequences of these changes and play their part in redressing the balance…? Does the Every Child Matters agenda represent the best available way of securing children’s wellbeing, identifying children at risk and protecting them from harm…? How might schools strike the best balance between protecting children from the dangers which some of them may confront outside school and overprotecting them…?’, and so on.

I have different questions: At a time when government, the media and advocacy groups are constantly panicking about children and their wellbeing, is it any wonder that fear for our kids is widespread in society? Couldn’t it be a self-fulfilling prophecy if some children (though by no means all of them) claim to be nervous and stressed? And wouldn’t we be better off if teachers were allowed to get on with teaching, instead of having to behave as social workers too, and if parents were trusted to bring up their kids as they see fit?

Adults should stop projecting their own fear and uncertainty on to children, labelling young people with the ‘stressed’ and ‘depressed’ tag, and instead allow children to grow and flourish with a balance of sensible adult guidance and some youthful independence.

First published by spiked

Friday 24 August 2007

A childish panic about the next generation

Many of those fretting over the state of contemporary childhood, concerned that kids are passive, cooped up and sedentary, are motivated by naked nostalgia - sometimes even by snobbery.

Children are cooped up inside, passive and apathetic and unable to create their own fun and entertainment. Their imagination is dulled by too many hours of watching television and playing sedentary computer games. They are corrupted by commerce and advertising, tormented by bullies, and traumatised by testing. Or so we are told - over and over again.

A plethora of recent books has set out to show that the modern world is damaging our children. The authors are allowing their rather romanticised view of, and nostalgia for, their own childhoods to influence their inquiry into how children’s lives have changed in recent times. It also seems that some of their concerns are shaped by a distinct unease about modern living and a disdain for affluence - even, in some cases, by a snobbish haughtiness towards ignorant ‘materialistic’ parents.

Sue Palmer’s Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children and What We Can Do About It argues that it is not only junk food that is allegedly poisoning our children; so is ‘junk culture’. ‘A toxic cocktail of the side-effects of cultural change is now damaging the social, emotional and cognitive development of a growing number of children, with knock-on effects on their behaviour’, she claims.

In The Power of Play: How Imaginative, Spontaneous Activities Lead to Healthier and Happier Children, David Elkind writes: ‘Children’s play – their inborn disposition for curiosity, imagination and fantasy – is being silenced in the high-tech, commercialised world we have created’. The power of play is being destroyed by ‘inexpensive toys available in enormous quantities and seemingly unlimited variety’, ‘sedentary screen play’, and ‘increasingly test-driven curricula’, Elkind argues.

In The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, Madeline Levine tells us that the US is facing an epidemic of depression, anxiety and substance abuse among children and young people. And this is happening not only among the disadvantaged, but in affluent families, too.

Not only are levels of mental illness and drug-abuse rocketing - apparently kids are also suffering from something called ‘nature-deficit disorder’. In Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv argues that children are ‘suffering a deficit in primary experiences – that which we can see, feel, taste, hear and smell for ourselves’. He writes: ‘Modern life narrows our senses until our focus is mostly visual, appropriate to about the dimension of a computer monitor or TV screen’.

Journalist Libby Brooks provides a fitting description of society’s gloomy view of children’s lives in The Story of Childhood: Growing Up In Modern Britain. ‘Over the past three decades, worries about children’s wellbeing have been amplified to an excruciating pitch’, she writes. ‘Childhood has become the crucible into which is ground each and every adult anxiety – about sex, consumerism, technology, safety, achievement, respect, the proper shape of life. This is a time of child-panic.’

Unfortunately, Brooks herself then contributes to this panic by exaggerating the dangers of bullying. ‘Despite anxieties about stranger danger and unsafe streets’, she writes, ‘it’s children’s peers from whom they require most protection, in the relentlessly familiar environment of the playground. We ask of children what few adults would tolerate: to endure hours of enforced proximity to their tormentors.’

In the round, it seems it is pretty awful to be a child today. But how seriously should we take this panicked literature about the state of childhood?

Nasty little brutes

Many of the problems thrown into the pot when discussing the state of contemporary childhood are not issues we should be obsessing about. Take bullying. There are, of course, tragically sad cases of children being tormented by bullies and some have even ended up taking their own lives. Yet debilitating bullying is thankfully very rare. Where it occurs, it should be dealt with by adults in a sensitive, but firm, manner.

Today, however, we are led to believe that we face an epidemic of bullying. And behind many of the anti-bullying campaigns lies an unhealthy disdain for children: these campaigns tend to present a substantial proportion of children as nasty little brutes who are out to destroy other kids’ lives.

Children can of course be excessively selfish. They are often thoughtless and unsophisticated. But they can also be utterly charming in their naivety. That is because they are learning how to become social beings – beings with a sense of belonging, who trust in, learn from and share with other people. It is precisely for this reason that they need to be given the opportunity to create and resolve their own conflicts. Unless children are given the opportunity to engage with each other without adults constantly hovering over them, they won’t really learn the consequences of being nasty and thoughtless. And neither will they learn how to cope with spiteful and hurtful behaviour.

What about the concept of nature-deficit disorder? Are those children who live in an urbanised environment losing out on something? As someone who spent most waking hours of my early childhood playing outdoors – catching grasshoppers with my bare hands, climbing trees, building dens and exploring the woods – I appreciate how nature’s many wonders can capture a child’s imagination. A childhood friend recently shared with me a vivid memory from our childhoods, when, aged around six, I was walking down a path, bucket in hand, looking absolutely delighted: I had collected a bucketful of slugs that I was going to keep as pets in our back garden. But much to my horror, the next day I woke to find nothing but disgusting slime on the stone where I had placed the slugs.

But children who grow up in cities - and maybe never get the chance to climb trees or go out in search of slugs - do not suffer from a disorder of any kind. Children can have hours of fun on street corners, in back gardens or in local parks - kicking a ball around, scrambling to the top of climbing-frames, playfighting with their mates, and just messing around.

Is ‘consumer culture’ really restricting children’s imaginations? It is true that some children have more toys than they know what to do with. I have lost count of how many dolls my four-year-old niece has acquired. And no matter how expensive and amazing her last doll is, her appetite for further acquisitions seems unsatisfiable. But she can recite the names of – and tell a story about - each and every one of the dolls. Her imagination and curiosity have not been stifled by her relative affluence, despite maybe getting as many toys for one birthday as I got throughout my entire childhood. She can have hours of fun engrossed in her own little fantasy world, just like we could at her age.

Also, screen-based entertainment should not be seen as a problem in itself. As Wendy Earle has argued elsewhere on spiked, research indicates that young people use new technology to do what they have always done - socialise, mess around and play games with each other. I have never seen the appeal of computer games myself, but by all accounts they can be fun, challenging, and, at times, educational. If children are spending too many hours on this type of ‘sedentary screen play’, maybe we should ask ourselves why that is. Perhaps new technologies are attractive to kids because they provide them with the opportunity to mess around with their friends – something they rarely get the chance to do outdoors because of our overprotective culture.

It is time to take a more critical look at today’s doom-mongering about children. Interpretations of social, economic and lifestyle changes, and their effect on children’s lives, are easily clouded by the researchers’ own experiences, outlooks and feelings. I know I often fall into the trap myself of romanticising my own childhood. But we should at least try to look at societal changes a little more objectively. Rather than pointing the finger at easy ‘junk’ targets and labelling children as fragile and easily damaged, we need to try to identify what the real problems are – if there are any.

Yesteryear’s tough childhood

In many ways children’s lives have improved immensely over the years. In fact, only a few hundred years ago children could not even be said to have a childhood. The French historian Philippe Aries showed in the classic Centuries of Childhood that the idea of childhood simply did not exist in medieval society. ‘As soon as the child could live without the constant solicitude of his mother, his nanny or his cradle-rocker, he belonged to adult society’, Aries wrote.

At the tender age of seven, young people were expected to enter the adult world - where they acted, and were treated, as smaller versions of other adults. Infants under two were treated with emotional indifference, according to Aries, mainly because of the low chance of them surviving to see their second birthday. In the seventeenth century the modern view of childhood first emerged, but it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the advent and extension of compulsory schooling and a corresponding decline in child labour, that childhood really existed in the modern sense.

Aries has been criticised for taking some of the evidence he drew upon - particularly from historic portraits and paintings - out of context and exaggerating his point. But whether or not childhood could be said to exist in the past, and whether or not we can say that parents of the past loved their children, today’s separation of a distinct world with its own clothes, games, entertainment and education is undoubtedly new. Over the past hundred years or so the family has become increasingly focused emotionally and financially on the welfare of the child in ways that would have been unrecognisable to people in previous centuries.

Prior to the twentieth century children did not have the same prolonged period of freedom from responsibility. Even in the nineteenth century, children as young as six would have to work long hours – longer than many adults would put up with today – in atrocious working conditions. They often contracted debilitating diseases and suffered terrible injuries. Accidental amputations were common in factories, when children, who were small enough to reach into the factory machinery, would attempt to clean the parts or clear obstructions. Young chimney sweeps suffered from chronic breathing problems and often broken and deformed limbs.

The fact that most children today, in the developed world anyway, do not have to work for a living, and have some freedom to play, mess about and receive an extended education, should be celebrated. But a question we do need to ask ourselves is whether society may have moved too far down the road of what Frank Furedi, author of Paranoid Parenting, calls the ‘infantilisation of children’.

Children need to be given the chance to grow up. That means giving them gradually more freedom and responsibility. It is the responsibility of adults to prepare children for a full and independent life, not to protect them from every conceivable risk in the wider world. Michael Ungar, an American social worker and family therapist and the author of Too Safe For Their Own Good: How Risk And Responsibility Helps Teens Thrive, recounts a dinner-party conversation about how children’s lives have changed: ‘Most of us could tell stories about the risks we were routinely exposed to that we would never expose our own children to. We were put out in the morning and told not to come back until lunch. We were allowed to ride motorcycles unsupervised at age twelve. We walked alone to school.’

Ungar argues that we can best help children by providing them with opportunities to show what they can do on their own. Parents should give children the structure ‘to navigate safely the period between being a child and acting like an adult’, he writes. ‘It’s our responsibility from the time they are little to help them embrace adventure and responsibility… A concerned parent provides scaffolding for growth, not just a lifejacket for safety.’

Peter Stearn, author of Anxious Parents: A History Of Modern Childrearing In America, is also concerned about the extent to which we try to keep children safe. ‘Almost all historians of contemporary childhood, and many other experts from other disciplines, agree that we have come to underestimate the capacity of children, in regulating and monitoring them beyond reasonable and productive levels’, he writes. Stearn told me that we encourage young people - even in their late teens or early twenties - continually to wait for parental guidance and not to take enough initiative and responsibility. ‘In my view’, he says, ‘parents, encouraged by experts, have come to regard kids as excessively fragile’. Parents feel more and more strongly that kids need protection rather than being allowed to roam freely. As a result, he says, ‘some kids never really manage to cut the psychological apron strings’.

Similarly, Elkind argues that we should not try to make play risk-free ‘because we learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope.’ Elkind shows that over the past decades children in the US have lost 12 hours of free time a week, including eight hours of unstructured play and outdoor activities. In contrast, the amount of time children spend in organised sports has doubled. He writes: ‘Children are not allowed to play on their own to the extent that they once were. And much of the play they engage with is organised and run by adults. This robs children of the opportunity to innovate and learn from risk-taking behaviours. To be sure, children today still manage to play on their own, but it is now the exception and not the rule.’

Bill Bryson’s The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: Travels Through My Childhood provides a vivid description of childhood in 1950s America and shows just how much it differs from today.

‘Kids were always outdoors – I knew kids who were pushed out the backdoor at eight in the morning and not allowed back in until five unless they were on fire or actively bleeding – and they were always looking for something to do’, Bryson writes. ‘If you stood on any corner with a bike – any corner anywhere – over a hundred children, many of whom you had never seen before, would appear and ask you where you were going… Life in Kid World, wherever you went, was unsupervised, unregulated and robustly – at times insanely – physical, and yet it was a remarkably peaceful place.’

The importance of freedom to play

It is this freedom to play away from adult supervision that children today are missing out on. The late Swiss child development expert, Jean Piaget, spent hours observing children at play. He concluded that children’s minds develop through interacting - and getting into disagreements - with their peers. Through being confronted with other children’s points of view they are encouraged for the first time to start thinking about thoughts.

In his seminal The Language and Thought of the Child, Piaget illustrates the role of egocentrism - that is, the inability to see the world from any perspective other than one’s own - in children’s thinking. Although Piaget claimed that children were fundamentally egocentric until around seven years of age, it is now widely accepted that by four years of age most children have started to comprehend that other people can have beliefs that differ from their own.

As part of the research for my PhD on child development, I carried out a test - referred to as a Theory of Mind test - on children between three and four years of age in a primary school in Manchester. I presented the children (one of whom I shall call Mark) with a tube of Smarties. When I asked Mark what he thought was inside the tube his face lit up – ‘Smarties!’, he exclaimed. I handed him the tube and asked him to look inside. His face quickly fell when he realised that what was inside was not Smarties, but crayons. I told Mark that after he had gone back to the classroom one of his classmates, Mary, would come into the room. ‘I will show Mary this tube and ask her what she thinks is inside. What do you think she’ll say?’ I asked Mark. As most children under four years of age would have done, Mark said ‘crayons’. He knew - after having looked inside - that the tube of Smarties actually contained crayons, so of course Mary would say it contained crayons, too. When I asked him what he thought was inside the tube before he opened it, he again said ‘crayons’. He could not contemplate that thoughts can be different from reality. Or, more precisely, he was not able to think about thought – thoughts and reality are one and the same thing to young children.

Piaget viewed particular social experiences - relationships between equals - as central to a child’s ability to overcome egocentrism in their thinking. Relationships between peers bring out differences of viewpoints and this helps children in developing an ability to think about thoughts. Piaget wrote that ‘social life is necessary if the individual is to become conscious of the functioning of his own mind… Just as, if left to himself, the child believes every idea that enters his head instead of regarding it as a hypothesis to be verified, so the child…believes without question everything he is told [by adults].’ To a child, what adults say has a sort of mystical power, Piaget argued. Play between equals is therefore necessary in order to socialise the child – that is, to succeed in ‘delivering him from the mystical power of the word of the adult’.

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, the eminent Russian developmental psychologist, also recognised the role of play in children’s development. He described children’s play as both liberating and constraining. Pre-school children are ‘free’ to explore new roles in play, but, as roleplaying with their peers has to be a co-operative activity, they need to exhibit an unprecedented level of self-control. In the groundbreaking book Mind And Society: The Development Of Higher Psychological Processes, Vygotsky wrote: ‘In play the child is always higher than his average age, higher than his usual everyday behaviour; he is in play as if a head above himself.’

Vygotsky developed the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) to illustrate how children learn and develop. It is a concept that has become hugely popular in education circles, most often used to bolster the fashionable idea of ‘child-centred learning’, but in the process it has been stripped of its core meaning. Behind many of the newfound education fads - such as ‘personalised learning’ - lies the belief that we should accept the limitations of children’s thinking or not push them beyond what they are capable of achieving in the here and now. But this is anathema to the spirit of the ZPD, which Vygotsky defined as: ‘The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers.’

In other words, the basis for development is overcoming the contradiction between the demands of a particular situation - forcing the individual to undertake new forms of behaviour - and the inadequacies of the individual’s existing forms of thought to cope with the task at hand. Play can create such a ZPD for the child. Vygotsky argued that ‘a child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality.’

Entering a shop with my husband one rainy day he gave me a look of absolute horror on hearing the agonising wails of a toddler in a buggy in front of us. One could be forgiven for thinking the boy was being slowly tortured. In fact, he was just being denied the bar of chocolate he wanted. It is quite incredible what tantrums three-year-olds are able to throw when they do not immediately get what they want. As Vygotsky perceptibly wrote: ‘No one has met a child under three years old who wants to do something a few days in the future.’ Luckily, young children can be distracted from what they want – and the younger the child, the easier that is. But as children get older, and this is where play comes into it, and cannot so easily be distracted from their immediate desires, make-believe situations serve the function of in some way satisfying those unrealised desires. To the young child, the adult world is full of obstacles and restrictions, and play gives them the chance to escape those barriers.

Putting children on the road to adulthood

Outside of play, the behaviour of infants and toddlers is determined by the situation in which they find themselves. Their behaviour, motivations and desires are shaped by their immediate perceptions – that is, by what they see and hear at any given moment. But in imaginary play, children for the first time are able to separate meanings from objects or actions. To a young child, words and objects, or words and actions for that matter, are not separate entities but are one and the same thing. As adults, we know that ‘cup’ is a word for a utensil one drinks out of. But to a young child ‘cup’ is a cup. The word is the object. The child cannot think about words in the abstract, as separate from the object, but can only think about the things the words represent.

However, in play a child spontaneously starts to separate meanings from objects – without knowing that he or she is doing so, it must be added. It is only when children start to learn to write that they consciously appreciate that there are such things as words that represent – but are also separate from - things. Play can therefore be seen, Vygotsky argued, as a preparatory stage in the development of children’s written language.

Unfortunately, many recent books unhelpfully counterpoise the educational value of play to the regimented nature of schooling, in particular testing. But, going back to Vygotsky’s ZPD, like play, adults can, through instruction and guidance, propel children beyond what they are capable of in the here and now. Play is important, but so is adult-directed teaching and learning. New Labour’s target-driven approach to education is indeed anathema to creative teaching, but that does not mean that academics and testing per se are a problem. A good teacher, according to Vygotsky, should expect more of the child than they are capable of without adult guidance.

It is true that the lives of most children today are very different from those of, for example, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and friends, with their many adventures - including getting lost in caves or playing pirates on the Mississippi river. But the changes we have seen in children’s lives over the last century, or even decade, are far from all for the worse. The key thing that could be holding children back today is the safety-obsessed culture and low expectations of what children are capable of. We need to argue for children being given more freedom to play and mess around. But let’s not use that as an excuse to undermine the need for a formal education.

First published by spiked

Monday 11 June 2007

Are children being held hostage by parental fears?

A new report calls on parents to let their kids venture out unsupervised. That might be easier if scaremongering officials put a sock in it.

It cannot be easy being a parent today. They get criticised for not giving their children the right kind of love and attention and for not sufficiently protecting them from a never-ending list of risks. And now they are criticised for overanxiously keeping their children tied to their apron strings. Last week, the UK Children’s Society published a report, The Good Childhood Inquiry, which caused a splash with its claims that children are becoming hostages to parental fears.

The report argues that parents are denying children the freedom to mess around with friends, a freedom that we ourselves once enjoyed. Play is essential for children and young people, the report points out, because it allows them to practice making and consolidating friendships and dealing with conflict. That means being given the space to play away from adult supervision. Yet according to research by Play England, a campaign group sponsored by the National Children’s Bureau which calls for kids to have access to good and free local play space, in 2003 67 per cent of 8- to 10-year-olds and 24 per cent of 11- to 15-year-olds had never been to the park or the shops on their own.

An NOP survey commissioned by The Children’s Society found that 43 per cent of adults thought children should not go out unsupervised until they were 14 years old. Other research has found that in 1970 the average nine-year-old was free to roam 840 metres from his or her front door. By 1997, that had shrunk to 280 metres.

Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of The Children’s Society, warned: ‘If we go too far down the road of being overprotective and not allowing children to explore, to play, to be up with their peers, but also with children of other ages, then we may be influencing the way in which they look at society and social interaction later on.’ (1)

So, in preoccupying themselves with keeping their loved ones safe, are parents denying children the freedom they need to develop and grow up? Quite possibly so. But can we really blame parents for this? As many contributors to spiked have argued, parents are constantly being inundated with warnings about the dreadful things that can happen to their children if they do not keep a watchful eye on them at all times.

Now that there is a growing recognition that parental fears are exaggerated, the finger of blame tends to be pointed at the media – and, of course, the media do have a lot to answer for. No doubt parental fears have been exacerbated by the relentless reporting of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and the earlier coverage of the murders of Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002, and the abduction and killing of Sarah Payne in 2000. Alongside this, there are frequent media reports about an obesity epidemic killing our kids, the dangers of bullying and how older children – ‘feral teens’ – are running riot. All of this no doubt contributes to a sense that the world is a dangerous place for children. However, it is disingenuous to pin all the blame on the media. The government and government-sponsored charities have done far more than their fair share of scaremongering.

Consider the government-sponsored Child Safety Week. As I pointed out on spiked in 2001, the message communicated by charities during that year’s Child Safety Week was that ‘from choking on food or being poisoned by detergents to falling out of windows or drowning in garden ponds…your child is at risk, from everything’ (see Child safety has its own dangers, by Helene Guldberg). Later this month, some of the tips parents will be given by the Child Accident Prevention Trust (CAPT) during Child Safety Week 2007 may be sensible, but they are also patronising. The message of this year’s Child Safety Week is ‘Safer children, healthier lives. Pass it on’ – because of course mums and dads don’t know that it is good to keep children safe and healthy. When parents are constantly reminded about how vulnerable children are, it is not surprising that they lose sight of how resilient, resourceful and capable children could be – if they were given more of a chance to make mistakes and to learn from them.

American social worker and family therapist Michael Ungar, author of Too Safe for Their Own Good: How Risk and Responsibility Help Teens Thrive, argues: ‘Adults go to great lengths to protect children from the very experiences of failure children need to grow up healthy.’ From his experience of working with troubled teenagers, Ungar has become convinced that children need to be given more opportunities for risk-taking, as well as more responsibility. The troubled youths he works with, whether they have grown up with many advantages or none, have all told him that they crave adventure and responsibility. ‘Both necessarily come with a sizable amount of risk. And both are often in short supply in families and communities dead set on keeping their children too safe for their own good’, he argues (2).

The UK government and various government agencies not only constantly warn parents about the need to prevent accidents – they have also played a key role in undermining, or even breaking down, people’s trust in other adults outside of the family. The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, for instance, which is currently working its way into law, will make it compulsory for any adult who comes into contact with a child as part of his or her working day to undergo criminal records checks. The message is clear: don’t trust any adult, as they may be out to harm or abuse your child. (3) Is it any wonder that parents don’t feel confident letting their children play unsupervised in local parks?

Very often today, it is assumed that a parent who does let their child go out and about is a bad parent. Simon Knight, a senior community learning and development worker for a Scottish local authority and director of the campaign group Generation Youth Issues, tells me: ‘This is the basis on which much government policy is founded….. Almost all state-sponsored youth work today is about getting children off the streets. Isn’t it ironic? In the name of combating anti-social behaviour, people, in jobs much like my own, are charged with acting like the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and tasked with clearing children off the streets – the very place where they learn to be social in the first place.’

On the one hand, youth workers are tasked with clearing kids from public spaces – on the other hand, parents are chastised for not letting their kids go out in public on their own. This says a lot about the screwed-up approach to children today.

Apparently, it is not only adults who pose a risk to children. Other children can destroy lives as well, parents are frequently told. Government officials, teachers’ unions, charities and, yes, the media warn about the dangers of bullying – which they claim can damage children for life, giving rise to socially inadequate and depressed adults.

As a consequence of today’s bullying obsession, teachers are encouraged to intervene in every little playground spat. More and more everyday childhood activities – from namecalling to group exclusion – are being lumped together with acts of violence as examples of the ‘bullying’ that is apparently rampant in our schools. The National Association of Head Teachers advises teachers always to take the word of the child claiming to be bullied – partly in order to avoid being sued for not taking action. One of Britain’s most expensive state schools, Thomas Deacon City Academy in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, is even being built without a playground. Staff claim that this will avoid a situation where pupils fall victim to playground bullies. Miles Delap, project manager at the academy, said: ‘For a school of this size, a playground would have had to be huge. That would have been almost uncontrollable. We have taken away an uncontrollable space to prevent bullying and truancy.’ (4)

It beggars belief. Such is the panic about bullying today that a school is denying children the ability to play freely – where they might make friends and develop interpersonal skills – in the name of protecting them from bullies. Such a strategy is likely to be far more damaging to children than the occasional argument or even kick or punch.

Thankfully, not many schools are abandoning breaktime completely. But breaktimes are being eroded in the name of combating bullying. In most schools, adults are put on guard at all times to make sure no children are being picked on. But is it necessarily in children’s interest to have adults intervening to help resolve every dispute? By having a zero tolerance approach to bullying, could we be denying children the experiences they need to develop? Peter Blatchford, professor of psychology and education at the Institute of Education in London, points out that some teasing serves a social purpose. He says it helps ‘to denote limits…define and consolidate friendships, [show] off sharpness in social discourse, and [jostle] for status. Pupils showed that considerable skill could be required in determining what form of teasing was appropriate with particular people.’ (5)

The Children’s Society inquiry found that in response to the question ‘If you need help with a problem, who is the person you are most likely to talk to?’, children were most likely to go to their friends (46 per cent), followed by a parent (35 per cent). The report concluded: ‘Having friends helps children to develop a sense of identity and social belonging and to learn a sense of “everyday morality” in the way they treat others.’ (6) The author of one of the submissions to the inquiry argued that, considering the importance of friendship to children, maybe there should be a re-evaluation of the purpose of education and teacher training in terms of ‘the ability to promote co-operation and friendship between students’. This misses the point. Children cannot be taught, in the abstract, about how to make friends. It is through unsupervised play – through conflict and cooperation – that children are given the opportunity to develop friendships and to build up relationships of trust.

Research has shown that there is often more conflict between friends than between peers in general. Children use friendship to test boundaries and explore what is appropriate and acceptable behaviour. When I went to pick up my four-year-old niece, Maja, from her nursery during a visit in Norway last week, and asked her if I could meet her best friend, Irene, I was sulkily told no, because they were ‘uvenner’ (Norwegian for ‘not friends’). Apparently, Irene had thrown two stones at Maja and when Maja picked up a stone to throw back, Irene declared that she no longer wanted to be her friend. Of course Maja thought the whole episode was very unfair, as she hadn’t even thrown a stone. Yet by the time I had finished my 10-minute tour of the nursery, Irene had given Maja a bouquet of dandelions and they were best friends again. As her nursery teacher told me, they frequently fall out, but they always make up again.

Children will often end up in disputes with their friends – disputes that can be a lot more upsetting than the tiff between Maja and Irene. But through conflict and argument, they gain a better understanding of what they can expect from each other. So the formation of childhood friendships will inevitably involve both intimacy and trust, as well as tension and conflict.

It is understandable that adults want to intervene when they feel children are misbehaving. But it may not necessarily be the best thing to do in all circumstances. Of course adults need to set boundaries. When a child is clearly being scared witless by other children, adult intervention is necessary. But the boundaries need to be very carefully drawn and applied, if the benefits of play are not to be undermined.

Tim Gill, a writer and consultant on childhood and former director of the UK Children’s Play Council, astutely argues: ‘One problem for adults is that children’s play is not always about nice warm-glow things like building sandcastles, climbing to the top of the spacenet or making chocolate chip cookies. Sometimes it’s about destroying someone else’s sandcastle, fighting for the right to get to the top of the net or stealing those cookies…. Play involves all of the emotions, not just the ones we normally see as positive.’ (7)

According to Gill, children can only learn to express feelings and recognise the feelings of others – and understand the difference between mock anger and real anger – ‘if they are given the chance to practice them. A lot. And much of what looks to adults like bad behaviour is simply children practising, getting the hang of all these skills.’ Adults need to appreciate that conflicts of interest are as inevitable in childhood as they are in adulthood. Children are, of course, not as sophisticated in resolving conflicts as adults, and therefore they need the experiences that will help them develop their social skills.

For those concerned about the future wellbeing of today’s generation of children, let us stop having a go at parents, castigating them for everything they do. It would be more constructive to counter all of the various initiatives – which are often government-led – which undermine our trust in other adults and children. Free from such scaremongering and hectoring advice and tellings-off from the authorities, parents might learn to trust each other more, and let their children play.

(1) See Young ‘not allowed out to play’, BBC News, 5 June 2007

(2) Too Safe for Their Own Good: How Risk and Responsibility Help Teens Thrive by Michael Ungar, McClelland & Stewart (2007)

(3) See The case against vetting by Josie
Appleton

(4) See School without play area bans break times, Daily Telegraph, 10 May 2007

(5) ‘The state of play in schools’ by Peter Blatchford in The Good Childhood Inquiry

(7) See Childhood freedoms and adult fears: Growing up in a risk-averse society by Tim Gill

First published by spiked

Monday 19 March 2007

A tick-box attitude to toddlers

When even infants are expected to achieve ‘69 early learning goals’, you know that no area of life is free from New Labour’s tyranny of targets.

Last week the UK government published a new framework document titled Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). It aims to set the ‘standards for development, learning and care of all children from birth to the age of five’ (1). From September 2008, every registered early years provider and school will be required to follow the EYFS and monitor children’s progress according to 69 ‘early learning goals’.

According to the Department for Education and Skills (DfeS), EYFS ‘is underpinned by the key principles of treating every child as unique, creating loving and secure relationships and environments in which children can learn and develop at their own pace, and with enjoyment’.

Will the government ever learn? It seems that such is New Labour’s reliance on targets as the only measure of success that even children’s early lives and learning will now be measured by lists, tick-boxes and rigid expectations and outcomes. Yet such an intricate monitoring of children’s behaviour and abilities is an anathema to creating a ‘challenging and enjoyable’ learning environment. A ‘national curriculum for toddlers’, as the framework document has been labelled, will surely take all the fun out of pre-school care.

On top of outlining 69 learning goals – as if young children can be put on some kind of officially approved conveyor belt towards success – the framework document also outlines several hundred developmental milestones that children should be assessed against.

According to the document, children under the age of one should show an ability to communicate through ‘crying, gurgling, babbling and squealing’, and should be able to ‘play with their own fingers and toes’ and ‘focus on objects around them’. Toddlers up to two years of age should be interested in ‘putting objects in and out of containers’ and should ‘begin to move to music, [and] listen to or join in with rhymes or songs’.

There will be Ofsted inspections to measure childcarers’ performance against EYFS national standards. So we’re told, for instance, that infants get a lot of enjoyment from ‘finding their nose, eyes or tummy’ and therefore carers should monitor whether babies are showing an interest in such games. But what if some babies don’t? What conclusion should a carer draw if a child is not really interested in tummy-finding activities? No childcare professional or researcher could really answer that question with any degree of certainty.

There is no convincing case for implementing such a detailed monitoring of young children’s behaviour and their carers’ responses to that behaviour. Beverley Hughes, the UK minister of state for children, says: ‘This government is committed to giving every child the best start in life…. We know that good early-years provision leads to better outcomes in a young person’s future education and life chances.’

Well, no, we don’t know that, actually. No serious researcher would draw such a conclusion from the studies into early-years education carried out to date. Studies investigating the short-term effect of early-years programmes on cognitive and emotional development suggest the evidence that it provides future benefits is murky at best. And there is no clear evidence at all that early-years education has longer-term benefits in terms of educational achievement and positive life or career chances in the future.

The fact is that children are unpredictable and cannot be moulded to order from birth. According to Stanley Greenspan, clinical professor of psychiatry and paediatrics at the George Washington University Medical School in the US, measurements of behaviour in young children are a poor predictor of later outcomes in terms of education, career or ‘life chances’.

Indeed, Jean Piaget, the late Swiss polymath and one of the most influential and prolific developmental psychologists, has been rightly criticised by researchers in the field (including many of his followers) for trying to apply overly rigid age ranges to his proposed stages of emotional, cognitive and moral development. A century of research has given us great insights into what children should be capable of at different stages of development – but it has also taught us that children vary greatly in the pace and nature of their development. It is difficult to draw any firm conclusions from certain children’s developmental delay, and to make any grand assessment about their cognitive, emotional or linguistic futures.

The targets approach to everything from health and education to childcare captures the government’s suspicion towards carers and parents, who allegedly cannot be left to their own devices. Unable to articulate what a good education should consist of in terms of content and resources, the government instead sets a series of abstract hurdles for young people to leap over by a certain strict period in their lives. This transforms carers and teachers into managers who must prod children in the right direction rather than cater for their sometimes differing levels of interest and inquisitiveness. At the same time, the tyranny of targets shows that the government does not trust teachers or parents to raise their children in a good and proper fashion. Thus everything, even gurgling and pencil-gripping, must be measured by a centrally-set standard in order to ensure that no child is being left behind by the apparently unthinking and uncaring adults out there.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tick-box mentality that has been introduced into the education system by today’s overly prescriptive national curriculum has driven some very good teachers out of the profession. Those who love working with children and who have a passion for passing on knowledge and facts are being put off by the overly bureaucratic measures introduced by both Conservative and Labour governments.

Who is going to be attracted to working with pre-school children if this same bureaucratic approach is brought into early-years care, too? We should not be stressing out over whether young children are learning to hold a pencil in the right way or whether they can recognise numbers between 1 and 9. Young children should be given the space to play and to use their imaginations. They will have plenty of time to catch up if they haven’t learnt to write by the time they start school – all they need is a good teacher, not a framework document that treats them like robots.

(1) See the DfES website

First published by spiked

Thursday 28 December 2006

A hard cell

Eve Herold on why we should take sides in the Stem Cell Wars, and cheer those scientists pushing the boundaries.

Stem Cell Wars: Inside Stories from the Frontlines, Eve Herold, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Eve Herold’s book puts a persuasive case for more biomedical research on human and animal stem cells, both to advance our knowledge of human biology and to provide the possibility of cures for debilitating diseases like diabetes, Parkinson’s, spinal cord injury, heart failure, cancer and more.

The book will be published in Britain early in 2007, and it’s a must-read for anyone who wants a better understanding of the current state of stem-cell science as well as an insight into the political and ethical controversies that are holding back developments in this new and exciting area of research. I talked to Herold about her book just before Christmas.

As director of public policy research at the Genetics Policy Institute in America, Herold argues passionately for taking medicine to a new level. She writes: ‘Disease and disability are already enormous drains on economies worldwide, but we are at the beginning of the biggest ageing boom in history.‘ She believes that medical science has made some spectacular strides in the twentieth century, stating: ‘In fact, more effective treatments and cures were discovered during the last century than in all prior human history.‘ Millions of people have benefited from new drugs, vaccines, diagnostic techniques such as x-rays, CT scans and MRIs, and our ability to carry out ever-more complex surgical procedures.

Although Herold recognises that the dramatic increase in life expectancy in the last century was mainly due to the development of modern sewage systems and water purification methods, she argues that medical progress has also played an important part. ‘If anyone doubts the march of medical progress’, she writes, ‘the most dramatic testament is the fact that, between 1900 and 1999, the average life span for Americans increased from 47 years to 77’.

What stem cell research may allow us to do, in the not too distant future, is provide cures for diseases that until now we have only been able to manage. But the research will not progress at an acceptable rate unless we have out some hard arguments about the need for experimentation. Stem Cells Wars provides ample ammunition against those who are trying to halt the research, both by putting the case for pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake and by confronting the ethical arguments – made both by religious and political figures – head-on.

My only concern is that Herold may have hyped the imminence of the medical benefits. When I asked her whether the medical promise of stem cell research may have been oversold, she responded: ‘Of course there is a very real danger of that. We are at such an early stage in the course of this research that there are a lot of unknowns.’ She pointed out that we have 30 years of animal research ‘that shows the proof of principle many times over’. But human research is at a very early stage – human embryonic stem cells were only isolated for the first time in 1998.

Herold argues that what we need is more laboratory research on adult stem cells, embryonic stem cells and therapeutic cloning. At the same time we need more animal research. Only then, she points out, will we be able to move on to clinical trials.

Just before Christmas, Professor Austin Smith, director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research told The Times (London) that ‘cloning research clearly upsets the general public’, and ‘there are real question marks about whether it has any utility at all’. Professor Smith would prefer scientists to focus on a basic understanding of adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells, rather than exploring their potential in helping to fight disease and injury (1).

Adult stem cells are more easily available than embryonic stem cells, but are more restricted in the types of cells they can form. Embryonic stem cells, also known as master cells, are extracted from early embryos and hold the blueprint for every cell, tissue and organ of the human body. Embryonic stem cells are currently only available from infertility clinics that provide surplus embryos donated by couples who have completed fertility treatment.

Many scientists believe that in the future embryonic stem cells could be generated from specific patients - through therapeutic cloning - by inserting a patient’s cells into an egg that has had its own nucleus removed. This method, called nuclear transfer, has worked in a mouse but has not yet been successful in humans. The benefit of patient-specific stem cells is that they will not be rejected by the patient.

Herold was surprised by Professor Smith’s statement about the utility of therapeutic cloning. Of course there is a possibility that scientists will never succeed in generating patient-specific embryonic stem cells, but unless we do the research we will never know, she argues, adding: ‘As Einstein said, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?”’

Stem Cell Wars confronts the myriad arguments against this branch of science in a convincing and engaging way. Herold concludes the book by saying: ‘The idea of putting a freeze on progress because there are good and bad people in the world, because knowledge can be misused, or because we can’t always guarantee the outcome is an assault on the human spirit. It is living by our worst fears not our greatest hopes.‘

This is an admirable sentiment, as long as we have a realistic expectation of the medical benefits of the research. Stem Cell Wars is peppered with heart-rending human-interest stories – about individuals who suffer from currently incurable diseases and injuries. But unfortunately, these individuals stand little chance of benefiting from stem cell research, whether or not restrictions on the research are lifted. Like all science, this research is arduous and will progress slowly. But unless we let the research grow, and put the case for further exploration and experimentation, we will never take medical science to a new level.

Stem Cell Wars by Eve Herold will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in the UK in January 2007 (buy this book from Amazon (UK)).

(1) Cloning benefits oversold, says stem-cell scientist, The Times (London), 18 December 2006

First published by spiked

Friday 20 October 2006

'There's no such thing as "stress"'

Angela Patmore has been branded a ‘heartless bitch’ for her attack on the stress management industry. Calm down and get a life, she tells her critics.

spiked is the online partner of the Battle of Ideas , the two-day festival of debate that will take place in London on 28 and 29 October 2006. In the run-up to the Battle, we will publish a series of taster interviews with some of the speakers and participants. In the seventh in the series Helene Guldberg talks to Angela Patmore, who is speaking in the session Workplace stress – medical epidemic or all in the mind? on 28 October.

Sometimes it seems as if everybody is ‘stressed out’ these days. Yet according to Angela Patmore, author of The Truth About Stress, the ubiquitous term ‘stress’ is ‘bogus and illogical’. She sees the supposed ‘stress epidemic’ of the last two decades as ‘deeply harmful to society’, and thinks that our preoccupation with stress has helped turn individuals into ‘sufferers’ rather than encouraging them to confront and overcome routine concerns.

Many have misinterpreted Patmore’s central thesis, believing she is having a pop at those who find it difficult to cope. Even one book reviewer who sympathised with Patmore over being ‘accused in all kinds of roundabout ways of being a heartless bitch’, complained that she had written off as ‘weaklings’ those who ‘in certain situations do, with blazing frequency, have mental and physical responses that they cannot master’ (1).

As Patmore tells me, ‘if you attack the ideology of stress management you get accused of attacking those who are suffering, which I am not doing.‘

Patmore recognises that there are people who, as a result of traumatic events or relentless everyday pressures, reach the point where they cannot cope. Despite its many shortcomings, one might hope that the psychiatric profession could find a way of helping those who are mentally ill. But, she says, ‘people’s coping mechanisms are not helped by the stress management industry’. 

De-stressing, her book shows, has become a multi-million-pound industry. And, she tells me, it is an industry that is entirely unregulated: ‘there is more regulation of hairdressing than people working on your head.‘

For Patmore, the stress management industry is not just ineffective. Its efforts are making things worse. Hundreds of thousands of therapists, counsellors and healers are ‘instilling fear and insecurity in people about perfectly normal coping mechanisms and emotions’, she argues, ‘which is a terrible thing to do’.

Patmore started researching the concept of stress in the 1990s, while working at the University of East Anglia with a team of World Health Organisation scientists. A meta-analysis of the clinical literature on stress showed that there were ‘literally hundreds of different definitions [of stress], some of them opposites, some of them irreconcilable and all of them felt to be “the correct one” by somebody or other.‘

So it proved impossible to define stress. And if there were no such thing as ‘stress’, if the label really meant nothing, then as she states in her book, ‘the whole stress management ideology must be at best misleading and at worst a dangerous deceit.‘ 

On the UK’s national Stress Awareness Day (1 November), we can expect to be bombarded with yet more reminders of how stressful modern life is. But the more we are told how stressed we should be, and the more the stress management industry grows, the more ‘stressed’ we are becoming. 

‘Let’s look at the statistics,‘ Patmore says: ‘Between 1991 and 2003 the number of accredited stress counsellors increased by 804 per cent’.  At the same time more and more people are apparently becoming more stressed. ‘So the more counsellors there are the more stressed people there are. What does that tell you?‘

Absences put down to stress now account for 12.8million lost working days per year in Britain, and cost British companies £1.24billion. Stress has overtaken back pain as the single biggest cause of long-term sickness absence. Even powerful people entrusted with running a country are not immune to the effects of ‘stress’ - a few years ago the Norwegian prime minister was given several weeks sick leave due to ‘the stresses of the job’.

The de-stressing industry does not seem to be helping people. ‘Of course, you may strike it lucky’, Patmore concedes, ‘and get some useful help. But you may be unlucky and end up worse off.‘ If we are encouraged to view ourselves as fragile creatures unable to cope without professional help, then minor problems can easily become potential crises.

And the ‘stress epidemic’ cannot be explained by life becoming harder in the twenty-first century. As Patmore points out, ‘during the London Blitz, for example, everyone lived under daily threat of enemy bombs. They worried about loved ones on the front line, about rationing, and about what might happen if the Nazis invaded’. Or, she adds, ‘take the Victorian age, when half of all children in poor families died before the age of five and families lived constantly with bereavement’.

Patmore’s message is a positive one. Life is if anything less stressful today, and human beings can be remarkably resilient, if only we are given the chance to find our own way of dealing with hardships.

Angela Patmore is speaking at the Battle of Ideas on Saturday 28 October. You can join discussion and debate on six themes from the Battle of Ideas at tiscali.community.

The Truth About Stress by Angela Patmore is published by Atlantic Books (buy this book from Amazon (UK)).

(1)  Zoe Williams, All Too Much, New Statesman, 13 February 2006

First published by spiked

Tuesday 8 August 2006

A hairy moment for free speech

Tommy Sheridan’s libel win over the News of the World was no ‘victory’ for the working class. It was a victory for an archaic law over open debate.

On Friday last week, by a majority of 7-4, a jury of six men and five women found in favour of Tommy Sheridan, former Scottish Socialist Party leader and MSP, in his defamation action against News Group Newspapers, publisher of the News of the World. Sheridan sued the tabloid for printing articles in 2004 and 2005 claiming he was an adulterer, had visited Cupids swingers’ club in Manchester, and had taken part in orgies. He was awarded £200,000 in damages.

Celebrating his victory outside the Court of Session in Edinburgh, Sheridan said: ‘I have over the last five weeks taken on one of the biggest organisations on the planet…. What today’s verdict proves is that working-class people, when they listen to the arguments, can identify the truth from the muck.’

But there has been no shortage of muck thrown by Sheridan himself – during and after the trial. He accused the News of the World’s 18 witnesses of perjury and branded the 11 members of the SSP who spoke against him in court as ‘scabs’. Apparently, they’ve been orchestrating a witch-hunt against Sheridan in order to bring about his political downfall.

These are the same 11 members of the SSP who refused to hand over to the court the minutes of the meeting where Sheridan allegedly admitted he had attended a swingers’ club but said he would deny it publicly because the News of the World would never be able to prove it. It was only after a former comrade and friend of Sheridan’s, Alan McCombes, was jailed for contempt that the minutes were produced.

McCombes has since issued a statement, with the backing of the SSP national executive, likening Sheridan to Jeffrey Archer and claiming he would bring down the SSP.

As commentator Magnus Linklater reminds us in an article in Scotland on Sunday, Scottish hero Robert Louis Stevenson thought there was nothing uglier than a court of law: ‘Hither come envy, malice, and all uncharitableness to wrestle it out in public tourney.’ To add insult to injury, some members of the SSP are apparently considering legal action against Sheridan over comments he made following his victory. Also, MSP Carolyn Leckie says that those whose reputations had been tarnished would welcome perjury charges as a chance to clear their names. Lothian and Borders Police yesterday confirmed they are considering whether to launch a perjury investigation.

It is hard to see who the winners are in this sorry state of affairs. Sheridan has won £200,000 in damages, subject to appeal, but whether suing has in any way helped to restore his reputation (let’s not forget that he told the court he is a hairy ape and offered to disrobe ‘if my lord will allow me’) remains to be seen.

Some members of the jury may not have been impressed with the News of the World’s defence, but then again the tabloid newspapers’ practice of ‘chequebook journalism’ rarely elicits much sympathy from members of the public today. The fact that Sheridan won the case, despite 18 witnesses testifying against him, indicates how low the media have sunk in the eyes of the public.

Sheridan is not the only famous permatanned Scottish socialist to use the UK’s libel laws in recent years. In December 2004 George Galloway, ex-Labour MP, and now an MP for the anti-war, anti-Blair party RESPECT, successfully won his libel battle against the Daily Telegraph. The paper published allegations that Galloway was in the secret pay of Saddam Hussein. After the ruling, Galloway declared: ‘I am glad and somewhat humbled to discover that there is at least one corner of the English field which remains uncorrupted and independent, and that corner is in this courtroom.‘

Galloway’s uncorrupted and independent ‘corner of the English field’ has won London the reputation as the libel capital of the world. The capital is often dubbed ‘a town called Sue’. Everybody knows that the UK libel courts are used by chancers, from around the world, to launder their reputation.

Court 13 – where Galloway’s case was heard - is the place where in July 1987 the now disgraced peer Jeffrey Archer won his £500,000 libel damages from the Daily Star over allegations that he had had sex with a prostitute. Later convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice, Archer was forced to pay the money back to the Star. It was also in Court 13 that high drama and farce were played out between Harrod’s owner Mohamed al-Fayed and former Tory MP Neil Hamilton - described during the proceedings as the meeting of a ‘habitual liar’ and a ‘politician on the make’.

Galloway and Sheridan have unfortunately given the UK’s anachronistic libel law - a law that grew out of a dissatisfaction with the old aristocratic ways of dealing with defamation through duels - a new lease of life. (The Scottish libel law is based in large part on England’s libel law, though with some minor differences.)

They, of course, see things differently, depicting themselves as brave working-class heroes fighting against the mighty media empire. Sheridan even accused the News of the World of endangering his unborn baby’s life with its lies. But it is far from brave to sue newspapers for libel. As claimants, the odds are clearly stacked in their favour, whether or not what was said about them was true - which is why the vast majority of claimants win their libel cases.

Under libel law, claimants do not need to prove that what was said about them was untrue (although Sheridan’s wife, Gail, did her bit to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of the jury by pointing out that none of the women who allegedly had affairs with Sheridan referred to his unusually hairy body). Rather, in libel law the assumption is that the defamatory statement is false, and the burden falls on the defendant to prove it is true. This reversal of the burden of proof – with the defendant pretty much guilty until he proves his innocence – is almost unique to UK libel law.

Libel laws are censorious and have a chilling effect on the whole of the media. The law does not only affect those journalists, broadcasters, editors and publishers who are faced with libel writs. If authors, editors or publishers have the smallest inkling that the truth of a proposition cannot be proven in court (even when made in good faith), the knowledge that they will have a less than a one-in-five chance of success in a libel trial means the story is most likely to be dropped.

Newspapers should have the right to publish abusive articles about politicians and celebrities, who, after all, are at the centre of public life, and who have recourse, more than anybody else, publicly to dispute unfair allegations made against them.

Some may argue that a law curtailing the freedom to publish titillating revelations about the allegedly sordid sex lives of politicians is not much of a threat to free speech. Of course, it would not be much of a loss to society if the claims about what went on between Sheridan and various women - including in Cupid’s - were never published. But as long as society is preoccupied with celebrities, whose private lives are – most often willingly – continually paraded before our eyes, we will have a media constantly searching for ever more salacious stories.

The way to deal with the dire state of public debate today is to fight for more speech and debate, not less. That means scrapping the UK’s censorious libel laws, for a start. Sheridan and Galloway’s cases are a further nail in the coffin of press freedom.

First published by spiked

Thursday 22 June 2006

Stop weeping over whaling

The attack on Japan for continuing to hunt whales is cultural imperialism dressed up in PC lingo.

On 18 June, on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, a slim majority of nations on the International Whaling Commission (IWC) backed a resolution supporting the repeal of a 20-year moratorium on commercial whaling.

Although it was a non-binding vote, as a 75 per cent majority is needed to overturn the worldwide ban, the anti-whaling bloc – with Australia, New Zealand and Britain at the helm – warned that the vote should act as a ‘wake-up call to the world’. Japan has been most harshly criticised, accused of ‘buying off’ smaller nations with promises of aid packages in return for their support in overturning the moratorium.

Having been brought up in Norway – a nation of people not known to be particularly sentimental about the hunting and killing of animals – I find all the fuss about whaling rather bemusing. Why should whales be singled out for special status? In fact, Norway has for years openly defied the 1986 IWC moratorium on whaling, carrying on regardless. Japan, on the other hand, has found a more subtle way of getting around the moratorium – claiming that it continues whaling only in the ‘name of science’, although it makes use of the whale meat for consumption, regularly selling it in shops and restaurants.

So what is all the fuss about? The objections to whaling on the basis of its ‘non-sustainability’ don’t hold much water. Although in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some whales were hunted almost to extinction (including the blue whale), scientists recognise that many whales – such as the minke that is hunted by Norwegians – are relatively plentiful. In fact, the IWC is maintaining its ban on whaling despite the advice of its scientific committee.

As the non-sustainability argument has lost its force, the anti-whaling lobby has come up with new lines of attack. It talks about animal welfare. Whaling is, after all, a rather bloody and gory business and it isn’t for the fainthearted. As one Norwegian whaler said, in typical Norwegian matter-of-fact fashion, ‘Of course there’s a lot of blood. Whales are big animals.’ When it comes to hunting – and all sorts of animals are hunted by humans around the world – animal welfare is a pretty strange concern. As Joanne Massiah, minister of food production and marine resources in Antigua and Barbuda, points out, the term ‘humane killing’ is a bit of an oxymoron.

Or the anti-whaling lobby talks up the impact of whale meat on human health – despite the fact that people have been eating it for centuries with little evidence of adverse effects.

The anti-whaling campaigns spearheaded by Australia, New Zealand, Britain and others have little to do with any hard evidence that whale meat is bad for people; nor are they driven by anti-hunting sentiments in general (after all, these countries all kill animals for meat). Rather, this is about moral grandstanding, a way of appearing pure and righteous by trying to tap into the widespread concern for the wellbeing of whales.

Rune Frøvik of the High North Alliance, a Norwegian umbrella organisation representing whalers, told spiked: ‘The cultural imperialists would have whales exempted from the sustainable-use principle – an exemption that would, quite simply, place whales above and apart from the animal kingdom to which they obviously belong.’ Although whales are often attributed with a human-like intelligence, there is no scientific evidence to support such claims.

Yet still these beasts of the ocean stir up a great deal of passion. There is continual bickering and backbiting at IWC gatherings. Chris Carter, New Zealand’s minister for conservation, said he was deeply disappointed that several Pacific island nations – including The Solomons, New Zealand’s biggest bilateral aid recipient – have allowed themselves to become pawns in Japan’s ‘long, expensive campaign to achieve a whaling majority’. Anti-whaling nations and pressure groups have responded to the Caribbean and Pacific island states’ vote by calling for tourists to boycott the islands.

Adopting the slogan ‘Save the whale’ is an easy way for the anti-whaling nations to establish their green credentials and take the moral high ground. It is also a rather handy and PC way for these nations to distinguish themselves from the apparently ‘uncivilised’ whale-eating nations of the world, to draw a line between their ‘humaneness’ in contrast to the bloody antics of the Japanese and others.

Yet why should these non-whaling nations have the right to tell whaling nations what they can and cannot do? As the science journalist Stuart Blackman said a while back on spiked: ‘[Whales] are to the green movement what cows are to Hindus – except that Hindus aren’t trying to force the rest of the world to give up beef.’

First published by spiked

Friday 2 June 2006

'Animals are less valuable than human beings'

Leading researcher John Martin tells Helene Guldberg why it is morally justifiable to cause heart attacks in rats - and why he isn’t scared of animal rights extremists.

‘I believe that animal research is morally justified because animals are less valuable than human beings.’ John Martin, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at University College London (UCL), does not mince his words.

He also argues that we have bigger fish to fry – no animal pun intended – than a handful of animal rights activists. ‘I think we overestimate their threat amazingly. I have refused to have my telephone number taken out of the telephone directory. I think the risk to me is minimal.’

I first met Professor Martin at the launch of the People’s Petition in April, an online initiative set up by the Coalition for Medical Progress that allows people who support vivisection – the ‘silent majority’ – to sign up in defence of medical research (see Stand up for animal research, by James Panton). I was immediately impressed by his unapologetic support for experimenting on animals in the name of advancing knowledge and medical science.

As I pointed out to Martin when we met again in his office this week, even most of those who do support vivisection don’t seem to want to go beyond talking about the immediate medical benefits of animal research.

There seems to be an emerging consensus within the scientific community that we should reject the philosophical outlook that says humans are ‘categorically superior’ to animals. But how can we really justify the use of millions of animals in experiments to further scientific knowledge and save human lives – experiments that include cutting animals open, pumping them full of toxins and carcinogens, and ultimately ‘destroying’ them – unless we believe, and are willing to argue, that human beings are morally more valuable than animals?

We seem to have become uncomfortable with asserting human superiority. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we live our lives on the basis of human and animal equivalence. Society simply couldn’t function if we did that, if we really did go around thinking that a man and a dog have the same moral worth and thus should have the same rights. Those who treat animals in the same way they treat their friends or family are generally seen as eccentrics, or even social misfits.

But in political and moral debate, there is a reluctance to declare that humans are superior and thus that animal experimentation to advance medical science is not a necessary evil, but a moral good. Even a working party of the British Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a serious scientific body, said in a report on the ethics of animal research published last year that it rejected the idea of ‘categorical human superiority’ over animals.

What we need, says Martin, is to have a debate asking the basic question, ‘What is a human being?’ He argues that this is one of the most important questions for both philosophy and biology over the next hundred years. ‘It requires both a biological and a philosophical analysis - in tandem’, he says. ‘And out of the decision about what it means to be human comes decisions about how we organise society, our laws…in fact, everything comes from that.’

What sets us apart from all other animals, Martin argues, is our ability to generate creative, abstract thought – ‘and with that, poetry, music and the social networks that bind us together’.

And this – our ability to reflect on what we and our fellow human beings are doing, thereby both teaching and learning from one another – is precisely what has made human progress possible. Through creative abstract thought we have been able to build upon the achievements of previous generations.

Yet today, many seem to go along with the idea that animals are ultimately not that different from humans. This is not the result of intellectual debate and persuasion, where animal rights activists and thinkers have ‘won’ people over to their outlook, but rather points to a broader contemporary cultural outlook that denigrates human abilities.

This loss of faith in human beings and our capacities has far-reaching repercussions. Martin points to the problems currently faced by the medical profession. ‘I have just come from a case presentation where some doctors were telling us that after Harold Shipman [the GP who was convicted in 2000 of the murder of 15 of his patients, and who was suspected of killing many more] it is now almost impossible to prescribe opiates to dying patients in the community. I heard a presentation from a doctor who said he was running around on a Saturday night trying to get hold of one vial of opiates to relieve the suffering of his patient, who was dying in agony.’

This demonstrates a deep lack of trust, he says. ‘As doctors we suffer from the same thing – we have lost our way as human beings. We don’t have the correct leadership. There’s this political correctness that has taken over after Shipman, which says all doctors are bad and need regulating, instead of trusting us. Of course the occasional Shipman may return in future. But not to allow doctors to carry opiates in their bags is on the whole a greater evil than the occasional Shipman.’

Martin wants to put man back at the centre of the universe. And his belief in human uniqueness means that he fully endorses vivisection. ‘People are demanding better and better medicines. They want to live healthy lives, quite rightly. The only way we can keep improving medicine is by carrying out more research, which must involve animals. There’s no way around it.’

Martin and his team at UCL are currently trying to develop a novel approach to treating heart disease, using stem cells. ‘We do that by causing heart attacks in the rats. Stem cells – taken from the bone marrow of the rats – are then prepared and put into the heart, lessening the effect of the heart attack.’

He challenges those who argue against animal research by questioning its validity, who ask whether it is really scientifically or medically useful. This has become a common argument recently, put forward not only by animal rights activists but also by respectable newspaper columnists.

Martin says they are being disingenuous, particularly because they never engage with the detail of the animal research currently being conducted. ‘If anybody says “it’s not valid”, I want to know the detail. I want to know what is not valid about me causing a myocardial infarction in a rat and looking at the effect of stem cells? I cannot see – no matter how technologically advanced we become over the next 50 years – how we could get away from using animals in research.’

Martin also argues that there must be a place for blue-sky research: we should conduct experiments even when we can see no immediate medical benefit, in order to further our understanding of physiology. ‘This is the basis of the scientific method’, he says. ‘Nearly every advance in science has been speculative in the beginning. Just looking at what happens is the way we’ll understand it, and from that understanding we will be able to change things.’

What about the more difficult question of primate research, an issue that even pro-vivisectionists tend to shy away from? I remind him that at the launch of the People’s Petition he admitted to not having a rational argument against primate research. ‘It is more of a sentimental argument. I would try not to do it, if possible’, he says.

I am concerned about the danger of conceding ground on the issue of primate research. ‘No, I won’t concede either’, says Martin. ‘I have done primate research myself, but I find it personally difficult to do. Although, if I was told it was the only way to cure a particular sort of childhood leukaemia, I would certainly do it.’

The medical benefits of research on primates are beyond question. Such research is valid and useful because of the genetic and physiological similarities between humans and apes.

And such research is morally justifiable because in all important respects primates are not like us. In the six million years since ape and human lines diverged, apes have not moved beyond their hand-to-mouth existence, nor have they significantly changed the way they live their lives. As I have argued previously on spiked, a human child, even as young as two years of age, is intellectually head and shoulders above any ape (see Why humans are superior to apes, by Helene Guldberg).

Today’s equivocation over primate research – from the top of society down – is having a detrimental impact on medical research. It is often assumed that the reason why Cambridge University put a stop to its plans to build a primate research centre in 2004 is because of the threats by animal rights activists. No doubt the activists had an impact, but official dithering about primate research is much more likely to have been the deciding factor. Research on great apes – chimps, gorillas and orang-utans – was banned under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act in 1986, and the UK home secretary’s Animals Procedure Committee says it has the goal of ‘minimising and eventually eliminating primate use and suffering’. It is this defensiveness about primate research at the heart of government and the scientific establishment which both inflames the protesters – because they sense that even officialdom is ashamed of such research – and which also makes institutions like Cambridge feel isolated when they try to build a primate research facility.

Behind today’s fashionable view of ape and human equivalence there lurks a denigration of human capacities and human ingenuity. The richness of human experience is trivialised when it is lowered to, and equated with, that of animals. We must not dodge the argument for primate research as we call for animal experimentation to continue.

First published by spiked

Friday 26 May 2006

Stop celebrating Tourette’s

From TV documentaries to Big Brother, why has a neurological disorder become so fashionably fascinating?

I’ve never been interested in watching Big Brother, the reality show on Britain’s Channel 4 where people sit in a house together for 12 weeks and then someone wins. So when Brendan O’Neill - spiked’s deputy editor - asked me to write an article about Tourette’s Syndrome because everyone is talking about the fact that one of the BB contestants has it, I feared he would encourage me to watch the show….

Twenty-four-year-old Pete Bennet, a contestant in this seventh series of Big Brother, says he entered the house to become ‘a famous Touretter’. Channel 4 has taken some stick for making a spectacle of a young man with a rather freakish condition. Campaigners have accused the channel of ‘exploiting’ Pete; Channel 4’s spokespeople responded by saying that Pete’s inclusion could ‘educate’ the public about Tourette’s Syndrome.

GP and writer Mark Porter agrees. In the London Evening Standard he said his interest in Big Brother is ‘not just the simple voyeuristic pleasure of watching people play up to the camera and make fools of themselves. As a doctor, I am actually learning something.’ The mind boggles.

Porter also says that ‘watching [Pete] during his repeated outbursts, and eavesdropping as he discusses the difficulty of living with the condition, has taught me more about Tourette’s than I ever learned at medical school’. It makes you wonder what he did learn at medical school.

Back in the Eighties, I remember watching a QED documentary entitled John’s Not Mad about how a fellow pupil at Galashiels Academy, 15-year-old John Davidson, and his family coped with Tourette’s Syndrome. Although we all felt for John and what he was going through, we couldn’t really stop ourselves from laughing when, in the local supermarket, he sweetly asked his mother if she wanted some coffee followed by the words ‘you fucking cunt’.

Sadly for John, the documentary was a source of much hilarity. We did not learn much about the syndrome. It may have raised our ‘awareness’, but it definitely did not give us much understanding. All I remember learning was that Tourette’s sufferers swear a lot and twitch uncontrollably.

But John Davidson and Pete Bennet both have rather severe forms of Tourette’s Syndrome. According to the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - the psychiatrist’s bible - Tourette’s may be diagnosed when a person exhibits ‘multiple motor tics’ and ‘one or more vocal tics’ over a period of one year, with no more than three consecutive tic-free months.  Fewer than 15 per cent of Tourette’s patients exhibit what is termed coprolalia – the spontaneous utterance of socially objectionable or taboo words or phrases.

Tourette’s Syndrome is an inherited neurological disorder with onset typically in childhood. Tics tend to be at their highest severity between the ages of eight and 12, and steadily decline in severity throughout adolescence.

I doubt anyone would have learned any of this from Big Brother. Pete’s selection for the show is nothing but cheap entertainment, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Of course Big Brother may raise public awareness of Tourette’s Syndrome, but really, what use is this oh-so-fashionable ‘awareness’? It is, to borrow a phrase that a friend of mine loves to use, ‘as useless as tits on a bull’. Most people are ‘aware’ that heart disease is rife in Scotland. Sadly, that was no use to my beloved mother who died recently – in Scotland – from a massive heart attack, while on a waiting list for heart surgery.

Neither would awareness be much help to my Norwegian nephew who has learning difficulties as a result of a relatively rare and severe form of epilepsy. My brother recently told me that he sometimes wondered what people thought when they saw Magnus’ rather unusual behaviour. Now he has learned not to give a damn. Why should he? What is important to Magnus is that he is loved and accepted for who he is by those near and dear to him, and that he gets the best medical treatment and pedagogic support he can. That some people may look at him as if he’s a little weird is neither here nor there.

Likewise, I cannot see how ‘public awareness’ will help Tourette’s sufferers. Those suffering from Tourette’s need help to develop strategies for dealing with and managing their tics, and, where necessary, medical treatment.

Surely Tourette’s sufferers don’t want to be patronised in the way that Pete has been. The other housemates have even praised him for being ‘different’ and ‘quirky’. He is indulged for his affliction, with his tics and outbursts presented as endearing and cute. If Tourette’s sufferers are celebrated as weird and wonderful, that is likely to make matters worse for them, not better.

One of the things about Tourette’s Syndrome is that it is quite suggestible. The first time John Davidson spat in his mother’s face was after the QED documentary-makers asked the family whether spitting was one of his symptoms.

Pete is in danger of taking the celebrity nature of victimhood to new heights, getting his 15 minutes of fame for nothing other than being ‘a Touretter’.  Now that really is sad.

First published by spiked

Monday 30 January 2006

Chemical stories can make you blind

A new report washes away some of the myths about ‘potentially deadly’ chemicals.

Do you know what ‘E-numbers’ are? Like me, you may have been led to believe that they are hazardous food additives that should be avoided at all cost. But at the launch of a new report Making Sense of Chemical Stories, by the charity Sense about Science, the dietician Ursula Arens explained that E-numbers merely ‘communicate that [the food additive] has been approved for its intended use across the EU’.

Many E-numbers are found naturally in foods and may include essential vitamins, such as ascorbic acid (vitamin C, E300) and tocopherols (vitamin E, E306-309). ‘The paradox’, said Arens, ‘is that many will try to avoid E-numbers while at the same time taking vitamin supplements’ (many of which, incidentally, have not been through the same testing procedure).

Making Sense of Chemical Stories is a welcome corrective to the abundance of misinformation about chemicals. Chemicals are often presented as substances that are harmful to our health and the environment and should be avoided. But the idea of a chemical-free existence is absurd: the world is full of chemicals, both natural and manufactured, and we could not exist without them.

Today, it is especially the ‘man-made’, ‘synthetic’ or ‘industrial’ chemicals that we are encouraged to avoid. ‘But how do we explain the fact that we are living longer and healthier lives?’ asked Andrew Cockburn, director of Toxico-Logical Consulting Ltd, at the launch of the Sense about Science report. In the UK in 1840 the average life expectancy was only 40 years of age; today it is nearer to 80. ‘That makes us the healthiest hypochondriacs that ever existed’, said Cockburn.

In the late nineteenth century the population was indeed exposed to a number of hazardous chemicals. In 1871 the Royal Sanitary Commission noted that the water in Bradford Canal was so contaminated that a dropped lamp could set it alight. Chemicals used in hat-making gave off mercury vapour, causing muscle tremors, distorted vision and slurred speech. Hence the origin of the phrase ‘mad as a hatter’. This chemical, and many more, are now carefully regulated, allowing us to live better and healthier lives.

But that does not stop some people from fretting. Not many of them end up as red faced as the Californian city councillors who in 2004 took steps to protect the public from the ‘potentially deadly’ chemical, dihydrogen monoxide. A hoax website had warned that this ‘odourless, tasteless chemical’ kills thousands of people every year, mainly through accidental inhalation. The website pointed out that dihydrogen monoxide causes severe burns in its gaseous state and severe tissue damage through prolonged exposure in its solid state. City officials considered banning foam cups after they learned the chemical was used in their production. But dihydrogen monoxide is, of course, H₂O; in other words, water.

The chemical terms for certain substances may sound ominous. The research scientist Derek Lohmann asks: ‘If someone came into your house and offered you a cocktail of butanol, iso amyl alcohol, hexanol, phenyl ethanol, tannin, benzyl alcohol, caffeine, geraniol, quercetin, 3-galloyl epicatchin, 3-galloyl epigallocatchin and inorganic salts, would you take it?’ Maybe not. But if they offered you a cup of tea - a chemical mixture containing the above chemicals - you may not be as reticent.

Making Sense of Chemical Stories has shed some much-needed light on a murky debate. It clearly spells out that whether a substance is manufactured by people, copied from nature or extracted directly from nature, tells us nothing about whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for us. The old rule that it is the dose that makes the poison still holds: everything is potentially poisonous, depending on the quantity. Rather than fear synthetic chemicals we should recognise that flame-retardants, cleaners, disinfectants, anti-bacterials and DDT have helped to save millions of lives and improved the quality of life for many more.

See Making Sense of Chemical Stories on the Sense about Science website.

First published by spiked

Monday 16 January 2006

'This is like a badly written Greek tragedy'

Stephen Minger of King’s Stem Cell Biology Laboratory on the fall from grace of South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang.

‘This is like a badly written Greek tragedy. It is hard to believe that anyone could shoot themselves in the foot so badly.’ Stephen Minger, director of King’s Stem Cell Biology Laboratory in London, is referring to the fall from grace of South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang, once regarded as the world’s leading stem cell pioneer.

Hwang’s team claimed, in two papers published in the prestigious American journal Science in 2004 and 2005, to be the first in the world to clone a human embryo and harvest stem cells from it. Being able to create patient-specific stem cells from cloned human embryos was seen as a major scientific and medical breakthrough.

But a recent investigation by Seoul National University (SNU) found that Hwang’s team had faked the results. They had not successfully cloned human embryos or embryonic stem cells. Science last week retracted the two papers by Hwang’s team.

It is hard to understand why such a prestigious scientist could stoop so low. As was reported in the science journal Nature in August 2005, Hwang’s team did successfully clone Snuppy, an Afghan hound - the first cloned dog in the world. DNA evidence has shown that Snuppy is a genuine clone. Evidence also points to Hwang’s team succeeding in generating cloned human blastocysts - that is, tiny balls of cells that have the potential to grow into embryos. ‘That, and Snuppy, are at least two bits of good news’, said Miodrag Stojkovic, who cloned the first human embryo in Europe last year at Newcastle University.

So, as Stephen Minger, who has visited Hwang’s laboratories and genuinely likes the man, says to me: ‘The whole thing does not make sense. Why would someone risk so much?’ Hwang was bound to be found out at some stage. Geneticist and science writer Professor Steve Jones rightly said, ‘The odd thing is that this was such a high-profile claim that people were bound to try to repeat his work sooner or later, and would not be able to do it; so he would be found out.’

Maybe we will never get to the bottom of why Hwang’s team did what it did. But the important thing for Minger is that ‘those of us who work in the field need to get out there explaining what we are doing and why’. He told me that the whole saga ‘is a wake-up call to all those in the scientific community not to forget that science takes time. It is incremental, proceeding in small steps.’ He concedes that ‘to a limited extent we have raised expectations that cannot be met’. Now is the time to put forward more realistic expectations.

We should not be expecting instant medical miracles from stem cell research. As with all science, this research is arduous and will progress slowly. In addition, there are particular difficulties in growing human embryonic stem cells. Minger tells me, ‘now we don’t even know whether it is possible. We believe it is, but we do not know.’

Chris Shaw, a neurologist at King’s College London, who with Ian Wilmut, creator of Dolly the sheep, heads one of only two groups in the UK to hold a human cloning licence, believes research into patient-specific stem cells has been set back significantly by the Hwang controversy. He points out that this means that no stem cells have ever been extracted from cloned human embryos, and scientists are left with few clues as to how this might be accomplished.

‘The problem is that Dr Hwang had a better chance to crack this than anyone else, because of his extraordinary access to fresh human eggs in their thousands, which is going to be very difficult to reproduce anywhere else in the world’, said Professor Shaw.

Although Hwang’s fabrication may be a setback for scientists working on human cloning, Stephen Minger stresses that it is not likely to have much of an effect on stem cell research: ‘It is important to remember that cloning and stem cells are different things, and that stem cell lines continue to be made without using nuclear transfer.’

I asked Minger what the controversy may mean for the peer-review process: should the Science reviewers have spotted the fabrication prior to publication? He doesn’t believe so. ‘Peer review is designed to pick up bad science not faked science.’ He says that peer reviewers should check whether studies have appropriate controls and are reproducible and that the data adds up. ‘But we cannot ask the reviewers to go to the labs, look at the notebooks or even do some of the tests themselves’, he says. ‘Anyway, if the results cannot be replicated after publication that will get around the scientific community, and will indicate that there is something fishy going on.’

That is the ultimate death-knell for a scientist, says Minger, because scientists cannot really go on ‘without their scientific integrity’. ‘If you lose it, that is it. That is the end.’ Thankfully, there are still very few cases of scientific fabrication.

What we should take from this sad and sorry saga is that, although stem cell research may bring cures for many debilitating and, until now, incurable diseases, we need to be realistic about the pace of scientific and medical progress. One day, hopefully human stem cells - which are cells that can potentially grow into any body tissue - will be used to cure degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and to regenerate damaged spinal cord tissue. But, as Minger points out, progress in this field - as with all areas of science - will be a result of a long and hard slog.

There is a tendency today to hype both the dangers and possibilities of science. It may be tempting to respond to scaremongering stories, about scientists playing God and creating Frankenstein’s monster and so on, by hyping the possibilities of science and making promises of miracle cures. But the exaggerated scaremongering and positive hype are two sides of the same coin, and are potentially equally damaging to science. We need a sober and realistic approach to scientific research and development, which emphasises, positively, our ability to solve problems.

We should not use this setback to abandon the exciting research area of stem cells. Instead, it is an opportunity to reaffirm the possibilities which, although eminently achievable, are likely to be a lot harder than Hwang’s ‘results’ made many believe.

First published by spiked

Thursday 3 November 2005

Man is more than a beast

The primatologist Frans de Waal says we should get in touch with ‘our inner ape’. Speak for yourself.

These were the parting words of Frans de Waal, one of the world’s foremost primatologists, when we met to discuss his new book Our Inner Ape: The Past and Future of Human Nature: ‘I hope you don’t portray me as pessimistic.’

Our Inner Ape describes the behaviour of our two closest living relatives - the bonobo and the chimpanzee - exploring what they can tell us about ourselves. De Waal argues for human and ape equivalence, and, according to the world-renowned zoologist, Desmond Morris, ‘he provides us with a revealing picture of the inner ape inside each and every one of us’.

In the book, de Waal asserts that ‘humanity’s special place in the cosmos is one of abandoned claims and moving goalposts’. But nothing in Our Inner Ape - nor research and findings from the fields of primatology and zoology - persuade me to abandon my belief in human exceptionalism.

To abandon the belief in our unique capacity to solve problems through the application of science and reason means abandoning a belief in change. De Waal, however, does not believe his idea of human and ape equivalence is in any way fatalistic.

He recognises that human beings have had a lot of bad press of late. He writes that ‘of the millions of pages written over the centuries about human nature, none are as bleak as those of the last three decades - and none as wrong’. When the Western world took stock of what had happened in the Second World War, it was, de Waal says, ‘impossible to ignore the savagery that had been committed in the heart of Europe by otherwise civilised people. Comparisons with animals were ubiquitous’. The argument was that deep down we humans are violent and amoral.

But de Waal does not believe that humans are naturally all bad. He draws upon his research on bonobos to argue in his book that, ‘peaceful by nature, they belie the notion that ours is a purely bloodthirsty lineage’: ‘Bonobos make love, not war. They’re the hippies of the primate world.’ In his view: ‘To have two close relations with strikingly different societies is extraordinarily instructive. The power-hungry and brutal chimp contrasts with the peace-loving and erotic bonobo - a kind of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Our own nature is an uneasy marriage of the two.’ (1)

De Waal argues that humaneness is grounded in social instinct that we share with other animals. ‘This’, he says, ‘is obviously a more optimistic view than the one proclaiming that we “alone on Earth” can overcome our basic instinct. In the latter view, human decency is no more than a thin crust - something we invented rather than inherited.’

It may be hard to understand how something as elusive as human agency may have emerged in the course of evolution. But it did. And, yes, we ‘alone on Earth’ do have the potential to shape our destiny and improve our lot. As Karl Marx so astutely proclaimed: man makes his own history, but not necessarily in circumstances of his own choosing.

In the six million years since the human and ape lines first diverged, the behaviour and lifestyles of apes have hardly changed. Human behaviour, relationships, lifestyles and culture clearly have. We have been able to build upon the achievements of previous generations. In just the past century we have brought, through constant innovation, vast improvements to our lives: including better health, longer life expectancy, higher living standards and more sophisticated means of communication and transport.

Primatology may be able to give us some insight into our evolutionary past, and help us start answering the difficult question of how human consciousness emerged. But ape studies cannot tell us much about why we behave the way we do today and how we got as far as we have.

There is clearly a biological basis to the emergence of consciousness and language. But we are not born with the creative, flexible and imaginative thinking that characterises human beings. It emerges in the course of development: humans develop from helpless biological beings into conscious beings with a sense of self and an independence of thought. The evolution of the human genetic make-up is merely the precondition for our humanity.

There is no clear consensus on what is the biological basis to human consciousness. De Waal tells me that the key is ‘empathy: we are hardwired to connect with those around us and to resonate with them, also emotionally. It’s a fully automated process’.

Here de Waal may well be touching on the key biological components to the emergence of human insight and engagement. Peter Hobson, professor of developmental psychopathology and author of The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking, puts a persuasive case for human thought, language and self-awareness developing ‘in the cradle of emotional engagement between the infant and caregiver’ (2). Emotional engagement and communication, he argues, are the foundation on which creative symbolic thought develops.

It may be the case, as de Waal argues, that the great apes possess some rudimentary form of emotional engagement. But the limitations of this ‘empathy’ or emotional engagement becomes clear when exploring the emergence, and transformative nature, of engagement in young children.

Through reviewing an array of clinical and experimental studies, Hobson shows that even in early infancy children have a capacity to react to the emotions of others. This points to an innate desire to engage with fellow human beings. However, with development, that innate desire is transformed into something qualitatively different - that is, symbolic engagement or, in other words, language.

As Hobson writes: ‘At this point, [the child] leaves infancy behind. Empowered by language and other forms of symbolic functioning, she takes off into the realms of culture. The infant has been lifted out of the cradle of thought. Engagement with others has taught this soul to fly.’

It is when thought and speech come together that children’s thinking is raised to new heights and they start acquiring truly human characteristics. Language becomes a tool of thought allowing children increasingly to master their own behaviour. Apes never develop the ability to use language to regulate their own actions in the way that even toddlers are able to do.

The differences in language, tool-use, self-awareness and insight between apes and humans are vast. A human child, even as young as two years of age, is intellectually head and shoulders above any ape.

It is far from clear whether apes have rudimentary forms of human-like insight and engagement. But if apes did have the capacity for insight, would we not see evidence of this in the way they live their lives? Would we not see a generation-upon-generation growth in their abilities?

When I put this question to de Waal, he responds: ‘But the great apes live fine now, except for us eating up their habitat. They have less pressure to improve their lot. So the question is not “why don’t chimps use all these capacities?”, but “why would they?”. They live in an environment where there is less pressure on them to do that.’

Anyway, he says, ‘apes do have the same basic capacity for cultural transmission that human beings have. If we consider the issue of the accumulation of knowledge there are parallels between humans and the great apes’. I have visions of apes reading books, composing music or teaching algebra, but that’s not what’s being suggested. Instead the ‘accumulation of knowledge’ involves acquiring and passing on skills such as how to use sticks to fish for termites or stones to crack nuts.

The cultural, as opposed to genetic, transmission of behaviour, where actions are passed on through some kind of teaching, learning or observation, is used as evidence of apes’ higher order reasoning abilities.

A review by Andrew Whiten and his colleagues of a number of field studies reveals evidence of at least 39 local variations in chimp behavioural patterns, including tool-use, communication and grooming rituals - behaviours that are common in some communities and absent in others (3). So it seems that these animals are capable of learning new skills and of passing them on to their fellows.

But the question remains: what does this tell us about their mental capacities? The existence of cultural transmission is often taken as evidence that animals are capable of some form of social learning (such as imitation) and possibly even teaching. But there is in fact no evidence of apes being able to teach their young. Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Centre in Germany, points out that ‘nonhuman primates do not point to distal entities in the environment, they do not hold up objects for others to see and share, and they do not actively give or offer objects to other individuals. They also do not actively teach one another’ (4).

Reviewing the literature on primate behaviour, it emerges that there is no consensus among scientists as to whether apes are capable of the simplest form of social learning - imitation (5).

The fact that it takes chimps up to four years to acquire the necessary skills to select and adequately use tools to crack nuts implies that they are not capable of true imitation, never mind any form of teaching. Young chimps invest a lot of time and effort in attempts to crack nuts that are, after all, an important part of their diet. The slow rate of their development raises questions about their ability to reflect on what they and their fellow apes are doing.

Compare this to the human ability to teach new skills and ways of thinking and to learn from each other’s insights: this laid the foundation for the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the development of science and technology, and the constant transformations of our ways of living.

According to de Waal, society is merely a surface veneer. If one looks beneath the surface one will find that we are merely animals. He accuses me of being on a completely ‘different track’. ‘You are talking about the unique capacities of humans’, he mocks, ‘but genetically we are 98.5 per cent identical to chimps and bonobos, and mentally, socially and emotionally we are probably also 98.5 percent identical to chimps and bonobos. We love to emphasise that little difference that exists and cling to it and make a big deal out of it, but the similarities vastly outnumber the differences.’

Six million years of ape evolution may have resulted in the emergence of 39 local behavioural patterns in tool-use, communication and grooming rituals. But this has not moved them beyond their hand-to-mouth existence nor led to any significant changes in the way they live. Our lives have changed much more in just the past decade - in terms of the technology we use, how we communicate with each other, and how we form and sustain personal relationships.

To say that there is no substantial difference between cultural transmission among apes and humans is like saying there is no substantial difference between a glacier and a car - both move from A to B, albeit one a lot slower than the other. De Waal makes the same mistake in looking at everything from warfare (apparently, the conflict between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda can be explained on the basis of the same ‘switches’ that turn ‘chimpanzee group mates into each other’s deadliest foes’) to politics (the US constitution and the Magna Carta of 1215 can apparently be explained on the same basis as chimps’ ‘collective resistance against the overbearing alpha male’).

Considering the vast differences in the way we live, it is very difficult to sustain the argument that apes are ‘just like us’. What appears to be behind today’s fashionable view of ape and human equivalence is a denigration of human capacities and human ingenuity. The richness of human experience is trivialised because human experiences are lowered to, and equated with, those of animals.

I will carry on ‘making a big deal’ out of the vast differences that exist between humans and apes. Unless we hold on to the belief in our exceptional abilities we will never be able to envision or fight for a better future.

Our Inner Ape: The Past and Future of Human Nature is published by Riverhead Books, October 2005. Buy a copy of this book from Amazon UK or Amazon USA.

(1) p5, Our Inner Ape: The Past and Future of Human Nature, Frans de Waal

(2) The Cradle of Thought: exploring the origins of thinking, Peter Hobson, Macmillan, 22 February 2002, p76

(3) Nature, Vol 399, 17 June 1999

(4) Michael Tomasello, ‘Primate Cognition: Introduction to the issue’, Cognitive Science Vol 24 (3) 2000, p358

(5) See a detailed review by Andrew Whiten, ‘Primate Culture and Social Learning’, Cognitive Science Vol 24 (3), 2000

First published by spiked

Friday 29 July 2005

Singer on 'speciesism': a specious argument

In his new book In Defense of Animals, Peter Singer reduces the value of human life to a tick-list of capabilities.

In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave, Peter Singer (editor), Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Peter Singer is recognised as the driving force behind the modern animal rights movement, and is widely credited with making ‘speciesism’ an international issue - speciesism being the idea that a human-centered morality is as abhorrent as racism or sexism. His new book In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave, of which he is editor, brings together ‘the best current ethical thinking about animals’, according to the cover blurb.

Yet neither the data nor the philosophical arguments in this book put forward anything like a convincing challenge to the Enlightenment belief in human exceptionalism.

That many today seem to go along with the idea that animals are ultimately not that different from humans is not the result of intellectual debate and persuasion, but rather points to a contemporary cultural outlook that denigrates human abilities.

This doesn’t mean, however, that people live their lives on the basis of human and animal equivalence. Those who treat animals in the same way they treat their fellow human beings are generally viewed as eccentrics or, worse, social misfits. Society could not function if we did not base out lives on the basic idea that humans are superior to animals. But today, we seem to have become uncomfortable with asserting that superiority.

Thirty years ago, when Singer wrote a review in the New York Review of Books entitled ‘Animal Liberation’, the mood was rather different. The use of the term ‘animal liberation’, which drew explicit comparisons with the liberation struggles of the 1960s, provoked widespread ridicule. But according to Singer, the title was used deliberately, ‘to say that just as we needed to overcome prejudices against black people, women and gays, so too we should strive to overcome our prejudices against non-human animals and start taking their interests seriously’.

Despite provoking outrage back then, this insulting comparison between the plight of animals and the oppression of black people, women or gays does not seem to raise many eyebrows today.

As Singer points out in the introduction to In Defense of Animals, ‘in 1970 the number of writings on the ethical status of animals was tiny [and] the tally now must be in the thousands’. In a roundabout way, he takes much of the credit for this growth of the animal rights movement. Philosophers, like himself, ‘were not the mother of the movement, but they did ease its passage into the world and - who knows - may have prevented it being stillborn’, he argues.

The philosophical framework that purportedly acted like a midwife for the animal rights movement is ‘preference utilitarianism’. Building on Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy, Singer believes that moral consideration should not be based on whether a being can reason or talk but on whether it can suffer. To Singer it is not happiness that matters, but preferences and interests. Preference utilitarianism therefore claims that the morally right course of action should be worked out by weighing up the preferences of all ‘beings with interests’ that might be affected by a certain action.

Singer argues that ‘all beings with interests are entitled to equal consideration: that is, we should not give their interests any less consideration than we give to the similar interests of members of our own species’.

If we tried to live our lives by Singer’s ethical calculus, every moral decision would become a never-ending computation of multifarious, and often unknown, costs and benefits. It would be impossible practically to live like that: indeed, Singer himself has been lambasted for failing to live up to his own moral teachings.

As well as being impractical, Singer’s philosophy is founded on a flawed conception of what it means to be human. He rejects the traditional distinction between humans and non-humans, distinguishing instead between ‘beings with interests’ and those without interests.

The special moral significance given to human beings has historically been on the basis of ‘the ability to reason, self-awareness, possessing a sense of justice, language, autonomy, and so on’, says Singer. But, he asks, seeming to believe that he has boxed humanists into a corner, how can ‘speciecists’ account for the fact that some human beings are ‘entirely lacking in these characteristics’? And what about the evidence for some non-human animals possessing at least some of the advanced cognitive characteristics of humans?

Setting aside the fact that there is no convincing evidence that animals have any capacity for insight - not even the great apes (see Why humans are superior to apes, by Helene Guldberg) - Singer is wrong to conclude that infants and neurologically impaired individuals are somehow less than human.

He has provoked a great deal of controversy in recent years for advocating euthanasia for severely disabled infants. Neonates and neurologically impaired human beings are not persons, in his view - in the sense that they are not ‘beings with interests’ - and therefore they have a lesser moral status than many animals.

However, it is not logically inconsistent to identify the ability to reason and reflect as the defining human characteristic while avoiding using that same criteria to decide whether or not an individual is human, or is worthy of having life.

Human progress has been made possible through our ability to evaluate who we are, where we come from and where we are going. In the past century alone we have constantly innovated to make vast improvements to our lives: including better health, longer life expectancy, higher living standards and more sophisticated means of communication and transport. Human society is thus premised on our ability to reason and reflect.

But the question of when life begins, or questions about the value of life, cannot be reduced to whether an individual has the capacity to reason, reflect and is self-aware - if that was the case, then most children under two would not be seen as human. Neither is this something that can be answered biologically. When life begins is a complex social question, defined differently in different societies in different historical periods.

As lawyer John Fitzpatrick has pointed out on spiked, it is necessary to draw a line as to ‘when life begins’ at some point, and ‘the law confers legal personhood at birth, drawing a crucial line at this point for understandable reasons, not least the fact of separation and entry into the world’ (see Jodie and Mary: whose choice was it anyway?, by John Fitzpatrick).

The distinction we make today between a fetus and a neonate is a social, moral and legal one that cannot be justified in terms of cognitive abilities or biology. The physical event of birth does not transform a fetus into a self-aware person. Yet in most societies a child, once born, is recognised in law as a legal person.

Singer gets himself into a complete muddle because he tries to reduce complex social questions and morality to simple logic. He says that those who believe morality is based on a social contract run into difficulties because ‘it means we have no direct duties to small children’. But you don’t need to be a professor of philosophy to work out that it is possible to confer legal personhood on children without giving them the same rights as adults.

The value of human life - and complex questions about life and death - cannot be reduced to simple arithmetic. It is a sign of a civilised human society that, even if severely disabled, an individual can be included in our common humanity. The value of human life cannot be reduced to a tick-list of capabilities. As Oscar Wilde might have said, that would be the outlook of a cynic: someone who ‘knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’.

First published by spiked

Monday 25 July 2005

Why Roman picked London for his libel trial

How does a film director based in France who is a fugitive from the USA sue a US publisher and win? By taking his case to ‘a town called Sue’.

How does a fugitive Polish film director living in France and facing a statutory rape charge in the USA sue a US publisher for libel and win? By suing in London’s High Court, of course.

On 22 July 2005, Roman Polanski was awarded £50,000 libel damages from Vanity Fair magazine, which had claimed that on the way to the funeral of his wife Sharon Tate, who was brutally murdered in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson, Polanski had tried to seduce the ‘Swedish beauty’ Beate Telle in a New York restaurant. Vanity Fair alleged that Polanski had promised to make Telle into ‘another Sharon Tate’.

The publisher of Vanity Fair, Condé Nast, conceded in court that the article was inaccurate in terms of dates, but insisted that the incident did happen. Polanski denied it, and said the allegation ‘dishonours my memory of Sharon’. Telle - who was Norwegian, not Swedish, and who did not testify at the trial - yesterday claimed in an interview with the UK Mail on Sunday that Polanski had never tried to seduce her.

In 1977, Polanski was convicted of having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in Hollywood. Fearing a lengthy jail sentence, he fled to France. As a French citizen he could not be extradited to the USA, but the same protection does not apply in the UK.

Yet, despite his fears about facing extradition to America if he entered the UK, Polanski succeeded in taking his libel case to the High Court in London. In February 2005, Law Lords ruled that Polanski should not be ‘denied access to justice’ because of extradition fears and should be allowed to give evidence via a video link.

It is not hard to imagine why Polanski would prefer to sue in England rather than France or America. As the libel lawyer David Hooper explained in his book Reputations Under Fire: ‘London has become known to many foreign “forum-shoppers” as a town named Sue - a place where you can launder your reputation on the basis of a few sales in the UK of some overseas publication.’

It is clear why the High Court is so attractive to litigants. In England the law of libel assumes that the words complained of are false and that the claimants reputation is untarnished. The lawyer for Vanity Fair, Tom Shields, unsuccessfully argued that Polanski didn’t have a reputation to be lowered. ‘As to whether Mr Polanski’s reputation is capable of being damaged, sadly, we would say, it is beyond repair’, he said.

Shields argued that Polanski’s reputation had already been ruined by his conviction in the USA for unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl and his escape from justice ever since. Yet in summing up, Justice Eady warned the jury that they were not there to judge Polanski’s morals.

Despite Polanski’s tarnished reputation, the odds were stacked in his favour in London’s Royal Courts of Justice. In England, claimants do not have to prove any actual damage to reputation - only that the statement could potentially lower their esteem in the eyes of ‘right-thinking members of the public’. The burden then falls on the defendant to prove that the defamatory words - and their possible interpretations - are true.

Polanski’s case would unlikely have come to court in the USA, even if he had ventured back there. The landmark ruling of New York Times v Sullivan in 1964 created a public figure defence in the USA, making it very difficult for public individuals to sue for libel. It was recognised that public figures have recourse, more than anybody else, to dispute unfair allegations made against them. In order to succeed, claimants would therefore need to show that not only were the allegations untrue but that they were made maliciously or with reckless disregard to the truth.

The US Supreme Court observed that in free debate erroneous statements are inevitable and must be protected - otherwise free expression would not have the ‘breathing space’ it needs and media self-censorship would be inevitable. The fear of not being able to prove the truth of the published words in court, and the recognition of the expense and resources required to do so, would limit public debate.

Some may argue that a law curtailing the freedom to publish titillating revelations about the sordid sex lives of public figures is not much of a threat to free speech. Of course, it would not be much of a loss to society if the seemingly erroneous claims about what went on between Polanski and a Norwegian model in a New York restaurant were never published.

But the problem with libel law is that it has a chilling effect on the whole of the media. The law does not only affect those journalists, broadcasters, editors and publishers who are faced with libel writs. If authors, editors or publishers have the smallest inkling that the truth of a proposition cannot be proven in court (even when made in good faith), the knowledge that they will have a less than a one-in-five chance of success in a libel trial means the story is most likely to be dropped.

Anyone concerned with raising the level of public debate should argue for more speech and debate, not less. That means scrapping the English libel law, for a start.

First published by spiked

Monday 9 May 2005

How can we halt the 'march of unreason'?

Dick Taverne on why we need to defend the Enlightenment against dodgy science and ‘dogmatic environmentalists’.

In his new book The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy, and the New Fundamentalism, Dick Taverne - who has had careers in politics, law, economics and industry, and who now sits as a Liberal Democrat in the UK House of Lords - presents a formidable case against what he terms ‘dogmatic environmentalists’.

Yet he was not always critical of their ‘dodgy science’. He admits to being one of many who ‘fell under the spell of Rachel Carson’ when reading her book, The Silent Spring, in 1962. In the late Sixties, as a Labour treasury minister, he took time off from ‘contemplating the economic problems of the UK’ to attend a conference at which Paul Ehrlich - the widely read prophet of doom - was ‘the star attraction’.

Taverne later joined both Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, and in the mid-Seventies - to make his ‘small contribution to cleaner air’ - gave up owning a car in favour of a bicycle. ‘It is a most enjoyable way to travel about London’, he says. ‘You can be sure of arriving on time, and you suffer none of the frustrations of being stuck in traffic jams or not finding anywhere to park’ (unless you try to park your bike in the vicinity of the Houses of Parliament, that is, where there are numerous signs warning that the police may destroy unattended bikes).

Having also used a bicycle as my main form of urban transport for many years, I agree with Taverne about its merits. But it is also an indictment of our capital city’s transport system that almost every journey in London is faster by bike than it is by public transport.

Despite his longstanding concerns for the environment, Taverne doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to attacking ‘irrational and fundamentalist forces’ in the environmentalist movement. ‘I am a militant rationalist’, he tells me. ‘Not that I think all that matters in the world is reason, or that poetry and music do not matter. But where reason is applicable and things can be judged by evidence, then we cannot discard reason and evidence.’ Taverne set up the charity Sense About Science in 2002, and his March of Unreason contains a wealth of evidence against the benefits of alternative medicine and organic farming and for the benefits of genetically modified food.

Taverne is concerned that irrational practices - ‘eco-fundamentalism’ and fundamentalist religion - are flourishing, and undermining the health of civilised society. He is ‘a great admirer of the Enlightenment as a glorious period in the history of mankind’, and warns that we are in danger of turning back the clock. The ‘back to nature’ movement is ‘a deeply disturbing anti-Enlightenment reaction’, he argues.

In The March of Unreason, Taverne warns that ‘many people have become increasingly sceptical about the benefits of new technology and no longer trust experts. Possible risks from new developments loom larger in the public mind than possible benefits and we hear constantly about the need to apply “the Precautionary Principle”, as if it is some scientific law that needs no further explanation.’

Although Taverne is ‘an optimist by nature’, he does not believe we should view the world through rose-tinted glasses. But he does think it is ‘an extremely unfortunate feature of life if we are pessimistic’. His optimism allows him to view the ‘back to nature’ movement as ‘a passing fad’.

‘Homeopathy and alternative medicine: they all claim it works’, he says. ‘Of course it works. The placebo effect works. Witchcraft worked when people believed in it. Anything that makes people feel better is, in a sense, a good thing, but it is also a form of deceit.’ He thinks that alternative medicine will do a lot of damage, but that ‘in due course people will come to realise - perhaps through education - that modern medicine is much more important than going back to ancient superstitions’.

He also believes that the popularity of ‘organics’ will fade. ‘But at the moment’, he says, warning me that he feels very passionately about this issue, ‘organic farming is deeply damaging. The idea that we can save the world by going organic is not just an illusion and a throwback to pre-historic days; it is also positively damaging. Organic farming is a very inefficient use of land’.

Taverne’s critics are, it seems, as passionate about this issue as he is. ‘Writing for the Guardian, I get a certain amount of abuse if I write something in favour of genetically modified crops or if I question any other fads - but if I write something attacking organics I get a torrent of abuse.’

The first line of criticism is usually that he must be in the pay of big companies. It seems almost impossible to put the case for progress, science and development today without being accused of being in bed with big corporations. Taverne has no illusions about the motivations of such corporations, warning that they have to be watched, ‘like all organisations with an agenda’.  ‘But I don’t find that companies are necessarily more motivated to cause ill to mankind than the movements designed to save the planet’, he says.

Neither pressure groups nor companies are accountable or democratic, but at least companies face the discipline of the market. As Taverne points out, ‘If a company produces a dud product it may ruin the company. Look at what happened to Distillers (Biochemical Ltd) after the thalidomide scandal. It disappeared.’

Taverne does not believe that pressure groups face a similar kind of discipline. ‘Their only test of success is whether they increase their network of support. And the more scare stories they raise, the better they will be at raising money. They suffer a bit if scare stories are exposed, but not much, as we seem quickly to forget about that.’

He points out that the Brent Spar saga did not do much damage to Greenpeace. In the mid-Nineties, Greenpeace initiated a campaign to stop Shell from dumping a disused giant oil rig in the Atlantic ocean. Shell might be one of the most powerful companies in the world, but in the face of Greenpeace’s effective media campaign and a Europe-wide boycott of its petrol stations, it caved in and left Brent Spar in a Norwegian fjord instead. The Natural Environment Research Council later confirmed that disposal in the mid-Atlantic would have been a cheaper and environmentally more beneficial way of getting rid of the rig.

The ‘dogmatic environmentalists’ that Taverne persuasively criticises in The March of Unreason have a lot to answer for. But I wonder whether Taverne is endowing them with too much power? In his book, he traces ‘some of the reasons for this change from optimism to widespread suspicion and pessimism towards science that exists today, and identif[ies] the rise of the environment movement as probably the most significant’.

He warns that ‘there is a semi-religious streak in the green fundamentalists. When they say “I don’t give a damn about the evidence because I know I am trying to save the world”, then they are not a million miles away from the creationists who say “I don’t give a damn about the evidence because it is written in the Bible”’.

Green and religious fundamentalists are fairly easy targets, but they are ultimately not the main problem. The problem goes far deeper and is all-pervasive: it is today’s cultural climate of cynicism and pessimism that provides a fertile ground for ‘dogmatic environmentalists’ to feed on. A society that has lost faith in humanity - in our ability to face up to challenges and to improve our condition - will allow environmentalists to present themselves, much to Taverne’s disdain, as ‘a noble band of crusaders struggling against malign forces in society that will damage or destroy the planet’. They are pushing at an open door.

It seems that Taverne, the optimist, has perhaps underestimated the forces of conservatism that we are up against today. The march of unreason, which Taverne believes will ultimately retreat partly of its own accord, may actually be a lot harder to fight against. It is not the strength of the ideas put forward by the ‘back to nature’ brigade that makes the battle such a challenge, but the lack of forward-looking ideas at the heart of public life.

What we need is a robust defence of reason, science and democracy, because without these things society will stagnate. And although The March of Unreason risks, in parts, attaching too much importance to eco-fundamentalists, it provides an engaging defence of Enlightenment values.

The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy, and the New Fundamentalism, by Dick Taverne, is published by Oxford University Press. Buy this book from Amazon(UK) or Amazon(USA).

First published by spiked

Friday 8 April 2005

All in the hormones?

Vivienne Parry, author of The Truth About Hormones, questions whether chemicals control our destinies.

Vivienne Parry, writer, broadcaster and science enthusiast, doesn’t seem to be too concerned about offending the new conformism. Reminiscing on her early teenage years - when she towered above her male dancing partners - she declares: ‘Thank God my mother smoked 40 cigarettes a day during pregnancy, or else I would have been 6 foot 3.’

In her new book The Truth about Hormones, published this week, Parry seeks to provide some ‘perspective and sanity’ on the discussion about hormones. We know that both natural and manmade chemicals with hormone-like actions are ubiquitous. They are in the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat and ‘in the very fabric of our daily lives, in cosmetics, plastics and household chemicals’. These endocrine disruptors - or ‘gender benders’ as they are commonly called - can block or disrupt the actions of human hormones.

This may sound scary, but as Parry tells me, ‘every mouthful of food that we have has some “endocrine disrupting” activity - without harm. Our bodies are evolved to have a large amount of “endocrine disruption” going on’. She explains that plant foods contain at least 12,000 chemicals - produced for structural, attractant, chemoprotective and hormonal purposes. Cabbage contains 49 natural pesticides. Although eating cabbage may inhibit the action of oestrogen, Parry says ‘such food has been part of the human diet for centuries and common sense suggests that we need not fear them’.

Some chemicals with oestrogen activity, such as phthalates, were banned in Europe in 2004. However this chemical is ‘five orders of magnitude [100,000] times less potent than the oestrogen in your own body, and a hundredfold less potent than the phytoestrogens found in food which you eat all the time’. Parry says: ‘We worry about the tiniest levels of hormones, believing they may cause major threat - when we have got walloping levels of hormones onboard internally. It doesn’t make sense.’

She finds it rather curious that some natural hormone disruptors are viewed as good while synthetic chemical disruptors are viewed as bad - especially given that ‘the [scientific] work that has been done shows that natural and synthetic chemicals turn on exactly the same genes’.

Synthetic chemicals are blamed for everything from the falling age of puberty and declining sperm counts to increasing rates of testicular and breast cancers. But take the age of puberty: falling from around 17 years of age in the mid-nineteenth century to around 11 years of age today. This may seem ‘unnatural’ to us - that 11-year-old girls are developing breasts, for instance. But as Parry says, ‘part of the reason for this is simply that we are better fed and are healthier. It is curious thing, isn’t it? People want to say that chemicals are all terrible and horrible, and we are all going to hell in a handcart, but at the same time we are living longer than ever before - which is kind of an inconvenient fact.’

The study of hormones has a relatively short history: it wasn’t until 1905 that the word ‘hormone’ was first coined. Most people (including myself) know little about hormones, other than being able to name a few - such as testosterone, oeststrogen or adrenalin. For those who want a better understanding, Parry’s opening chapter, ‘A bluffer’s guide to hormones’, is an accessible and fun read. She explains that hormones are one of the body’s two great communication systems. The nervous system carries messages from the brain that are transmitted throughout the body by electrical stimuli, while the endocrine system - the hormone system - is much slower, and uses the blood as its medium for communication, and chemicals - hormones - as its messenger.

We are shown how hormones rule our internal world: controlling our growth, metabolism, weight, water balance, body clock, fertility and much more. Parry criticises ‘hormone determinism’, arguing in The Truth about Hormones that ‘hormones are just part of what you are and there’s more to human life than the endocrine system, magnificent though it is’. But she herself seems to veer towards this when it comes to the murky subjects of sex and attraction, claiming that hormones ‘are busily brokering marriages behind the scenes’. In the same chapter she writes, ‘Free will? I don’t think so, madam. We’re talking sexual chemistry here with your brain playing Cupid, and your hormones providing the arrows’.

Endocrinology clearly can tell us much about how our bodies work, and provide insights into why certain behaviours are selected for through evolution. But hormones do not control us. Neither, of course, are we in control of our hormones. As Parry states ‘hormones to some extent work behind our backs’. Even though most women don’t know when they are ovulating, research has found that men do seem to be able to tell. Studies have shown, Parry explains in the book, that ‘simulated ovulation scents send [men’s] testosterone levels soaring’. So subconsciously men’s brains are picking up olfactory signals from women - which would make sense in human evolutionary terms. But does that mean that the study of hormones can tell us about love, romance or marriage - who we fall for, whether or not we pursue an initial attraction or decide to commit to a person?

When Parry discusses the phenomenon of adolescence she again emphasises the biological roots of ‘living in a universe of one’, arguing that: ‘Teenagers are trapped in limbo - neither children nor adults: an excruciating mix of vulnerability and potential, which by turns engages, inspires and alienates adults.’ She continues: ‘It is tempting to believe - indeed, it has always been assumed - that [teenage] behaviour is entirely hormone driven. After all, aren’t teenagers hormones on wheels?’

Hormones themselves aren’t seen as the problem. ‘There is no consistent relationship between normal circulating testosterone levels and violence in teenagers.’ Instead, she tells me, it is the process of neurological maturation that is responsible for much of the behaviour that was classically attributed to hormones - ‘teenagers are disabled by the brain changes that are going on’.

But adolescence is not a timeless or universal human concept. Youth culture is a relatively recent phenomenon, emerging during the twentieth century. Not all societies have a period of adolescence. In some societies children enter adulthood, with all the responsibilities that entails, in their early teens. Brain changes may have an impact, but it’s unlikely that they alone can explain adolescent behavior.

And surely there cannot be a biological explanation for the expansion of adolescence in Western societies? Parry recognises this. ‘My parents’ generation was pretty much out of the nest and working at 16’, she says. ‘If I get mine out of the nest [she has two adolescent boys] by 25 I’ll be lucky - and that’s probably how most parents feel. That’s partly because of a cultural shift. We want them to stay in education longer - recognising they need this period of adjustment and experimentation at being an adult.’

Although I wouldn’t go along with the claims made in the Truth about Hormones that we ‘are completely in the thrall of [hormones]’, Parry does show the potential of this exciting - and adolescent, I suppose - science that can potentially teach us so much more about ourselves and our bodies.

The Truth About Hormones is published by Atlantic books, 2005. Buy this book from Amazon (UK).

First published by spiked

Friday 3 December 2004

Galloway 1, free speech 0

Ex-Labour MP George Galloway was defamed, but his victory under English libel law is nothing to celebrate.

Ex-Labour MP George Galloway, who successfully won his libel battle against the Daily Telegraph on 2 December 2004, proclaimed in his customarily flamboyant style that the allegations made by the paper - that he was in the secret pay of Saddam Hussein - were ‘a dagger, a sword, right through the heart of my political life’. After the ruling he declared: ‘I am glad and somewhat humbled to discover that there is at least one corner of the English field which remains uncorrupted and independent, and that corner is in this courtroom.’

It is a sad state of affairs when anti-war campaigners honour the High Court as one of the sole remaining beacons of light. Court 13 - where Galloway’s case was heard - is the place where in July 1987 the now disgraced peer Jeffrey Archer won his £500,000 libel damages from the Daily Star, over the allegations that he had had sex with a prostitute. Later convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice, Archer was forced to repay the Daily Star. It was also in Court 13 that high drama and farce were played out between Mohamed al-Fayed and Neil Hamilton - described during the proceedings as the meeting of a ‘habitual liar’ and a ‘politician on the make’.

Galloway’s uncorrupted and independent ‘corner of the English field’ has won London the reputation as the libel capital of the world, often being dubbed ‘a town called Sue’. This is not to imply that the Daily Telegraph was right to malign Galloway. But a victory in the High Court is unlikely to mend wounds from the sword ‘through the heart of [his] political life’. Everybody knows that London’s High Court is the place where chancers come to launder their reputation - if they have enough money to pay the extortionate lawyers’ fees, that is.

The case may be seen by some as the victory of a poor and hounded individual against a large and powerful news corporation. But it can also be seen as a further nail in the coffin of press freedom. The Daily Telegraph did not defend the truth of its claims, relying instead on what is known as the Reynolds defence of qualified privilege - which recognises that on certain occasions a person should be free to publish defamatory matter, provided he acts in good faith, even though it may prove to be false.

This defence was used by Times Newspapers Limited in the case brought by the former Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Albert Reynolds. The House of Lords ruled that newspapers that have made defamatory statements - even if they are untrue - should be protected if the information published is so important that the interest in publishing it outweighs safeguarding a person’s reputation. ‘The press discharges vital functions as a bloodhound as well as a watchdog’, the Lords ruled. ‘The court should be slow to conclude that a publication was not in the public interest and, therefore, the public had no right to know, especially when the information is in the field of political discussion. Any lingering doubts should be resolved in favour of publication.’

The ruling was seen by many as a victory for press freedom. But, as was argued on spiked at the time, England still has a long way to go to catch up with the law as it exists in most other Western countries. In England, libel law rests on the assumption that claimants have an ‘unblemished record’, and claimants only need to show that the words complained of are capable of lowering their standing in the estimation of ‘right-thinking members of the public’.

Those who sue do not need to prove that their reputation has been damaged, nor do they have to prove that the words complained of are untrue. The assumption is that the defamatory statement is false, with the burden falling on the defendant to prove it is true. This reversal of the burden of proof - with the defendant pretty much guilty until he proves his innocence - is almost unique to English libel law.

The defendant does not only have to defend the literal meaning of what has been said, but also possible interpretations. So arguing that a particular defamatory meaning was not intended will not hold up as a defence in court. Claimants can - and often do - succeed in attributing defamatory meanings to statements that the defendant never intended to be defamatory.

In the USA, the landmark ruling in New York Times v Sullivan in 1964 created a ‘public figure defence’, making it extremely difficult for public individuals to sue for libel. To succeed in a libel case, claimants would need to show that not only were the allegations untrue but that they were made maliciously or with reckless disregard to the truth.

The US Supreme Court observed that in free debate erroneous statements are inevitable and must be protected - otherwise free expression would not have the ‘breathing space’ it needs, and media self-censorship would become the norm. The fear of not being able to prove the truth of the published words in court - and the recognition of the expense and resources required to do so - would limit public debate.

In 1997, the US Maryland State Appeals Court refused to recognise an English ruling, arguing that the principles of English libel law failed to measure up to basic human rights standards and were ‘repugnant’ to the First Amendment ideal of free speech.

By broadening the scope of qualified privilege it was assumed that English law was finally moving towards incorporating a ‘public interest’ defence. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. When looking at the criteria that publications will have to meet in order to qualify for the protection, it becomes clear that this is only a very small step in that direction.

In the Reynolds ruling, the Lords suggested a list of at least 10 factors that should be taken into account to determine whether journalists and editors acted responsibly, including: the seriousness of the allegation; the nature of the information, and the extent to which the subject matter is a matter of public concern; the source of the information; the steps taken to verify the information; the urgency of the matter; whether comment was sought from the claimant or whether the article contained the gist of the claimant’s side of the story; and the tone of the article.

In short, the price of broadening ‘qualified privilege’ is to submit editorial judgements to judicial scrutiny. Justice Eady said the Daily Telegraph didn’t give Galloway a ‘fair or reasonable opportunity’ to investigate or respond to the allegations and had no ‘social or moral duty’ to publish the articles. The Telegraph was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Unable to verify its allegations, it argued that it had acted ‘responsibly’ and ‘in the public interest’. Given the number of hoops it would have to jump through to be deemed to have acted ‘responsibly’, and the vituperative nature of the articles it published, the Telegraph was clearly in a no-win situation. You don’t need to have any sympathy with the pro-war views of that newspaper to see that there is a problem with this.

Newspapers should have the right to publish abusive articles about politicians - who, after all, are at the centre of public life, and have recourse, more than anybody else, to dispute unfair allegations made against them. When it is left to judges, however ‘uncorrupted’ and ‘independent’ in Galloway’s eyes, to make decisions about the ‘social and moral duty’ of the media and balance the interests of freedom of speech and the protection of reputation, democracy will inevitably suffer. In practice, safeguarding a person’s reputation invariably outweighs the right to publish.

It is almost impossible for editors to know at the time of publication whether a particular story is likely to be protected or not, leaving little protection for the open exchange of ideas.

Almost five years ago spiked editor Mick Hume and myself were defendants - in Court 14, next door to Galloway’s uncorrupted and independent corner - in a libel case brought by ITN that led to the closure of our magazine, LM. We are therefore acutely aware of the costly and time-consuming nature of libel trials. But the law does not only affect those journalists, broadcasters, editors and publishers who are faced with libel writs. It has a chilling effect on the whole of the media. Rather than tinkering with something that is antithetical to free speech, it is time we got rid of the libel law once and for all.

First published by spiked

Friday 26 November 2004

Stop apologising for animal experiments

We don’t need more laws against animal rights activists, but a more robust defence of animal experimentation.

This year’s Queen’s Speech, in which the British government sets out its lawmaking agenda for the forthcoming year, was dominated by a string of anti-crime measures - including an unprecedented criminal offence that targets ‘economic sabotage’ conducted by animal rights extremists.

In the past year alone, activists’ have succeeded in blocking the £24million primate research centre at Cambridge University, and interrupting work at the £18million animal research facility at Oxford University.

UK prime minister Tony Blair, who has vowed to make Britain a global magnet for science companies, is determined to tackle the small band of misanthropes responsible and prevent them from further targeting companies and research institutions.

But surely there are more than enough laws to criminalise harassment, intimidation and protest? Home Secretary David Blunkett is planning to make it a legal offence to ‘target’ (and that can even mean phoning more than twice) directors, shareholders and employees in companies involved in animal experimentation.

However abhorrent their ideas, animal rights activists should have the right to express their views, and even to make a few phone calls, however threatening. If their protests involve physical violence or vandalism then the law is already well-equipped to deal with them. It is against the law to throw bricks through people’s windows and to damage other people’s property.

The anti-vivisectionists’ campaigns of harassment and intimidation, even when they are lawful, are a legitimate concern for the individuals at the receiving end. It is of course worrying to receive phone calls in which you or your family are threatened.

But the government’s authoritarian strategy - restricting freedom of movement further, cracking down on pickets, and broadening the definition of harassment - is unlikely to improve matters. The anti-vivisectionists are not going to stop just because more of their activities are made illegal. If anything, they will win some sympathy as ‘victims of civil rights abuses’.

Currently, the tactics of animal rights activists are generally not seen as acceptable - yet a sense of defensiveness at the heart of the government and the research community means that they constantly feel the need to send out a ‘clear message’ to the British public about how unacceptable the extremists’ actions are.

When setting out her Department of Trade and Industry’s five-year-plan to make Britain the most attractive place in the world for scientific research, Patricia Hewitt stated that attacks on graveyards are ‘unacceptable and disgusting’ and should not be tolerated in a civilised society. She was referring to the desecration of the grave - and the removal of the body - of an 82-year-old woman whose relatives run a farm breeding guinea pigs for medical research. But since when were attacks on graveyards tolerated?

The British public does not, on the whole, support the tactics of a small band of animal rights extremists. A far bigger problem we face, both the government and those of us who support the use of animals in research, is that many do have some sympathy with the animal rights cause - the ‘ending of animal suffering’.

Making Britain a centre of scientific excellence will remain a pipe dream unless the government and the scientific community start tackling the animal rights arguments head on. Ministers have responded to criticisms from animal rights activists by highlighting that the UK has the ‘strongest laws in the world’ on the use of animals in research.

But there is no point in capitulating to the activists, by highlighting concern for animal welfare and dodging the fact that the killing and maiming of animals is necessary. We are not talking about wanton assaults on animals, of course, which most of us find abhorrent. But millions of animals have been and will be used in experiments; they will be cut open, pumped full of toxins and carcinogens, and ultimately ‘destroyed’, in order to further scientific knowledge and save human lives.

For sentimental reasons some may find this treatment distasteful. But many major medical advances - insulin to treat diabetes, polio vaccines, antibiotics, safe anaesthetics, open heart surgery, organ transplantation, drug treatments for ulcers, asthma and high blood pressure, and much more - would not have been won, or would have been introduced at great human cost, if it were not for animal experimentation. There are few people alive today who won’t have benefited in some way from such medical advances.

Rather than defensively stating that concern for animal welfare is paramount, which makes little sense and will convince nobody, the government and the research community should give an unequivocal message of support for animal research. So long as animal research helps in the battle against disease and disability, thereby improving human welfare, campaigners should champion it as a morally good pursuit - without feeling the need to apologise for anything.

First published by spiked

Friday 30 July 2004

Keep taking the tablets

Forget the scare stories, says Diarmuid Jeffreys, author of a history of aspirin – the little white pill is ‘one of the most amazing creations in medical history’.

In the opening pages of Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, Diarmuid Jeffreys describes this little white pill as ‘one of the most amazing creations in medical history, a drug so astonishingly versatile that it can relieve headache, ease your aching limbs, lower your temperature and treat some of the deadliest human diseases’.

Evidence shows that aspirin can prevent heart attacks, strokes and deep vein thrombosis, as well as bowel, lung and breast cancer, cataracts, migraine, infertility, herpes, Alzheimer’s disease and more.

Yet news headlines tend to highlight the risks rather than the benefits associated with pharmaceutical products, from gastointestinal bleeding to overdoses. According to the headline of a recent BBC News article, ‘Medicines are “killing 10,000 people”’; it was reported that one in 16 people admitted to two hospitals in Merseyside ‘had been admitted because of an adverse reaction to drugs such as aspirin’.

‘The media will often go for simple headlines’, says Jeffreys, who has worked in the media industry for years, as a journalist and a producer of current affairs and documentary programmes such as Newsnight and the Money Programme. So is the book an attempt to rebalance the debate about drugs? ‘To some extent, yes. I wanted to correct the impression given by the media.’ While recognising that there are risks associated with aspirin - just as there are with every other drug - Jeffreys argues that ‘you have to set these numbers against the thousands and thousands of people whose lives can be saved by taking aspirin on a daily basis’.

After his father suffered a heart attack 12 years ago and was put on a daily dose of aspirin, Jeffreys was struck by how ‘a very ordinary, everyday, humdrum pill that could be found in just about every bathroom cabinet when I was a kid could have morphed into something so life-saving’. He decided then that he would one day investigate how this could be, and now he has done just that. He found ‘it was like peeling away the skin of an onion. I came across Bayer’s story [the drug company that first patented aspirin over 100 years ago] and then I looked a little further and a little further, and a kind of mosaic of people, places and events began to emerge’.

Jeffreys’ book shows that aspirin did not just emerge out of nowhere. He provides a fascinating account of the history of the drug, which is ‘a product of a rollercoaster ride through time, of accidental discoveries and intuitive reasoning, of astounding scientific ingenuity, personal ambition and intense corporate rivalry’ (1).

Ancient Egyptian physicians used extracts from the willow tree as an analgesic. Centuries later the Greek physician Hippocrates recommended the bark of the willow tree as a remedy for the pains of childbirth and as a fever reducer. But it wasn’t until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that salicylates - the chemical found in the willow tree - became the subject of serious scientific investigation. The race was on to identify the active ingredient and to replicate it synthetically. At the end of the nineteenth century a German company, Friedrich Bayer & Co, succeeded in creating a relatively safe and very effective chemical compound, acetylsalicylic acid, which was renamed aspirin.

Within 15 years aspirin was one of the most widely used drugs in the world - ‘a pharmaceutical superstar’, as Jeffreys says. A few years later aspirin faced its greatest challenge, when influenza swept the world between 1918 and 1919. The pandemic was devastating, killing tens of millions of people. Aspirin didn’t cure influenza but what Jeffreys shows is that ‘it helped millions of people in their battle with the virus and undoubtedly saved lives as a result.’ (2)

In the course of telling aspirin’s story Jeffreys engagingly grapples with challenging questions about the nature of innovation and the impact of commercial rivalry on scientific advancement.

He argues that the late nineteenth century was a more fertile period for experimentation, partly because of ‘the hunger among scientists to crack some of the great secrets’, but also because ‘those secrets - that were the first and second layer of scientific discovery - were within their means to crack’. He shows that one scientist in a laboratory with some chemicals and a test tube could make significant breakthroughs - whereas today, in order to map the human genome for instance, ‘one would need an army of researchers, a bank of computers and millions and millions of dollars’.

But is an understanding of the nature of science and scientific inquiry enough to explain how society innovates? Jeffreys acknowledges the connection between the late industrial revolution and scientific advance, explaining ‘there was nothing predestined about the industrial formulation of aspirin, any more than there was about the invention of the internal combustion engine or the building of the Suez Canal. But fortunately for us, the nineteenth century was a period when people frequently had the means, motive and determination to take an idea and turn it into reality. In the case of aspirin that happened piecemeal - a series of minor, often unrelated advances, fertilised by the century’s broader economic, medical and scientific developments, that led to one big final breakthrough’ (3).

The relationship between big money and pharmaceutical innovation is a very important one, argues Jeffreys. ‘Had it not thrived through profit-driven competition, [aspirin] might never have survived to release its incredible therapeutic benefit.’ Aspirin’s continued shelf life was ensured ‘because for the first 70 years of its life, huge amounts of money were put into advertising and promoting it as an ordinary everyday analgesic’. In the 1970s, when discoveries were made regarding its beneficial role in preventing heart attacks, strokes and other afflictions, other analgesics, such as ibuprofen and paracetamol, were entering the market. Had it not been for the recent discoveries of aspirin’s therapeutic benefit this pharmaceutical marvel may well have disappeared.

So the relationship between big money and drugs ‘is an odd one’, says Jeffreys. Commercial markets are necessary for developing new products and ensuring that they remain around long enough for scientists to carry out research on them. But the commercial markets are just as likely to kill off certain products when something more attractive comes along. So if ibuprofen or paracetamol had entered the market just a decade earlier, he says, ‘aspirin might then not be here today. It would be just another forgotten drug that people hadn’t bothered to explore’.

‘If I have an argument with the relationship between drugs and money, it is because sometimes it gets completely distorted’, he says. A potential ‘wonder drug’ was around for over 70 years without anybody asking how it worked, because ‘they were making more than enough money out of it as it was’.

None of the discoveries of aspirin’s benefits were made by the big pharmaceutical companies; they were made by scientists working in the public sector. ‘The reason for that is very simple and straightforward’, Jeffreys says. ‘Drug companies will only pursue research that is going to deliver financial benefits. There’s no profit in aspirin any more. It is incredibly inexpensive with tiny [profit] margins and it has no patent any more, so anyone can produce it.’ In fact, there’s almost a disincentive for drug companies to further boost the drug, he argues, as it could possibly put them out of business by stopping them from selling their more expensive brands.

So what is the solution to a lack of commercial interest in further exploring the therapeutic benefits of aspirin? More public money going into clinical trials, says Jeffreys. But the future doesn’t look rosy. The EU Directive on Clinical Trials has arguably made conducting research into drugs such as aspirin more difficult (4). It states that every clinical trial needs to have one sole sponsor, so that if something goes wrong (and the EU seems to believe that there are a lot of rogue trials going on out there) one institution or ‘sponsor’ can be held responsible.

‘The financial risks associated with this are enormous’, says Jeffreys. ‘A university or academic institution cannot carry that load alone. Previously they would have combined with others to spread the starting costs and any legal liability.’ So what should be done? ‘If I were the Department of Health, I would say “this is a very inexpensive drug. There may be a lot of other things we could do with it.” We should put a lot more money into trying to find out.’

Jeffreys’ book - which not only tells the tale of a ‘wonder drug’ but also explores the nature of innovation and the role of big business, public money and regulation - reminds us why such research is so important.

Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug by Diarmuid Jeffreys is published by Bloomsbury, 2004. Buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)

(1) Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, Diarmuid Jeffreys, Bloomsbury 2004, p2

(2) Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, Diarmuid Jeffreys, Bloomsbury 2004, p124

(3) Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, Diarmuid Jeffreys, Bloomsbury 2004, p35

(4) Clinical trials directive 2001/20/EC

First published by spiked

Tuesday 24 February 2004

Why humans are superior to apes

The fashion for equating chimps with children is based on a degraded view of humanity and an ignorance about animals.

Humanism, in the sense of a faith in humanity’s potential to solve problems through the application of science and reason, is taking quite a battering today. As the UK medical scientist Raymond Tallis warns, the role of mind and of self-conscious agency in human affairs is denied ‘by anthropomorphising or “Disneyfying” what animals do and “animalomorphising” what human beings get up to’ (1).

One of the most extreme cases of ‘animalomorphism’ in recent years has come from the philosopher John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. In his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Gray argues that humanity’s belief in our ability to control our destiny and free ourselves from the constraints of the natural environment is as illusory as the Christian promise of salvation (2).

Gray presents humanity as no better than any other living organism - even bacteria. We should therefore not be too concerned about whether humans have a future on this planet, he claims. Rather, it is the balance of the world’s ecosystem that we should really worry about: ‘Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone the Earth will recover.’

Thankfully, not many will go along with John Gray’s image of humans as a plague upon the planet. For our own sanity, if nothing else, we cannot really subscribe to such a misanthropic and nihilistic worldview. If we did, surely we would have no option other than to kill ourselves - for the good of the planet - and try to take as many people with us as possible?

However, even if many will reject Gray’s extreme form of anti-humanism, many more will go along with the notion that animals are ultimately not that different from us. The effect is the same: to denigrate human abilities.

Today, a belief in human exceptionalism is distinctly out of fashion. Almost every day we are presented with new revelations about how animals are more like us than we ever imagined. A selection of news headlines includes: ‘How animals kiss and make up’; ‘Male birds punish unfaithful females’; ‘Dogs experience stress at Christmas’; ‘Capuchin monkeys demand equal rights’; ‘Scientists prove fish intelligence’; ‘Birds going through divorce proceedings’; ‘Bees can think say scientists’; ‘Chimpanzees are cultured creatures’ (3).

The argument is at its most powerful when it comes to the great apes -chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. One of the most influential opponents of the ‘sanctification of human life’, as he describes human exceptionalism, is Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation and co-founder of the Great Ape Project (4). Singer argues that we need to ‘break the species barrier’ and extend rights to the great apes, in the first instance, followed by all other animal species. The great apes are not only our closest living relatives, argues Singer, but they are also beings who possess many of the characteristics that we have long considered distinctive to humans.

Is it the case that apes are just like us? Primatology has indeed shown that apes, and even monkeys, communicate in the wild. Jane Goodall’s observations of chimpanzees show that not only do they use tools, but that they also make them - using sticks to fish for termites, stones as anvils or hammers, and leaves as cups or sponges. Anybody watching juvenile chimps playfighting, tickling each other and giggling, will be struck by their human-like mannerisms and their apparent expressions of glee.

But one has to go beyond first impressions in order to establish to what extent great ape abilities can be compared to those of humans. Is it the case that ape behaviour is the result of a capacity for some rudimentary form of human-like insight? Or can it be explained through Darwinian evolution and associative learning? Associative learning, or contingent learning, are concepts developed in the early twentieth century by BF Skinner, one of the most influential psychologists, to describe a type of learning that is the result of an association between an action and the reinforcer - in the absence of any insight.

BF Skinner became famous for his work with rats, pigeons and chickens using his ‘Skinner Box’. In one experiment he rewarded chickens with a small amount of food (the reinforcer) when they pecked a blue button (the action). If the chicken pecked a yellow, green, or red button, it would get nothing. Associative or contingent learning, concepts developed by the school of behaviourism, is based on the idea that animals behave in the way that they do because this kind of behaviour has had certain consequences in the past, not because they have any insight into why they are doing what they do.

In Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings (2003), primatologist Duane Rumbaugh and comparative psychologist David Washburn argue that ape behaviour cannot be explained on the basis of contingent learning alone (5). Apes are rational, they claim, and do make decisions using higher order reasoning skills. But the evidence for this is weak, and getting weaker, as more rigorous methodologies are being developed for investigating the capabilities of primates. As a result, many of the past claims about apes’ capacity for insight into their own actions and those of their fellow apes are now being questioned.

• Cultural transmission and social learning

The cultural transmission of behaviour, where actions are passed on through some kind of teaching, learning or observation rather than through genetics, is used as evidence of apes’ higher order reasoning abilities. This is currently being revised.

The generation-upon-generation growth in human abilities has historically been seen as our defining characteristic. Human progress has been made possible through our ability to reflect on what we, and our fellow humans, are doing - thereby teaching, and learning from, each other.

The first evidence of cultural transmission among primates was found in the 1950s in Japan, with observations of the spread of potato washing among macaque monkeys (6). One juvenile female pioneered the habit, followed by her mother and closest peers. Within a decade, the whole of the population under middle age was washing potatoes. A review by Andrew Whiten and his colleagues of a number of field studies reveals evidence of at least 39 local variations in behavioural patterns, including tool-use, communication and grooming rituals, among chimpanzees - behaviours that are common in some communities and absent in others (7). So it seems that these animals are capable of learning new skills and of passing them on to their fellows.

The question remains: what does this tell us about their mental capacities? The existence of cultural transmission is often taken as evidence that the animals are capable of some form of social learning (such as imitation) and possibly even teaching. But there is in fact no evidence of apes being able to teach their young. Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Germany, points out that ‘nonhuman primates do not point to distal entities in the environment, they do not hold up objects for others to see and share, and they do not actively give or offer objects to other individuals. They also do not actively teach one another’ (8).

Yet even if apes cannot actively teach each other, if they are capable of social learning - in terms of imitation (which it has long been assumed that they are) - this does still imply they are capable of quite complex cognitive processes. Imitation involves being able to appreciate not just what an act looks like when performed by another individual, but also what it is like to do that act oneself. They must be able to put themselves in another person’s shoes, so to speak.

However, comparative psychologist Bennett Galef points out, after scrutinising the data from Japan, that the rate the behaviour spread among the macaque monkeys was very slow and steady, not accelerated as one might expect in the case of imitation (9). It took up to a decade for what, in human terms, would be described as a tiny group of individuals to acquire the habit of the ‘innovator’. Compare this to the human ability to teach new skills and ways of thinking and to learn from each other’s insights: which laid the foundation for the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the development of science and technology and the transformations of our ways of living that flow from these.

Reviewing the literature on primate behaviour, it emerges that there is in fact no consensus among scientists as to whether apes are capable of the simplest form of social learning - imitation (10). Instead it could be the case that the differences in their behavioural repertoires are the result of what has been coined stimulus enhancement. It has been shown in birds, for instance, that the stimulus enhancement of a feeding site may occur if bird A sees bird B gaining food there. In other words, their attention has been drawn to a stimulus, without any knowledge or appreciation of the significance of the stimulus.

Others argue that local variations may be due to observational conditioning, where an animal may learn about the positive or negative consequences of actions, not on the basis of experiencing the outcomes themselves, but on the basis of seeing the responses of other animals. This involves a form of associative learning (learning from the association between an action and the reinforcer), rather than any insight.

Michael Tomasello emphasises the special nature of human learning. Unlike animals, he argues, humans understand that in the social domain relations between people involve intentionality, and in the physical domain that relations between objects involve causality (11). We do not tend to respond blindly to what others do or say, but, to some degree, analyse their motives. Similarly we have some understanding how physical processes work, which means we can manipulate the physical world to our advantage and continually develop and perfect the tools we use to do so.

Social learning and teaching depends on these abilities, and human children begin on this task at the end of their first year. Because other primates do not understand intentionality or causality they do not engage in cultural learning of this type.

The fact that it takes chimps up to four years to acquire the necessary skills to select and adequately use tools to crack nuts implies that they are not capable of true imitation, never mind any form of teaching. Young chimps invest a lot of time and effort in attempts to crack nuts that are, after all, an important part of their diet. The slow rate of their development raises serious questions about their ability to reflect on what they and their fellow apes are doing.

• Language

But can apes use language? Groundbreaking research by Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney in the 1980s on vervet monkeys in the wild showed that their vocalisations went beyond merely expressing emotions such as anger or fear. Their vocalisations could instead be described as ‘referential’ - in that they refer to objects or events (12). But it could not be established from these studies whether the callers vocalised with the explicit intent of referring to a particular object or event, for instance the proximity of a predator.

And Seyfarth and Cheney were careful to point out that there was no evidence that the monkeys had any insight into what they were doing. Their vocalisations could merely be the result of a form of associative learning. Later experiments have attempted to refine analyses in order to establish whether there is an intention to communicate: involving an understanding that someone else may have a different perspective or understanding of a situation from themselves, and using communication in order to change the others’ understanding.

It is too early to draw any firm conclusions on this question from research carried out to date. There is no evidence that primates have any, even rudimentary, human-like insight into the effect of their communications. But neither is there clear evidence that they do not. What is clear, however, is that primates, as with all non-human animals, only ever communicate about events in the here and now. They do not communicate about possible future events or previously encountered ones.

Ape communications cannot therefore be elevated to the status of human language. Human beings debate and discuss ideas, constructing arguments, drawing on past experiences and imagining future possibilities, in order to change the opinions of others. This goes way beyond warning fellow humans about a clear and present danger.

• Deception and Theory of Mind

What about the fact that apes have been seen to deceive their fellows? Does this not point towards what some have described as a Machiavellian Intelligence (13)? Primatologists have observed apes in the wild giving alarm calls when no danger is present, with the effect of distracting another animal from food or a mate. But again the question remains whether they are aware of what they are doing. To be able to deceive intentionally, they would have to have some form of a ‘theory of mind’ - that is, the recognition that one’s own perspectives and beliefs are sometimes different from somebody else’s.

Although psychologist Richard Byrne argues that the abilities of the great apes are limited compared with even very young humans, he claims that ‘some “theory of mind” in great apes but not monkeys now seems clear’ (14). However, as the cognitive neuroscientist Marc Hauser points out, most studies of deception have left the question of intentionality unanswered (15). Studies that do attribute beliefs-about-beliefs to apes tend to rely heavily on fascinating, but largely unsubstantiated, anecdotes. As professor of archaeology Steven Mithen points out, ‘even the most compelling examples can be explained in terms of learned behavioural contingencies [associative learning], without recourse to higher order intentionality’ (16).

So even if apes are found to deceive, that does not necessarily imply that the apes know that they are deceiving. The apes may just be highly adaptive and adept at picking up useful routines that bring them food, sex or safety, without necessarily having any understanding or insight into what they are doing.

• Self-awareness

Although there is no substantive evidence of apes having a theory of mind, they may possess its precursor - a rudimentary self-awareness. This is backed up by the fact that, apart from human beings, apes are the only species able to recognise themselves in the mirror. In developmental literature, the moment when human infants first recognise themselves in the mirror (between 15 and 21 months of age) is seen as an important milestone in the emergence of the notion of ‘self’. How important is it, then, that apes can make the same sort of mirror recognition?

The development of self-awareness is a complex process with different elements emerging at different times. In humans, mirror recognition is only the precursor to a continually developing capacity for self-awareness and self-evaluation. Younger children’s initial self-awareness is focused around physical characteristics. With maturity comes a greater appreciation of psychological characteristics. When asking ‘who am I?‘, younger children use outer visible characteristics - such as gender and hair colour - while older children tend to use inner attributes - such as feelings and abilities.

The ability of apes to recognise themselves in the mirror does not necessarily imply a human-like self-awareness or the existence of mental experiences. They seem able to represent their own bodies visually, but they never move beyond the stage reached by human children in their second year of life.

• Children

Research to date presents a rather murky picture of what primates are and are not capable of. Field studies may not have demonstrated conclusively that apes are incapable of understanding intentionality in the social domain or causality in the physical domain, but logically this must be the case. Understanding of this sort would lead to a much more flexible kind of learning. It may be the case that the great apes do possess some rudimentary form of human-like insight. But the limitations of this rudimentary insight (if it exists at all) becomes clear when exploring the emergence, and transformative nature, of insight in young children.

We are not born with the creative, flexible and imaginative thinking that characterises humans. It emerges in the course of development: humans develop from helpless biological beings into conscious beings with a sense of self and an independence of thought.

The study of children can therefore give us great insights into the human mind. As Peter Hobson, professor of developmental psychopathology and author of The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking, states: ‘It is always difficult to consider things in the abstract, and this is especially the case when what we are considering is something as elusive as the development of thought. It is one of the great benefits of studying very young children that one can see thinking taking place as it is lived out in a child’s observable behaviour’ (17). Thinking is more internalised, and therefore hidden, in older children and adults, but it is more externalised and nearer to the surface in children who are just beginning to talk.

Hobson puts a persuasive case for human thought, language, and self-awareness developing ‘in the cradle of emotional engagement between the infant and caregiver’. Emotional engagement and communication, he argues, are the foundation on which creative symbolic thought develops.

Through reviewing an array of clinical and experimental studies, Hobson captures aspects of human exchanges that happen before thought. He shows that even in early infancy children have a capacity to react to the emotions of others. This points to an innate desire to engage with fellow human beings, he argues. However, with development, that innate desire is transformed into something qualitatively different.

So, for instance, at around nine months of age, infants begin to share their experiences of objects or actions with others. They begin to monitor the emotional responses of adults, such as responding to facial expression or the tone of voice. When faced with novel situations or objects, infants look at their carers’ faces and, by picking up emotional signals, they decide on their actions. When they receive positive/encouraging signals, they engage; when the signals are anxious/negative, they retreat. Towards the middle of the second year these mutually sensitive interpersonal engagements are transformed into more conscious exchanges of feelings, views and beliefs.

Hobson is able to show that the ability to symbolise emerges out of the cradle of early emotional engagements. With the insight that people-with-minds have their own subjective experiences and can give things meanings comes the insight that these meanings can be anchored in symbols. This, according to Hobson, is the dawn of thought and the dawn of language: ‘At this point, [the child] leaves infancy behind. Empowered by language and other forms of symbolic functioning, she takes off into the realms of culture. The infant has been lifted out of the cradle of thought. Engagement with others has taught this soul to fly.’ (p274)

The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky showed that a significant moment in the development of the human individual occurs when language and practical intelligence converge (18). It is when thought and speech come together that children’s thinking is raised to new heights and they start acquiring truly human characteristics. Language becomes a tool of thought allowing children increasingly to master their own behaviour.

As Vygotsky pointed out, young children will often talk out loud - to themselves it seems - when carrying out particular tasks. This ‘egocentric speech’ does not disappear, but gradually becomes internalised into private inner speech - also known as thought. Vygotsky and Luria concluded that ‘the meeting between speech and thinking is a major event in the development of the individual; in fact, it is this connection that raises human thinking to extraordinary heights’ (19). Apes never develop the ability to use language to regulate their own actions in the way that even toddlers are able to do.

With the development of language, children’s understanding of their own and other people’s minds is transformed. So by three or four years of age, most children have developed a theory of mind. This involves an understanding of their own and others’ mental life, including the understanding that others may have false beliefs and that they themselves may have had false beliefs.

When my nephew Stefan was three years of age, he excitedly told me that ‘this is my right hand [lifting his right hand] and this is my left hand [lifting his left hand]. But this morning [which is the phrase he used for anything that has happened in the past] I told daddy that this was my left hand [lifting his right hand] and this is my right hand [lifting his left hand]’. He was amused by the fact that he had been mistaken in his knowledge of what is right and what is left. He clearly had developed an understanding that people, including himself, have beliefs about things and that those beliefs can be wrong as well as right. Once children are able to think about thoughts in this way, their thinking has been lifted to a different height.
The formal education system requires children to go much further in turning language and thought in upon themselves. Children must learn to direct their thought processes in a conscious manner. Above all, they need to become capable of consciously manipulating symbols. Literacy and numeracy serve important functions in aiding communication and manipulating numbers. But, above all, they have transformative effects on children’s thinking, in particular on the development of abstract thought and reflective processes.

In the influential book Children’s Minds, child psychologist Margaret Donaldson shows that ‘those very features of the written word which encourage awareness of language may also encourage awareness of one’s own thinking and be relevant to the development of intellectual self-control, with incalculable consequences for the kinds of thinking which are characteristic of logic, mathematics and the sciences’ (20).

The differences in language, tool-use, self-awareness and insight between apes and humans are vast. A human child, even as young as two years of age, is intellectually head and shoulders above any ape.

• Denigrating humans

As American biological anthropologist Kathleen R Gibson states: ‘Other animals possess elements that are common to human behaviours, but none reaches the human level of accomplishment in any domain - vocal, gestural, imitative, technical or social. Nor do other species combine social, technical and linguistic behaviours into a rich, interactive and self-propelling cognitive complex.‘ (21)

In the six million years since the human and ape lines first diverged, the behaviour and lifestyles of apes have hardly changed. Human behaviour, relationships, lifestyles and culture clearly have. We have been able to build upon the achievements of previous generations. In just the past century we have brought, through constant innovation, vast improvements to our lives: including better health, longer life expectancy, higher living standards and more sophisticated means of communication and transport.

Six million years of ape evolution may have resulted in the emergence of 39 local behavioural patterns - in tool-use, communication and grooming rituals. However this has not moved them beyond their hand-to-mouth existence nor led to any significant changes in the way they live. Our lives have changed much more in the past decade - in terms of the technology we use, how we communicate with each other, and how we form and sustain personal relationships.
Considering the vast differences in the way we live, it is very difficult to sustain the argument that apes are ‘just like us’. What appears to be behind today’s fashionable view of ape and human equivalence is a denigration of human capacities and human ingenuity. The richness of human experience is trivialised because human experiences are lowered to, and equated with, those of animals.

Dr Roger Fouts from the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute expresses this anti-human view well in his statement. ‘[Human] intelligence has not only moved us away from our bodies, but from our families, communities, and even Earth itself. This may be a big mistake for the survival of our species in the long run.’ (22)

Investigations into apes’ behaviour could shed some useful light on how they resemble us - and give us some insight into our evolutionary past, several million years back. Developing a science true to its subject matter could give us real insights into what shapes ape behaviour.

Stephen Budiansky’s fascinating book If A Lion Could Talk shows how evolutionary ecology (the study of how natural selection has equipped animals to lead the lives they do) is showing us how animals process information in ways that are uniquely their own, much of which we can only marvel at (23). But as Karl Marx pointed out in the late nineteenth century: ‘What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.’(24)

Much animal behaviour is fascinating. But, as Budiansky shows, it is also the case that animals do remarkably stupid things in situations very similar to those where they previously seemed to show a degree of intelligence. This is partly because they learn many of their clever feats by pure accident. But it is also because animal learning is highly specialised. Their ability to learn is not a result of general cognitive processes but ‘specialised channels attuned to an animal’s basic hard-wired behaviours’ (23).

It is sloppy simply to apply human characteristics and motives to animals. It blocks our understanding of what is specific about animal behaviour, and degrades what is unique about our humanity.

It is ironic that we, who have something that no other organism has - the ability to evaluate who we are, where we come from and where we are going, and, with that, our place in nature - increasingly seem to use this unique ability in order to downplay the exceptional nature of our own capacities and achievements.

(1) New Humanist, November 2003

(2) Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, by John Gray, Granta, August 2002

(3) ‘How animals kiss and make up’, BBC News, 13 October 2003; Male birds punish unfaithful females, Animal Sentience, 31 October; Dogs experience stress at Christmas, Animal Sentience, 10 December 2003; Capuchin monkeys demand equal rights, Animal Sentience, 20 September 2003; Scientists prove fish intelligence, 31 August 2003; Birds going through divorce proceedings, Animal Sentience, 18 August 2003; Bees can think say scientists, Guardian, 19 April 2001; Chimpanzees are cultured creatures, Guardian, 24 September 2002

(4) See the Great Ape project website

(5) Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings, by Duane M Rumbaugh and David A Washburn (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA))

(6) Frans de Waal, Nature, Vol 399, 17 June 1999

(7) Nature, Vol 399, 17 June 1999

(8) Michael Tomasello, ‘Primate Cognition: Introduction to the issue’, Cognitive Science Vol 24 (3) 2000, p358

(9) BG Galef, Human Nature 3, 157-178, 1990

(10) See a detailed review by Andrew Whiten, ‘Primate Culture and Social Learning’, Cognitive Science Vol 24 (3), 2000

(11) Tomasello and Call, Primate Cognition, Oxford University Press, 1997

(12) Peter Singer: Curriculum Vitae

(13) Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, (eds) Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne, Oxford 1990. Buy this book from
Amazon (USA) or Amazon (UK)

(14) How primates learn novel complex skills: The evolutionary origins of generative planning?, by Richard W Byrne

(15) M Hauser, ‘A primate dictionary?’, Cognitive Science Vol 24(3) 2000

(16) The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science, Steven Mithen, Phoenix, 1998. Buy this book from or Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)

(17) The Cradle of Thought: exploring the origins of thinking, Peter Hobson, Macmillan, 22 February 2002, p76. Buy this book from Amazon (UK) or
Amazon (USA)

(18) Thought and Language, Lev Vygotsky, MIT, 1986

(19) Ape, Primitive Man and Child, Lev Vygotsky, 1991, p140

(20) Children’s Minds, Margaret Donaldson, HarperCollins, 1978, p95

(21) Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution, Kathleen R Gibson, 1993, p7-8

(22) CHCI Frequently Asked Questions: Chimpanzee Facts

(23) If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness, by Stephen Budiansky. Buy this book from
Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)

(24) Capital, Karl Marx, vol 1 p198

First published by spiked

Friday 23 May 2003

Scaring into space

A new book by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, gives humanity a 50/50 chance of survival.

In his new book, Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, offers to bet anybody $1000 that a bioterrorism incident will kill at least a million people before the year 2020. I happily took him up on that bet on Radio 4’s Start the Week the other Monday.

If we are both still alive, I am confident that I will - and Rees says he hopes that I do - pocket his cash.

But not only does he believe we are likely to witness the tragic effects of bioterrorism within our lifetime: Rees also believes that the future of all life on Earth is under threat. In his book Our Final Century: will the human race survive the twenty-first century?, published earlier this month, Rees concludes that our civilisation only stands a 50/50 chance of survival.

Yet despite giving us such lousy odds, Rees claims that he does not want to be seen as a doom-monger, and seems rather uneasy about the way that his book has been marketed. The US edition of his book is, he says, ‘melodramatic’. He cannot have his cake and eat it. The American title Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: how terror, error, and environmental disaster threaten humankind’s future in this century - on Earth and beyond may be something of a mouthful, but as a description of the book, it is rather accurate.

Rees, after all, is warning that we only have a 50 percent chance of escaping ‘an eternity filled with nothing but base matter’ (p8). He thinks that civilisation itself is threatened by twenty-first century technology. ‘Populations could be wiped out by lethal “engineered” airborne viruses… . We may even one day be threatened by rogue nanomachnies that replicate catastrophically, or by superintelligent computers’, he speculates on the very first page of the book.

Should we take these warnings seriously? The reviews of Our Final Century - which invariably describe its message as sobering - imply that we should. The book’s jacket instructs us that, when a leading scientist predicts that this could be our final century, ‘we could do well to take notice’. I beg to differ.

Martin Rees has quite rightly been described as ‘arguably the finest all-round theoretical physicist working today’ (1). His international eminence in the field of cosmology is without doubt. But his many warnings about hypothetical and, he admits, ‘improbable’, risks should not cause us too many sleepless nights. The threats are based on science fiction rather than fact.

According to Rees ‘bio-, cyber- and nanotechnology all offer exhilarating prospects. But there is a dark side: new science can have unintended consequences.’ (p vii) Of course, all science can lead to outcomes that have not been predicted. That is the nature of experimentation. But why should we now start organising society on the basis of avoiding the ‘unintended consequences’ of scientific and technological advance?

Rees’ warnings are not based on the current state of science, but on a multitude of scary ‘what if?’ scenarios. What if, for example, a lone lunatic or a terrorist organisation were able to genetically engineer the Ebola virus so as not to kill its victims too quickly, enabling those infected by the virus to pass it on to more people before meeting their own deaths?

Nobody can guarantee that this could never happen. But that is precisely the problem with ‘what if?’ scenarios. Nobody can guarantee that, in the future, someone somewhere might not build a spacecraft with the power to alter the orbit of the moon and send it crashing into Earth - but so far as I know, there is no danger of that happening in the near future.

Similarly, with bioterrorism. Leading virologists assure us that bioterrorism is, now and for the foreseeable future, one of the least effective ways of killing large numbers of people. It took the Aum Shinrikyo sect in Japan 10 years and £10million of research to try to develop an effective biological weapon - including Anthrax, Q Fever and botulinum. The sect failed. In the end, it released the nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo subway - one of the most densely populated places on Earth - killing 12 people.

Or take Rees’ threat that human beings may at some point in the future be deemed redundant by superintelligent computers. Right now we don’t even fully understand how a single brain-cell works - never mind designing a conscious, intelligent, thinking machine capable of outmanoeuvring the human race.

Proponents of today’s risk-averse culture present us with a false choice. In Rees’ view, we can carry on as usual: allowing for technological and scientific developments that bring incremental social benefits, but which create the conditions in which calamitous events can destroy our entire planet. Or we can pause: forsake some scientific and technological advance, and by doing so avert disaster.
Rees does acknowledge that we could miss out on the benefits of science and technology, asking: ‘How will we balance the multifarious prospective benefits from genetics, robotics, or nanotechnology against the risk (albeit smaller) of triggering disaster?’ But he does not have an answer. And his constant warnings about possible disaster only serve to heighten our fears about the consequences of change.
The bottom line is that we cannot live our lives, nor curtail innovation on the basis of such hypothetical future risks. And we could pay a very heavy price for taking on board this precautionary outlook, missing out on unimaginable social benefits.

People living 100 years ago could not have imagined our lives today - with the technological, scientific and medical advances we have witnessed. The advances have had tangible human consequences: at the turn of the twentieth century, life expectancy was less than half of what it is today. Out of every 1000 babies born, 150 died before they reached their first birthday. Today the infant mortality rate has dropped to fewer than five in every 1000.

Rees is not entirely averse to risk-taking. When it comes to space exploration, he argues, we need people who are prepared to accept high risks in pursuit of new frontiers. Why? Because ‘even a few pioneering groups, living independently of Earth, would offer a safeguard against the worst possible disaster - the foreclosing of intelligent life’s future through the extinction of all humankind. Humankind will remain vulnerable so long as it stays confined here on Earth. Once self-sustaining communities exist away from Earth - on the Moon, on Mars, or freely floating in space - our species will be invulnerable to even the worst global disaster’ (p170).

I’m all for space exploration, but let’s not give up on creating a world fit for people here on Earth. That means confronting today’s risk-aversion: what Mick Hume describes as ‘humanity’s most powerful self-imposed constraint on its own potential liberation’ (see Who wants to live under a system of Organised Paranoia?).

(1) See In the Matrix: Martin Rees on edge.org

First published by spiked

Thursday 24 January 2002

'This is a case of table pounding'

The ‘Skeptical Environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg tells Helene Guldberg how he has weathered the storm of reaction against him.

The hate campaign against Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World and professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, has been gathering momentum.

From having an Alaska pie pushed in his face at a book-signing in Oxford, to being vilified on anti-Lomborg.com, a website dedicated to trashing him (1), Lomborg has had the ultimate insult hurled at him - being compared to a holocaust denier, in the respected scientific journal Nature. The current issue of Scientific American has devoted a series of articles to attacking Lomborg’s ‘contrarian good news’ views.

Every religion, it seems, has its heretics who must be stoned - and as a Sunday Telegraph article put it, Lomborg is the ‘anti-Christ of the green religion’. (2)

But Lomborg does not seem to be too perturbed by the hate campaign. Okay, he says, some may have presented the book ‘as an evil book that has to be excommunicated’. But The Skeptical Environmentalist has had not only bad press. There have been positive reviews on both sides of the Atlantic - and the book has sparked a lively and reasoned debate between Lomborg and his critics here on spiked (see spiked debates: Kyoto).

Even being compared to a Holocaust denier does not upset Lomborg too much.
‘I actually feel kind of good, because it shows the desperateness of their argument. A good saying among lawyers is: if you have a good case, pound the case; if you have a bad case, pound the table. And this is definitely a case of table pounding…which is kind of revealing about their arguments.’

This is true, but there is something particularly insidious about likening critics of contemporary orthodoxies to Holocaust deniers (see I’m right because…you’re a Nazi, by Josie Appleton). This tactic may indicate the weakness of the arguments put forward by Lomborg’s critics, but in today’s censorious climate it can be effectively used to silence any real debate.

What does agitate Lomborg is that the pieces published in Science, Nature and Scientific American have been presented as ‘the scientists’ response’. ‘This is clearly untrue’, he argues. ‘Many scientists, both in public and private, have praised the book.’ He also makes the point that none of the pieces has put forward any real critique of the overall analysis of the book. ‘Instead you will find that they deal with fairly minor points: errors they have found in the data.‘

In his book, Lomborg aims to show the real state of the world, challenging what he calls the ‘litany’ of environmental destruction that has pervaded the debate for so long. ‘Blatantly false claims can be made again and again, without any references, and yet still be believed.’ Lomborg’s 500-page book is the product of four years of statistical research with a team of students, contains 180 figures and tables, almost 3000 footnotes and a 70-page bibliography. Being cavalier with the facts is something Lomborg cannot reasonably be accused of.

But as Lomborg points out, ‘of course there are bound to be some errors in the book when you are dealing with so many numbers. Which is not to say that errors do not matter. You want to present the public with the right figures. But there are other ways of dealing with such minor errors, like in an email’. Lomborg hopes that any impartial observer would recognise that the articles in the Scientific American are ‘fairly petty pieces’.

One of the criticisms thrown at Lomborg is that he selectively uses just those data that support his thesis that the world is getting better, on almost every count. In response, he says: ‘Of course I can never say, yes, I included all the data that are available in the world. That is an impossible task. But I really honestly tried to use the most relevant and balanced data. And if I have failed to do so, my critics cannot get away with just saying, “Oh, he’s biased”. They have to actually show how that is true.’

Lomborg’s book has gone a long way towards challenging what he calls the environmentalist ‘Litany’. And he is hopeful about the impact it will have because ‘rational arguments have a strong force’. However, in a culture that is so risk-averse, claims that the environment is deteriorating dangerously are likely to have more resonance than Lomborg’s argument, regardless of the facts. The predisposition to view everything as getting worse has infected politics, culture and just about every sphere of life today.

Facts and data are crucial in showing that, in so many ways, things are far from getting worse. But as Lomborg must be starting to realise, today’s political and cultural outlook has to be countered with more than numbers alone.

Buy Bjørn Lomborg‘s The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)

Visit Bjørn Lomborg‘s official website

First published by spiked