This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 4, Issue 6, from 1990.

In the history of modern science there have been several disputes, sometimes quite heated, over controversial phenomena which were later shown not to exist. These are examples of what is sometimes called pathological science. Examples of pathological science are sometimes raised in discussions on the paranormal partly because they are instances where conventional science can become very similar to the paranormal – see, for instance, Dave Love’s article on cold fusion in The Skeptic 3.4.

Pathological science is of relevance to paranormal research because it shows how researchers can mistakenly come to believe in the existence of a phenomenon. It shows how mistakes, self-deception, and careless or hurried research can lead to mistaken beliefs. But in the hard sciences, such as chemistry and physics, as the weight of evidence against the phenomenon increases, most supporters are able to accept they were mistaken.

The two classic examples of pathological science are N rays and polywater. I will discuss N rays in a future issue but in this article I would like to present the scientific ‘discovery’ which inspired Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle with its lethal ‘Ice 9’-polywater.

In 1962 Nikolai Fedyakin was working in a laboratory in Komstroma, a city about 1 90 miles from Moscow, investigating the behaviour of pure liquids in very narrow (about 0.003 mm diameter) glass capillaries. He found that over a period of a month a column of liquid about 1 .5 mm long formed at the top of some of the capillaries, where previously there had been no liquid. Even odder than this separation of a pure liquid into two parts was the fact that the liquid in the top of the capillary was denser that the original liquid below it. His publication of these findings in a widely read Soviet science publication marked the start of the strange story of polywater.

Fedyakin’s report aroused the interest of some scientists in Moscow, especially Boris Deryagin, the director of the Surface Forces Laboratory at the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Moscow. As early as the 1930’s he had conducted research into how liquids very close to solid surfaces differed structurally from liquids in bulk. Deryagin and his colleagues began by repeating – and improving – Fedyakin’s original experiment until it only took a matter of hours to collect a sample of this modified liquid several millimetres long. To try to prevent impurities getting into the liquid, they took great care over the liquids and equipment they used. However, they found that the modified water they produced had very different properties to normal water: it froze at -30 degrees Celsius, boiled at 250 degrees, was 15 times more viscous and its density was 10% to 20% greater. It was this modified water which was later given the name polywater.

Between 1962 and 1966 Deryagin’s laboratories published ten papers in a small circulation Soviet journal, and in 1965 Deryagin presented details of his work at an international chemistry conference in Moscow. Despite all this activity, western scientists were still not properly aware of the importance of the claims being made. Partly to blame for this was the way in which the papers actually understated the importance of their contents, and an inefficient translation system at the conference.

This situation changed with the 1966 Faraday Discussion at the University of Nottingham, where Deryagin presented a summary of his team’s discoveries. He also speculated that polywater was more stable than ordinary water, with the implication that all water would eventually change into polywater, though this could take a very long time. He claimed that this work on modified liquids proved that liquids could exist in several forms. This phenomenon – called polymorphism – is known to occur in solids. For example, the element carbon can exist as graphite or diamond, and disappointingly, even diamonds are not forever: they change extremely slowly into graphite. As for polywater, Deryagin suggested that it could be caused by the solid surface of the capillary altering the forces between the water molecules to such an extent that the modified water could exist independently of the surface. Surprisingly, there was little reaction from the audience to his work or his speculations.

While he was in Britain, Deryagin visited several British laboratories which were interested in his work on polywater, and subsequently a number of British groups, including one led by Brian Pethica of Unilever, began research into polywater. The Russians continued their research but neither they nor anyone else was ever able to produce more than very small amounts of polywater. In 1967 Deryagin attended the Gordon Conference in the USA but once again his report on polywater was received with little interest. But things began to change with the 1 968 Gordon Conference, where Pethica announced that his group had verified Deryagin’s work. Most of the audience were skeptical but one scientist, Robert Stomberg of the US National Bureau of Standards, was interested enough to investigate further.

In fact, it was due to the US Office of Naval Research that the idea began to be taken seriously in the US. They were alerted in 1968 when the regular summaries they received recording developments in European research began to mention polywater. They reacted by setting up a conference in February 1969 exclusively for US scientists, to increase their knowledge about polywater. In this it was very successful and it was to America that the story now moves.

In early 1969 there were many speculations in the scientific journals on polywater, but the first serious report was in Nature (12 April 1969) in which Pethica summarised his findings. He confirmed some of Deryagin ‘s results but warned that until polywater became available in large amounts it would not be known whether it was just an impure solution or actually a new form of water.

Then, on 24 May, an Anglo-American team, which included Ellis Lippincott, professor of chemistry at the University of Maryland, announced that using spectroscopy they were sure that polywater was ‘a new form of water and not the result of casual contamination.’ They concluded it must be a polymer of water molecules.

But it was a paper which appeared in the 27 June issue of Science which more than anything else aroused the interest of US scientists in polywater. This paper, by Lippincott, Robert Stromberg and others, reported that after comparing 100,000 different spectra with the polywater spectrum they were sure that polywater was a new substance, which they believed was produced when the quartz capillary tube caused the water molecules to form a polymer. Their tests for contamination revealed minute quantities, but these were too small to have caused the difference between the polywater and water spectra. Lippincott and his colleagues increased the publicity they were receiving by travelling widely to different countries to give lectures on polywater.

There was much reporting and speculating on polywater in the scientific press but it was not until a lecture given by Lippincott in New York on 11 September that the news was published in the media worldwide. The media would probably have soon lost interest in this subject if it had not been for a letter F J Donahue sent to Nature. He wrote that polywater was ‘the most dangerous substance on Earth’, fearing that if molecules of polywater got outside the laboratory they could, because they were more stable than normal water, act as nuclei around which normal water could change into polywater, eventually turning Earth into a Venus-like planet. From this point the mass media were to play an important – but bad – role in the polywater affair.

In contrast to the growing support for polywater, at the end of 1969 a letter was published in Nature from a researcher into glass solubility suggesting that polywater was just silica contaminated water. In 1970 a team led by Dennis Rousseau of Bell Laboratories reported in Science (27 March) that careful chemical analysis showed that polywater was simply water contaminated with sodium, potassium, chlorine amongst other things, but hardly any silicon. In June many of the leading people in the polywater debate attended a conference at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania Deryagin dismissed the contamination explanations by saying that these were the result of careless work, and that his own samples contained only minute levels of contamination. The revelation by Lippincott that his polywater spectrum was almost certainly caused by contamination shook the belief of many supporters. Little new evidence was presented, and most of the scientists left as they had arrived, unconvinced by either side in the debate.

Little new data emerged during the rest of 1970 but many articles continued to be published including one by Deryagin on the evidence for polywater (Scientific American, September 1970). Robert Davis of Purdue University received much publicity without having published a single paper on polywater at that time. To support the contamination theory on polywater he was able to show an article from an obscure Russian journal in which a chemist reported that in 1968 an analysis of samples of Deryagin’s polywater suggested it was caused by contamination. Its chemical composition suggested it could be of human origin, possibly sweat. This was reported in the New York Times of 27 September. In October Davis appeared in Time magazine with a photo of him at work, wringing sweat out of a T-shirt.

The year 1971 began with Pethica and his colleagues announcing that the recent work of others led them to think that polywater was a contaminated solution rather than a polymer of water. Deryagin’s reply to this showed that he still believed in polywater. Chemical analysis continued to provide evidence against polywater and by now much of the argument had moved away from whether polywater existed to what the cause of the contamination was. The sweat and carelessness theories continued to have some support but it was the silica contamination explanation which was receiving increasing support. Headlines in Nature such as ‘Polywater and Polypollutants’ and ‘Polywater Drains Away’ reflected how attitudes were turning towards acceptance of contamination.

During 1972 and early 1973 papers on polywater were still being published, though in decreasing numbers. Nothing of significance on polywater was reported until the 17 August Nature in which Deryagin stated that more careful work had shown that polywater was caused by impurities in the water. The composition of these impurities depended on the method of preparation, but always included silicon (Scientific American September 1973). This can be considered the end of the polywater affair though the results of polywater research continued to be published for the next few years.

It is now believed that the properties of polywater are due to high silica concentrations. But is is also known that it could not all come from the quartz capillary tubes because quartz is not soluble enough to produce the required concentration of silica. This fact had been used by Deryagin against the claims of silica contamination. This is one of the questions which Felix Franks, in his definitive Polywater (MIT Press, 1981), claims had still not been satisfactorily answered when he wrote about these events in 1981. The negative label attached to polywater research may have delayed investigation into the exact nature of the contaminants, but what is now clear is that polywater was not at all what it originally appeared to be.

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 4, Issue 5, from 1990.

For anyone possessing a television, a radio or, for that matter, the Friday edition of the Daily Telegraph it is difficult to avoid Stephen Fry’s pugilist’s nose, mellifluous tones and dry wit. The actor’s art does not give much scope for personal opinion but in his writings Fry’s irreverence for the irrational, his antipathy for the antiscientific and his intense disdain for daftness become apparent. In the Listener in December 1988, for instance he wrote ‘It’s extremely unlucky to be superstitious for the simple reason that it is always unlucky to be colossally stupid…’ It was in the context of this skepticism, unusual in actors who are generally regarded as a superstitious lot, that Stephen Fry agreed to be interviewed by the Skeptic.

It was perhaps appropriate on arriving at the Groucho Club for the interview that our conversation began with an unintentional spot of comedy. This resulted from the fact that I could not initially persuade the reels on my (borrowed) cassette recorder to turn round. The first recorded phrase of the interview was thus ‘…and you are an electrical engineer and you don’t quite know how to operate a cassette recorder…’.

But then (I suspect unusually for actors) Fry is quite at home with technology and is a keen user and programmer of Apple Macintosh computers. It would be tempting to think that this was perhaps natural for someone whose father is a physicist and a computer buff but, in fact, his father’s scientific, mathematical and musical abilities had the effect of initially pushing Fry away from these areas: ‘From an early age-and without wanting to be too psychoanalytic about myself – I think I probably gave up on things that I thought I could never compete with my father on. So I became far more interested in the arts and gave up piano lessons as soon as I possibly could-at the age of about eight-and went round claiming I had a maths block. But after I’d left Cambridge when I was a bit more grown up I became very interested in computers – I got an early BBC micro and then bought a Macintosh the year they came out and began programming and discovered I didn’t have a maths block at all.’

Although he was a student at Cambridge at the end of the seventies (1978-1981) this was a few years after the infatuation of the student community with Eastern religions. And although his mother’s family was religiously Jewish and his father’s family Quaker, western religion did not feature greatly in his upbringing either:

‘I had a sort of vague yen to go into the church when I was about 15 or 16 – I rather fancied myself in a cassock – but I think, generally speaking, I have always inclined towards what is loosely called liberal humanism. I’ve never really been strongly drawn to anything religious. This is not to say that I can’t be drawn towards anything spiritual which is not the same thing at all. But I’ve always, for as long as I can remember, had an irritation with things superstitious. I have a great belief in reason – the world is so remarkable and extraordinary anyway that to try and find things that are subject to no testing, no logic and no reason is ugly. The world is far too mysterious a place in its own right to try to add mysteries.’

Although he read English at Cambridge and took no science courses Fry nonetheless has a sympathy for science which is unusual in arts graduates, and does not feel that a scientific understanding of the world reduces our appreciation of it:

‘Just as there is nothing intrinsically dry and unspiritual about science, similarly there is nothing intrinsically mystical and irrational about the study of literature. Indeed, when I was at Cambridge we were going through the great structuralist debate and a lot of people were saying that the trouble with structuralism is that it is a rather scientific method, so that at linguistic levels you actually have complex formulas for the description of phonemes and so on. They felt that English should be about your response to a text, and there is of course room for that, but my view has always been that you don’t find the Lake District less beautiful just because you happen to know about the rock structure underneath it. If anything, geologists may even find it more beautiful because they see what Eliot might call the skull beneath the skin, which gives them a greater sense of the beauty of it. Similarly I have no patience for people who say that Shakespeare was ruined for them by having to study it at school; a further understanding of something never ruins its beauty.’

At this point Stephen Fry paused to blow his nose and remarked on the fact that for many years he had felt that he was immune to colds as he never seemed to catch them. Unfortunately, a few days previously, the Cosmos had responded to this false confidence by giving him the grandaddy of all colds – and in the acting world having a cold brings its own problems:

‘I would say the worst thing about being in a play is the moment you get a sniffle like I’ve got now, and you’re in your dressing room, suddenly there is a knock on the door and you hear:

“Stephen, hello it’s Lucy here. I heard your cough and there’s a wonderful little man in Camden Passage who does Bach wild flower remedies. Here’s his card.”

“Yes thank you”

And then there’s another knock:

“Would you like to borrow my crystals?” somebody else says. And it continues:

“Knock, knock” –  “I’ve got four piles of vitamins. Here’s a bottle of vitamin C there’s one of vitamin B, one of vitamin D and one of vitamin K, which not many people know about.”

“Get out!”, I cry. “I’ve got a cold, for God’s sake leave me alone, I don’ t want your crystals, I don’t want your homeopathy, I don’t want your little weird spongy trace element pills that melt on your tongue. I don’t want any of this drivel, I just want a handkerchief!”

But he does proffer an explanation for this type of almost superstitious belief in unproven, quack remedies or formulae for self-improvement that seem so popular amongst actors and perhaps more particularly amongst actresses:

‘One of the explanations is that actresses careers are very difficult. They have to rely so much on their personal appearance, on their health, and on their skin quality, that they’re desperate for anything that they think might even have a 0.01% chance of making them fitter, or look better or glossier.’

Fry, himself, however, did not avail himself of a unique opportunity for self-improvement which he had seen on a TV programme:

‘I was so staggered when I saw some television programme about an American who is genuinely producing jeans with crystals sewn into a special gusset because he believes the crotch is the centre of consciousness and that the crystals resonate with some cosmic frequency. He’s making a fortune out of people buying jeans with bits of mineral in them.’

As lone skeptic in the midst of a generally credulous community of actors and actresses, an easy course of action might be to keep one’s views on homeopathy, astrology and psychic powers to oneself. Stephen Fry, on the contrary, expresses his views and expresses them forcefully. Andrew Lloyd Webber has a long-weekend party at his house in Newbury every year and often organizes a debate in the evenings. One year Fry was asked to propose the motion ‘Sydmonton (the name of Lloyd Webber’s house) Believes that Astrology is Bumf’ and was seconded by John Selwyn Gummer (of mad cow disease fame). The motion was opposed by no less a personage than Russell Grant who was seconded by the woman who taught TV ‘s cuddliest astrologer his mystical arts. Fry began his speech in blunt terms: ‘I said that not only does Sydmonton believe that astrology is bumf, it believes that it is crap, it’s a crock of horseshit, that it’s bullshit.’ But this rhetoric was followed up with some good skeptical entertainment as Fry had asked his agent to obtain ‘serious’ astrological readings based on information given to a number of astrologers about him, Hitler and various other persons. He proceeded to amuse the gathering by reading these totally inaccurate personality profiles thereby somewhat weakening the opposition’s argument.

Astrology is clearly a subject about which Fry has strong feelings (to be expected in a Sagittarius): ‘The constellations are all based on the parallax from which we view them so that it is totally arbitrary when we say that a particular constellation looks like, say, a pair of scales. Then to say, given that from this particular point of view this particular constellation looks slightly like some scales, someone born under it therefore is balanced is just the most insane thing you’ve ever heard. Or to say that someone born under Gemini, the twins, displays some kind of split personality, it seems so clear that this is just nonsense. And then people say “It stands to reason you know…” . It stands to all kinds of things, but reason is certainly not one of them.’

He recently participated in television programme on Channel 4 called Star Test in which celebrities are interviewed by a computer. The interviewee is alone in a studio with the cameras operated remotely and is asked by an electronic voice to select a topic and then to select a number from 1 to 5. So far so good – but the next question asked of him was ‘what is your star sign? ‘ – not a good question to ask the man who once said, in an interview with the Independent, that the length of his penis was likely to reveal as much about his personality as his star sign (–and no Freudian will disagree with that!).

‘… And so I refused to say anything and just stood up – you’re supposed to sit down – with the cameras following me, and spoke angrily about astrology for about 2 minutes. I expect they ‘ll cut this bit because I went on and on and on and on…’

Fry, when confronted with the there-are-more-things-inheaven-than-are-dreamt-of-in-your-philosophy school of logic, stresses the word ‘dreamt’ and insists that he also dreams of heffalumps, unicorns and tolerable estate agents. However he does accept that it is possible for people to have a significantly greater sensitivity to certain stimuli than most of us and that this can lead to, for instance, an apparent ability to dowse for water:

‘I was in the South of France recently where a friend of mine who is a great skeptic, Douglas Adams (author of Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), has a house. Now, all of Provence is desperately short of water, it’s the worst crisis they have ever had. If you want water you have to ring up for the water lorry and pay a vast amount of money to have your tank filled. It really is very, very bad. And he was talking to a chap who looks after a lot of houses belonging to English people in that area who was saying “well you either pay for the lorry each time it comes or you can have someone to come and dowse”. And indeed there are dowsers in Provence who make a fat living out of finding water for people.

‘Now, goodness knows I certainly don’t believe that a mystic power comes out of the earth but I do believe in hyperaesthesia and I know of a great many people who are able to read signs in a semiotic way; who are able, for instance, to see someone talking and know that he is lying simply because they are so good at reading signs that most of us don’t notice. Similarly, someone who is experienced in the kinds of places where water is likely to be, may well see patterns in the plants or geology of the area that indicate the presence of water – perhaps at a subconscious level. But he may genuinely believe that the water is influencing his dowsing twig. So I won’t dismiss dowsing because, in my view, anybody who can make a decent living by dowsing, amongst people as naturally cynical as the French, in an area where water is so rare must have some talent for finding water. But I don’t for a moment believe that there is any outside agency which is making the twig move’.

Another esoteric art for which Fry has a certain respect but without believing that there are any mystical elements to it – is the use of randomness to help gain insights into oneself or into problems: ‘I think the use of the aleatory in life is rather good. The I Ching for instance – which I don’t actually think any Chinaman believes to be particularly mystic – is a rather useful way of confronting anything. But the thing that you must do is think of the question you want to ask, ultimately, yourself. In fact, you can use any random event. For instance, you may have an important decision to make and what you can do is concentrate on the first thing you see out of the window – which could be a sparrow. You look at this sparrow with the question in your mind and anything the sparrow now does – via the natural patterning and metaphorical symbolizing abilities of the mind – will help you to come to grips with the problem. Essentially, you have the answer yourself but you just want to be shown an authority for it. Everyone needs a sense of some authority behind what they’re doing it, no-one wants to think of himself as being entirely alone and self-determining. In reality, of course, the real authority comes from oneself but we search for something to sanction what we’ re doing and rather reasonable things like the I Ching, ultimately, turn the authority back to oneself by the way in which one is obliged to frame the question.’

Tolerant of oracles and dowsers, vociferous in his opposition to astrology and quackery – but what is Stephen Fry’s particular bete noire amongst the mindless, mystical menagerie?

‘I suppose the one that really gets me going probably more than most is what the Greeks used to call metempsychosis – what we now call reincarnation. It doesn’t take much to realise that even at the rate at which we are increasing as a population, there are still many more dead people around than there are living ones. Therefore there is a surplus of dead people so that they can’t all be reincarnated – except as wasps perhaps, rather than WASPs. So I would love to hear one of these fatuous people who claim they’ve been around in previous lives just for once having lived in a period of time or as a person that wasn’t dramatically interesting. Why must they all have been a serving maid to Cleopatra or caught up in the persecution of the Jews in York or something that is so easily researchable, so pointlessly predictable?

And the other thing that really annoys me is the people who claim to have seen ghosts. They nearly always—because they think its going to impress you more – tell you about it in a rather matter-of-fact tone of voice. Whereas, if l was going to even vaguely begin to believe that someone had seen a ghost, I would expect them to be absolutely staggered because it turns upside-down one’s whole preconception about what the physical universe is.’ He leaned forward and gesticulated with his cup of cappuccino. ‘If I dropped this and it went upwards, I would be talking about it for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t just dismissively say “Yeah, it’s interesting – I let go of this cup and it fell upwards – would you like another cup of coffee?”. And similarly with ghosts. Seeing a ghost would overturn everything you understand about the universe around you. You would have to be excited about it. Yet the person who recounts his experience pretends he’s bored with it How can you take it seriously? The whole paranormal panoply gets me going. It’s all such ineffable piffle, isn’t it?’

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 3, Issue 5, from 1989.

Mensa hit the news in August when they launched a search for Britain’s 1,000 brightest children in the Sunday Times. Later, they admitted this was a ‘stunt’ to attract media attention. They may have gotten more than they wanted: on 14 August the Independent reported that educational psychologists said the tests Mensa was administering were “culturally biased towards white, middle-class children” and pointed out that “the test assumes that intelligence is based on the ability to read, write, spell, and do arithmetic. Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci, two of the greatest brains to ever have lived, both suffered from dyslexia.”

This is neither the first time Mensa has searched for so-called ‘gifted’ children, nor the first time IQ tests have been criticized. And yet, we continue to believe, paranoiacally, in IQ test scores, and a society based on them continues to exist. This is not sour grapes on my part: I was trawled in just such a child-testing exercise when I was 14. This is, by the way, a matter of deep embarrassment on my part, so I do hope you won’t tell anyone…

Same routine: Mensa supplied a test to be taken at home, supervised by parents. Those who passed went on to some sort of central testing place where the tests were supervised by Mensa’s flunkies. It’s hard to see why people think testing at home encourages cheating. Since you have to take a supervised test afterwards, where would cheating get you? Certainly in my parents’ house these things were taken very seriously, and no trickery went on. I found the test ridiculously easy, and was sent on for the supervised tests.

I remember my mother posted my final score and my letter of acceptance from Mensa on the refrigerator, proudly. I was enrolled, and I began getting Mensa newsletters. I think I went to one meeting. It was all adults: Mensa had no idea what to do with the 14-year-olds they had recruited. When I was 17, a new friend said rather forcibly that the idea of Mensa was snobbish and, worse at that time, ‘straight’. I resigned, over my father’s protests: “I like reading the newsletters!” I told him he should join himself. I guess he thought he wouldn’t qualify even though he always used to say, “you got it from somewhere, you know.”

People talk in the British press about the damage that being labelled ‘not clever’ could cause. I had the opposite problem: I was an ‘underachiever’. I could think quickly and score well on standardized tests, so why wasn’t I an ‘A’ student? My IQ test scores pursued me like an animated yardstick in a cartoon. Of course, the school would never tell me what they were. I’m not sure why, but I gather asking what your own IQ score is, is about like asking someone else what their age or income is. I guess they figure, if you know, you might tell someone. Such is the power of the IQ score.

Mensa should acquire two books for its library: Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and David Owen’s None of the Above: Behind the Myth of Scholastic Aptitude. Both are classics of critical thinking about the science of intelligence. Both call into question some of the basic assumptions we make about intelligence, aptitude, and education.

Gould’s book traces the history of science’s attempts to measure intelligence, from measuring skulls, to weighing brains, to test scores. Over and over, white, middle-class male scientists found that white, middle-class male brains were biggest, strongest, quickest. And regularly, a little while later, along came someone else who proved that their work was faulty, biased, and sometimes even fraudulent.

Into the fray came Binet, the grandfather of IQ testing. His assignment was to devise a test which would identify children with learning disabilities so they could be helped. That was all. He specifically said, according to Gould:

The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.

Gould, p. 151

Binet foresaw the potential difficulties for children if his system were used to rank them, as it is now. He worried about self-fulfilling prophecies:

It is really too easy to discover signs of backwardness in an individual when one is forewarned.

Binet refused to label the results of his tests as inborn intelligence. His successors in America, however, seized on mass intelligence testing as a way of life, and abused the results in exactly the ways Binet had foreseen. And a few he had not: the results of the first mass intelligence tests, conducted by the US Army in World War I, were used as evidence in favour of limiting immigration in 1924 Congressional debates.

David Owen’s book concentrates on a later outgrowth: the SATs. These ‘Scholastic Aptitude Tests’ are taken by all American teenagers who want to go to college. The idea behind them sounds all right: America is huge, State curricula differ, and colleges need some way of comparing the many applicants from different areas and different schools. So far, so good.

Owen, however, shows – often hilariously – that what the SATs really test is your ability to think like the people who designed the test. He explains how the questions work, how to identify the correct answers without doing the arithmetic, and even gives a short course in how to answer questions about the content of the provided paragraphs without actually reading them.

The SATs are administered by the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ. Most students assume a connection with Princeton University; there is none. The ETS is an independent, secretive organization which has parlayed tests into a fortune (tax-free) and which administers more tests every year.

ETS now supplies tests for licensing teachers, hairdressers, golfers, among many others, and for admitting graduate students, law students, and medical students. It’s quite an empire. ETS reacts a bit like the British government when challenged: they claim superior knowledge, refuse to give information, and lose inquiries in red tape. They also accuse critics of wanting to destroy the fabric of society. A bit excessive, perhaps.

Fortunately, America has a legal system which allows challenges even to its major institutions. Recently, a court ruled that New York State’s use of SAT scores to award state scholarships discriminates against girls. This was the first time a court has ever confirmed the SATs sex bias. Result: New York State is designing a new test. Oh, well…

The criticisms these books raise are biting, legitimate, and undoubtedly right on the money. And yet… it’s very hard to shake the nervous feeling that there must be something in it: it’s so accepted. What would I rather believe? That I think exactly like the unoriginal, conservative, middle-class white men who design the tests? Or that I really am smarter than 99% of the rest of the population?

When I was a kid, I had a button which was an advertising gimmick for General Electric: “Be nice to me, I’m going to be a GEnius someday.” I guess I’m still working on it.

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 3, Issue 5, from 1989.

“If you’re so skeptical…” a colleague said to me the other day. I wondered what I’d said, what sort of hole I’d dug for myself, what incriminating evidence I was about to face. “If you’re so skeptical, why do you believe in all that folklore rubbish? People dancing round maypoles, wearing antlers, dressing wells with flowers and bearing rushes? What’s it supposed to achieve? Good luck? Prosperity? A fruitful harvest? In this day and age, it’s ridiculous. Why don’t you and your lot tell them it’s all rubbish?”

“Me and my lot”? I felt like a hit-man in some sort of skeptical Mafia. But did she have a point? In one sense, I think she did. For instance, I cannot honestly believe that the locals in the Helston Furry Dance in Cornwall are really driving out the darkness of Winter and welcoming in the luck of Summer. Nor can I believe that the bizarre South Queensferry Burryman – covered from head to toe with sticky thistle burrs – keeps the town in good fortune as long as his annual Parade is observed. And I cannot believe that whoever draws the Cream of the Well – the first water – on New Year’s morning will be certain of good luck in the coming year.

Having said this, why, last New Year, was I the First Foot – the dark-haired man standing in the cold outside the front door at a minute to midnight, with a penny in my pocket, a lump of coal in one hand and a piece of bread in the other? If I don’t believe and if, as I suspect, many others who take part in customs don’t believe, why do we all do it?

The answer, of course, is that there is far more to ritual than a claimed supernatural result. Rituals in themselves cannot affect the material universe, but they can have great importance and meaning for individuals, and for society.

So can we believe and not believe, at the same time? Bergen Evans, in his classic book The Natural History of Nonsense says that “we function on a dozen different levels of intelligence”. He is surely correct, but – call me a traitor if you will – I find his relentless cut-and-dried exposure of human error and stupidity wearisome. Naturally I don’t think that birds choose their mates on St Valentine’s day, but it’s such a lovely idea…

Coincidentally, the previous evening I had watched The Wicker Man, an obscure (but now cult) film from the early seventies. In it, Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is a devoutly religious Presbyterian police sergeant and lay preacher who has been called to a remote Scottish island – Summerisle – to investigate the disappearance of a young local girl. In fact, there is no missing girl; Sergeant Howie has been chosen for his special qualities and lured to Summerisle for a quite different reason. The island’s fruit and crops have failed, and one more failure would mean disaster for the island.

According to the tradition of the island, a sort of folky druidic mish-mash served up by Lord Summerisle – Christopher Lee at his full height – there is only one solution: to appease the Goddess of the Sun and the Orchards with the dreadful sacrifice of a true Christian believer. Sergeant Howie is imprisoned in a huge wickerwork pyre in the shape of man, and burns to a martyr’s death.

It’s a good yarn, with the subtle twist that you’re never quite sure whether Lord Summerisle really believes in what he’s doing. Is the ‘religion’, with all its traditional elements of hobby-horse, fool and teaser, a religion at all? Is it genuine folk-memory, of the kind – albeit free of sacrifice – that survives to this day around the country? Or is it all a cynical manipulation by Lord Summerisle?

It is interesting to consider the question of why we sometimes accept and do things which – if we try to intellectualise – appear hard to justify. However you care to explain it, the fact is that ordinary people do get up to extraordinary things.