Home Blog Page 13

From the archive: Many Happy Returns – Are past-life regressions evidence for reincarnation?

Melvin Harris
-
0
From the archive: Many Happy Returns – Are past-life regressions evidence for reincarnation?

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

Carl Jung wrote: ‘With a free and open mind I listen attentively to the Indian doctrine of rebirth and look around in the world of my own experience to see whether somewhere and somehow there is some authentic sign pointing towards reincarnation.’ For many thousands in the Western world the signs have arrived. For them, hypnotic regressions have lifted the heavy veil that once shrouded the subject, and the domestic tape-recorder has become the great ally of Truth by capturing ‘authentic accounts’ of long-forgotten life-cycles.

It all began with the Bridey Murphy case in 1952. The Search for Bridey Murphy, by Morey Bernstein, topped the best-seller lists in the United States and was translated into five languages. It spawned a motion picture; a disc from one of the recordings sold tens of thousands of copies; and all over the United States tape-recorders began purring away at innumerable regression sessions.

Twenty years after the Bridey Murphy sensation, a much more impressive case of past-lives startled the public. The Bloxham tapes were first presented as a BBC television documentary produced by Jeffrey Iverson. Then they were included and enlarged on in Iverson’s book More Lives Than One? The tapes were regarded as ‘the most staggering evidence for reincarnation ever recorded… amazingly detailed accounts of past lives – accounts so authentic that they can only be explained by the certainty of reincarnation.’ Inevitably they achieved international renown.

The tapes themselves had been accumulated for years by an elderly Cardiff-based hypnotherapist named Arnll Bloxham. Bloxham had been unable to study as a doctor and had turned to hypnotherapy. He was a life-long believer in reincarnation, but his interest in past-life regressions did not emerge until quite late in his career. Despite that, he managed to accumulate a cupboard full of tapes of his experiments with more than four hundred people.

Jeffrey Iverson first heard about this collection at a party. As a producer with the BBC in Cardiff, he was constantly on the outlook for programme ideas; and, in October 1974, he called the Bloxhams’ house. After listening to the calm old man’s claims, Iverson concluded that, if his claims were true, the recordings could represent the largest investigation ever undertaken into regression. Iverson thought that, if Bloxham’s tapes could be verified, ‘then that single famous case… The Search for Bridey Murphy, was just a tune on an Irish fiddle compared to his symphony of voices.’

Iverson began listening to the tapes and discarding those he felt could not be researched and proven. Gradually, he came to concentrate on a limited number that seemed to contain information that ‘coincided remarkably with known but quite obscure periods of history… in which people talked about cities and countries that they apparently never visited in their present lives.’

Two outstanding cases emerged from this weeding process. In one, Graham Huxtable, a Swansea man, regressed to a squalid life aboard a Royal Navy frigate engaged in action against the French some two hundred years before. But the most important case involved a Welsh housewife named Jane Evans.

Jane Evans

Mrs Evans described six past lives. They were remarkable not so much for their number and diversity as for the sheer, almost overwhelming amount of detail that was packed into her account of three of them. In her three minor lives she was first a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon in the 1500s, then a London sewing girl named Anne Tasker living about 1702, and finally Sister Grace, a nun living in Des Moines, Iowa, who died in the 1920s.

Of Mrs Evans’ three major lives, two centred around the town of York. The earliest was set in the third century during the rebellion of Carausius, the Roman admiral who seized power in Britain and declared himself emperor. Jane Evans was then Livonia, the wife of Titus, tutor to the young son of Constantius (governor of Britain) and his wife, Helena.

As Livonia, Mrs Evans describes how Constantius has to return to Rome and how the rebellion is engineered in his absence. As a consequence, Livonia, Titus, and the rest of Constantius’s household flee from Eboracum (York) to Verulam (St Albans), where they live apprehensively until the rebel regime is overthrown by an army led by Constantius. Yet her husband’s triumphant return brings only sadness for Lady Helena. Roman power-struggles dictate that her husband has to divorce her and contract a new marriage with Theodora, daughter of Emperor Maximinus. Helena, therefore, decides to stay in Verulam with Livonia and Titus. There they are influenced by the Christian wood-carver Albanus, and Titus becomes so zealous in his new faith that he volunteers for the priesthood. On the eve of Titus’s induction as a priest, Roman troops swoop down on Christian houses and burn them. Titus dies in the melee, and Livonia apparently dies in some terror a short while afterward.

Mrs Evans’s next life in York also ended tragically. It unfolded in the year 1189 in the north of the city, where ‘most of the wealthy Jews live.’ She was then Rebecca, wife of Joseph, a rich Jewish moneylender. The times were troubled for Jews. Anti-Jewish uprisings had occurred in ‘Lincoln, London and Chester.’ In York Jews were subject to abuse and threats. One member of their community, Isaac of Coney Street, was even murdered by a mob.

By the spring of the next year it was obvious that violence was inevitable. Rebecca and her family prepared to leave the city, but they were too late. An armed band broke into the next-door house, killed the inhabitants, looted the place, and then set fire to it. Joseph, Rebecca, and their two children were able to run only as far as the castle of York. But even there they were unable to find safe shelter. They finally found refuge of a sort when they entered a church, took the priest and his clerk captive, and hid in the cellar. Later, from the safety of the church roof, they could see flames and hear distant mobs screaming ‘Burn the Jews, burn the Jews!’

Rebecca’s family’s respite was short-lived. Their captives escaped and alerted soldiers, who came to the church. At this point in the story, Jane Evans became ‘…almost incoherent with terror’ as the soldiers took her daughter; then, whispering ‘Dark… dark’, she presumably died.

Evan’s other major life was in medieval France around 1450. At that time she was apparently a young Egyptian servant named Alison in the household of Jacques Coeur – the outstanding merchant prince of that period. She was able to talk at length and knowledgeably about Coeur’s intrigues, about the King’s mistress Agnes Sorel, and about the clash between the Dauphin Louis and King Charles VII. She knew a great deal about Coeur’s possessions and his extraordinary house at Bourges. Her knowledge of the clothes worn by her

master was accurate: ‘tunic edged with miniver, redhose… shoes of red Cordovan leather… a jewelled belt around his waist and a chain around his neck.’

She was again accurate when she related Jacques Coeur’s fall from favour. He was once close to the king, but after the death of Agnes Sorel a rumour spread that Coeur had poisoned her. Coeur was indeed arrested, tried on a number of charges, and imprisoned. But Alison knew only of his arrest. According to her, when the soldiers came for her master he gave her a poisoned drink, and she ended her life by accepting it.

When television viewers saw Jane Evans under hypnosis and heard her astonishing stories, they were understandably impressed. She did not seem to be acting. When fear and anguish came into her voice, it was clear that she was racked with real emotions. And her easy grasp of often difficult names of people and places made it seem that she was indeed remembering things that she’d once known intimately. But Jane Evans in her unhypnotised state was adamant that she knew nothing of Jacques Coeur, nothing of Carausius and his times, and nothing of the massacre of the Jews of York.

Iverson concluded: ‘The Bloxham Tapes have been researched and there is no evidence that they are fantasies. In our present state of knowledge about them, they appear to convey exactly what they claim: a genuine knowledge and experience of the past.’ But were these tapes ever researched as painstakingly as they should have been? Is it possible that quite another phenomenon rather than reincarnation can account for these rich narratives?

Cryptomnesia

Are past-life regressions really evidence for reincarnation? Or could they be glimpses of ancestral memories? Both theories have their followers. Yet rigorous research provides a distinctly different answer. These regressions are fascinating examples of cryptomnesia.

To understand cryptomnesia we must think of the subconscious mind as a vast, muddled storehouse of information. This information comes from books, newspapers, and magazines; from lectures, television, and radio; from direct observation and even from overheard scraps of conversation. Under normal circumstances most of this knowledge is not subject to recall, but sometimes these deeply buried memories are spontaneously revived. They may re-emerge in a baffling form, since their origins are completely forgotten. This is cryptomnesia proper.

Because its origin is forgotten the information can seem to have no ancestry and can be mistaken for something newly created. The late Helen Keller was tragically deceived by such a cryptomnesic caprice. In 1892, she wrote a charming tale called ‘The Forest King’. It was published and applauded, but within a few months it was revealed that Helen’s piece was simply a modified version of Margaret Canby’s story ‘The Frost Fairies’, published twenty-nine years earlier. Other authors have fallen into the same trap.

In a similar fashion a number of cases of automatic writings, supposedly from discarnate spirits, have been traced to published works. For example, the famous Oscar Wilde scripts of the 1920s were gradually shown to be derived from many printed sources, including Wilde’s De Profundis and The Decay of Lying.

But could such unconscious plagiarism account for Bridey Murphy and her offspring? Were these past existences nothing but subconscious fantasies yielded up in order to please the hypnotists? Were they simply a pastiche of buried memories made gripping by the sincerity that accompanies cryptomnesia? In 1956, Dr Edwin S Zolik of Marquette University set out to answer these questions.

After Dr Zolik hypnotized his subjects, he instructed them to ‘remember previous existences’, and they obliged by providing convincing accounts of past lives. In a waking state they assured him that they knew nothing about these previous lifetimes. But, when rehypnotized and reexamined, the subjects were able to remember the sources used in constructing their past-life adventures. In brief, Zolik’s detailed analysis showed that past-life memories could easily be nothing but a mixture of remembered tales and strong, symbolically coloured emotions.

Zolik recommended his method of probing for real-life origins of reincarnationist material to anyone seriously interested in the truth. Unfortunately, few, if any, of the enthusiastic hypnoregressionists took any notice of his advice, and session after session was committed to tape and marvelled over, without any effort being made to verify the origins or meaning of this material. Hypnotherapist Arnall Bloxham, for one, recorded more than four hundred past-life regressions without ever once digging for the possibly mundane origins of these alleged lives. On the other hand, the Finnish psychiatrist Dr Reima Kampman devoted years to the systematic investigation of the cryptomnesic origins of past-life accounts.

Dr Kampman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oulu, Finland, began his work in the 1960s. He found his subjects among large groups of volunteers drawn from the three highest grades of the secondary schools of Oulu. All who were able to enter a deep hypnotic state were selected for closer study. Kampman found it relatively easy to induce past-life recall as a response to his instruction: ‘Go back to an age before your birth, when you are somebody else, somewhere else.’

His most amazing subject was as a girl who conjured up eight past-lives. Her lives took place in ancient Babylonia, in Nankin, in Paris, in England, and finally in revolutionary Russia. Her thirteenth-century life – as Dorothy, an innkeeper’s daughter – brought to light ‘a very explicit account of contemporary happenings’. And she astonished everyone by singing a song that none of the listeners was familiar with – she called it ‘the summer song’. The language of the song was later studied by a student ‘with high honours in the English language’. He had no difficulty in identifying the words as examples of an old-style English, possibly Middle English. But the girl had no memory of ever having heard the words or the music of the song before.

The solution to this riddle came during a later experiment. She was asked to go back to a time when she might have seen the words and music of the song or even heard it sung. She then regressed to the age of thirteen and remembered taking a book from the shelf in a library. It was a casual choice, and she merely flicked through the pages; yet she not only remembered its title but was able to state just where in the book her ‘summer song’ could be found. The book was Musiikin Vaiheet, a Finnish translation of The History of Music by Benjamin Britten and Imogen Hoist. And the mystery music was, of all things, the famous ‘Summer Is Icumen In’ with the words rendered in a simplified medieval English.

A spate of similar successes led Kampman to conclude that he had demonstrated ‘that the experiences of the present personality were reflected in the secondary personalities both in the form of realistic details and as emotional experiences. The recording of a song from a book simply by turning over the leaves of the book at the age of 13 is an outstanding example of how very detailed information can be stored in our brain without any idea whatever of it in the conscious mind, and how it can be retrieved in deep hypnosis’. These findings allow us to look at Bloxham cases with more understanding.

But the case is very different with the Bloxham tapes. Graham Huxtable proved unable to help in an investigation, and Jane Evans flatly refused to cooperate. As a result, the only course was to scrutinize the texts and laboriously search for the probable origins of their ‘previous lives’. The extravagant claims made for these tapes led me to undertake the search. I decided to concentrate on the six past-lives of Jane Evans, since Iverson considered them to constitute ‘the most consistently astonishing case in Bloxham ‘s collection’. My investigation soon showed that the claims made for the tapes were false and the result of misdirected and inadequate research. For example, one of Jane Evan’s minor lives, as a handmaiden to Catherine of Aragon, could easily have been based, sequence for sequence, on Jean Plaidy’s historical novel Katherine, The Virgin Widow.

But Evans’ three major lives proved to have the most illuminating ancestries. Her recital as Alison, a teenage servant to Jacques Coeur, the fifteenth-century French merchant- prince, was said to prove that she ‘knew a remarkable amount about French medieval history’. Yet in her waking state she said, ‘I have never read about Jacques Coeur. I have never even heard the name.’

Jeffrey Iverson even concluded that she could not have picked up her many facts from standard sources. After all, she knew so much, including inside knowledge of the intrigues surrounding the king’s mistress Agnes Sorel. Among other things, Evans was able to fully describe the exteriors and interiors of Coeur’s magnificent house – she even gave details of the carvings over the fireplace in his main banquet hall. Even more surprising, she spoke of the carved tomb of Agnes Sorel that was housed in a church. According to Iverson, this tomb ‘had been cast away by French revolutionaries and spent a hundred and sixty-five years, until its rediscovery in 1970, out of sight in a cellar’. But like a number of observations in the book More Lives Than One? this claim does not stand up to scrutiny.

The truth is that the Sorel tomb was placed in its present setting no later than 1809. It has been a tourist attraction for the whole of this century, and it is described in detail in HD Sedgwick’s A Short History of France published in 1930. The book was popular for decades and often found in public and school libraries. Apart from that, the tomb has been referred to in many other books and photographed frequently.

The circumstances are very much the same with Jacques Coeur’s house. It is one of the most photographed houses in all of France. Fine, explicit photographs of it are included in Dame Joan Evans’s book Life in Medieval France. There once can see the stone carvings over his fireplace and gain a sound idea of how the place looked, both inside and out. There is little doubt that Jane Evans has seen these or similar pictures. And there is overwhelmingly strong evidence that the rest of Jane’s material was drawn from a source not known to Iverson, the 1947 novel The Moneyman by C B Costain. The booked is based on Coeur ‘s life and provides almost all the flourishes and authentic-sounding touches included in Evans’s ‘past-life’ memory.

In particular, the novel very neatly answers an important question raised by Iverson and other commentators: Why doesn’t Alison know that her master is married? As Iverson puts it: ‘How is it that this girl can know Coeur had an Egyptian bodyslave and not be aware that he was married with five children? – a published fact in every historical account of Coeur’s life? …If the explanation for the entire regression is a reading of history books in the twentieth century, then I cannot explain how Bloxham ‘s subject would not know of the marriage’.

Costain’s short introduction to his novel clears up the mystery. He writes: ‘I have made no mention of Jacques Coeur’s family for the reason that they played no real part in the events which brought his career to its climax… When I attempted to introduce them into the story they got so much in the way that I decided finally it would be better to do without them’.

The view that Evans’s tapes were simply the result of cryptomnesia could still be contested if it were not for the confirmation provided by the vetting of her remaining two major lives. As Rebecca, the Jewess of York, Evans was supposed to have met her death during the massacre of 1190. At that time, most of the Jewish community died in the York Castle Keep, but Rebecca ‘s death came in the cellar episode and a formidable legend has grown up. It is now asserted that the church is St Mary’s of Castlegate and the crypt was actually discovered after Jane’s regression.

The truth is that the original television programme script stated that there were three possible churches that could qualify as the place of refuge. St Mary’s was chosen to film simply because it was the most convenient, since it was being converted into a museum. And it was this conversion that led to the uncovering of an aperture under the chancel. For believers, this was naturally a medieval crypt and proof of Rebecca’s story. A very different view is presented by a report of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments. On York (vol. 5, 1981) it says, ‘Beneath the East end of the charnel vault with a barrel-vault of stone rubble, probably a later insertion and now inaccessible’.

For all that, the furore over the crypt is meaningless, since the Rebecca regression is clearly a fantasy. It is an amalgamation of at least two different stories of persecution taken from widely separated centuries.

Historical absurdities

The proof that we are dealing with a fantasy lies in the historical absurdities found in the tale. Rebecca repeats four times that members of the Jewish community in York were forced to wear yellow badges, which she described as ‘circles over our hearts’. But the Jewish badge was not introduced until the following century, and then the English pattern consisted of two oblong white strips of cloth that represented the tablets of Moses. The yellow circle was, in fact, the badge worn by Jews in France and Germany after 1215. This is one aspect of Jewish history over which there are no legitimate doubts.

Further absurdities were discovered in passages from the tapes that were excluded from both the book and the film. In these revealing passages, Rebecca repeatedly speaks of living in the ghetto at the north of York. This ghetto was a quarter without street names in which only the rich Jews lived and she pointedly mentioned a poor Jew who had lived in ‘the middle of York in a street called Coney Street’.

Now there never was a special Jewish quarter in York. The Jews lived scattered among the Christians in Micklegate, Fosgate, Bretgate, Feltergayle, and near the centre of town in Jewbury. The idea that a Jew would live on Coney Street because of his poverty is ludicrous. Coney Street was, in truth, the choice place for many of the rich Jews to settle, including Josce, the head of the Jewish community!

As for the notion of the ghetto itself, this involved a leap in time of over three hundred years, since the first ghetto was not set up until 1516 in Venice. It was established on an old foundry site. The very name is derived from the Italian geto, or foundry.

This means, inevitably, that Jane Evans has the ability to store vivid stories in her subconscious and creatively combine and edit them to the point where she becomes one of the characters involved. The clinching proof that this is so is provided by the Livonia regression. It is the purest regression of all, as it is based on one source only.

This particular life involves a turbulent period in Britain’s history: a time of rebellion and instability. The name of the Roman governor of Britain during this period is unrecorded in existing historical records. Evans’s past-life memories seem to fill this gap for us by stating that Constantius, father of Constantine the Great, was in charge. After consulting his reference books, Iverson happily concluded: ‘Nor can the regression be dismissed as a fiction built around a blank area of history. Livonia knows a considerable number of verifiable historical facts that fit perfectly into her vision of the missing years. No modem student of history could contradict the names and events she describes… After hearing the tape, Professor Brian Hartley, an authority of Roman Britain, seemed to agree, since he commented: ‘She knew some quite remarkable historical facts, and numerous published works would have to be consulted if anyone tried to prepare the outline of such a story’.

Professor Hartley was right, much painstaking research went into the making of Jane’s story; but the research was undertaken by the late Louis De Wohl. In 1947, he wrote the best-selling novel The Living Wood, and Jane’s life as Livonia is taken directly from that novel. Brief comparisons will show how.

Livonia’s tale opens in Britain during 286 AD. She describes the garden of a house owned by the Legate Constantius. His wife is Lady Helena, his son Constantine. The son is pictured as being taught the use of shield, sword, and armor by his military tutor Marcus Favonius Facilis. This entire sequence is taken from Book 2, Chapter 2, of the novel, in which Constantine trains in the use of arms and armour under his military tutor Marcus Favonius, called ‘Facilis… because every-thing was easy to him’. De Wohl based this character on a real-life centurion whose tombstone is now in Colchester Castle Museum. But his account of this centurion’s life is pure fiction, since Facilis died in the first century AD.

Livonia then describes a visit by the historical character Allectus. He brings Constantius an urgent message from Rome, but despite its urgency Constantius ‘stopped at Gessoriacum to see Carausius who is in charge of the fleet’. This section is drawn from the same part of the novel as the above, in which the visit leads to the takeover of Britain by the rebellious Carausius, who is aided by Allectus. Iverson writes: ‘Livonia gives a basically accurate picture of this quite obscure historical event’. Quite so, but only because the whole of the material rests on De Wohl’s research.

In the same way, every single piece of information given by Jane Evans can be traced to De Wohl’s fictional account. She uses his fictional sequences in exactly the same order and she even speaks of his fictional characters, such as Curio and Velerius, as if they were real people.

There are two minor differences worth noticing, since these involve her editing faculty. In the first instance, Evans takes a minor character, Titus Albus, a Christian soldier willing to die for his faith, and recasts him as a tutor to Constantine. But only the name itself is taken from De Wohl, for all of Titus’s feelings and actions are those of De Wohl’s character Hilary. Hilary is converted to Christianity by Albanus, ordained as a priest of Osius, and killed during a violent campaign against his faith. All these things happen in turn to Jane Evans’s Titus.

In the second instance she takes another insignificant character, Livonia, who is described as ‘a charming creature with pouting lips and smouldering eyes’, and amalgamates her with Helena. A composite character is able to act as both an observer and as someone who voices Helena’s sentiments, thus making the story that much fuller and far easier to relate.

This feat of editing reveals a little of the psychology behind these fantasies. Hilary is an eminently desirable male in the novel described as having ‘a beautiful honest face with eyes of a dreamer’. He is also secretly in love with Helena. As Titus he becomes the lover of Livonia of the pouting lips and smouldering eyes – in other words, of Jane Evans herself. And there we have all the combustible material that fuelled a young girl’s daydreams. And all inspired by an exciting historical novel.

In conclusion, I should emphasize that in investigating regressionist claims, I chose the most difficult and best-known cases available. They had remained unchallenged for years and were regarded as impregnable. A BBC documentary team had checked them out in every detail. They were triumphantly marketed as ‘the most staggering evidence for reincarnation ever recorded… accounts so authentic that they can only be explained by the certainty of reincarnation…’ Yet in the end they turned out to be nothing but fantasies, pure and simple.

Moroccan Argan oil is an interesting traditional product, but it’s certainly no panacea

Alice Howarth
-
0
Moroccan Argan oil is an interesting traditional product, but it’s certainly no panacea

Earlier this year, I went to Morocco, where I visited Paradise Valley – a section of the Tamraght River high in the Atlas Mountains. I took a trip through parts of the Sahara desert, and to wild beaches, took a drive up to Essaouira – a city on the sea that’s beautiful and very, very windy. On each of these excursions there were stops along the way. Sometimes to look at a particularly picturesque view. Once to look at some goats grazing in the trees.

On every single trip we stopped to learn about argan oil. Argan oil – often known in the UK as Moroccan Oil – is oil derived from the fruits of the argan tree. Traditionally, argan oil was made in the Essaouira region but after Western demand increased, the production spread down to Agadir, the region where we holidayed.

Argan trees themselves grow only in the Southwest of Morocco and the argan tree is an old species – around 60 million years old. These trees are able to grow in the very arid, hot conditions of Morocco. I was genuinely surprised by how green Morocco is, and a lot of this comes from the argan tree surviving well in these conditions, supporting the growth of other plants. Their roots provide structure for the soil and the shade from their canopy allows the growth of less hardy crops (and the grazing of goats). They are important trees for the region.

The area where argan trees grow has been defined as a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO – a region that can be used for “testing interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and managing changes and interactions between social and ecological systems, including conflict prevention and management of biodiversity”.

Argan oil production

Extracting the argan oil is a traditional practice, usually done by women, often by hand. Producing it is very labour intensive. The fruit must first be dried under the sun, before the seed is remove and then cracked open, by hand, between rocks. Inside the seed is a kernel called an almond. This can be roasted to make edible argan oil, or left unprocessed for cosmetic use.

Next the almonds are ground on a type of millstone and then water is added gradually, while kneading into a paste to release the oils. It takes 40 kilograms of dried fruit to produce one litre of argan oil. And that takes 15 hours of labour.

And this is largely women’s work – often in women’s cooperatives – so argan trees are a feminist issue as well as a climate issue.

Two women sit with traditional, shaped millstones in front of them on raised platforms, grinding argan tree fruit kernels into argan paste for the production of argan oil. The tiled wall behind them has multicoloured flower-like symbols
Women grinding argan kernels into argan paste using traditional methods. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Argan oil has been used as a traditional medicine in Morocco for hundreds of years, but more recently it has become popular worldwide as a cosmetic product. Its popularity in the UK and US began in the early 2000s. In part because Argan oil is a particularly light oil, so it’s great to use on hair and skin without feeling too greasy.

However, as with any “natural product”, it comes with a whole range of unevidenced claims. In Morocco people often use argan oil for skin complaints like dry skin and eczema – this makes some sense, in that applying an oil to dry skin can help to rehydrate it and keep some of that moisture in. It’s the same principle behind emollients for eczema. Of course, I would tend to suggest that if you have eczema, it’s best to use a very bland emollient as prescribed or recommended by a doctor, because eczema can often worsen with irritants, perfumes or allergens, which might be present in other creams or oils. But I can see how it might help in a pinch.

In terms of cosmetic use, argan oil is most commonly applied to add moisture to dry hair. I use hair oil regularly myself just to smooth down flyaways. I don’t believe it’s doing anything to change or improve my hair in the long term, but it is useful for styling for my very light, dry hair. Some people claim argan oil can cure dandruff if used as a hair mask. This isn’t based in any evidence, but using an oil on the dry skin of the scalp might help rehydrate the skin a little.

The culinary form of argan oil is claimed to be good for the immune system, as it’s high in vitamin E – vitamin E is an antioxidant that is used by the immune system, but we don’t need to supplement antioxidants in our diet in order to support the immune system. Similarly, it’s claimed the vitamin E in argan oil makes it an excellent topical treatment for wound healing due to these apparent anti-inflammatory properties. Again, there is just not enough high-quality evidence to support this claim about vitamin E itself, let alone about argan oil.

Many of the argan cooperatives I visited went further. Not only did they sell a variety of argan oils for either eating or cosmetic use, there were also many modified products to make the argan oil more useful. In some cases this was simply a case of adding fragrance or colour to the product, so that it could be used as a perfume or make up product. In other cases, the oil was added to creams to make it absorb better or be a little less oily on the skin.

There were many products that had other oils layered in, with claims they would help with a variety of other complaints, including hair loss. I hadn’t come across claims that argan oil could help with hair loss previously, but I had seen those claims made for another oil: rosemary oil.

Rosemary oil

Rosemary oil has been all over TikTok this year. Even doctors and dermatologists claim that it can be used for treating hair loss. It’s been covered in British Vogue, British GQ, Cosmopolitan. Some of that coverage has been reasonably balanced, with GQ Magazine saying:

Rosemary oil may not work for everyone, but according to a 2015 trial, participants showed a significant increase in follicle count after just six months of use. However, it’s worth noting that this was a controlled study, so it may not be an accurate representation of real-world results.

The Cosmopolitan article also mentioned the 2015 trial, saying:

[trichologist Gretchen] Oligee and dermatologist Yoram Harth, MD, also point to a commonly cited 2015 study that compared rosemary oil extract to minoxidil when used on men with genetic androgen-related hair loss.

So what about this evidence? Sadly, this 2015 study is of very low quality. It’s titled “Rosemary oil vs minoxidil 2% for the treatment of androgenetic alopecia: a randomized comparative trial”. It involved around 100 participants, which isn’t too bad, but it compares the treatment group to a different treatment – there is no placebo arm. This is a problem, because if neither treatment works, this study will be useless.

Expert dermatologists agree that 2% minoxidil isn’t really strong enough to treat hair loss. And treatments were only followed for six months; nowhere near long enough to see any true effects of a hair growth treatment. Our hair grows in cycles, and can effectively go into a dormant phase. We even have some seasonal growth, with slightly increased hair loss in the autumn and slightly increased hair growth in the spring. We need studies that are longer than six months. But that isn’t even the biggest issue with this study.

The best critique I’ve seen of this study is a video from Dr Michelle Wong, who has a PhD in chemistry and now works in cosmetic chemistry. In it she points out that two of the six crucial data points in the paper are clearly wrong. At baseline and the three-month time point they find the exact same hair count and standard deviation for each of the two test conditions (minoxidil/rosemary oil). This is practically impossible. As Michelle points out, as the measurement is literally just counting hairs, even if you did the measurements an hour apart, you would expect some minor variation in the measurements, let alone across three months. That is a pretty major error to include in a published study.

Wong also highlights that their “significant” increase in hair growth is a hair count increase of, at most, six hairs. There’s a standard deviation of 50 hairs. This is a very tiny number, in terms of hairs. The average human head has between 90,000 and 150,000 hairs. The “significant” increase here was an average of just six hairs.

Further, part of the study involves giving participants a questionnaire about their levels of depression… as one of their methods to measure hair loss. It is baffling.

So, to summarise, argan oil for hair loss: no evidence. Rosemary oil for hair loss: some evidence, but it’s pretty shabby.

As for other oils, the argan oil I saw promoted for hair loss treatment also contained cannabis oil, apparently in order to promote hair growth. Again, the evidence there is lacking. There is a study from 2021 that looked really promising, but it didn’t have a control group. It claims there was statistically significant hair growth, but claimed this based on comparing the result after six months of treatment to the original baseline of the treatment arm. That is not an appropriate way to research this issue. We know that hair loss can occur because of things like stress, childbirth or sudden weight loss, and then the hair returns naturally with time. What we are likely seeing in this paper is regression to the mean… or, at least, we have absolutely no way of ruling that out. Until a properly conducted trial is available, we should be skeptical.

What’s the harm?

Sure, argan oil might not actually be effective for the many things it’s claimed to treat, but is there any harm to using it? After all, aren’t these all natural ingredients? They’re probably therefore fine to apply directly to the scalp to see if they enhance hair growth?

Sadly, that’s not how this works – if we think a product can enhance hair growth then we must also consider that it could enhance hair loss. Acting sufficiently on the hair follicles to change their behaviour in one direction must mean causing a change in behaviour in the opposite direction is also possible. We have no evidence that these products don’t cause hair loss. Some hair loss can even be caused or exacerbated by an allergic response, so applying products that haven’t been regulated as a treatment (and therefore could have a range of other additives in there) could cause allergic reactions and harm to the scalp. Rosemary oil in particular does have some compounds that could be allergenic.

It’s also important to note that concentrated rosemary oil (ie not diluted in a carrier oil) is really likely to irritate your skin. There are some studies that show that some phytocannabinoids might lead to hair loss, too, particularly in very high doses.

As ever, the risk with cosmetic products over medical products is that the regulations are different. It can make it hard to be clear the exact doses of the active ingredients in the product. The other risk here is that hair loss can be a signifier of a serious health problem – many of which would require treatment. Looking for answers on TikTok instead of speaking to a doctor is never a good idea.

None of this means that I’m completely anti-argan oil, however. I still use some kind of hair oil in my hair almost daily (long-haired readers, don’t be aghast, I know it sounds like a lot, but my hair is so hungry for it, I still only need to wash my hair twice a week even with regular hair oil use).

Plus, argan oil production itself is probably a good thing – before it got popular outside of Morocco, deforestation was a major issue. The trees were being cut down to make way for crops and for charcoal. The tree takes around 50 years to get mature enough to grow fruit, so deforestation is definitely not good. And the ecosystem really benefits from this tree, so if trees are maintained to grow oil for cosmetic use – and produced using cooperatives with fair pay and fair-trade methods (big ifs, I know) – then it could actually be a great thing for our environment.

But, of course, there is still a risk that this industry becomes exploitative, if we aren’t careful.

Faking the faking of fake news, 1910 style: the ‘death’ of film star Florence Lawrence

Andrew Shail
-
0
Faking the faking of fake news, 1910 style: the ‘death’ of film star Florence Lawrence

If we define ‘fake news’ as the presentation of a news story that is either known, by its author, to be evidently untrue; or not known, by its author, to be evidently true, we are referring to some long-practiced activities, older than the existence of commercial newspapers.

At its simplest, fake news involves an attempt to dishonestly convince a reader, viewer or listener of a claim about some aspect of their immediate reality, such as their healthcare or their politicians. But there is also a more complex form of fake news: an attempt to dishonestly convince a reader, viewer, or listener of a claim about a rival news source. As Donald Trump’s habit of accusing the journalists attending his own press briefings of being creators of ‘fake news’ (or, oddly, just ‘fake news’ itself) suggests, in the context of some public awareness that news fakery can happen, it is possible to convince the public to classify as fake all claims that come from a certain person, organisation, company or grouping. Indeed, it is possible to convince the public that everyone except a single news source is lying to them – a fundamental component of conspiracist thinking.

This second form of news fakery can be achieved by a process that involves the first: one can publish a whole contrived news story, attribute that news story to one’s adversary and then sit back to wait for someone to discover that the story is fake and observe smugly while one’s adversary is cancelled. But there is an even more efficient, and less risky, way of discrediting one’s adversaries: fake the very existence of the fake news story, by publishing what looks like public reactions to that non-existent news story rather than the story itself.

This practice makes it much harder for anyone to show that one’s target did not actually publish that news story, as it is always possible to insist that the original is unavailable for scrutiny not because it never existed but because of the ephemeral, messy and plethoric nature of works of news media. It is plausible to insist that the original fake news story cannot be found because it was published in the evening edition of a certain newspaper rather than its morning edition, or because someone has made a mistake about what day it was published or what newspaper it was published in, or because it was broadcast only on late-night news on terrestrial television in just one region, or because its authors have deleted it from their website.

An early instance, though probably not the earliest instance, of this second form of news fakery occurred in the American film industry in early 1910. At the beginning of 1910, the filmmaking industry in the US was divided into two factions: an older faction, the seven production companies (including the Edison Company) who had orchestrated the formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) in late 1908 in an attempt to use patents to monopolise the production, distribution and exhibition of films throughout the USA and Canada, and a younger faction, the six production companies, most of them set up by distribution companies who were trying to operate outside of the reach of the MPPC’s patents.

The ‘independent’ production companies and distribution companies had formed the National Independent Moving Picture Alliance in September 1909. One of these ‘independent’ distributors was the Laemmle Film Service, run by Carl Laemmle, who in June 1909 set up his own production company, initially called Yankee Films but soon re-branded as Independent Motion Pictures, or IMP. These ‘independents’ were trying to carve out a share of the market for hiring films to cinemas in the face of a system of licenses that the older faction was using to try to persuade cinema managers across the USA and Canada that getting their films from anywhere other than the MPPC was basically illegal. And in this situation of desperation, they were willing to try anything.

At the beginning of 1909 there was no star system in the film industry in the USA: when creating publicity posters for a film, for example, it was normal not to give the names of anyone who acted in the film; credits in films might indirectly name the director of the production company if that production company’s name was also the director’s name, but would not name any other people involved in making the film unless that person was, for example, a famous theatre celebrity appearing in a film on a short-term basis. But during the Summer and Autumn of 1909 Carl Laemmle, on a trip to Europe, probably saw some evidence of the Pathé Frères company launching a publicity campaign for a film actor, one Max Linder, and when he got back to the USA in mid-October 1909 he seems to have decided to do the same thing for one of his employees.

When Laemmle got back to the USA, he found that William Ranous, the director/producer who he had left in charge while he was away, had employed a new actress, a Canadian who was born Florence Bridgwood, who used the pseudonym Florence Lawrence, and who, significantly, had recently been fired by the Biography company, one of the members of the MPPC.

Florence Lawrence had accrued some recognisability during her time acting for films at Biograph, even though Biograph had never used her name in any publicity. That is, she was an asset that the older faction had somewhat short-sightedly thrown away. Finding that he now had such an asset on his hands, and willing to depart from the US industry’s norm of keeping film performers anonymous in publicity, Carl Laemmle jumped at the opportunity by launching a publicity campaign for her in which he used her name, in an attempt to gain an advantage over his rivals.

We can see evidence of this in a poster, dating from late January 1910, distributed by the Laemmle Film Service alongside Lawrence’s films, on display at a cinema in Los Angeles, a poster which refers to her as “America’s most popular moving picture actress”.

  • Postcard sent from the Shell Theatre in Los Angeles to “Miss Florence Lawrence” care of Carl Laemmle, 111 East-14th Street, New York, and postmarked on the reverse either 25 or 29 January 1910. Florence Lawrence Papers, Margaret Herrick Library, VF211.
  • Detail from top right of the postcard
  • Reverse of the postcard shown in Figure 1a, showing postmark of 5pm on 25 or 29 January 1910. The message reads “With all / good wishes / From / “The Shell Theatre / Los Angeles. / Cal[ifornia].”

The eight photographs used on the poster have survived, and are reproduced below, with text under the photographs reading: “America’s Foremost Moving Picture Actress Appears in “Imp” Films Only!”.

Undated photographs of Florence Lawrence taken in c.late November/early December 1909. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Image 132974.
Figure 2. Undated photographs of Florence Lawrence taken in c.late November/early December 1909. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Image 132974.

Had Laemmle built Lawrence’s public profile and she didn’t agree to renew her contract when it expired in late 1910, Laemmle would have just built value in an asset that one of his rival companies could then use in competing against him. He therefore seems to have done everything he could to capitalise on Lawrence’s value during her time with him, including escalating this publicity campaign, and in collaboration with his press agent Robert Cochrane, he decided to use some second-order news fakery to do so.

Reproduced here is an example of advertising that IMP placed in the film trade press in early March 1910.

IMP’s advertisement for The Broken Oath (mistakenly called The Broken Bath) and The Time-Lock Safe printed in the trade press on 5 March 1910, which contradicted purported reports of Lawrence’s death. Moving Picture World 6.10 (12 March 1910), p.365. (Note that the cover date of magazines at the time referred to a date one week after it was published.)
IMP’s advertisement for The Broken Oath (mistakenly called The Broken Bath) and The Time-Lock Safe printed in the trade press on 5 March 1910, which contradicted purported reports of Lawrence’s death. Moving Picture World 6.10 (12 March 1910), p.365. (Note that the cover date of magazines at the time referred to a date one week after it was published.) Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

Notice the opening text:

“The blackest and at the same time the silliest lie circulated by enemies of the “Imp” was the story foisted on the public of St. Louis last week to the effect that Miss Lawrence (the “Imp” girl, formerly known as the “Biograph” girl) had been killed by a street car. It was a black lie because so cowardly. It was a silly lie because so easily disproved. Miss Lawrence was not even in a street-car accident, is in the best of health, will continue to appear in “Imp” film, and very shortly some of the best work in her career is to be released.”

Before the publication of my 2019 book The Origins of the Film Star System, those film historians who have come across this advertisement in the trade press have got this story at least a bit wrong in a variety of ways, with some claiming that some St Louis newspapers published a news story which claimed that Florence Lawrence had died(1), and some claiming that no stories even mentioning the idea that Florence Lawerence had died had appeared in any St Louis newspapers(2).

The truth is more complex, because some news stories were printed that referred to the belief that Florence Lawrence had died. The most elaborate of the surviving examples is reproduced and transcribed here, originally from Billboard in March 1910. To gloss some details: the Gem was one of St Louis’s independent cinemas, and the Wagner company was St Louis’s main independent film hiring company.

Anon., ‘Rumor Hands a Hot One’, Billboard 22.10 (5 March 1910), 17. Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

“Chicago, Feb. 26 – Dame Rumor aroused herself in a manner that for a few moments caused Mr. Carl Laemmle, of the IMP Company[,] to sit up and take notice, and then make a bee-line for the telegraph office [….] All this happened last week when a story was flashed over the country that Miss Florence Lawrence, the queen of moving picture actresses, had been killed in an accident, and that thereby the IMP Company had been deprived of the services of the famous “girl of one thousand faces.” It may not be ascertained as to the exact source of the story, or as to who were the instigators. It is to be hoped, however, that the flimsy foundation that is responsible for the rumor was not prompted by ulterior motives of jealousy or otherwise. Miss Lawrence has gained an enviable reputation on the sheer merit of her work, which is indeed a revelation such as has put her on a plane with those famous of our well-known emotional actresses. Further than this, she has grown into the popular fancy of that big host of people who constitute the world of moving picture patrons in a manner that has never heretofore been accomplished. [T]he following telegrams, which were received by Mr. Laemmle, testify conclusively as to her hold upon those people who know her face, admire her art and treasure her acquaintance even though it has of necessity been of the “absent treatment” [i.e. silent film] sort. Here are reproduced several of the wire inquiries which were the first of the many that followed up the story:

St Louis, Mo., Feb. 19, 1910
Mr Carl Laemmle – Was Miss Lawrence killed. Wire at our expense quick.
(Signed) F. L. TALBOTT.
Gem Theatre.

———

St. Louis, Mo., Feb. 19, 1910
Independent Moving Pictures Co. – Daily papers here printed death of Florence Lawrence. Affirm or deny. May use answer for publication. Wire.
(Signed) WAGNER FILM & AM. CO.

[…]

Signed “Monte L. De Hoog,” and from St. Louis, this little bit of verse was mailed to Carl Laemmle, at Chicago.

IN MEMORY OF FLORENCE LAWRENCE
(Died Feb. 17, 1910.)

The angel of death has come again
And gathered for his own,
A Friend whom we have learned to love,
Whose name we’ve never known

As a loving and faithful wife;
Or a maiden full of grace;
She had made us laugh and cry,
And in our heart she’s found a place

On many a pleasant journey
With her we have been,
When the Man up in the gallery
Flashed the picture on the screen

But now she is gone forever,
And we have lost a pearl:
We shed a tear in memory of
The moving picture girl.

Well, Monte, you will have to put your rhyme on ice, where it will keep a long while , for Miss Lawrence has a one hundred per cent. health certificate that should keep her with us for a long while, and Messrs. Laemmle and Cochrane are too solicitous for her safety to allow her to even take a street crossing without having traffic stopped until their star is transported to the safe side of the curb.

As for Miss Lawrence, she read the astounding news, which was smuggled into the papers from we know not where, and since then has been busy assuring her host of friends that she is very much alive and intends to be in that happy state for many years to come.

Here’s hoping that the love of her friends, the kind words of sympathy, and all that goes to prove that one has a place in this world may continue to be for the reigning queen of the picture artists. Here’s hoping, too, that ever will be their life in those hearts which are not filled with self, but that their use in praise of this one departed by held in abeyance and stored away on the shelves of the far distant future until mellowed by time their appropriation be accomplished with a life’s work completed.”

What is going on here? Of course, Carl Laemmle and Robert Cochrane are trying to make out that Lawrence Florence is much more famous and much more publicly adored than she actually is, as a way of trying to get the public to treat her as more famous than she actually is, which might in turn actually make her that famous.

Laemmle and Cochrane organised for Florence Lawrence to make a series of personal appearances, in the company of her fellow employee King Baggot in St Louis, Missouri on the weekend of 25th to 27th March 1910 (Baggot was a St Louis native), and Laemmle and Cochrane had probably already done so before creating this press release; these personal appearances both ‘responded’ to the non-existent public outcry about the news that she had died and created opportunities for further news stories about Lawrence being mobbed by fans. But in addition to this ‘fake it until you make it’ strategy, in this press release Laemmle and Cochrane are also orchestrating a piece of subtle second-order faking of fake news.

The press release claims that one of IMP’s competitors had published a fake news story about Florence Lawrence’s death, and its ‘evidence’ of this earlier fake news story takes the form of horrified responses to that news among residents of St Louis, both people who work in the film industry (the manager of the Gem and the manager of Wagner) and a member of the general public (the probably entirely invented ‘Monte L. De Hoog’). We can be very confident that no original news stories claiming that Florence Lawrence had died were ever published, but by faking these bits of evidence of a horrified reaction to such a story, IMP faked those original news stories indirectly. The staff at the IMP company did this both to try to discredit the MPPC companies by making them appear to have created a piece of fake news and to build the IMP company’s own reputation by making out that the IMP staff have heroically saved the public from an attempt to deceive them.

Billboard was reproducing most or all of IMP’s press release. Such press releases are designed to feed copy into national and local newspapers, and several local newspaper editors do seem to have been convinced by this claim that a story about Lawrence’s death had been printed somewhere, because versions of the story about the debunking of the fake news of Lawrence’s death appeared in some local Mid-West newspapers, including the St Louis Post-Dispatch on 6 March 1910(3), and on 7 March 1910 a contributor to Louisville’s Courier-Journal remarked that “it was only the other day that a report had gained wide credence that this charming actress had met with an accident while posing on the streets of New York”(4). That is, the attempt at discrediting IMP’s business rivals, without even naming them, met with some success.

In early 1910, then, in the era of print newspapers, we can identify industry awareness of some basic guidelines for how to conduct news fakery in the context of the public awareness that news fakery can happen:

  1. Do not actually directly fake the news. To do so means there could be a paper trail that might lead to you. Instead, print a third-hand ‘account’ of the fake news in the form of a report of people who have supposedly read/seen/heard that original news story.
  2. Attribute the act of hearing the fake news to a reputable source, so you can say that you have it on good authority that the lie existed.
  3. Avoid naming the people who are supposedly responsible for the fake news, but nonetheless imply their identity.
  4. Make the claims in the third-hand fakery both a) perverse, and b) imbecilic in their susceptibility to being shown to be incorrect.
  5. Make the claims in the third-hand fakery amenable to an act of refutation that serves one’s own interests (in Laemmle’s case, the announcement that as Lawrence was luckily not dead, it was incumbent on IMP to announce which films the public might see her in next).

This act of covertly faking a piece of covert-turned-exposed fake news and attributing that act of fakery to one’s opponent was a straightforward consequence of a highly competitive business environment, itself a product of the little-regulated form of capitalism that was practised in the USA at the time. (I say ‘little-regulated’, as anti-trust legislation did exist in the USA: with reference to the prohibitions against a monopoly that had been stated in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, decisions in several cases concerning the MPPC, at District Court level, Circuit Court level and Supreme Court level, in late 1915 through to early 1918, resulted in the MPPC’s dissolution, in spite of the argument that its pool of patents exceptionally gave it the right to control trade in and use of films in the USA.)

Fostering unwarranted public mistrust of one’s competitors is one natural consequence of any system that makes competition the crux of how humans interact with each other. Unwarranted public mistrust of anyone and everyone except for a single source of ‘information’ is one of the two fundamental components of the mindset behind conspiracy theorising (the other is a lowering of the burden of proof for that single source of ‘information’). Our habits of thought are shaped by large-scale systems to which we have grown so accustomed that we cannot even see them as systems anymore. With a knowledge of what capitalism prompts its subjects to do to each other, we should not be surprised at just how widespread that public mistrust and its resulting conspiracism currently is.

Footnotes

(1) Anon., ‘Heroes and Heroines of Moving Picture Shows’, St Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine, 6 March 1910, p. 4. Anon., ‘Famous Picture Actress is Still in Posing Land’, Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky) 113.15040 (6 March 1910), section 4, p. 8; this article included two of the eight ‘range photographs and claimed that the fake obituaries had been printed on 4 March 1910.

(2) Anon., ‘Love Picture and Two Star Comics’, Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky) 113.15041 (7 March 1910), p. 10.

(3) See, for example, Ralph Cassady, ‘Monopoly in Motion Picture Production and Distribution,’ 1959, The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures, ed. Gorham Kindem (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982, pp. 25-68, p. 52, Richard Schickel, The Stars (New York: Bonanza, 1962), p. 11, Alexander Walker, Stardom: The Hollywood Phenomenon (New York; Stein & Day, 1970), p. 31-2, Kevin Brownlow, Hollywood: The Pioneers (London: Collins, 1979), p. 156, Charles Musser, ‘The Changing Status of the Actor’, Before Hollywood: Turn-of-the Century American Film (New York: Hudson Hills Press/American Federation of Arts, 1987), pp. 57–62, p. 59, Richard Dyer MacCann, ‘Early Luminaries’, The Stars Appear, ed. Richard Dyer MacCann (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1992), pp. 44-47, p. 45, Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 112, Hugues Marc Antoine Bartoli, ‘Florence Lawrence: Myth and Legend of the Biograph Girl’, Classic Images 343 (January 2004), pp. 71-6, p. 73, Robert Kobel, Silent Movies: The Birth of Film to the Triumph of Movie Culture (London: Little, Brown & Co., 2007), p. 151, Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 232.

(4) This has been the case for most (but not all) film historians who have written on the topic since Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities, 1990 (Champaign, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 58.

HADD its day: there’s no evidence for an inherited hyperactive agency detection device

Kat Ford
-
0
HADD its day: there’s no evidence for an inherited hyperactive agency detection device

Many of you have probably heard of the hyperactive agency detection device, or ‘HADD’. It’s a great little concept that is incredibly useful to invoke when talking about numerous weird human beliefs. Why do we see faces in clouds? HADD. Why do some people believe in ghosts? HADD. Fairies? HADD. Conspiracy theories? HADD. Aliens? HADD. God? HADD. Got a question about some mysterious goings on that people seem desperate to attribute to the activity of some sentient being or other? HADD it mate. Throw HADD at it, case closed, problem solved! But what is the history of this ubiquitous HADD, and where is the evidence that HADD exists?

The hyperactive agency detection device has its roots in evolutionary psychology, quite a specific approach to evolutionary psychology in fact. Put very simply, the argument goes a little something like this. The human brain is almost like a Swiss army knife. At birth the brain is fully kitted out with pre-existing mechanisms or devices. Given the right environmental input, these mechanisms will spring into action at the appropriate time. These mechanisms have been passed through generation after generation, because individuals in our ancestral environments possessing these traits were more likely to successfully solve challenges of survival and reproduction, and therefore pass on these traits to offspring. Those offspring, endowed with these inherited mechanisms similarly did a cracking job at surviving long enough to create offspring. As long as the same challenge reoccurs, the same inherited solution is useful. Rinse, hump, repeat.

Hyperactive agency detection device is often argued to be one of those nifty little mechanisms that helped ancestral humans navigate a dangerous world. In a world full of lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), better to assume that the rustling sound in the bush is a hungry predator and run like stink, than to ignore it and become something’s lunch. So what if you occasionally leg it because the wind made a noise? Being a bit out of breath is far better than the awful, no good, terrible consequences you might face if you never run from the scary sound.

This logic of the hyperactive agency detection device sits comfortably within the larger framework of error management theory – the idea that some mistakes are far more costly than other mistakes. A classic example used to illustrate the importance of error management is that of the smoke detector. Would you prefer to have a smoke detector that is a touch too sensitive and causes a frantic outbreak of window opening, tea-towel flapping and exasperated swearing every time you dare to make toast, or would you prefer a smoke detector that sits placidly on the wall as your furniture and favourite trinkets get a lovely crispy crust. Clearly, you want the hysterical smoke detector that will take any excuse to sing its ear splitting siren song – better that than sofa flambé. The same is true for human cognition: if a false positive is annoying but a false negative is deadly, it’s best to calibrate your brain in favour of the false positive.

This idea, that humans are hyperactive agency detectors because assuming agents where there are none is less costly than not detecting agents where there are some, is beautiful. It’s elegant and charming in its simplicity and explanatory power. It makes intuitive sense, and it’s just so damn logical! There is just one tiny problem: there is no empirical evidence that the hyperactive agency detection device exists.

In Disbelief by Will Gervais, a few pages are dedicated to this specific problem. Although the concept of a hyperactive agency detection device has been around since the 1990’s, there is no evidence it exists. But this concept is so pervasive, especially among those who work in the cognitive science of religion, that it is almost treated as established fact. During my PhD I tried to investigate a link between heightened sensitivity to agents and religious belief and found… nothing. During their postgraduate days, Will Gervais and fellow researcher Aiyana Willard also tried to investigate the link between HADD and religion but found no evidence that HADD even existed. 

After giving a talk at a conference detailing research that turned up no evidence that HADD was even a thing, Willard was approached by multiple other researchers who similarly spent time conducting research based on the idea that the HADD was the key to understanding religious cognition from an evolutionary perspective only to find the hyperactive agency detection devise was ironically undetectable. I have heard it said that researching a hypothesis generated on the assumption that HADD not only exists but is central to explaining religious cognition, then coming away with null results and the sudden need to change direction as quickly as possible, is tantamount to a right of passage for those of us who have spent time working in the Cognitive Science of Religion. The publication bias against null results is responsible for many doctoral tears.

But if HADD doesn’t exist, why is there so much anecdotal evidence that it does? Why do so many people have the experience of hearing a creak in the night and suddenly becoming filled with the fear that there is a burglar in the house? Why is HADD such an attractive, versatile and intuitively appealing idea?

In the paper agency detection is unnecessary in the explanation of religious belief Willard argues that our tendency to suspect a sentient being (or agent) is present is entirely dependent on context. We do not just assume any unexpected noise in any context or circumstance is an agent, but it depends entirely on previous experience, prior learning, expectations and likelihood. The paper opens by illustrating this beautifully: 

A bump in the night can make us fear that a burglar is in the house […] If that bump is heard deep in the Canadian wilderness ,we are more likely to think – and are better served by thinking – that the sound is a bear. If we are  skiing across snowy mountain peaks, an unexpected noise should make us fear an avalanche rather than any type of agent.

The likelihood that you will perceive a strange noise as a ghost is dependent on whether you live in a culture where ghost beliefs are common. If your culture is full of mischievous pixies, you are likely to attribute unexpected noises to mischievous pixies. The inferences you make will be dependent on the beliefs you already hold. So yes, many of us have had the experience of hearing an unsettling noise and thinking “burglar!” or being in a spooky place, hearing an unexpected whistle of wind and thinking “GHOST!” not because we have a hyperactive agency detection devise, but because of the expectations we have been endowed with due to cultural learning.  

So, why is this story interesting? Two main reasons, I think. Firstly, that HADD is so often invoked, means it is important that we as skeptics are aware of the shaky foundations on which it sits. Secondly, and most importantly to me, it illustrates both the biggest problems and biggest potential in evolutionary psychology and adjacent disciplines. A common criticism of evolutionary psychology is that those who work in the area often tell very nice, plausible stories about the human mind with ideas that seem very logical but are ultimately unfalsifiable. The story of HADD and the research around it is showing something quite different. Yes, the idea has taken hold because it is a nice, pleasingly logical, easy to follow story, but it did allow researchers who are currently still working in the field of human evolutionary behavioural sciences (including evolutionary psychology) to generate falsifiable hypothesis and conduct research investigating this very idea. The idea is probably wrong, HADD probably doesn’t exist, and now researchers are continuing the work of trying to figure out an explanation that better fits and better predicts human behaviour. Yes, even evolutionary psychology can be self-correcting.

Unborn in the USA: being honest about IUDs could help us fight the anti-abortion movement

Colin Brewer
-
0
Unborn in the USA: being honest about IUDs could help us fight the anti-abortion movement

The biggest irony of the repeal of Roe v Wade that has caused the recriminalisation of abortion in some southern states of the USA is that even the most fervent of anti-abortionists have almost entirely ignored a widely used contraceptive method that has aborted far more of the ‘unborn Beethovens and Einsteins’ so prominent in anti-abortion discourse than all the world’s abortion clinics combined. These millions of abortions were caused by one of the ways in which intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUDs) work and, for different but related reasons, both anti-abortionists and family planners seem to have agreed never to mention it. I believe it is worth publicising, however, because it may help to restore the status quo in the USA that prevailed for nearly half a century. It may also help to quash efforts to restrict abortion rights in Europe.

Whatever Constitutionalist arguments were invoked by religious and/or Trump-appointed supreme court members to justify it, the Roe v Wade repeal is a triumph of misogyny which, as well as rape victims, will disproportionately affect the people whose lives are most at risk of being blighted by unwanted pregnancy – teenagers, often from poor families, forced into early and single motherhood or early marriage with all the well-documented problems that generates for them and their children; and mothers already stretched by caring for their existing children. Middle-class women will, as usual, navigate the obstacles more easily, even if they have to go interstate or abroad. Delaying motherhood will increase their education and employment prospects, further increasing their life-chances compared with their poorer counterparts.

If anyone wants to set up a Museum of Irony and Paradox, the main exhibit could focus on abortion, because it attracts so much of the stuff. There’s the capital punishment paradox – the fact that among typical ‘pro-life’ anti-abortionists, with their traditional set of moralities, are many enthusiasts for capital punishment. There’s the historical paradox that we get lectured on the sanctity of life by the spiritual heirs of Catholic and Protestant heretic-burners, to mention only the Christian kind.

There’s also the irony that a large proportion of human pregnancies end in very early spontaneous abortion (the term ‘miscarriage’ usually describes spontaneous abortion later in pregnancy), which suggests that the putative deity of the fundamentalists isn’t interested in maximising foetal survival. Indeed, since many of these early spontaneous abortions seem to involve anatomical or chromosomal abnormalities that would lead to severe birth defects if the pregnancy were to go to term, it also suggests that God is a Foetal Darwinist.

Finally, there’s the peculiarly American irony that the Southern states and white fundamentalists, who have only recently and reluctantly got over their enthusiasm for church-sanctioned slavery and segregation (as Tom Lehrer called it, ‘The land of the boll-weevil/Where the laws are mediaeval’) are among those most keen to ban abortion. This would have the biggest impact on the disproportionately African American poor.

For me, though, the chief irony has always been the way in which anti-abortionists reveal their fundamental dishonesty and hypocrisy over the millions of very tiny ‘unborn babies’ (aka ‘potential Beethovens’) who are, to use their terms, ‘murdered’ every year by the action of contraceptives, especially but not exclusively the intrauterine device (IUD) or ‘coil’. Ever since IUDs were introduced in the 1960s, it was obvious that they worked in a number of ways, including the destruction of tiny Beethovens (they might, of course, be tiny Hitlers or Stalins) during the first few days after fertilisation (and thus ‘personhood’), before or after the implantation of the blastocyst – the embryo’s initial and tiniest manifestation. They are therefore at least part-time abortifacients (ie drugs or devices that cause abortion) and they remain abortifacients even if most of the time, they prevent pregnancies by killing or disabling sperm and/or ova before they can unite.

The fact that the tiny, brainless Beethovens who are aborted at this stage are barely visible to the naked eye does not prevent the Vatican from asserting that they are large enough to accommodate a soul, though that evidence-free assertion dates, along with the doctrine of papal infallibility, only from 1869. Previously, Rome held, equally without evidence, that ‘ensoulment’ took place later, at 40 days for a male foetus and 80 days for a female (and presumably at 60 days for the occasional true ‘hermaphrodite’). Islam gives us a ball-park range of 42-120 days for both sexes: take your pick.

Until the 1830s in Britain, inducing an abortion was not an offence under common law unless it took place after ‘quickening’ – ie obvious foetal movement – around 18-20 weeks’ gestation. Even after seven weeks of development and perhaps two missed periods, our little Beethoven/Hitler is barely 3/4 inch, or 18mm, long. In Oklahoma a few years ago, legislators seized on a more modern version of the Beethoven argument. It was proposed, and very nearly enacted, that women seeking abortion, even after rape, had to watch and listen while a doctor did an ultrasound examination of the foetus and described its cute little fingers. According to The Guardian:

The sponsor of that law, the Republican state senator Todd Lamb, said it was intended to give the mother “as much information as possible about that baby” because it might grow up to win the Nobel prize.

I wrote to Sen. Lamb, making some of the points that I’m about to describe but like many anti-abortion British politicians, he did not respond to my arguments.

Today, there are two types of IUD. The simpler kind is a T-shaped bit of plastic, wrapped around with copper wire. The combination of mechanical and inflammatory action from a foreign body barging around in the uterus and the local toxic effect of copper makes things difficult for sperm and fertilised or unfertilised ova. In the other sort, sometimes called an intrauterine system, the device is impregnated with hormones that may reduce (but are not guaranteed to prevent) ovulation, or implantation.

However, for both types, the product information sheets concede (though usually not very prominently) that causing early abortion is among the modes of action and that people with strong views on these matters may prefer to use other methods. As a 2002 review in a leading obstetric journal concluded,

although prefertilization effects are more prominent for the copper IUD, both prefertilization and postfertilization mechanisms of action contribute significantly to the effectiveness of all types of intrauterine devices.

They also apply to some types of oral contraceptive but I will leave those out of the argument.

Let’s look at what ‘postfertilization mechanisms of action’ means, using the pro-life language of ‘murdered babies’. There are currently over 150 million IUD-users world-wide. Apart from the 100 million of them who live in China and are thus mostly beyond the reach of anti-abortionists inspired by Abrahamic religions (the only ones that seem to bother about it much), that means 50 million women, each of whom might be murdering at least one soul-equipped baby every year, even if hormone-impregnated IUDs mean that they only release three or four ova in that time. That could mean 50 million induced abortions a year, which is far more than the total combined annual live births of Europe and the USA, let alone the much smaller total of notified legal abortions. Even if the true figure for IUDs is only a tenth of that, 5 million is still an awful lot of minced-up micro-Beethovens, though far fewer than are lost in the daily Malthusian wastage and Darwinian weeding-out of defective embryos.

The essence of anti-abortionism is that destroying a tiny embryo is morally the same – or virtually the same – as destroying a full-grown human baby. Anti-abortionists must maintain that stance, or their case collapses. They also have to maintain (and most of them do) that ‘humanity’ begins at fertilisation. That is why the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children campaigned vigorously but ineffectively a few years ago in Britain against increasing the availability of post-coital ‘morning after’ contraception; which works – whichever method is used – by ensuring that if a fertilised ovum results from the coitus in question, it is aborted, either by the prescribed medication or, less often, by inserting a post-coital IUD.

One leading British anti-abortionist obstetrician, Prof. Hugh McLaren did try to argue that ‘humanity’ began at implantation rather than at fertilisation, so that IUDs were acceptable as contraceptives but he encountered two unanswerable objections. The first was that if he could move the goalposts to suit his moral beliefs, so could the pro-choice tendency. The second was that IUDs could clearly work not only after fertilisation but also after implantation. Furthermore, his views were not typical of anti-abortion doctors who are also obstetricians and thus particularly well-informed about foetal development.

A survey of 1760 US obstetricians found that in a response rate of 66% (which is high for this sort of survey),

One-half of US obstetrician-gynecologists (57%) believe pregnancy begins at conception. Fewer (28%) believe it begins at implantation, and 16% are not sure. In multivariable analysis, the consideration that religion is the most important thing in one’s life…and an objection to abortion…were associated independently and inversely with believing that pregnancy begins at implantation.

In other words, the more religious and anti-abortion the obstetricians, the more likely they were to believe that pregnancy, humanity and ‘personhood’ begin at conception and that conception means fertilisation, not implantation. Accordingly, when our own abortion laws were under attack in the decade or so after the 1967 Abortion Act was passed, I wrote to several prominent British antiabortionists along the following lines.

You apparently regard the fertilisation of the ovum as the starting point of humanity.  I do not share this view but it is not an entirely dishonourable one.  However, you may not realise that IUDs work not only by preventing fertilisation but also by destroying the fertilised embryo during the first week or two of its existence, both before and after implantation.  Most of the hundreds of thousands of British IUD-users are sexually active, so they could each be having an early abortion several times every year.  This makes for an awful lot of murders of potential Beethovens (as you regularly portray abortions) and probably amounts to far more ‘murders’ than all the abortions formally notified under the provisions of the Abortion Act. If you really are as outraged by abortion as you claim, you will, of course, want to make it very clear that you are just as outraged by those who manufacture, insert or wear IUDs as you are by those involved in murder/abortion at later stages of pregnancy. I therefore invite you to make an immediate public statement to that effect. Alternatively, if you feel unable to make such a statement, I invite you to explain why you regard the destruction of a mini-Beethoven at one or two weeks as so much less worthy of your indignation than the destruction of the same mini-Beethoven a month, or two or three months, later.

Among the people I wrote to were the former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster (the late Cardinal Basil Hume) and several Members of Parliament, and I still have a collection of wonderfully evasive letters from them. Most tried to change the subject. Leo Abse, one of the MPs and noted for his flamboyant and articulate style, was struck uncharacteristically dumb and declined to continue the correspondence.

I had – and later published – an extensive correspondence with Cardinal Hume, who eventually conceded that if what I said about the mode of action of the IUD was true, which it clearly is, then the point I had made was an important one. He reminded me of his church’s traditional opposition to all forms of contraception but he never subsequently referred in public to the IUD problem. Pope John Paul II (to whom I didn’t write) mentioned IUDs briefly and in passing as part of a general attack on abortion in the early 1980s but rarely referred to the matter thereafter. He never, as far as I know, singled out IUDs, despite their enormous numerical importance in any calculation of murdered Beethovens and blighted souls. I think Americans could have a lot of useful and innocent fun by similarly tormenting the US equivalents and exposing their hypocrisy.

To publicise the issue, I even devised a little stunt in the late 1970s. Together with a medical journalist and an academic expert on abortion law, I arranged for a leading professor of gynaecology to insert an IUD into the uterus of a friend of mine who was a prominent women’s magazine editor. We all then signed a letter testifying that we had witnessed this illegal procedure, namely using an instrument, (specifically an IUD) to procure a miscarriage, contrary to the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 (where the prohibition of abortion is picturesquely sandwiched between prohibitions of bigamy and buggery) and without the two medical opinions, medical reasons and other bureaucratic requirements of the reformed 1967 abortion law. We then jointly posted this explosive document through the letter box of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Our bit of street theatre got into the papers, but produced absolutely no response. After several months and several reminders, a weary letter from the DPP informed us that he would not take any action against the gynaecologist, despite our request that he should do so. Significantly, he did not argue that the professor had not broken any law.

Short of inviting Cardinal Hume to be one of the witnesses, I couldn’t have done more to alert British anti-abortionists to the medical facts about IUDs but they have remained very reluctant to mention the matter. The reason is obvious. They know that most people – probably including most Catholics – know the difference between an acorn and an oak tree and know that destroying an acorn, or even a small sapling, is not the same as cutting down an oak tree. They know that opposition to contraception is a political dead duck, even in Catholic countries. Finally, they know that most people cannot get very worked up about the moral status of something that is almost invisible to the naked eye but they dare not say that murdering unborn babies doesn’t matter provided that they are only little ones, because that, of course, is exactly the position of the pro-choice lobby. We differ only in our definitions of ‘little’ and all such definitions are largely arbitrary.

Instead, anti-abortionists concentrate on abortions that take place after the foetus has begun to resemble a very tiny (about 1 inch/2.5cm long) humanoid around 10 – 12 weeks after fertilisation, which is the time by which most induced abortions are performed. Anti-abortion films such as ‘The Silent Scream’ argue that abortion is wrong not only because it is murder but also because it is cruel, since it involves dismembering living mini-Beethovens. This is often backed up by heart-warming reports that long before delivery, the foetus can respond to music as well as to pain.

The problem with this highly emotive argument is that pain that isn’t remembered isn’t really pain in the usual sense of the word. If that weren’t the case, we would presumably insist on delivering all babies under general anaesthesia or by Caesarian section, because being squeezed through the birth canal for several hours would be extremely painful. After all, it is such a tight fit that the bones of the foetal skull are often forced to overlap to make the head small enough to pass.

We would also surely insist that male circumcision soon after birth should be done under anaesthesia as well. Babies certainly scream during this procedure (I performed it several times without even local anaesthesia on new-born Australians when it was still fashionable), but they never remember it as adults, any more than they remember being born. Surgical patients under light anaesthesia also react visibly when the knife goes in or when their fractures are manipulated but unless the anaesthetic is far too light, they don’t remember it either. So, ‘Silent Scream’ is misleading.

One might expect that pro-choice exponents and the Family Planning movement would welcome the IUD argument but in practice, they too have kept quiet. Their reasons for silence are very similar to those of the pro-lifers but their motivation is very different. Many anti-abortionists are old-fashioned sexual moralists whose ideological ancestors fought similar battles against contraception and votes for women a few generations ago. As well as those who feel genuinely offended by what they see as the murder of tiny babies with not-so-tiny souls, their ranks include many tedious male supremacists who fear giving women control over their own fertility and sexuality.

Obviously, the family-planning and pro-choice exponents are about as far away from that position as it is possible to be, but they fear that by mentioning the abortifacient effects of IUDs, they may deter some women and some family planning clinics from using a particularly efficient contraceptive method that is also very cost-effective. That is not hypocritical but it is dishonest. They also feared (until President Obama reversed American policy) the displeasure of the US government, which banned all financial aid to family-planning programmes that used, promoted or even discussed abortion. A US government-funded internet contraception library even prevented users from searching for articles containing the word ‘abortion’ until protests caused it to relent. Consequently, one of the strongest and most embarrassing arguments to use against anti-abortionists – that they are a bunch of odious hypocrites – is rarely deployed. I discussed my conclusions with a leading international figure in the world of population control and family planning. ‘You’re quite right, of course’ he said, ‘but you absolutely must not quote me’.

Even in Britain, family planning organisations deliberately conceal the physiological truth. I contacted the Family Planning Association, whose website stated very clearly that IUDs do not cause abortions. They said they could not give me a statement, even though in addition to gynaecologists, they employ many doctors who specialise in family planning and have diplomas to prove it. Instead, they referred me to the Faculty of Family Planning of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists – who could not help me either because I was not a member of the Faculty. In desperation, I sought the advice of Prof. John Studd, an old friend and, until his death in 2022, a very prominent and experienced gynaecologist. He said I could quote him and this is what he emailed me.

After further telephone discussions with “experts”, it seems there has been very little new research on this subject and the thinking is that it is a deliberate neglect in order not to offend the fundamentalists of Rome.

Nothing has changed since I wrote in 1976, for World Medicine:

People working in contraception have told me how there seems to have been almost a tacit international agreement not to discuss the abortifacient properties of the IUD. It is, they say, a useful birth control agent for many countries where an ignorant and unsophisticated peasantry is in thrall to religious leaders who accept contraception but not abortion and who could easily torpedo an IUD programme. I can understand their motives but I do not believe this is an attitude that should commend itself to a reasonably educated democracy.

Brewer C. Mortal Coils. World Medicine. June 2nd 1976, 33-6

I did manage to get a response from one leading British authority on contraception, who happens to be an Evangelical Christian, though he preferred not to be named. He is not an anti-abortionist but he relied on much the same ‘implantation’ argument that the anti-abortionist Prof. McLaren had used, though he also noted the large amount of ‘normal’ foetal wastage between fertilisation and implantation, even without IUDs. How likely was it, he asked rhetorically, that (I paraphrase) an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God with the additional attribute of “omni-common sense”, would expect us to give the status, importance and respect to this unimplanted entity that it acquires, in his view, at the moment of implantation?

Surely it is now safe for the IUD to come out of the closet? The inconvenient truth has been published in scientific journals for over 40 years and even a Republican US government could not easily pretend that it neither knew nor cared about it. I think it would not now dare to withdraw funding from IUD programmes, especially in countries where its advantages make it a preferred method of contraception.

Surely not even Donald Trump really believes that the lot of poor women and their families would be improved by being forced to bear more children than they can support in countries where the process of childbirth is often still lethally dangerous? Properly presented, I think the IUD argument can breach the moral defences of the anti-abortionists (and the anti-stem-cell and anti-embryo research lobbies) more effectively than any other. Their leaders, including Pope John-Paul II, knew perfectly well that millions of IUD-induced early abortions were taking place every year but they mostly preferred not to acknowledge them and said nothing that compared with their regular torrents of outrage about abortions only slightly later in pregnancy. Where does that leave their moral credibility and authority?

Animals, acupuncture and alt-med: the Brazilian penguin being subjected to Enya

Natália Pasternak
-
0
Animals, acupuncture and alt-med: the Brazilian penguin being subjected to Enya

The use of medical treatments based on alternative practices – even under labels like “integrative” and “complementary” – is unfortunately common among humans, as has been covered in this magazine many times. But the notion of using treatments which lack evidence of safety and efficacy on the most defenseless of living beings – animals – is just as important.

People who use – or advocate for the use of – health practices that are without scientific proof (and often based on theoretical foundations that make less sense than flat Earth theories) often defend the practice by arguing that patients should be free to choose what they do to and with their bodies. But what freedom does an animal have? An adult human has the right to choose whether or not to seek treatment as they see fit. Children and animals don’t have this prerogative: they are at the mercy of their caregivers.

Recently, it was reported that a rescued penguin was being treated in Rio de Janeiro for spinal inflammation. The novelty was that the treatment included acupuncture, music, and cannabinoids. But what evidence supports and justifies the use of these practices and substances on penguins or any other animals, whether wild or domestic?

A search in scientific literature reveals that there is basically none. A systematic review published in 2006 examined 31 studies that used acupuncture on domestic animals. Evidence of effectiveness in treating any condition: zero.

Another review, published in 2017, highlighted the low methodological quality of animal acupuncture clinical trials. It also noted that most of the studies were narrative – in essence, the authors told stories instead of analysing data. Of course, if storytelling could prove anything in health, then chloroquine would cure COVID.

Just like acupuncture in humans, veterinary acupuncture is no more than a placebo, as has been shown multiple times. Animals may react to the placebo effect for various reasons – such as conditioning, or the comfort generated by the caring attention from surrounding humans – but there is also something called “proxy placebo”: the animal continues to suffer as before, or even more, while the observing humans falsely believe their situation has improved.

Beyond the issue of scientific evidence, acupuncture in animals doesn’t even make sense according to acupuncture’s own logic, which claims that the human body is traversed by meridians connecting vital energy points. Maps of these meridians are widely available (indeed, they’re so widely available that different schools of acupuncture use wildly different maps). But who mapped the meridians of a penguin’s body? Are there millennia-old schools of Traditional Antarctic Medicine?

Veterinary acupuncture manuals suggest that acupuncture points are simply transposed from humans to animals. This might explain, as pointed out by veterinarian David Ramey, author of a review on acupuncture in horses, why the practice describes a “gallbladder meridian” in equines… even though horses don’t have a gallbladder.

Medications like cannabinoids have never been tested on penguins, so we cannot know the appropriate dosage or side effects. And I’ll leave it to readers to judge who decided that listening to Enya calms penguins… or even humans.

One enthusiast of alternative veterinary therapies referred to the “treatments” imposed on the poor penguin as “more innovative and respectful practices that significantly reduce the need for allopathic medications.” It’s complicated for a practice to be both ancient and innovative. And to whom is this respectful? Perhaps to certain ideological prejudices – like those who use “allopathic” as a pejorative term – but certainly not to the poor, defenceless penguin, who has been prodded with needles and subjected to Orinoco Flow.

Exploding the myth of the longevity “Blue Zones”, where people live beyond the age of 100

Carlos Orsi
-
0
Exploding the myth of the longevity “Blue Zones”, where people live beyond the age of 100

This story was originally written in Portuguese, and published to the website of Revista Questão de Ciência. It appears here with permission.

A sign of the shrinking space for science in the Brazilian press is the lack of attention that this year’s IgNobel Award received – announced on the night of 12 September 2024, there hasn’t been a single prominent mention of it in any of our major newspapers. Which is a shame, because among this year’s winners there is a researcher who exploded a myth that Brazillian journalism had swallowed hook, line, sinker, and dock: the myth of “blue zones” of longevity.

Over a year ago I criticised the concept of “blue zones”: the idea that certain regions of the planet, supposedly inhabited by a disproportionate number of people over 100, could hold the “secret of supercentenarian life.” The idea has even been the theme of a successful documentary released by Netflix.

My criticism was based on the naive interpretation of the apparent correlation between certain habits (such as eating honey, or taking long walks) and supposed longevity. It is the fallacy of survival bias: seeing who has succeeded in some activity and trying to reverse engineer the process that led to their success.

It sounds like pure common sense, but it fails to adopt proper controls: just because two or three billionaires have the habit of waking up at four in the morning, that doesn’t mean that getting up at dawn can make someone get rich – just ask bus drivers or garbage collectors. Such markers of success (or “longevity”) are only reliable if there a significantly increased likelihood of success among the population that adopt them, compared to a significantly lower chance of success among the population who do not. And what if, while there are a few outspoken billionaires who get up before the sun, the rest all sleep until noon, but don’t give interviews about it?

A promotional image in the style of watercolour figures painted onto a map showing primarily China, Indonesia and Australia. Several figures starring in the series "Live to 100, Secrets of the Blue Zones" are depicted as happy and strong.
Promotional imagery from Netflix’s “Live to 100” series, “Secrets of the Blue Zones”.

The recent IgNobel-winning study, published in the bioRxiv repository and authored by the demographer Saul Justin Newman, from University College London, went beyond this philosophical criticism; Newman sought other “common factors” present in the supposed zones of high longevity and discovered a strong prevalence of what he called “anti-health” factors: poverty, misery, high unemployment, high rates of illiteracy, low life expectancy, and high crime.

It is worth noting that, like all material available in bioRxiv, Newman’s study did not go through peer review – but neither, of course, have the many books, reports and documentaries that have credulously promoted the cult of the “blue zones”.

In the United States, the largest “predictor” of the prevalence of supercentenaries (people over 100 years) in a population is the absence of birth certificates in the early 20th century. “In total, 82% of supercentenary records in the US are prior to the adoption of birth certificates in their states. When these states have full coverage of birth certificates, the number of supercentenarians falls 82% per year.”

“I’ve tracked 80% of people over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t significantly analyze). Of these, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US, there are more than 500 of these people; seven have birth certificates,” he said in an interview with The Conversation after receiving IgNobel.

Newman documents several clerical errors going on in places that purportedly contain “blue zones”. In Costa Rica, it was found, by 2008, that 42% of the population registered as over 99 years of age had ‘made mistakes’ when declaring their ages in the 2000 census. In 2010, more than 230,000 centenarians from Japan were found to have been fictional, were the product of bureaucratic errors, or were actually already dead. In 2012, Greece determined that 72% of its centenarians had already died – a likely indication of pension fraud.

According to Newman, the marketing of blue zones – including tourism, the trade of “natural” products from these areas or “inspired” by them, plus books, courses, and television programs – lacks scientific basis, but also the demographic research on extreme longevity is based on highly contaminated data: there are strong indications of fraud, lying or deception by a significant part of those who declare themselves supercentenarians.

He cites a study conducted in the US that showed that centenarians have similar (or worse!) body mass index, physical activity rates, smoking and alcohol consumption levels versus the population that served as a basis of comparison, which was 35 years younger. Newman offers four hypotheses to explain how it would be possible to survive from the age of 65 to 100 by smoking more, drinking more, eating worse, and doing less physical activity each year: 1/ either these behaviors do not cause mortality, or 2/ they cause mortality, but the lives lost are “compensated” in the published statistics by bureaucratic errors in the age records, or 3/ the centenarians are actually more likely to drink and smoke more, or 4/ that older drinkers and smokers lie about their age.

The author gives a hypothetical example to show how a small error or fraud rate in age records can, over time, generate a spurious overpopulation of supercentenarians. Imagine that a 50-year-old man decides to lie, saying he is 60, perhaps to claim some kind of social security benefit. When other people who were actually 60 at the time of the fraud began to die – say, from the age of 85 – our character will still have, in fact, the biological age of 75. If he lives to 95, his official age, recorded in documents, will be 105. Given the small number of supercentenarians, only a few of such situations are enough to distort statistics – and the places where there is more incentive for such fraud are exactly those where the dependence on social security benefits due to poverty is greater, which is the case of most “blue zones”.

“Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst recordkeeping,” explained Newman.

Reading Newman’s article and recalling the Netflix series, it occurred to me that the allure of the “blue zones” derives – among other things – from a romantic fascination with the way of life of “simple people”, from a lyrical view of the supposed purifying merits of poverty, rustic life and rural isolation (views that only held, of course, by those who are not poor, but live in comfort in urban areas). It is a condescending populism converted into the most crass commercialism.

The evidence for pill colour impacting placebo effects gets flimsier the more you examine it

Mike Hall
-
0
The evidence for pill colour impacting placebo effects gets flimsier the more you examine it

In 1996, the British Medical Journal published a systematic review of studies examining whether the colour of a pill could change its effectiveness. At first glance, the idea might make intuitive sense. Red is bold and energetic, blue is calm and serene, so patients might expect different things from red or blue pills and these expectations could influence their reported outcomes.

The review comes to a cautiously positive, if slightly hedged, conclusion: ‘[Colours] seem to influence the effectiveness of a drug.’ Since publication, the idea that different coloured placebo pills can produce different effects has become a frequently cited example whenever ‘the power of placebo’ is discussed in science communication or popular media, with this review often cited in support.

A closer look at the included studies, however, uncovers significant problems. The BMJ references six studies on the impact of drug colour on effectiveness, conducted between 1968 and 1978, all of which are impacted by some methodological or statistical issue.

Blackwell 1972

The first is Blackwell 1972, which was reviewed recently for The Skeptic. Fifty-six medical students were given either blue or pink placebo pills and asked to report which effects they felt. Blackwell claimed to show that blue pills made students feel ‘more drowsy’ and ‘less alert’, compared to pink pills.

Unfortunately this study is small, only single blind, and is based on self-reported effects – a combination which opens the door to all sorts of uncontrolled biases. Worse still, the students were primed with a list of possible effects, making it more likely they would report something even if nothing had changed. There are good reasons to doubt that the findings from this paper represent a real effect.

Schapira 1970

The next paper in the BMJ review is Schapira 1970. Forty-eight patients suffering with anxiety were treated with the anti-anxiety drug oxazepam over the course of several weeks. Although the dose was identical in each case, pills were presented in a range of colours. Patients self-reported their condition and were also evaluated by a clinician. Since the active drug was the same in all cases, Schapira suggests that any differences would be the result of the colour of the pills alone.

While the paper initially reports that anxiety was ‘most improved with green [pills],’ and depression ‘appeared to respond best to yellow,’ (and these are the findings cited by both the BMJ review and Ben Goldacre’s popular science book Bad Science), in fact neither of these findings reaches statistical significance. Schapira reports only one statistically significant finding with respect to pill colour, and that is for the effect of green pills on phobias. Even this finding is questionable, however, since it is based on the clinician reports only (no effect is found when considering the patient reports), and it involved just 17 of the 48 patients. The remaining 31 were not suffering with phobias, since participants were recruited for their anxiety symptoms. The fact that 17 of them also struggled with phobias was unintended and the analysis performed post-hoc.

This effect in phobias also disappears when the figures are properly adjusted to account for the fact that Schapira makes many different comparisons, across pill colour, symptom, and rating type.

Cattaneo 1970

Cattaneo 1970 examined 120 patients awaiting surgery on their varicose veins. The patients were randomly given either an orange or a blue pill and told they were sedatives to help them sleep. In fact, the pills had no drug in them at all. The next morning, patients were asked how long it took them to fall asleep, how long they slept, whether they felt rested, and which of the two pills they preferred.

In an odd leap of logic, Cattaneo asserts that whichever pill patients said they preferred must be the one which best helped them sleep, but it should be immediately obvious why this doesn’t necessarily follow. Perhaps orange is simply their favourite colour? Maybe they’re big Everton supporters and will pick a blue anything regardless of how well it does?

You may also reasonably ask why they are giving fake sleeping pills to patients who are awaiting varicose vein surgery? The paper claims that since they are awaiting surgery, therefore patients must be experiencing mild-to-moderate anxiety. Since they are experiencing mild-to-moderate anxiety, therefore they must have trouble sleeping. And since they cannot sleep, they must need a sedative. 

No effort is made to establish whether the patients actually are suffering with anxiety, nor is any effort made to establish whether they are struggling to sleep; these claims are just nakedly asserted.

An assortment of pills in a bowl, of different shapes, sizes and colours. There are triangular, circular and capsule-shaped pills. Colours include blue, orange, green, white and pink.
Will you pick the blue pill… or the orange pill? Image by Valeria GB from Pixabay

In fairness, the paper does claim that there is correlation between the ‘favourite pill’ and the other self-reported sleep quality scores gathered from the patients, but it makes no effort to quantify this statistically. The primary findings of the paper are then based on this self-reported preference, not the sleep quality scores.

Cattaneo reports that 41% of patients preferred the blue pill and 39% preferred orange. The remainder expressed no preference. Astute readers will doubtlessly have noticed that there is only a very small difference between 39% and 41%. In fact, if patients who expressed no preference are excluded, this is a 51/49 split. This is not a significant effect that can be generalised to the wider population, it is a coin flip.

With no meaningful effect in the overall analysis, the paper then breaks the results down by sex, claiming that men prefer the orange pills and women prefer the blue. This comparison just makes it to the common threshold for a significant finding, with a p-value of 0.042. As discussed in a previous article, the p-value represents the probability of obtaining these results even when there is no true effect. In this case, there is a 4.2% chance we would see these results even if there were no effect from pill colour by sex.

However, we should still be skeptical of the data, which appears to be the product of p-hacking. P-hacking refers to the practice of intentionally or unintentionally manipulating your analysis until you find some significant result and then reporting on that. For example, performing a subgroup analysis by sex when the overall analysis finds nothing. Even if we leave Cattaneo’s bizarre methodology aside, p-hacked data does not lead us to reliable conclusions.

Luchelli 1978

Luchelli 1978 took a similar approach, which is perhaps no surprise given that Luchelli is a co-author on the Cattaneo paper, and Cattaneo is a co-author on Luchelli. This time, 96 patients awaiting unspecified elective surgeries were recruited. The paper reports that all participants had significant sleep problems, including difficulty falling asleep, disturbed sleep, and an average sleep duration of ‘five hours or less.’

Patients were given either an orange-coloured sedative (heptabarbital), a blue-coloured sedative (also heptabarbital, in the same dose), an orange placebo, or a blue placebo. The following morning, they were interviewed to determine how long it took them to fall asleep, how long they slept, the quality of their sleep, and whether they woke feeling rested or groggy.

Unlike the earlier ‘pill preference’ metric, Luchelli used sleep onset and duration data directly in the analysis, which found two significant findings concerning pill colour. Patients who took blue pills fell asleep 32 minutes faster and slept 33 minutes longer on average. No statistically significant effect was observed for pill colour on sleep quality or grogginess.

Despite these results, there are significant issues with relying on self-reported data for metrics like sleep onset time. Be honest, can you recall the exact time you fell asleep last night or how long you slept? Such figures are difficult to report accurately, and there is substantial room for biases to affect these kinds of subjective measurements. Even if pill colour had no real impact, the effect of bias may result in an illusory effect being recorded in the data. Luchelli acknowledges these limitations but defends the approach, claiming ‘sound results have been obtained based on subjective assessments.’

Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t provide enough data to verify whether the statistical analysis was conducted correctly, but the results presented for the effect of blue pills as sedatives are marginal and would likely disappear if properly adjusted to account for the large number of subgroup comparisons made in the study.

Moreover, these subgroup findings contradict the overall analysis. For example, men taking orange capsules fell asleep faster and slept longer on the first night compared to those taking blue capsules, but on the second night, the opposite effect was observed. In women, the effect of blue capsules remained consistent across both nights, but orange capsules were more effective on the second night than the first.

Inconsistencies like these make it clear that, if pill colour has any true effect, it is variable and unpredictable. Given the variability in the data and the small sample size, it wouldn’t be surprising if just one or two outliers were skewing these results.

Nagao 1968

Nagao 1968 is a paper we unfortunately cannot examine in any great detail (despite my best efforts) as I’ve been unable to obtain a copy of the original text. But since it was published in Japanese, I’m unlikely to have understood it anyway. The BMJ does, however, outline the main findings: ‘79% of patients reported adequate pain relief with red pills, compared to 73% with white pills.’ We don’t know if this was a significant finding or not, since we can’t see the data, how the analyses were performed, which other comparisons were made, or the trial methodology.

One observation we can make is that these findings will be based on self-reported data, as there is no real alternative when measuring pain. Self-reported outcomes are especially susceptible to bias, and while it is unlikely that patients are being deliberately deceptive when reporting how much pain they are in, there are several psychological effects which can distort those reports. The subject-expectancy effect can result in patients reporting what they think should be happening, rather than what is actually happening. Social-desirability bias can result in patients reporting what they think is the most pleasing or acceptable answer.

Importantly, these sorts of effects (and dozens of others like them) can modify what is recorded in the data without necessarily changing anything about the patient. For this reason, it can be difficult to disentangle self-reported data from simple bias in studies like Nagao.

Huskisson 1974

Finally, Huskisson 1974 conducted a study on 24 patients with rheumatoid arthritis, each of whom required on-demand pain relief (in addition to their standard care) at least once per day. In a somewhat complicated design, patients were randomised to receive one of three active painkillers or a placebo, with the pills presented in pairs and in various colours, across several days. Patients self-reported their pain relief on a scale from 0 (no relief) to 3 (complete relief), and their responses were recorded hourly for six hours after taking the medication.

Huskisson found that pill colour did not significantly alter the effectiveness of the active painkillers, but patient-reported pain relief did vary by pill colour when administering placebos. No difference between the colours was found one hour after administration, but differences appeared at two hours (p < 0.02), three hours (p < 0.05), four hours (p < 0.02), five hours (p < 0.05), and six hours (p < 0.05).

Despite this, we should still interpret the data cautiously. First, the sample size was small, with at most six patients receiving each coloured placebo. Two patients dropped out of the study, but the paper does not specify why or which groups they left. Second, like Nagao, the results are likely to be influenced by reporting biases, as all the data gathered was self-reported by patients. Finally, even the statistically significant results were relatively marginal, with p-values ranging from < 0.02 to < 0.05. Given the number of statistical comparisons performed, it is likely that even these results would not remain significant if adjusted for the false discovery rate.

Interestingly, the red-coloured pills did not outperform the other colours when active painkillers were administered. This effect, if it represents a real phenomenon, was limited to the placebo pills. However, studies like Huskisson are often used to support the idea that the colour of medication can enhance its placebo effect, even while this study’s findings do not support such claims for active drugs.

Returning to the BMJ review itself, each of the six papers referenced is graded for its methodological quality. Blackwell, which claimed that blue pills made students less alert, scores 6.5/10. Schapira, which claimed yellow pills were better for depression and green are best for anxiety, scores 7/10, as does Cattaneo, with patients waiting for their varicose vein surgery. The remaining three studies, Luchelli, Nagao, and Huskisson, all score less than 5/10.

Taken together, the studies from the BMJ paint a picture not of a meaningful placebo effect tied to pill colour, but of random noise in poorly designed research. Perhaps not a surprise, given that most of it was conducted 20 years before the BMJ review, which itself is rapidly approaching 30 years old. The most impressive effects are found in the studies judged to have the poorest methodological quality, while the better-designed trials show little to no real effect.

This is a pattern we see frequently in pseudoscience: acupuncture, homeopathy, reiki, and similarly implausible therapies tend to show the biggest effects in poorly controlled studies. When proper controls are enforced, the effects disappear.

The BMJ tries to walk a middle ground. The review acknowledges that the evidence is inconsistent while still suggesting that colour might influence the effectiveness of a drug. It ends with a call for more research. And while it’s plausible that colour could change how patients perceive a treatment, the data don’t show a reliable and meaningful clinical effect. The studies that seem to support the idea are small, weak, and flawed. The more robust trials find little of interest.

So should we start colour-coding pills, based on what we think patients will respond to best? I’ve seen more than one commentator make this very suggestion, but absent any robust, reliable, and reproducible data showing that pill colour has a measurable impact on clinical outcomes, I would suggest we focus on what we can be sure actually works: proper treatment, solid evidence, and good science.

1...121314...147Page 13 of 147

Expert skeptical analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal.

[email protected]

About

Categories

Shop