To help monitor the performance of different areas of government policy, the UK Parliament forms Commons Select Committees. These are cross-party groups of MPs who publicly scrutinise a particular subject. The Science & Technology group is chaired by the Conservative MP for North Oxford (who lives in Summertown!) Nicola Blackwood. The committee’s page on the parliament website states its aims as…
The Science and Technology Committee exists to ensure that Government policy and decision-making are based on good scientific and engineering advice and evidence.
The committee [..examines..] the activities of departments where they have implications for, or made use of, science, engineering, technology and research.
No doubt they will be looking into the decision by the government to allow limited use of an insecticide recently banned by the EU. Parliament is on holiday until 7th September so some people have suggested that this move was deliberately designed to coincide with the recess, avoiding the need to explain the decision. It will, hopefully, have been based upon scientific evidence presented by the National Farmers’ Union on behalf of some of their members. To some it will look like caving in to pressure from a lobby group. Let’s hope that our friends at the S&T Committee can dig out the truth. [Check comments below for clarification.] Only about half of the committee members have science backgrounds – Ms Blackwood read music, for example – but no doubt there are civil servants around who can explain how scientific research works, what a randomised controlled trial is and how to read a scientific research paper.
The good news, and the real point of this article, is that Conservative MP David Tredinnick is no longer on either the Science and Technology Committee (February 2013 – March 2015) nor the Health Committee (July 2010 – March 2015). The reason I think this is good news is that Mr Tredinnick holds some distinctly unscientific views. He is an advocate of alternative medicine (such as homeopathy) and astrology. Astrology is the belief that the alignment of the stars and planets on the day of your birth has an influence on your future. Mr Tredinnick feels that it should be part of the service provided by the NHS, saying…
I am absolutely convinced that those who look at the map of the sky for the day that they were born and receive some professional guidance will find out a lot about themselves and it will make their lives easier.
What I have most enjoyed is an article in the Astrology Journal from January 2015 in which Mr Tredinnick responds to some of the criticism he has received. It is a minefield of logical fallacies…
People who oppose what I say are usually bullies who have never studied astrology.
Because I disagree with him I am a bully – this is an ad hominem argument in which criticism is rebuffed by questioning the character of the person disagreeing and not by addressing the argument.
Astrology may not be capable of passing double-blind tests but it is based on thousands of years of observation.
This is an appeal to antiquity in which we are supposed to be swayed by the age of something, again without any real evidence that it works. It also includes an admission that the greatest tool humankind has for finding out about the natural world i.e. science, is unable to show that astrology works. Not being testable is the definition of pseudoscientific.
Hippocrates said, ‘A physician without a knowledge of astrology has no right to call himself a physician.’
Hippocrates lived in Greece in about 400 BCE and is an important figure in the history of medicine. He may have felt that astrology was important to being a doctor but I should point out that he could not have know about bacteria, viruses, DNA, any significant biochemistry or any other scientific advance of the last 2000 years. This is an appeal to authority argument which is a fallacy because Hippocrates is not a relevant authority in this context. Whilst he contributed a great deal philosophically to the study of medicine, he had little practical knowledge that would be relevant today.
I think it is a great pity that so many scientists today are dismissive of right-side brain energy, such as intuition.
People who study the brain, neuroscientists, have not been able to demonstrate that there is this kind of difference between the hemispheres of the brain. Also, energy is “the ability of a system to do work” – always be very suspicious when people start using it as an explanation for anything more mysterious.
In 2001 I raised in the House the influence of the moon, on the basis of the evidence then that at certain phases of the moon there are more accidents. Surgeons will not operate because blood clotting is not effective and the police have to put more people on the street.
When someone stands up and says that blood doesn’t clot during a full moon, I think most people will be inclined to believe them. I mean, it would be an extraordinarily odd thing to stand up in parliament and say if it wasn’t true wouldn’t it? Just for the record, there is no evidence whatsoever that the phase of the moon influences human behaviour. The only Google references to blood clotting and the moon all link to Mr Tredinnick.
I am arguing for more research.
Even though he has already explained that astrology is not susceptible to scientific study, he wants more research. The research so far done has not produced the answers that he wants so instead of moving on to some more productive area he wants ‘more research’!
I am talking about a long-standing discipline – an art and a science – that has been with us since ancient Egyptian, Roman, Babylonian and Assyrian times. It is part of the Chinese, Muslim and Hindu cultures. Criticism is deeply offensive to those cultures, and I have a Muslim college in my constituency.
This is perhaps an appeal to pity logical fallacy. Banning criticism on the grounds that it might offend some people is, in my opinion, censorship. If the criticisms are accurate it doesn’t really matter who is offended and if they are not accurate then it is the inaccuracy that should be attacked. However, on the subject of offence, there are some people who get fed up with having their culture reduced to pseudoscientific nonsense such as acupuncture, astrology, Ayurveda and auras (sticking just to the letter a!).
The opposition is based on what I call the SIP formula – superstition, ignorance and prejudice. It tends to be based on superstition, with scientists reacting emotionally, which is always a great irony.
Some scientists and other commentators may intuitively feel that astrology has to be false but remember, Mr Tredinnick earlier criticised scientists for failing to use their ‘right-side brain energy’ which controls intuition! Does he want them to go with their gut instinct or not?
They are also ignorant, because they never study the subject and just say that it is all to do with what appears in the newspapers, which it is not, and they are deeply prejudiced, and racially prejudiced too, which is troubling.
Not all scientists are ignorant of the subject. They may not be experts at it but that is not the same thing. You don’t have to be an expert on the life and works of J.K Rowling to know that Lord Voldemort is not a real person. Astronomer Phil Plait has certainly taken a serious look at the subject, and if you have the time, this article goes into his concerns in some detail. You will also notice that Mr Tredinnick is now accusing anyone who doubts the truth of astrology of being racist. That is another ad hominem argument and a pretty desperate one too.
I have a strong 6th house which suggests an emphasis on being a servant of the people – and this is quite a strong indication of health and healing. My Moon-Venus-Jupiter planets [in Aquarius] sit opposite Pluto in the 12th house.
The planet Uranus was discovered in 1781, turning the seven (a mystical number) local bodies – five planets and the moon and sun – into eight bodies. The ancient art and science of astrology suddenly had to include this new planet. Neptune was located in 1846 (a cool story) and as you will be aware from all the exciting news about the New Horizons spacecraft Pluto was only discovered in 1930. Ah, isn’t that ancient wisdom so much better than our modern rubbish!
Chinese astrology is aligned to feng shui [an ancient form of Chinese geomancy concerned with energies] I know there was concern that the Bank of China Tower has unfavourable, sharp angles sending aggressive energy to Government House nearby.
I have not got anything to say about that sentence – I just think it is a great example of word salad. Perhaps we should add aggressive energy to our list along with kinetic energy and thermal energy!
[…] I do believe that astrology and complementary medicine would help take the huge pressure off doctors. 90% of pregnant French women use homeopathy.
Ha ha! One non-sequitur and an appeal to popularity logical fallacy. Non-sequitur means ‘it does not follow’ – in this case the pregnant French women are not taking the pressure off any doctors by using homeopathy. It is an appeal to popularity because it does not matter how many people do a thing – that is not evidence that the thing itself works, just that it is popular.
Astrology is a useful diagnostic tool enabling us to see strengths and weaknesses via the birth chart. And, yes, I have helped fellow MPs. I do foresee that one day astrology will have a role to play in healthcare.
Since he is able to see into the future using astrology it must just be a matter of time before he is shown to be correct!
In a hostile interview on LBC radio last summer, Tredinnick invited listeners to consider the “great leaders who have used astrology – Churchill, de Gaulle, Ronald Reagan, to name just a few. Astrology is not wacky as some people think.”
This is another appeal to authority – ‘these people believed in it therefore it works’. Belief in unscientific ideas is magical thinking. It doesn’t have anything to do with someone’s intelligence (Mr Tredinnick was educated at Eton and Oxford) but it does say something about their understanding of scientific evidence and the store they hold in it. I like to try to believe as many true things as possible and disbelieve as many false things as possible.
I am Pisces because I was born between February 19th and March 20th. This means that I share being Pisces with one twelfth of the world’s population – about 580,000,000 people. I did a Google search for ‘typical pisces’ and chose the first link. I particularly enjoyed the second section about ‘the health of Pisces’…
As long as they live Pisces can have problems with their feet, never able to find good shoes. In the winter they have cold feet, in the summer swollen feet. This comes about because of bad functioning of the lymph nodes. They should walk a considerable length every day.
Usually horoscopes (astrological readings) are designed to be generic and apply to everyone, which is why most people recognise something about themselves in any astrological statement. The feet and lymph thing above is weirdly specific and although it is absolutely mad I do respect the confidence with which it is delivered. I expect that Mr Tredinnick would argue that I am being far too simplistic in my use of astrology by ignoring my left-side brain energy and being an ignorant, racist bully. I hope that I have done better than that.
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