Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (2006, reviewed by Kendrick Frazier in the March/April 2007 Skeptical Inquirer; see also, Massimo Pigliucci, “Is Dawkins Deluded?” SI, July/August 2007) has attracted much attention. My initial encounter with the book, in which I only read a sampling of pages, gave me the recurrent thought: why is he so angry? As if Dawkins was aware that readers were likely to ask this question, he headed a chapter “Why Be So Hostile?,” in which he explained his belief that too many religions are evil, that they have been responsible for much of human misery, and perhaps the worst, that they deeply offend the scientific mind.

But without religion and God, where will our sense of morality come from? Specifically, what accounts for altruistic behavior? Charles Darwin, anticipating atheists such as Dawkins, believed that altruism is an adaptive trait and, therefore, evolved by natural selection.
Dawkins is well known for his books The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Blind Watchmaker (1986), among others, which popularized the field of evolutionary science with particular emphasis on the gene as the unit of natural selection. Dawkins’s writings are noted for their clarity, logic, and wit. Appropriately, he has been Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University since 1995.

The God Delusion attempts to contribute to the public understanding of what Dawkins and others see as a war between science and religion. Dawkins is an ardent Darwinian and militant atheist. He is on the frontline opposing religion in hopes of encouraging wavering skeptics to join the atheist ranks. The word Delusion in the title sets a belligerent tone. He seems to be saying, “If you still believe in God after reading this book, it is likely you are mentally disturbed.”

Darwin’s Views of Religion

Darwin, in his Autobiography, appears to have anticipated much of what Dawkins has to say on religion. When the Autobiography was first published five years after Darwin’s death, it was an expurgated version (Darwin 1887). Now we have the complete text, which was edited by his granddaughter, Nora Barlow (Darwin 1958). All omissions were restored, particularly the section headed “Religious Belief.”

Some in Darwin’s family, including his wife, Emma, felt his reputation would suffer irrevocably if his lack of conventional religious belief were widely known. Emma successfully argued for the purging of sensitive remarks from the public text in a letter to her son Francis in 1885: “There is one sentence in the Autobiography which I very much wish to omit, no doubt partly because your father’s opinion that all morality has grown up by evolution is painful to me. . . .” It is unsettling to realize that we might not have learned of Darwin’s profound idea for seventy-one years if Darwin had not already openly published it in The Descent of Man (Darwin 1871, pp. 161-166).

Darwin describes his slow but complete loss of faith (italicized passages are those that were originally expurgated): “Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox. . . . But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world . . . and from its attribution to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos [sic], or the beliefs of any barbarian.”

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection undermined the conventional religious concept of an all-powerful God. It could explain in a natural way the existence of complex organisms without the need for an intelligent designer, a term made popular by the Reverend William Paley.1 In an argument familiar to us today, Paley asserted that the incredible perfection of the human eye could not be explained by any hypothesis other than a supernatural one. Many were convinced that Paley had proved the existence of God because no competing plan existed. But that was simply only a matter of time. Darwin himself confessed (1958) that he, too, was at first convinced by Paley that God must exist, but that lasted only until a much better theory-natural selection-came along. That better theory made God superfluous in Darwin’s view.

His aversion to Christianity was explicit. For example (Darwin 1958, pp. 86-87), “By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be [required] to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported . . . that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us . . . disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.

“I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all their best friends, will be everlastingly punished. . . .” Charles’s father, Robert, also a nonbeliever, warned Charles that he would be wise to keep his religious feelings to himself because few of his acquaintances would understand his lack of faith.

Dawkins’s Views of Religion

Dawkins is equally passionate in his own condemnation of the Old Testament. He writes that the God of the Old Testament is “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” (Dawkins 2006, p. 31). This is classic Dawkins.

Dawkins has his crosshairs on the personal God, which makes a clear target of what most believers believe in. A personal God is one who is concerned with us individually, listens to our prayers sympathetically, and responds favorably to our requests. In many cases, the personal God takes an interest in our behavior, he punishes and rewards us and from time to time performs a few miracles (which are often recognized only in retrospect).

Dawkins agrees with Darwin that evolution challenges the concept of a personal God. He concedes, however, that the implications of evolution appear damaging to his cause: (1) Evolution implies denial of a personal God; (2) Lack of a personal God is equivalent to atheism; (3) Therefore, evolution implies atheism. Creationists now feel free to equate evolution with atheism. Since most people in the United States consider atheism unquestionably false (Dawkins 2006), for them it follows that evolution must likewise be false and we ought to fall back to Paley’s intelligent design, a bitter result.

Next to Darwin, Einstein is most utilized by Dawkins, occupying nearly the entire lengthy first chapter. It allows Dawkins to repeat what most physicists know: that Einstein, like many other physicists, had the habit of referring to God metaphorically-e.g., “God is subtle but he is not malicious”-in which case God might represent the Universal Laws of Nature. Einstein emphatically rejected the notion of a personal God with obvious feeling (Dukas and Hoffmann 1979, p. 43).2 Dawkins seems unable to pass up any chance, no matter how anecdotal, to identify highly accomplished people who are also atheists. Einstein is a particularly good catch. Why does Dawkins do this? First, it seems quite natural to be curious about the religious views of such an eminent scientist, and Dawkins’s chapter on Einstein goes a long way in satisfying that curiosity. But there is more to it here. Dawkins was responding to religious people’s claims that many outstanding scientists are religious.

He describes the poll published in Nature (Larson and Witham 1997, 1998) depicting scientists’ views about religion. In contrast to the roughly 90 percent of all Americans who believe in a personal God, the number drops to 40 percent among scientists in general and plummets to 7 percent for a class of outstanding scientists-defined as members of the National Academy of Sciences. Dawkins continues to reiterate his point with comparable statistics about recipients of Nobel prizes. Both sides seem to be playing the same publicity game. Dawkins describes “[t]he efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists who are religious” as having “an air of desperationÉ” (2006, p. 100).

Dawkins invents a nearly subliminal version of the game. Conceding that some scientists are sincerely religious, Dawkins describes one of them, Francis Collins, a devoutly religious evangelical Christian, as the “administrative head of the American branch of the official Human Genome Project” [emphasis added]. He doesn't refer to Collins as simply the head or the director (which he was) of the project, but gratuitously tries to diminish his role by implying Collins’s role was only administrative. In the very same paragraph, he refers to his friend Jim Watson, who is strongly irreligious, as the “founding genius of the Human Genome Project,” ignoring the fact that Watson could also have been labeled as the administrative head of the Human Genome Project before he resigned under fire and was eventually replaced by Collins, who saw the project to its completion.

Ignored by Dawkins is the pioneering leadership of Collins in the successful search for, and sequencing of, genes involved in cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, and Huntington’s disease. Ignored also was the election of Collins to the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. And then, to rub it in, Dawkins inserts a footnote cautioning the reader not to confuse the official genome project with the unofficial one, which was “led by that brilliant (and nonreligious) 'buccaneer' of science, Craig Venter” (Dawkins p. 99). Venter was elected in 2002 into the same section of the National Academy that Collins was in.

Why do I devote so much space to such petty stuff? To make two points. The first is that Dawkins recklessly implies that smart scientists are the best judges of whether there is a God. It is conceivable that scientists, most especially outstanding scientists, are too engrossed in their scientific studies to give much intellectual thought to the subject of religion. It is important to remember that nothing in science gets resolved by authority, but rather by the voice of reason. My point is that Dawkins weakens his case by unnecessarily including a weak argument. Added to that is my second point, which is to expose bias in Dawkins’s presentation and to question his objectivity.

Natural Selection versus Randomness

Natural selection proceeds in small mutational steps that depend on the random occurrence of DNA mutations. In what sense, therefore, can the process be said to not be random? It is easy to see how people could be confused. The process is not random because of selection. Only those mutations that confer significant, albeit small, benefit (under local environmental conditions) are selected and so may seem to occur with considerably greater probability than random occurrence would allow.

Dawkins goes to pains to point this out in order to counter the intelligent designers who rule out natural selection on the fallacious charge that it is a random process and therefore must be improbable. This is fundamental; it would seem that any reader who doesn't understand that point could not fully appreciate Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and should be offered a helpful explanation, preferably one showing semi-quantitatively the advantages of natural selection.

Consider Dawkins’s explanation of how natural selection takes the random out of random mutations to greatly increase the probability of evolving an adaptive version of a gene:

What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, where chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. When large numbers of these slightly improbable events are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation is very very improbable indeed, improbable enough to be far beyond the reach of chance. It is these end products that form the subject of the creationist’s wearisomely recycled argument. The creationist completely misses the point, because he (women should for once not mind being excluded from the pronoun) insists on treating the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, on-off event. He doesn't understand the power of accumulation. (Dawkins 2006, p. 121)

Correct, but does that sound like the author of The Selfish Gene? I believe it is appropriate to quote Einstein, Dawkins’s inspiration, in this context. “Most books about science that are said to be written for the layman seek more to impress the reader . . . than to explain to him clearly and lucidly the elementary aims and methods” (Dukas and Hoffmann 1979, p. 41).

Intelligent-design advocates are keen to argue that you cannot disprove the existence of God. That may be true, but Dawkins argues that there are innumerable things we cannot disprove, and that God is merely one more. The burden, he says, should be on believers to prove God’s existence. He resorts to Bertrand Russell, the famous English mathematician and one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. Russell proposed, for the sake of argument, that there is a teapot in orbit between the Earth and the Sun too small to see with a telescope. You cannot prove the teapot is nonexistent. Would you therefore propose that it has a reasonable chance to exist? If you list innumerable similar items-unicorns, Zeus, Egyptian gods, etc.-and you assign each a practical chance, then inevitably it becomes almost certain that at least one of them must exist.

Where does Darwin stand on the matter of a personal God? “The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which seemed to be so conclusive, fails now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man” (Darwin 1958, p. 87). Darwin seems to reject the idea of a personal God and, therefore, theism too. His religious views are difficult to pin down (Browne 2006, p. 46), but something close to deism would seem to fit.

Theism is a belief in a personal God, one who responds favorably to prayers and interferes in daily events; atheism is the opposite of theism. Deism is the belief in a God who set the universe in motion with all the physical laws and both sacred and learned commentaries, but was absent after that. In practice, deism is much like atheism.

Morality (and Altruism) Without God and Religion

It is often taken for granted that a moral code requires God and religion. Why be good if there is no God? Believers ask how atheists could be moral inasmuch as they seem to deny any fear of God’s punishment for immoral behavior. We saw that Emma Darwin expurgated from her husband’s Autobiography his conviction that morality is established by natural selection, implying that religion was not a significant factor. On this question of morality, Dawkins is a staunch disciple of Darwin and emphasizes the view that the conventional role of religion is delusional.

While in his take-no-prisoners mode, Dawkins asks what it is that religion has taught us. His answer: nothing. In this he goes up against Stephen Jay Gould. The two frequently fought intellectually. In Gould’s scheme, there are two nonoverlapping realms of knowledge. He called them NOMA: Non-Overlapping Magisteria. Science answers objective questions about how the universe works (empirical questions); religion answers the ultimate questions: why am I here, what is the purpose of life, what is the basis of morality?
Dawkins will have none of that. It may turn out, he says, that there are meaningful questions that science cannot handle, but why should we assume that religion is equipped to answer them? What do theologians know that enable them to handle such questions better than science? Again: nothing. He is completely scornful of theologians and is even skeptical that theology is a field of knowledge. None of this should come as a surprise; theologians have long claimed authority over questions that science had not yet answered. In the course of time, however, the theologians were forced to retreat-with lengthy rearguard action (White 1896).

Dawkins’s defiant dismissal of theology reminds me of the challenge E.O. Wilson made at the end of his tome on Sociobiology (1975, p. 451): “Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” Its time may have come.

Moral sense is the ability to judge good from bad. As such, believers conclude that our moral inclinations come from God. Altruism, which implies a concern for the welfare of others at the expense of oneself, appears as a higher form of morality.
I have defined altruism as behavior “that increases the reproductive fitness of others at the apparent expense of the altruist” (Tessman 1995). “Apparent” because from an evolutionary point of view it turns out that several forms of altruism unexpectedly benefit the altruists, that is, they are really selfish and not selfless behaviors. Darwin upset his family by proposing that altruism, which he saw as a key element of morality and a distinctly human activity, evolved by natural selection (Darwin 1871).

It is now commonly argued that some altruistic behavior is genetically determined, and that altruism may have a selective advantage. The earliest and arguably most influential was William D. Hamilton’s explanation of altruistic behavior among the social insects that is controlled by a haplo-diplo sexual system (Hamilton 1964). In that case, a female is more closely related to her sister (75 percent) than to her own offspring (50 percent), which accounts for her devotion to raising sisters in preference to her own offspring-with the false illusion of selflessness.

Critical insight into the motivation for altruistic behavior can be found in a quip by essayist Charles Lamb (1834): “The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and have it found out by accident.” Having it found out by accident is designed to suggest indifference to credit for the altruistic deed and therefore imply (falsely) the purity of the act. The admission of a secret wish to be found out, however, exposes the truly selfish nature of the act. It is a shortcut to a good reputation, and what is a good reputation good for? R.A. Fisher, cofounder of modern statistics, tells us one important benefit of a good reputation: “The wooer relies on his reputation even for the decision of the lady herself” (1958, p. 266).

That is why I have suggested that human altruism may serve as a courtship display that has successfully evolved by natural selection. I have offered a simple example that arose in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice which I find convincingly illustrates my point, although its scientific value may be arguable.

“An altruistic act is performed [by Mr. Darcy] without apparent publicity or hope of reward, but the author contrives to have Darcy’s beneficence revealed to his love, Elizabeth. In this case the altruism clinches Elizabeth’s developing affection and secures her hand in marriage.” The courtship strategy was successful.

As suggested by science author Matt Ridley, another literary example of the perverse courtship role of altruism is consciously employed in the classic erotic tragedy Les Liaison Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1782). The Vicomte de Valmont, the amorous protagonist, acts out an impressive display of seemingly pure altruism to capture the heart of his victim. He is successful, in part because he ensures that his contrived altruism is revealed to her with no hint of his complicity.

Francis Collins presses the view that there is indeed a selfless, godlike purity and virtuousness to at least one form of altruism that opened his eyes to God’s presence and gave him a sure glimpse of God’s work (2006). And we are invited to walk the same path to view God’s certain existence. With the growing literature on the evolution of altruistic behavior, though, Collins is painting himself into a corner. It looks as if he will eventually provide yet another example of science forcing the retreat of supernatural theories (White 1896).3
Dawkins adds an exclamation point to the question of whether morality is possible without religion. Isn't religion the source of moral behavior? Dawkins suggests the opposite. If we are attracted to a religion because it advocates a particular philosophy that we find morally attractive, doesn't it mean that we have an internal appreciation of morality? We may well be genetically programmed internally to favor certain moral convictions. In other words, it would be we who shape religion, contrary to the conventional wisdom that religion shapes us. That may have alarming implications: if humans shape religion then we must have shaped the evil behavior that so moves Dawkins to anger.

I return to Dawkins’s confession of being on a mission to recruit new atheists. Once again, Darwin is a source of thoughtful comment. He adopted an understanding attitude with a compassionate tone. He said, “At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons” (Darwin 1958, p. 90).
He himself was not such a believer. He believed that natural selection doomed intelligent design by providing a natural explanation for evolution. Darwin and Dawkins are alike in many ways, but with at least one striking difference. Dawkins is an active fighter in a war with religion for reasons Darwin shared, but Darwin, defended by friends who were willing to fight in the trenches, was apparently content to let them go to the front while he worked effectively behind the lines.

A notable event was the recent emergence from the nontheistic closet of a public official, Congressman Pete Stark of Fremont, California, who announced that he did not believe in a supreme being. Will other public officials do likewise?4

It will be fascinating to see if Dawkins can make significant inroads on the American religious scene. Recently, there has been an outpouring of books by prominent authors aggressively challenging the dominant role of religion in American life: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Richard Joyce, Lee Silver, Victor Stenger, and Christopher Hitchens.

Is change in the air?

Acknowledgments

I thank Laszlo Csonka, Jeff Lucas, and Sam Rosenfeld for extensive discussions and criticisms.

Notes

• Theologian and philosopher, 1743-1805.
• A reply, in English, by Einstein to a correspondent: “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.”
• Collins fights back (2006, pp. 27-28). His arguments, however, are fragmentary and criticism is dismissed casually.
• He is the only current member of Congress to admit to being a nonbeliever. His House seat is said to be safe (San Francisco Chronicle, March 14, 2007).

References

• Browne, Janet. 2006. Darwin’s Origin of Species: A Biography. Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre.
• Darwin, Charles. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: J. Murray.
• —. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter. Francis Darwin, ed. London: J. Murray.
• —. 1958. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Nora Barlow, ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
• Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press.
• —. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton.
• —. 2006. The God Delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
• Dukas, Helen, and Banesh Hoffmann, eds. 1979. Albert Einstein: The Human Side. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Hamilton, W.D. 1964. The genetical evolution of social behavior. The Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 146.
• Lamb, Charles. 1834. Table Talk-No. I [by the late Elia].-Athen¾um (London). No. 323: 14-15.
• Larson, Edward J., and Larry Witham 1997. Scientists are still keeping the faith. Nature 386: 435-36.
• —. 1998. Leading scientists still rejecting God. Nature 394: 313.
• Ridley, Matt. 2007. E-mail correspondence with the author. September 13.
• Tessman, Irwin. 1995. Human altruism as a courtship display. Oikos 74: 157-58.
• White, Andrew D. 1896. A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. New York: Dover Publications.

Five years ago in this magazine, Elizabeth Loftus and Melvin J. Guyer published a two-part article called “Who Abused Jane Doe?” (Loftus and Guyer 2002a, 2002b). It was their critical interpretation of a case study that provided alleged evidence of a repressed and then recovered memory of childhood sexual abuse, and its subject, “Jane Doe,” was not happy with their account. In February, 2003, she sued both of them, this magazine, its publisher, me, and a few others involved in the investigation for defamation, invasion of privacy, infliction of emotional distress, and fraud. She claimed twenty-one counts and causes of action within these four categories, and she wanted more than a million dollars in punitive damages and compensation for her injured feelings. The invasion of privacy claim was especially ironic, given that Loftus and Guyer never once revealed her name, and the Skeptical Inquirer and I didn’t even know what it was until she filed the lawsuit in her own name. And so, it was Jane Doe herself who told the world that her real name was Nicole Taus.

After wending its way for years through the California courts, ending with a ruling in early 2007 by the California Supreme Court, the case was finally resolved. Taus lost resoundingly on twenty of the twenty-one counts. The Skeptical Inquirer’s right to publish the articles was completely supported; Loftus, Guyer’s, and my right to write and talk about the case was given complete protection; and the Supreme Court ruled that because the defendants won the “overwhelming majority” of Taus’s claims, we were entitled to recover fees and costs. Taus thus faced a bill for $450,578.50—the cost of nearly five years of litigation and fees for the attorneys representing all the defendants she had accused. All in all, it was a sound defeat for the plaintiff and a tremendous victory for open, skeptical inquiry and free speech—with one quirk related to that lone twenty-first count. Here is the full story.

First, some background. In 1997, psychiatrist David Corwin and his colleague Erna Olafson published a case history that proponents of recovered-memory therapy quickly began using—in conversation, in scholarly writing, and in court—as proof of the existence of repressed memories. Corwin had entered Taus’s life (at that time, noted as “Jane Doe”) during a custody evaluation in the early 1980s, when child sex-abuse allegations were reaching a peak, and videotaped six-year-old Taus as she claimed that her mother physically and sexually abused her. Corwin believed her, and the mother lost custody and even visitation rights. Taus lived with her father until he became seriously ill, at which time she went to live with a foster mother. When she was seventeen, Corwin returned to interview and videotape her once again. During this encounter, she at first didn’t recall any acts of sexual abuse but eventually did. Corwin’s detailed account, and his repeated showing of her videotapes as a child and teenager at conferences, were persuasive to many mental health professionals, researchers, and of course prosecutors.

Yet Loftus and Guyer were suspicious of Corwin’s story. Using public records and newspaper clippings, they eventually located Taus’s family. After poring over thousands of pages of court records documenting the virulence of the original custody battle, including a thorough, court-ordered report by a clinical psychologist who doubted that Taus had been sexually abused (a report not mentioned by Corwin), and after interviewing several key players in the story, they became convinced that Taus’s biological mother was almost certainly innocent. When the mother learned that someone believed her after so many years, she sobbed and said, “I never thought this day would come.” It had been more than a decade since she had lost custody of her daughter.

As Loftus and Guyer were getting ready to publish their findings and interpretation of the evidence, however, Nicole Taus complained to the University of Washington, where Loftus was a professor, that her privacy was being violated by a faculty member who was investigating her story. Despite having already permitted her face to be shown and the details of her life to be publicly revealed, she pursued her complaint. University officials seized Loftus’s files, and although university regulations stipulate that all such complaints against faculty members are to be resolved within 120 days, the investigation against Loftus went on for nearly two years, during which time she was forbidden to speak or write about the case. Eventually Loftus was completely cleared of wrongdoing or ethical violations. At the University of Michigan, Mel Guyer was enduring similar harassment from his Internal Review Board, but finally he, too, was free to publish.

And so their two-part article “Who Abused Jane Doe?” appeared in the Skeptical Inquirer, along with a companion piece that I wrote describing the struggles that Loftus and Guyer had endured at their respective universities (Tavris 2002). “Who Abused Jane Doe?” offered an alternative explanation to the one proposed by the repression proponents: namely, that the child had probably not been abused at all, but that her “memories” were the result of suggestive influences on the part of her father, her stepmother, and perhaps a few mental health professionals as part of her father’s determination to gain custody of his daughter.

When Nicole Taus filed her lawsuit, the lawyers representing all the defendants hoped to get the case dismissed immediately on the grounds that Loftus and Guyer had not done anything that ordinary investigative journalists would not do. The lawyers argued that Taus’s suit was a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP), filed in retaliation for the defendants’ protected exercise of free speech.1 Our anti-SLAPP motion alleged that the plaintiff’s suit was intended to interfere with certain constitutional rights of the defendants and the public’s interest in being informed of important issues and questions of public policy and controversial topics. Once we made our motion showing that fundamental constitutional rights were placed at risk by Taus’s suit, Taus was required to show that she had a chance of prevailing on any of her claims if they were to proceed to trial. As the case made its way through the courts, the plaintiff was found to have filed a suit that indeed infringed on our constitutional rights, that her claims lacked any likelihood of prevailing if the case went to trial, and that all of her charges were without legal foundation (Taus v. Loftus et al. 2007). The California Supreme Court dismissed all counts against the defendants but split on one single factual question involving Loftus only.

To understand this one issue, you need to know that the Court doesn’t rule on the validity of a person’s claim but rather its legality. If you sue someone for calling you “a son of a bitch,” the Court doesn’t determine whether the person actually called you a son of a bitch but whether you have a legal claim against him if it turns out to be true that he said those words. In this case, Taus’s former foster mother, who had given Loftus information about Taus’s background, attempts to reach her biological mother, and other matters, alleged that she had given Loftus this information under false pretenses. (Guyer was not involved in that interview.) The foster mother claimed that Loftus had told her she was Corwin’s supervisor, thereby gaining information that she, the foster mother, would otherwise not have revealed. In issuing its ruling, the Supreme Court had to assume this allegation was true before it could determine whether there was any legal basis for remanding the matter to trial, where a jury would decide whom to believe. For example, the courts have ruled that certain categories of investigators—police officers and reporters among them—are allowed to lie to interviewees in order to gain information. Are social scientists? Realtors? Marketers? Employers?

By a narrow majority, the Supreme Court held that one narrow, particular kind of lie can be actionable: the kind the foster mother alleged. Investigators may not pretend to have a special relationship with the target of their investigation (e.g., Corwin) in order to lower their interviewee’s (e.g., the foster mother’s) normal caution about disclosing personal matters. They may not intrude on a privileged relationship in which the subject has an expectation of privacy. Taus, said the Court, had a reasonable expectation that no one would pretend to be privy to her special relationship with Corwin—that she could trust Corwin’s supervisor (as if he had one!) as much as Corwin. Although Taus’s own lawyer explicitly informed the Court that Corwin never acted as Taus’s therapist, the Court nonetheless decided that because Corwin is a psychiatrist, he and Taus had some kind of trusting, therapist-patient-like relationship. And so they ruled that the case could go to trial to determine that one factual issue: Did Loftus lie to the foster mother to get information about Taus? But, as one of the dissenting judges wrote, “In fact, it is fairly apparent that the impetus for this litigation is not Loftus’s investigative techniques but her perceived adversarial stance toward Corwin and, derivatively, toward Taus. But by any ordinary sense, the desire to deny an investigator information based on the investigator’s viewpoint cannot be called an expectation of privacy or seclusion, and the enforcement of Taus’s preference through tort law is contrary to free academic inquiry and the First Amendment.”

Some of Loftus’s opponents have misinterpreted the Court’s ruling for their own purposes as a confirmation that Loftus lied to the foster mother. In fact, Loftus is adamant that she did no such thing. The foster mother also claimed that during the interview, when she somehow discovered that Loftus was not whom she said she was (how would this have happened if Loftus was deceiving her?), the interview turned hostile and she demanded that the tape recorder be turned off and the tape handed over. Loftus refused, she said, and so she ended the interview at once. However, as witnesses to the interview can confirm, the interview was not taped; it lasted four hours until Loftus ended it, and when it was over, the foster mother amiably posed for photographs with Loftus, who had put her arm supportively around her. What seems likely, therefore, is that the foster mother repented of her conversation with Loftus in order to make amends with Taus. The phenomenon of “source remorse” is well known to journalists and biographers.

Nonetheless, there it was: Taus facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs, Loftus facing a petty, but onerous, she-said/she-said trial.2 And then Taus made an offer to settle. She would drop the remaining claim against Loftus for $7,500—a pittance compared to the million she had been asking—plus an agreement by Loftus to forgo her portion of the attorneys’ fees she was otherwise entitled to receive from Taus. Accepting the offer, Loftus knew, meant that her enemies would say she was admitting that she used deceit to interview the foster mother. But accepting the offer also meant she would avoid years of potentially protracted and costly legal machinations. The foster mother, presumably wishing to remain in Taus’s good graces, might lie about how Loftus represented herself to her. Most of all, the defendants had won their biggest battle—to protect their right, and the right of journals such as the Skeptical Inquirer, to investigate case studies and publish alternate interpretations of them. So Loftus accepted the offer, and the case ended for her.

We other defendants, all of whom had been fully exonerated on all counts, pursued our right to recover legal fees and costs. Taus’s lawyer filed yet another motion, this time to decrease the amount of money that Taus was liable for, based on a subtraction of fees waived by the Loftus settlement. On October 2, 2007, a judge agreed to reduce the fees to those incurred on behalf of the remaining defendants, and as of this writing we await his decision as to the exact amount Taus will have to pay. (If it is too high, her attorney may appeal it.)

Who abused Jane Doe—and whom did she abuse? She wanted her story told her way, as everyone does; and when others disputed her version of events, she took out her anger the American way: by suing. Fortunately, this time, the result was an undeniable victory for free speech and scientific inquiry.

Notes

• In the early l990s, the California Legislature enacted into the Code of Civil Procedure the anti-SLAPP law, noting a disturbing increase in lawsuits brought primarily to chill the valid exercise of the constitutional rights of freedom of speech. It recognized the public’s interest in encouraging participation in the significant matters of a society and was essentially a way to ensure that such participation was not suppressed through the misuse of the judicial process.
• Technically, one other defendant remains in the case; Taus also sued Harvey Shapiro, a private investigator who obtained court records and arranged for the interview with the foster mother. As of this writing, Taus’s claim against him has not been fully resolved. To our knowledge, he did nothing outside the scope of the work of ordinary private investigators.

References

• Corwin, David L., and Erna Olafson. 1997. Videotaped Discovery of a Reportedly Unrecallable Memory of Child Sexual Abuse: Comparison with a Childhood Interview Videotaped 11 Years Before. Child Maltreatment 2:91—112.
• Loftus, Elizabeth F., and Melvin J. Guyer. 2002a. Who Abused Jane Doe?: The Hazards of the Single Case Study: Part 1. Skeptical Inquirer 26(3):24—32.
• Loftus, Elizabeth F., and Melvin J. Guyer. 2002b. Who Abused Jane Doe? Part 2. Skeptical Inquirer 26(4): 37—40, 44.
• Taus v. Loftus et al., 40 Cal. 4th 683 (2007).
• Tavris, Carol. 2002. The High Cost of Skepticism. Skeptical Inquirer 26(4):41-44.

While it may take only a few moments for someone to report a UFO, it may take weeks or years for the data to surface that could explain it. Those in the business of promoting UFOs are unfazed by the constant UFO-to-IFO transformation, since there is always a residue of old cases to tout, as well as a constant supply of new ones with which to mystify a credulous public.

Unidentifieds . . .

Here are a few of the UFO mysteries that came across my desk in 2007-cases that readers may wish to try their hand at solving before learning how the sightings were ultimately converted to IFOs. One is a case I personally reviewed for a major television show.

•An unidentified airborne craft was shown in a photo posted on the Ufodigest Web site by someone calling himself “Gaston.” The picture was supposedly snapped over Buenos Aries, Argentina, on May 2, 2007, at about 5 in the afternoon. Ufodigest’s Dirk Vander Ploeg said Gaston “is confident the image is not of an aircraft but in all truthfulness he is not sure what it is” (Vander Ploeg 2007a). Some saw pixilation around the object that they thought indicated Photoshop computer fakery, but another blogger, noting that a roof shown in the image was similarly pixilated, explained: “That’s an effect most digital cameras have when photographing objects against a very bright background during daylight” (Cohen 2007). Was the UFO real or fake?

•Sightings of a mysterious silver-colored, rocket-like UFO silently hovering above Salt Lake City were reported in June. The object was estimated at approximately one hundred feet long. And, although seen by dozens of eyewitnesses, it was not picked up on radar, according to air traffic controllers at Salt Lake City International Airport (Moseley 2007; 'UFO' 2007). What were people seeing?

•On Wednesday, July 25, a group of Millington, Tennessee, residents were perplexed to see a large, dark, ring-like object floating in the sky. “It stayed stationary, no lights or anything like that. Stayed there for 20, 30 minutes and then it just started disappearing,” said one woman who snapped several photos in the meantime. Notions of what the photographed object might have been ranged from water on the camera lens to “a spaceship with a cloaking device” (Kenney 2007). Whatever it was, it was not something dozens of e-mailers had ever seen before. What could it have been?

. . . Become Identifieds

Soon, each of these UFOs yielded up its secrets. The Argentinean photo turned out to be genuine after all, but the UFO was not: it was what I long ago termed an “unidentified Frisbee object"-that is, a model flung into the air so that its picture could be quickly snapped (Nickell 1994, 163-164). In this instance, the model was identified by James Carrion, international director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), as one of a series of the “fictional mecha” in the Metal Gear series of video games (Vander Ploeg 2007b).

The Salt Lake City hovering UFO turned out to have been a small remote-controlled blimp only thirty feet long, less than a third of the UFO’s estimated size. The craft was being developed by a local resident named Daniel Geery, who said he had made more than six hundred of the blimps over more than a decade. Geery’s blimp lost power, eventually went down, and was retrieved by a worker in the area (Moseley 2007).

The third UFO, the dark, doughnut-shaped object in Tennessee, turned out to have been a carbon smoke ring. It was a byproduct of a gas bomb set off by a crew from High Tech Special Effects who had been shooting pyrotechnics for a television special. Because of a lack of wind that day, the smoke ring hung in the air for a relatively long time, according to the special effects operator (Kenney 2007).

As these cases illustrate, UFOs may well become IFOs with the expenditure of sufficient effort-or the advent of good luck. Sometimes, as in the following case I studied, one can reach through the “noise” to obtain the clues needed for a probable identification.

Fiery UFO

The case began around 8 p.m. on Wednesday, January 24, when a UFO was seen by numerous people in the American southeast. It was watched by eyewitnesses from Greer, South Carolina, to Asheville, North Carolina, some of whom dialed 911 to report the sighting.
I was subsequently asked by a major CNN television show, Anderson Cooper 360, to give my opinion of the UFO. The segment aired late in the evening of February 6, after I had spent several hours studying the available evidence in the case.

On the same program, George Lund of the Mutual UFO Network noted that-because the North Carolina sighting occurred near a nuclear power plant-some people felt that extraterrestrials might be “coming in that area maybe to feed off some of the energy that plant is producing” (Lund 2007). However, I had a simpler explanation.

Several eyewitnesses’ descriptions had been given in online news stories, providing characteristics of the UFO that aided in its probable identification.

• The object was fiery. It was described as resembling “a glowing flare” or being “like a shooting star.” One person stated, “It was like a ball that grew a tail,” and another compared it to “a comet coming down” (Dick 2007).
• The light was bright, and bluish-to greenish-white. Eyewitnesses stated it was “a really bright light” and “brighter than a plane,” and that it was “a greenish-like light,” “a bright green light,” and “a blue/green light” ("Reader” 2007).
• The duration was brief. “It was visible for about, oh, 10-15 seconds,” one person reported (Dick 2007), while another stated it “disappeared within seconds.” Another said, “I saw it for a couple of seconds, and then just like fireworks, it started to blink and then disappeared” ("Reader” 2007).
• Some thought it resembled an aircraft going down. One man related that he and his children “really thought a small plane or helicopter was going to crash at first” ("Reader” 2007). Another man had a similar impression but, being a former military pilot, realized the colors were different than those of a crashing plane (Dick 2009).

Now, UFOlogists typically classify UFOs by a six-category system posited by J. Allen Hynek: nocturnal lights, daylight discs, radar-visuals, and three categories of “close encounters” (those of very close proximity [less than 500 feet], those having physical effects on the environment, and those having “occupants” associated with them). (See Hendry 1979, 7-12.) Obviously, the Carolinas’ UFO falls into the first category.

Among the nocturnal-light IFOs are celestial bodies, satellites, aircraft, and balloons, as well as flares and other “UFO impostors” including meteors and re-entry of man-made material, e.g., satellites and rocket bodies. Of the latter-objects burning up on entering (or re-entering) earth’s atmosphere-meteors are most common and may be seen at any time of the year and at any hour of the night (Hendry 1979, 24-56).

Consistent with the Carolinas’ UFO, a meteor will often have a bright appearance, with or without a trail, and may be of any color, even green. Witnesses often describe one as like a “comet” or “downed plane.” A meteor can be of “any continuous trajectory,” and its duration usually ranges from one to twenty seconds (Hendry 1979, 41-44).

Considering all the reported features of the Carolinas’ UFO, I identified it as a probable meteor. The same conclusion was reached by a meteorologist (Kramer 2007) and an astronomer (Anderson Cooper 360 2007). I did tell Anderson Cooper whimsically that if it really was an extraterrestrial craft it appeared to have burned up on entry, and that in the future the aliens should take corrective measures before again approaching Earth (Nickell 2007).

Meanwhile, UFOs will continue to be reported as long as people look at the skies. Not all will be identified, but proponents must realize that merely touting unidentifieds does not in any way imply that they are extraterrestrial craft. To suggest that is to engage in a logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance; that is, one cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. What is needed is clear, positive evidence of alien visitation, and so far that is lacking.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to CFI’s Assistant Director of Communications, Henry Huber, for keeping me posted on matters of paranormal newsworthiness, including UFO sightings.

References

• Anderson Cooper 360. 2007. CNN broadcast, February 6.
• Cohen, James. 2007. Quoted in Vander Ploeg 2007b.
• Dick, Natalie. 2007. UFO spotted over the Carolinas. Available at kvue.com. Posted January 26.
• Hendry, Allan. 1979. The UFO Handbook. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company.
• Kenney, Nick. 2007. UPDATE: Mystery of ‘UFO’ seen last week near Millington is solved. Available at www.wmcstations.com/Global/story.asp?s=6867470. Accessed August 1, 2007.
• Kramer, Jack. 2007. Strange lights in the sky spark UFO calling frenzy in the Carolinas. Available at www.nationalledger.com. Posted January 25.
• Lund, George. 2007. Appearance on Anderson Cooper 360, February 6.
• Moseley, Fields. 2007. Blimp 'UFO' was being developed by Utah man. Available at kutv.com. Accessed June 14, 2007.
• Nickell, Joe. 2007. Appearance on Anderson Cooper 360, February 6.
• Reader UFO reports. 2007. Available at charlotte.com. Posted January 25.
• 'UFO' recovered over Salt Lake City. 2007. The Salt Lake Tribune. Available at sltrib.com. Accessed June 14, 2007.
• Vander Ploeg, Dirk. 2007a. A most unusual UFO. Available at ufodigest.com. Accessed May 24, 2007.
• —. 2007b. Buenos Aires UFO mystery solved! Available at ufodigest.com. Accessed June 1, 2007.

A year ago last spring, Canada’s second-largest research-granting agency, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), which dispenses around $300 million a year for research projects, clumsily initiated a major controversy about evolution and intelligent design in Canada. The problem centered on the rejection of an application by Brian Alters of McGill University. Alters is one of the world’s foremost authorities on evolution, particularly as it relates to education-he appeared as an expert witness in the recent landmark Dover, Pennsylvania, trial. He proposed to study “the detrimental effects of popularizing anti-evolution’s intelligent design theory on Canadian students, teachers, parents, administrators and policymakers."

The rejection in itself was not the problem. Only relatively few projects submitted to SSHRC are approved, and even one from the likes of Alters could be rejected for any number of reasons. The rejection alone would not have created even a ripple. For some reason, however, the adjudication committee that reviewed Alters’s application could not resist, in its statement of rejection, adding the following gratuitous comment:

Nor did the committee consider that there was adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of Evolution, and not Intelligent Design Theory, was correct. . . .

This is the statement that caused concern among scientists around the world. Was SSHRC buying the creationist ploy of intelligent design, a shallow and obvious strategy to bring religion into the science classroom? Do people at SSHRC really think that the religious idea of intelligent design is just as valid as evolution?

Sometime last year, in a response to the controversy, the SSHRC Web site posted an announcement saying that it did recognize that evolution was a “cornerstone of science.” That was the statement Pendergast recently heard about and construed as a concession, but it was not, and it in fact (deliberately, many of us suspect) obscured the real issue. Of course evolution is a cornerstone of science-even many creationists would agree with that. But is it an idea that is more scientifically sound than intelligent design? Apparently the SSHRC adjudication committee didn't think so.

This SSHRC-induced fiasco has endured for well over a year now with the agency steadfastly refusing to retract or explain the position of its committee in regard to intelligent design. Representatives of the SSHRC have tried various gambits to take the heat off. They have repeatedly said that Alters could always reapply, but that is not the issue. They have frequently made reference to their statement about evolution, but that too avoids the point of concern.

Early in the controversy, instead of simply saying that the committee had erred in its equation, various SSHRC spokespersons only made matters worse. Janet Halliwell, who at that time was SSHRC’s Executive Director, said:

There is a growing belief among scientists that certain phenomena in the natural world may not be easily explained by current theories of evolution. The Research Council supports 'critical inquiry' that challenges scientific doctrine . . . we don't make any blanket assumptions.

A similarly troubling statement was made by Larry Felt, a sociologist from Memorial University in Newfoundland, who was the only member of the adjudication committee to comment publicly:

No one is disputing the theory of evolution . . . a powerful tool not without some difficulties, but nothing that renders it obsolete . . . there are features of the natural world including the rapid development of complex organs that evolution has some trouble accounting for.

In responding to my correspondence to him, Felt referred to that “one damn sentence” that caused all the trouble (the sentence equating evolution and intelligent design), as being “just one of those unintended bit too general statements that opened up multiple interpretations. . . .” On the contrary, as I wrote back to him, “the problem is the exact opposite of that. The 'damn sentence' can mean only one thing-that ID has as much validity as evolution. That is why it is so disturbing to so many people, and that is why so many of us want an answer."

We are still waiting for one. Various groups, such as the American Sociological Association, the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, and the American Institute of Biological Sciences, as well as many individual scientists in Canada and elsewhere, have expressed their concerns to SSHRC, but to no avail. Prompted by the SSHRC affair, one of Canada’s most prestigious scientific associations, The Royal Society of Canada, issued a statement clearly differentiating the religious idea of intelligent design from the scientific idea of evolution.

SSHRC, however, refuses to address the issue of intelligent design and exacerbates its reluctance to do so by arguing that its role is “not to enter into debates on the issues,” which suggests that there is indeed a legitimate debate on the matter. This is fully in accord with the strategy of the creationists, who argue that there is a legitimate scientific controversy and that because intelligent design and evolution are equally valid theories, both should appear-side by side-in school science curricula.

Are the people at SSHRC fundamentalists? This is unlikely, although some have suggested that SSHRC, a federal government agency, may be acting under the influence of Canada’s current right-wing government. More likely, I think, is that this large public agency is in thrall to certain trendy ideas in the social sciences and humanities. There clearly is a large postmodernist contingent in those circles in Canada, as in the United States, which holds that science is an ideology no better and probably worse than other ways of knowing.

One insightful columnist in Canada, in reporting on the SSHRC affair, referred to an “unholy alliance” between the academic left and the religious right. My guess is that something like this is happening at SSHRC, which unfortunately remains firmly in control of research funds for science education in Canada.

So, sadly, there is no victory here at all. This entire affair has been chronicled in detail in several issues of the magazine Humanist Perspectives, and the complete text is available under “Collections” on our Web site, humanistperspectives.org.

In 1895, D.D. Palmer, a grocer and magnetic healer, announced that “Ninety-five percent of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae, the remainder by luxations of other joints” (Homola 1963). Palmer claimed that he had cured deafness and heart trouble by adjusting the spine (Wardwell 1992). He concluded that most diseases could be cured by adjusting vertebrae to remove interference with “nerve vibrations” that flowed from the brain to the spinal cord and out through openings between the vertebrae (Palmer 1914). Palmer’s questionable and anecdotal claims gave birth to the profession of chiropractic.

Today, the chiropractic profession agonizes over the definition of chiropractic, which has changed little except in wording used to explain how adjusting the spine can restore and maintain health. For many years, the vertebral subluxation theory was explained in a very simple way: a vertebra out of its normal position encroached upon spinal nerves, interfering with the flow of nerve impulses to the tissues and organs supplied by the affected nerve. Certain spinal nerves supplied certain organs. Adjustment of a selected vertebra would release vital nerve flow so that so-called “innate intelligence” could heal the body (Wardwell 1992). This theory has since been rejected and ridiculed by the scientific community.

New Definition for an Old Approach

Facing the realization that pressure on a spinal nerve cannot be demonstrated to be a cause of organic disease and that slight displacement of a vertebra does not compress a spinal nerve, defenders of the subluxation theory further theorized that abnormal joint function could affect general health by triggering nerve impulses from proprioceptors, nociceptors, mechanoreceptors, and other monitors of joint function. There are no appropriately controlled studies, however, to indicate that any type of dysfunction in structures of the spinal column is a cause of organic disease (Nansel 1995).

It is the consensus of the chiropractic profession’s schools and leaders that chiropractic should not be limited to treatment of back pain and should focus on treatment of general health problems. In July 1996, the Association of Chiropractic Colleges (ACC), representing sixteen North American chiropractic colleges, drafted a new paradigm stating that “Chiropractic is concerned with the preservation and restoration of health, and focuses particular attention on the subluxation. A subluxation is a complex of functional and/or pathological articular changes that compromise neural integrity and may influence organ system function and general health” (Association 1996). Such a subluxation has never been proven to exist.

In 1997, the Foundation for Chiropractic Education and Research (FCER), supporting the vague, untestable, and all-inclusive ACC paradigm, published a monograph titled The Role of Subluxation in Chiropractic. Noting that a vertebral subluxation complex (VSC) “may not be detectable by any of the current technological methods,” the monograph explained, “[The VSC] embraces the holistic nature of the human body, including health, well-being, and the doctor/patient relationship as well as the changes in nerve, muscle, connective, and vascular tissues which are understood to accompany the kinesiologic aberrations of spinal articulations” (Rosner 1997).

The ACC paradigm was endorsed by the International Chiropractic Association and the American Chiropractic Association in November 2000 and by the World Federation of Chiropractic in May 2001.

A random survey of 1,102 active North American chiropractors in 2003 revealed that 88.1 percent of 687 respondents believed that the term “vertebral subluxation complex” should be retained by the chiropractic profession. The respondents also believed that vertebral subluxation is a significant contributing factor in 62.1 percent of visceral ailments. The majority believed that spinal adjustment should not be limited to treatment of musculoskeletal problems (McDonald 2003).

Chiropractic Consensus versus Scientific Consensus

Scientific consensus does not support the theory that vertebral misalignment or “subluxation” is a cause of organic disease (College 1996, Crelin 1973, Jarvis 2001, National Council Against Health Fraud 2005). Spinal nerves primarily supply musculoskeletal structures. Organ function is governed by the autonomic nervous system in concert with psychic, chemical, hormonal, and circulatory factors. Autonomic cranial and sacral nerves that supply the body’s organs do not pass through movable joints. Spinal nerves are commonly irritated or compressed by bony spurs, herniated discs, and other abnormalities in the spine. Even the most severe compression of a spinal nerve, however, which cripples the supplied musculoskeletal structures, does not cause organic disease. It is unreasonable to assume that slight misalignment of a vertebra or an undetectable vertebral subluxation complex can cause disease or ill health when those effects do not occur because of gross displacement of a vertebra or as a result of impingement of a spinal nerve.

There is considerable evidence that spinal manipulation can be helpful in treating some types of back pain (Bigos 1994, Shekelle 1991), but “there appears to be little evidence to support the value of spinal manipulation for nonmusculoskeletal conditions” (Shekelle 1998).

Choices for the Future

Back pain is one of this nation’s most common medical problems, accounting for $50-100 billion in health costs annually (Pelletier 2002). Despite the need for a back-pain specialty that combines the use of spinal manipulation with physical therapy modalities, it does not appear that the chiropractic profession plans to take advantage of the growing back-pain market by specializing.

Spinal manipulation is only one treatment of many available in the treatment of back pain. A back-pain specialty would require the use of a variety of physical treatment methods in concert with various medical specialties. Chiropractors who adjust subluxations to restore and maintain health do not qualify as back specialists. Chiropractic as an alternative method of primary care for general health problems is far from being accepted by the scientific community.

A 2005 report by the Institute for Alternative Futures reported that the future of chiropractic is uncertain because of economic challenges and the limitations in chiropractic science and methods. The Institute predicted four possible scenarios for chiropractic: (1) slow, steady growth as support mounts for the use of manipulation in the treatment of back and neck pain; (2) a downward spiral from competition and healthcare costs; (3) evidence-based collaboration in the care of neuromusculoskeletal conditions; or (4) chiropractors will become healthy life doctors “specializing in preventing disease with health-management plans” (Institute 2005).

Concerned that the chiropractic profession “has failed to define itself in a way that is understandable, credible and scientifically coherent,” a group of evidence-based chiropractors offered a model for “spine care” that focuses primarily on treatment for back pain. The purpose of the plan is to “help integrate chiropractic care into the mainstream delivery system while still retaining self-identity for the profession” (Nelson 2005). The plan was not well-received by the chiropractic profession at large, which is loathe to restrict chiropractic treatment to back pain, preferring instead to claim a broad scope of health problems as its purview.

On June 15, 2005, the World Federation of Chiropractic, at its Eighth Biennial Congress, unanimously agreed that chiropractors should be identified as “spinal health care experts in the health care system . . . with emphasis on the relationship between the spine and the nervous system” (World 2005). This definition fails to place proper limitations upon chiropractors who use spinal adjustments to treat general health problems, plunging the profession deeper into pseudoscience and away from establishing an identity for chiropractors as back-pain specialists. Most states continue to define chiropractic as a method of adjusting vertebral subluxations to restore and maintain health, allowing chiropractic treatment of almost any ailment.

Filling a Niche in Mainstream Health Care

If the chiropractic profession continues to define itself as a method of health care based on the relationship between the spine and the nervous system rather than as a method of treating back pain, it seems likely that physical therapists and other practitioners of physical medicine will step in and offer manipulation along with physical therapy modalities in the treatment of back pain. According to the American Physical Therapy Association, “Physical therapy, by 2020, will be provided by physical therapists who are doctors of physical therapy and who may be board-certified specialists. Consumers will have direct access to physical therapists in all environments for patient/client management, prevention, and wellness services. Physical therapists will hold all privileges of autonomous practice” (American 2005).

Many physical therapists are already using manipulation/mobilization techniques. Of the 209 physical therapy programs in the United States, 111 now offer Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) degrees. About thirty-five states now grant physical therapists direct access to patients (Institute 2005), and there are nearly three times as many physical therapists (137,000) as chiropractors (49,000) (Bureau 2005).

Given a choice, it seems likely that informed consumers who seek treatment for back pain would prefer the services of a physical therapist whose therapeutic armamentarium is limited to treatment of musculoskeletal problems rather than the controversial services of a chiropractor who adjusts the spine to restore and maintain health. In 2002, only about 7.4 percent of the population was seeing a chiropractor annually (Tindle 2005). I suspect that this percentage would increase if the chiropractic profession identified itself as a specialty that deals with back pain and related problems.

References

• American Physical Therapy Association. 2005. APTA Vision Sentence and Vision Statement for Physical Therapy 2020. Available at www. apta.org/About/aptamissiongoals/visionstatement. Accessed October 1, 2005.
• Association of Chiropractic Colleges. 1996. A position paper on chiropractic. Journal of Manipulative Physiological Therapeutics 19:633-37.
• Bigos, S., O. Bowyer, G. Braen, et al. 1994. Acute Low Back Problems in Adults. Clinical Practice Guidelines No. 14. AHCPR publication No. 95-0642. Rockville, Md.: Agency for Health Care Policy and Research.
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. 2005. Occupational Outlook Handbook. Washington, D.C.: Office of Occupational Statistics and Employment Projection, 2004-2005.
• College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Province of Quebec. 1996. A scientific brief against chiropractic. The New Physician, September.
• Crelin, E.S. 1973. A scientific test of the chiropractic theory. American Scientist 61:574-80.
• Homola, S. 1963. Bonesetting, Chiropractic, and Cultism. Panama City, Fla.: Critique Books.
• Institute for Alternative Futures. 2005. The Future of Chiropractic Revisited 2005-2015. Available at www.altfutures.com. Accessed October 1, 2005.
• Jarvis, W.T. 2001. NCAHF Fact Sheet on Chiropractic. National Council Against Health Fraud. Available at www.ncahf.org/articles/c-d/chiro.html. Accessed October 1, 2005.
• McDonald, W., K. Durkin, S. Iseman, et al. 2003. How Chiropractors Think and Practice. Ada, Ohio: Ohio Northern University.
• Nansel, D., and M. Szlazak. 1995. Somatic dysfunction and the phenomenon of visceral disease simulation: A probable explanation for the apparent effectiveness of somatic therapy in patients presumed to be suffering from true visceral disease. Journal of Manipulative Physiological Therapeutics 18:379-97.
• National Council Against Health Fraud. 2005. Position Paper on Chiropractic. Available at www.ncahf.org/pp/chirop. Accessed October 1, 2005.
• Nelson, C., D. Lawrence, J. Triano, et al. 2005. Chiropractic as spine care: A model for the profession. Chiropractic and Osteopathy 13:9. Available at www.chiroandosteo.com/content/13/1/9. Accessed October 1, 2005.
• Palmer, D.D. 1914. The Chiropractor. Montana: Kessinger Publishing Company.
• Pelletier, K.R., and J.A. Astin. 2002. Integration and reimbursement of complementary and alternative medicine by managed care and insurance providers: 2000 update and cohort analysis. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 8:38-39.
• Rosner, A. 1997. The Role of Subluxation in Chiropractic. Des Moines, Iowa: Foundation for Chiropractic Education and Research.
• Shekelle, P.G., A.H. Adams, M.R. Chassin, et al. 1991. The Appropriateness of Spinal Manipulation for Low-Back Pain: Project Overview and Literature Review. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND
• Shekelle, P.G. 1998. What role for chiropractic in health care? New England Journal of Medicine 339:1074-1075.
• Tindle, H.A., R.B. Davis, R.S. Phillips, and D.M. Eisenberg. 2005. Trends in use of complementary and alternative medicine by U.S. adults: 1997?2003. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 11:42-49.
• Wardwell, W. 1992. History and Evolution of a New Profession. St. Louis, Mo.: Mosby Year-Book.
• World Federation of Chiropractic. 2005. WFC Consultation on the Identity of the Chiropractic Profession, June 15, 2005. Available at www.wfc.org, Identity Consultation. Accessed October 1, 2005.

A “Special Report” published recently in Nature argued that Samuel Hahnemann’s famous Principle of Similars (“let like cure like”), which is based on the treatment of the sick with extremely diluted, vigorously shaken agents (so-called “potencies”), is a pseudoscience (Giles 2007). While that conclusion is true, I fear that this paper, which can be viewed as a sequel to an excellent review article on homeopathy and physics published ten years ago in the Skeptical Inquirer (Park 1997), will not convince all readers of the antiscientific nature of this alternative medicine. However, I think that the following additional arguments should persuade every open-minded person that homeopathy is, in fact, eighteenth-century quackery.

First, the claim of homeopaths that the extremely diluted remedy has an effect independent of the belief of the patient and practitioner has been refuted. This contention is based on the premise that the various potencies can be distinguished from one another. In a quantitative study, it was shown that two specific potencies, namely Natrium muriaticum 30C and Sulphur 30C, which are said to be very active and have strikingly different properties, were indistinguishable by an eminent homeopath. For identification of the potencies the practitioner was allowed to use all available methods, whether clinical, physical, or chemical (Roberts 1989).
Second, homeopaths usually argue that Hahnemann’s principle has been corroborated by the treatment of animals with homeopathic medicine. In these trials, the nonhuman patient is not even aware of receiving any medicine, so the placebo effect can be discounted. But a recent article on homeopathy in veterinary medicine showed that this popular claim is false (Taylor 2005).

Third, modern homeopathy rests on the assumption that remedies retain physiological activity even when diluted beyond Avogadro’s number (see figure 1), meaning no molecules of the active substance should remain (“high potencies,” i.e., are “solutions without solute”). This “memory-of-water” or “imprint” hypothesis, which was discussed in detail by Park (1997), has recently been refuted. Using novel spectroscopic techniques, it was shown that water loses its “memory” of structural correlations within fifty femtoseconds (a femtosecond is 10-15 of a second), discounting any long-term “information storage” of former dissolved particles, as claimed by homeopaths (Cowan et al. 2005).

The Avogadro number (or constant) is the number of “entities” (atoms or molecules) in one mole (N_A = 6.02214179 x 10²³ mol^-1). If a stock solution of 1 mol3L-1 of substance (for instance, sucrose) is diluted 24 times by a factor 1/10, no solutes remain in this “diluted solution” (i.e., “D 24” is pure water).

Finally, it should be noted that the tenets of homeopathy have not changed much over the past two hundred years. If Hahnemann had to pass an examination in homeopathic medicine today, he should have no problems answering most questions correctly. However, Charles Darwin would have no chance at passing an examination in evolutionary biology today, because our modern synthetic theory of biological evolution has developed far beyond his classical Principle of Descent with Modification by Natural Selection. Terms such as genotype, phenotype, germ-line mutations, etc., were unknown to Darwin, who used the methods of his time. Despite these restrictions, he raised many new, open questions and finally became the doyen of a new research agenda and scientific discipline (Kutschera and Niklas 2004).

Figure 2. Dilution series. A concentrated solution is serially diluted by a factor of 10. After three steps, the number of particles per volume of water drops from 100 to zero (average value). According to one of the dogmas of classical homeopathy, this “solution without solutes” is supposed to exert a positive physiological effect on the bodies of animals, humans, and plants.

In contrast to evolutionary biology, homeopathy is a closed, dogmatic system of fixed rules. Moreover, the basic tenet of homeopathy, “Nothing, dissolved in water, is more effective than water in which nothing is dissolved,” is an irrational tautology that lacks any factual basis (see figure 2). Homeopathy must be regarded as a static, quasi-religious faith that has no place in any science curriculum.

References

• Cowan, M.L., B.D. Bruner, N. Huse, J.R. Dwyer, B. Chugh, E.T.J. Nibbering, T. Elsaesser, and R.J.D. Miller. 2005. Ultrafast memory loss and energy redistribution in the hydrogen bond network of liquid H2O. Nature 434: 199-02.
• Giles, J. 2007. Degrees in homeopathy slated as unscientific. Nature 446: 352-53.
• Kutschera, U., and K.J. Niklas. 2004. The modern theory of biological evolution: an expanded synthesis. Naturwissenschaften 91: 255-76.
• Park, R.L. 1997. Alternative medicine and the laws of physics. Skeptical Inquirer 21 (5): 24-28.
• Roberts, T.D.M. 1989. Homeopathic test. Nature 342: 350.
• Taylor, N. 2005. Homeopathy in veterinary medicine. Skeptical Intelligencer 8, 15-18.

The late Carl Sagan said “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This skeptical principle can be applied generally to the area of consumer affairs and more specifically to the claims of chiropractic, an “alternative healing” approach now practiced widely throughout the United States and other parts of the world.

Chiropractic practice began in 1895, when D.D. Palmer administered a 'chiropractic adjustment' to a deaf man who reportedly regained his hearing. Palmer, a grocer and 'magnetic healer,' made great claims about the importance of his new treatment for human ailments. According to Palmer, “A subluxated vertebrae . . . is the cause of 95 percent of all diseases . . . the other 5 percent is caused by displaced joints other than those of the vertebral column.”

The very existence of vertebral subluxations and their etiological role in health problems is uncertain and subject to considerable controversy, since there is very little empirical evidence in support of the efficacy of chiropractic (see Crelin 1973; Keating, Charlton, Grod, Perle, Sikorski, and Winterstein 2005).

J.J. Palmer, the son of chiropractic’s founder, was primarily responsible for the development of chiropractic as a profession within the United States. In a little more than a hundred years, chiropractic has advanced dramatically to the point where there are now sixteen accredited colleges of chiropractic and fifty thousand licensed chiropractors in the U.S. alone.

Within the state of Florida, where the current study was initiated, chiropractic medicine is defined by law as “a noncombative principle and practice consisting of the science of the adjustment, manipulation, and treatment of the human body in which vertebral subluxations and other malpositioned articulations and structures that are interfering with the normal generation, transmission, and expression of nerve impulses between the brain, organs, and tissue cells of the body, thereby causing disease, are adjusted, manipulated, or treated, thus restoring the normal flow of nerve impulse which produces normal function and consequent health . . .” (Florida Statute 460.403). In 1998, Florida, with its four thousand practitioners, ranked fourth in the nation in the number of licensed chiropractors.

It is generally agreed that chiropractic may be a useful approach in alleviating pain for a very limited set of disorders associated with the back or spine. However, many skeptics are concerned that chiropractic is being applied to disorders for which it is an inappropriate intervention and for which solid evidence of its efficacy is lacking. If this is the case, then several unfortunate consequences might result. Patients might be harmed by the treatment itself, they might waste their time and money, or they might be deterred from seeking effective treatments. Skeptics fear that chiropractors and their representatives may often promise too much and create expectations that chiropractic can cure or heal medical problems for which it is ill suited.

This study was designed to ascertain the degree to which the representatives of chiropractic in a medium-sized Florida city would agree to treat a patient presenting complaints for which chiropractic has not been shown to be effective (see Goertz, Grimm, Svendsen, and Grandits 2002; Plaugher et al. 2002; Ernst and Canter 2006). The setting for this study was Tallahassee, the capital of Florida, with a population of approximately 151,000 people and where both the authors of this article reside. The local telephone book lists about thirty-three chiropractors in the city. Bruce Thyer contacted the offices of most of these practitioners by telephone during the months of December 2005 and January 2006 and was successful in reaching someone in the office in twenty-eight of the cases. Thyer used a standard opening script for each call: “Good afternoon, my name is Bruce and I am fifty-two. I am interested in learning if chiropractic can help me with high blood pressure and arthritis.” Occasionally, after an initial response, Thyer would ask for confirmation by saying “So you treat people with high blood pressure and arthritis?” In nearly every case, the call was received by a secretary, receptionist, technician, or someone representing the chiropractor, not by the chiropractor himself. So, how often did the representatives of chiropractors agree to treat a fifty-two-year-old man with high blood pressure and arthritis?

Twenty-one of the twenty-eight offices (75 percent) said that they could treat high blood pressure, arthritis, or both; two of the twenty-eight (7 percent) said they did not treat either of the disorders; and three of the twenty-eight (11 percent) indicated that they didn?t know or were uncertain if these problems could be treated. Among the positive responses were the following:

“Absolutely, all the time.”

“Yes, definitely.”

“Yes, it should help.”

“Yes it can.”

“It has been known to be of great benefit for both.”

“I know it will help with the high blood pressure, and with the arthritis it will help maintain you, but it will not cure you.”

“Not high blood pressure, but arthritis, yes.”

“Yeah, sometimes, especially the high blood pressure part.”

“The arthritis . . . and generally, yes, blood pressure. He can help you in terms of making you feel better.”

“Sure, I can administer the adjustments, open up the joints and improve blood flow.”

“Can probably help with the pain of arthritis, but blood pressure, no that would need to get homeopathy treatment and he does that too.”

“Yes, the doctor can treat that [high blood pressure and arthritis]. What insurance do you have?”

Negative responses included:

“Generally that is not what chiropractic does.”

“Primarily [we] focus on spinal and orthopedic problems, not arthritis or high blood pressure.”

Uncertain responses included:

“This is something we would need to talk to the doctor about, and he is out of town.?”

In the end, three-quarters of the representatives of chiropractors in Tallahassee agreed that their offices would be able to treat someone with high blood pressure and/or arthritis. Now, it might be argued that the chiropractors themselves would have given responses much different from those obtained in this study. Maybe they would not have been as agreeable to the treatment of high blood pressure and arthritis as their employees were. At worst, the office employees were accurately representing the intentions of the chiropractors for which they work, and those chiropractors were offering treatment for high blood pressure and arthritis. At best, the employees were misrepresenting the intentions of the chiropractors for which they work and were promising too much, in which case the employees were not properly trained to interact with prospective patients. Neither outcome is in the best interest of the public.

Results similar to those of this study have been reported elsewhere. Recently, a reporter in Ontario, Canada, posed as a mother seeking treatment for her two-year-old son’s chronic ear infections. She called the offices of fifty randomly selected chiropractors and asked if the chiropractors provided treatment for young children and if they would be able to help with a child’s ear infections. Forty-five of the fifty offices (80 percent) said they treated young children and thirty-six of the fifty (72 percent) said they could help with the ear infections. These expectations were given even though the glosso-pharyngeal nerve in the ear doesn't go through the spine, which is the intended target of chiropractic. In the 1970s, physician Stephen Barrett supervised a woman who took her healthy four-year-old daughter to five chiropractors for a “checkup.” Prior to these visits, the child was examined by a pediatrician and found to be healthy. The mother carried a concealed tape recorder during the visits. One chiropractor ran a “nervoscope” up and down the child’s spine for a minute and said she had pinched nerves to the stomach and gallbladder, and he recommended X-rays. The second chiropractor said the child’s pelvis was twisted and needed adjusting. The third found one hip to be elevated, and recommended adjustments. The fourth found a shorter leg and neck tension, and recommended weekly adjustments. And the fifth found hip and neck misalignments and without permission provided adjustments to the four-year-old. The screams of the child during the adjustments, heard over the tape recorder, caused Dr. Barrett to terminate this study. Later, as an eleven-year-old, the girl was in good health and a gymnast (for more information, see www.chirobase.org).

There is evidence from this study and other similar investigations that chiropractors or their representatives are agreeing to treat, and possibly attempting to treat, disorders for which their practice is not appropriate. In a sense, they are advertising that they can effectively treat certain disorders when there are few or no controlled clinical studies that actually back up these claims. Thus, many of the claims of chiropractic can be considered extraordinary, and as Sagan would remind us, these claims require extraordinary evidence before they should be believed.

We also suggest that the approach used in this study, calling up health care providers and asking them about the types of disorders they claim to treat, is a very useful and low-cost investigative strategy that can be adopted by skeptical consumers in their local communities. Our study revealed that the large majority of chiropractic offices contacted claimed to be able to treat hypertension and arthritis, claims that the current scientific literature does not justify. The costs to consumers who are seeking legitimate and effective treatments for these serious health problems, and who instead receive inappropriate and ineffective diagnostic (e.g., spinal radiographs) and therapeutic procedures (spinal manipulation), are undoubtedly substantial. So, too, are the costs to private, state, and federal health insurance providers. The extent to which consumers are diverted from receiving evidence-based treatments for serious health problems is similarly unknown but also likely to be considerable.

References

• Crelin, E.S. 1973. A scientific test of chiropractic?s subluxation theory. American Scientist, September/October, pp. 574-80.
• Ernst, E. and P.H. Canter 2006. A systematic review of systematic reviews of spinal manipulation. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99(4): 192-96.
• Goertz, C.H., R.H. Grimm, K. Svendsen, and G. Grandits. 2002. Treatment of hypertension with alternative therapies (THAT) study: A randomized clinical trial. Journal of Hypertension 20: 2063-2068.
• Keating, J.C., K.H. Charlton, J.P. Grod, S.M. Perle, D. Sikorski, and J.F. Winterstein. 2005. Subluxation: Dogma or science? Chiropractic & Osteopathy 13(17): 1-10.
• Plaugher, G., C.R. Long, J. Alcantara, A.D. Silveus, H. Wood, K. Lotun, J.M. Menke, W.C. Meeker, and S.H Rowe. 2002. Practice-based randomized controlled-comparison clinical trial of chiropractic adjustments and brief massage treatment at sites of subluxation in subjects with essential hypertension: Pilot study. Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 25: 221-39.