Pseudoscience is on the rise – and the media is completely hooked
‘The whole aim of practical politics,’ wrote H.L. Mencken, ‘is to
keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by
menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary.’ Newspapers, politicians and pressure groups have been moving
smoothly for decades from one forecast apocalypse to another (nuclear
power, acid rain, the ozone layer, mad cow disease, nanotechnology,
genetically modified crops, the millennium bug…) without waiting to be
proved right or wrong.
Increasingly, in a crowded market for alarm, it becomes necessary to
make the scares up. More and more headlines about medical or
environmental panics are based on published scientific papers, but ones
that are little more than lies laundered into respectability with a
little statistical legerdemain. Sometimes, even the exposure of the
laundered lies fails to stop the scare. Dr Andrew Wakefield was struck
off in 2010 after the General Medical Council found his 1998 study in
the Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism
to be fraudulent. Yet Wakefield is now a celebrity anti-vaccine activist
in the United States and has left his long-suffering wife for the
supermodel Elle Macpherson. Anti-vax campaigning is a lucrative
business.
Meanwhile, the notion that chemicals such as bisphenol A, found in
plastics, are acting as ‘endocrine disruptors’, interfering with human
hormones even at very low doses, started with an outright fraudulent
study that has since been retracted. Many low-quality studies on BPA
have pushed this theory, but they have been torpedoed by high-quality
analyses including a recent US government study called Clarity. Yet this
is of course being largely ignored by the media and the activists.
So the habit of laundering lies is catching on. Three times in the
past month, pseudo-science flew around the world before the scientific
truth had got its boots on (as Mark Twain did not say, but Jonathan
Swift almost did): in stories about insect extinction, weedkiller
causing cancer, and increased flooding. The shamelessness of the
apocaholics is increasingly blatant. They know that even if a story of
impending doom is thoroughly debunked, the correction comes too late.
The gullible media will have relayed the headline without checking, so
the activists have made their fake-news hit, perhaps even raised funds
on the back of it, and won.
Take the story on 10 February that ‘insects could vanish within a century’, as the Guardian’s
Damian Carrington put it, echoed by the BBC. The claim is, as even
several science journalists and conservationists have now reported,
bunk.
The authors of the study, Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris Wyckhuys,
claimed to have reviewed 73 different studies to reach their conclusion
that precisely 41 per cent of insect species are declining and ‘unless
we change our way of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the
path of extinction in a few decades’. In fact the pair had started by
putting the words ‘insect’ and ‘decline’ into a database, thereby
ignoring any papers finding increases in insects, or no change in
numbers.
They did not check that their findings were representative enough to
draw numerical conclusions from. They even misinterpreted source papers
to blame declines on pesticides, when the original paper was
non-committal or found contradictory results. ‘Several multivariate and
correlative statistical analyses confirm that the impact of pesticides on
biodiversity is larger than that of other intensive agriculture
practices,’ they wrote, specifically citing a paper that actually found
the opposite: that insect abundance was lower on farms where pesticide
use was less.
They also relied heavily on two now famous recent papers claiming to
have found fewer insects today than in the past, one in Germany and one
in Puerto Rico. The first did not even compare the same locations in
different years, so its conclusions are hardly reliable. The second
compared samples taken in the same place in 1976 and 2012, finding fewer
insects on the second occasion and blaming this on rapid warming in the
region, rather than any other possible explanation, such as timing of
rainfall in the two seasons. Yet it turned out that there had been no
warming: the jump in temperature recorded by the local weather station
was entirely caused by the thermometer having been moved to a different
location in 1992. Whoops.
Of course, human activities do affect insects, but ecologists I have
consulted say local populations of some species are often undergoing
huge changes, and that some species regularly die out in one location
and are then regenerated by migrants. This is not to be confused with
species extinction. The real evidence suggests that insect species are
dying out at a similar rate to mammals and birds — which means about 1
to 5 per cent per century. A problem, but not Armageddon.
Curiously, 41 per cent cropped up in another misleading story the
same day, 10 February. This is the claim that exposure to glyphosate,
the active ingredient in Roundup weedkiller, increases the incidence of a
particular, very rare cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). ‘Exposure to
weed-killing products increases risk of cancer by 41 per cent,’ said
the Guardian’s headline.
Once again, this paper is not a new study, but a desktop survey of
other studies and its claim collapses under proper scrutiny. According
to the epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat, the paper combined one
high-quality study with five poor-quality studies and chose the highest
of five risk estimates reported in one of the latter to ensure it would
reach statistical significance. The authors highlighted the dubious 41
per cent result, ‘which they almost certainly realised would grab
headlines and inspire fear’.
