IMH and Acupuncture.

I read with dismay and shock that the Institute of Mental Health is now introducing acupuncture in its hospital. This is what asiaone.com reports:  "The Institute of Mental Health (IMH) has become the first health-care provider here to start using acupuncture to help addicts break their drug, drink or gambling habits."  For more, please read this.

This is a first that no reputable hospital should be proud of.  Medical doctors, if they are to be true to their honourable calling, must always practise only evidence-based medicine.  Anything more than that would not be in line with the clear mandate doctors have to heal their patients.  When I see a doctor, I would be shortchanged if he performs faith-healing on me.  Even if he does not force it down my throat but politely offers faith healing as one of the "methods" of treatment to me when I go to his clinic or hospital, that would be, in my opinion, an outrageous abuse of his position as a legally recognised medical practitioner.

It is not too much for a patient to expect a registered medical practitioner to offer only evidence-based treatment recognised by his peers and validated in proper peer-reviewed journals.  Before IMH embarks on any treatment programme, it is duty bound to satisfy itself and the public that whatever programme it offers is backed by evidence and properly controlled studies and is duly referenced in peer-reviewed journals.

Let us see what evidence IMH has in starting this new acupuncture programme.  How effective is acupuncture?  I have personally gone through a huge amount of data on this question and from what I can gather, there has been not a single study that shows that acupuncture is efficacious.  No, not one.  Any study that seems to suggest even remotely that it has some efficacy is alway immediately shot down by experts in the area who point out that the study is flawed or there is no real control provided.  Almost all studies show there is absolutely zero effect in the use of acupuncture.  Of the rare studies that suggest its mild efficacy, reviews of these studies always indicate some severe flaws in the studies and any perceived efficacy is due wholly and indisputably to placebo effect. In many of the studies that proponents of acupuncture will draw your attention to excitedly, the sample size is too small for any significant conclusion in favour of acupuncture to be made.  It is also significant that the "success" of acupuncture is always in ailments that cannot be properly confirmed such as pain and the placebo effect is usually shown to be at play here.  That it is merely placebo effect is frequently confirmed when a control group is subjected to a needle prick too but they are pricked at the "wrong" point of the body and yet this control group claims to have benefitted from the procedure.

As far as science goes, it is correct to say that acupuncture has no advantage whatsoever apart from being a placebo.  That is a scientific statement of fact and I defy IMH to dispute it with evidence.

Given that acupuncture has zero advantage to the patient, can IMH argue that as long as there is no harm, it's all right to administer the procedure?  Of course not.  A hospital is not a church.  You can show statistics as I have shown in the past (click here) that prayers don't work but churches will continue to pray.  But a hospital is different.  It's obliged to do only that which can be of medical benefit to the patients.  But it's not only that.  Prayers are harmless even if they don't work but the same can't be said of acupuncture.  There are serious risk factors.

The latest study of adverse events related to acupuncture concludes that "although serious AEs associated with acupuncture are rare, acupuncture practice is not risk-free." (See Xu, Shifen, et al. (2013). "Adverse Events of Acupuncture: A Systematic Review of Case Reports"Evidence Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2013 Infection was the most common adverse event.  You may click here to read the entire paper.  Bear in mind that the paper is not addressing the question of whether acupuncture works.  The fact that acupuncture does not work is well documented in countless other papers and studies.  This paper only deals with the adverse effect of acupuncture, not its non-existent benefits.

There are many articles that you can find from respectable journals that attest to the fact that acupuncture does not work.  In fact there are at least a few hundred times more articles about the inefficacy of acupuncture than there are of the inefficacy of prayer and so technically, if IMH were to introduce prayer into its list of treatments, it would not be so outrageously wrong as if it were to introduce acupuncture.  If you are interested in reading a sample of the many articles against acupuncture as a treatment for anything at all, please click on this link.  I think I have made my point clear. Acupuncture is inefficacious and not beneficial to the patient except as a placebo. But that's not all. It also exposes the patient to unnecessary risks of adverse effects.

This is what the news report says:  "The Straits Times understands that no major scientific studies have been published on using acupuncture for behavioural addictions but the ancient method has developed in recent years outside of China as part of a combined approach to curb such disorders."  The reader is left wondering why then does IMH introduce acupuncture when no study has been done to show its efficacy on behavioural addictions and there are known adverse events?

If you read on further in the newspaper, we are told this which I quote from asiaone.com:

Acupuncture can enhance the standard mode of treatment, said Associate Professor Wong Kim Eng, clinical director of IMH's National Addictions Management Service, which runs the new acupuncture clinic.
It can help to relieve withdrawal symptoms, pain and cravings, as well as anxiety, he added, noting: "So far, there is no single medication that can cure addiction, or a perfect treatment programme. As an Asian society, we sought to borrow some age-old wisdom to improve treatment for our patients."

Is it right for the clinical director of IMH's National Addictions Management Service to say that acupuncture "can help to relieve withdrawal symptoms, pain and cravings, as well as anxiety"?  What I would like to know is on what basis is he making such a claim?  If a patient were to undergo such a treatment and subsequently takes legal action against IMH for subjecting him to a treatment that is not backed by evidence and proper medical opinion, what defence can IMH rely upon to show that it has acted in the best possible manner as a registered medical hospital that delivers health care services using evidence-based treatments?

The clinical director of IMH's National Addictions Management Service continues to say in that newspaper article that we are an Asian society and so they "sought to borrow some age-old wisdom".  Should we engage tangkees to perform religious rites on the patients? After all, we are an Asian society and if we are at liberty to dish out treatment even when there is no study or evidence for it, what is so wrong with having something that is perfectly consistent with our culture as an Asian society?

What I'm concerned about is the newspaper further reports that this initiative "is backed by the Ministry of Health".  Is it right for the Ministry of Health to back a treatment that is totally unsupported by evidence or any form of study?  Let's not forget that acupuncture has been shown not to have any desirable effect (except as a placebo) on a whole host of ailments that it is traditionally reputed to treat. If acupuncture has been shown not to work in ailments that it is traditionally supposed to treat, what makes IMH think that it will work in something totally new and untested, such as behavioural addiction?

Singapore is a well-known medical hub for responsible and efficient health care services. People in the surrounding countries would fly to Singapore to seek treatment and they do that because they know they can trust the doctors in Singapore to practise responsible evidence-based medicine and they know we have great expertise in the various fields of medicine.  But reputation can be lost very easily and going into treatments that are not backed by evidence is the surest way to ruin our good name.  Acupuncture may be a part of our culture but so are the offering of prayers to the Goddess of Mercy and the rituals of tangkees or temple mediums.  They may be a part of our rich cultural heritage but I sure would not want to see them practised in our hospitals.

Jonathan Sacks' debate with Dawkins

This is a post that I wrote very late one night a few months ago but I left it in my list of unpublished posts.  I do not know the reason why I didn't publish it and I have totally forgotten the debate I saw between Dawkins and Sacks.  But since this is a personal blog of mine, I will just publish it without reading it through again and without listening to the debate one more time.

I just saw this debate between the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks and Richard Dawkins (click here) and I must say I'm extremely uneasy with Sacks' response.

He says the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac was a firm teaching against human sacrifice.  Dawkins' point is this is a case of child abuse.  Dawkins is of the view that it is surely immoral of God to lead Abraham to prepare Isaac for the sacrifice and only stopped him before he plunged the knife into Isaac's breast.  In his book, The God Delusion, he suggests that any child who has gone through such a trauma would suffer some permanent psychological problems after that and he asks a legitimate question why God should do that in the first place.  It's wrong for Sacks to ignore all that and to simply say that it's a lesson to the Jewish people not to commit human sacrifices.  Sacks is so obviously missing the point.

Sacks does not consider (and I'm surprised Dawkins does not raise) the fact that elsewhere in the Bible, there is at least one instance when God countenanced a human sacrifice to himself.  Jephthah sacrificed his daughter to God after making a promise to God when the spirit of God came upon him.  As Dawkins puts it in his book, this time, God did not intervene to stop the human sacrifice.  I am a little disappointed that Dawkins fails to remember this case of human sacrifice to God.

Sacks uses a cheap trick to discomfit Dawkins and throw him out of kilter.  He accuses Dawkins of anti-semitism.  Asians may find this hard to understand because we don't owe Jews anything but in the West, people have this guilty conscience whenever a Jew brings in anti-semitism.  Sacks uses it unfairly on Dawkins and Sacks tells a blatant lie.  He says that when Dawkins speaks of the God of the Old Testament as a "homicidal, infanticidal, genocidal bully", Dawkins is guilty of anti-semitism.  Dawkins rightly points out that he is speaking about a non-existent being and he says nothing against the Jews.  Sacks says that this description of the Old Testament God is a stereotypical portrayal of the Jewish God for the first 1700 years of Christianity and it has resulted in the deaths of many innocent Jews.  It's therefore anti-semitic.

I'm surprised nobody points out the outrageous falsehood of what Sacks says.  I'm surprised Dawkins does not jump on Sacks for this piece of nonsense.

It is Sacks who is anti-Christian and dishonest.  To say that Christians or the Church, in order to rage against the Jews, portrayed the God of the Old Testament as a homicidal maniac for the first 1700 years of Church history is not just an outrageous lie; it's an anti-Christian polemic and a dishonest one too.  Any Christian who had dared then to say this of the God of the Old Testament would have been burnt at the stake for blasphemy.  That's because the God of the Old Testament is the Christian God.  The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the God of the Christian Church.  What Dawkins says of the God of the Old Testament is not at all anti-semitic.  It may be blasphemous to Jews, Christians and Muslims but as Dawkins will say, blasphemy is an offence that has no victim.  To accuse Dawkins of being anti-semitic is cowardly and dishonest.  That may tug at the heartstrings of people in Europe who have such a heightened sensitivity to every whimper that comes from a Jewish rabbi but to most Asians, it sounds like an undignified wallowing in self-pity over something that happened a century ago in entirely unrelated circumstances and which is totally irrelevant to the motion of the debate.

Sacks is also unfair in another aspect of his argument.  Whenever Dawkins brings up an example in the Old Testament of God's cruelty, Sacks will stop him and ask him if he has read Jewish commentaries on these verses.  It may be heartening to see that Judaism has seen fit to re-write Scriptures by reinterpreting the troublesome verses but surely Dawkins has the right to read the holy book in the original version?  The Jewish commentators may decide to ameliorate God's character and nature so that it becomes something entirely different from what is actually reported in the holy book itself but that does not alter the fact that the holy book is wrong.  Sacks declares that it is heresy to read the Bible literally.  He explains that in Judaism, whenever the holy book conflicts with science, the part that is in conflict is no longer read literally.  That seems a rather clever way out of a predicament, doesn't it?  The Jewish Bible will be read literally until it conflicts with science.  Thereafter, it's not read literally but commentaries will be written to re-interpret the verses.  Frankly, I like this aspect of Judaism and I think it is laudable that rabbis take it upon themselves to correct the errors of their holy book by re-interpreting the erroneous parts.  I have said many times that this is precisely what all religions should do and it's a feather in the cap of Judaism that its rabbis do this.  But Richard Dawkins has every right to question the veracity of a holy book that needs to be revised according to scientific discoveries of men.

What Jonathan Sacks has done is to show that he really hasn't got a single logical leg to stand on.  He has shown that his version of Judaism is benign and moderate and the scholars of his school of Judaism go out of their way to reinterpret erroneous passages in Scriptures so that they are in line with science and truth.  The harsh bits of Scriptures are pared off, the ostensible evil of God is white-washed and reinterpreted and only that which is good, kind and pleasant is allowed to remain in the faith.  That makes his brand of Judaism a model religion for all religions to follow.  But that doesn't win him the debate.  It doesn't show Judaism to be true.  On the contrary, the fact that his brand of religion needs to be reinterpreted and corrected so that it can go alongside science is a confession that it is flawed since what is true has no need of correction or reinterpretation.

ISS again

The message from NASA this morning read: " Wed Dec 05 7:20 PM, Visible: 6 min, Max Height: 60 degrees, Appears: SSW, Disappears: NE".  Sure enough, at precisely the minute, I spotted the International Space Station again, this time a lot more clearly.  First I took a pic of it but it was not clear as you can see below:

It's the white fuzzy dot close to the centre of the pic. It's fuzzy because I have unsteady hands. 

I then took a video clip of it.  It's moving to the left of the screen.  The erratic movement you see in the video is because of the movement of my camera.  I foolishly moved the camera to centralize the object which I ought not to have done.  The white dot seems sometimes to take on a life of its own and it flits about the screen.  Again, it's the movement of my hands and not the ISS which moves steadily across the night sky towards the left of the screen.  Here's the video:

ISS

Got this message this morning from NASA: "Time: Tue Dec 04 8:12 PM, Visible: 2 min, Max Height: 43 degrees, Appears: WSW, Disappears: NNW" and I immediately set my alarm to ring at 8pm.  When my alarm rang tonight, I went directly to the balcony armed with my camera and binoculars but the view wasn't good.  So I went to the children's playground and stood on top of a slide.  It was cloudy and I tried my binoculars but the range of vision was too limited.  Anyway, the International Space Station can be viewed with the naked eye.  So I stared at roughly the right clearing in the sky.  I ignored the red flickering light from a plane.  Sure enough I saw a white light in the sky.  I saw it for about a second before it disappeared behind a cloud.  It was soon 8:14pm and the show was over.  But I have seen the ISS with my naked eye.  It was just a brief white light, fainter and thinner than I thought it would be but it was the real thing.  It still amazes me that humans can place a space station into orbit which can be seen from the Earth.

Genesis tells us that God hung the stars and the sun on the firmament (sky).  How right it is to say we bear the very image of God in that we too are able to hang our own "stars" in the sky.  Truly, how great we are!

Quantum Quack

Deepak Chopra

File from Wikimedia Commons

Date: 13 November 2011

I really don't know much about Deepak Chopra except that I remember having seen his books on spirituality and faith healing ever since I was a boy.  As far as I am concerned, faith healing really means nothing more than quackery or shamanism and of course shamanism is just a longer word for the more familiar "sham".

PZ Myers puts it very well.  I couldn't help laughing when I read Myers description of Deepak Chopra as a quantum quack.  I'm inclined to think that term suits Chopra admirably because he does try to insert quantum physics into his mumbo-jumbo jargon of faith healing.  If you want to read PZ Myers' well-written post in his blog, there are two places in which his post appears:  here and here.  They are identical and it's prudent of him to have his blog in two places.  If one site shuts down, there's still the other site and we won't be deprived of his wisdom.

Myers is laughing at Chopra's review of Dawkins' book, The Magic of Reality.  In his review, according to PZ Myers and I have to depend on what Myers says since I make it a point never to read books written by witch-doctors, Chopra uses words such as "obnoxious" and "ignorant" in his tirade against Dawkins' book.

Having long ago seen a video of an interview of Chopra by Richard Dawkins, I can easily understand the reason for Chopra's burning anger for Dawkins.  You see, Dawkins exposed Chopra in an interview a couple of years ago and held him up as a charlatan and fraud.  If you are interested in seeing the interview, click here.

Observe how Chopra is very careful when he talks to Dawkins, a real scientist, about quantum physics.  He begins by saying that he employs the term "quantum physics" merely as a metaphor.  But when Dawkins is about to seize on that (presumably because Chopra claims to "use" quantum physics in his "healing"), Chopra immediately talks about some disagreement among physicists.  This is a common ploy used by faith-based people who try to find fault with science - they harp on the lack of consensus among experts in some esoteric scientific field (and there is always some area of science which is in dispute) and somehow they appropriate for themselves a vague validation of their faith even though the dispute among the experts may have nothing to do with the claim of their faith.

Jumping on the bandwagon of science's uncertainty is not uncommon for "spiritual" people.  Some New Age devotees make constant references to quantum physics and Schrodinger's Cat as some kind of validation for their New Age belief but in very vague terms of course. Apart from quantum physics, astronomy is another fertile ground for faith believers.  The origin of the universe is an exceptionally good area to go into.  I've heard an argument that the String Theory proves the existence of God.  My own bishop once mentioned dark matter in his sermon.

I have often wondered why religious apologists don't really make it clear how an uncertainty in science can possibly prove the truth of their beliefs.  Perhaps they can't afford to be any clearer because clarity on such a subject can make their whole argument appear ludicrous.  For us believers, ambiguity and haziness work to our advantage.  For example, my bishop did not explain how the postulation of dark matter by scientists can in any way forward the religious claims of the church.  If he were to say that scientists had to postulate the existence of dark matter to account for the mass in the universe when this mass is actually the mass of God himself, that would certainly make his point clearer but it would also at the same time elicit laughter from the congregation.  Perhaps my bishop meant to point out the fact that scientists were uncertain of many things in the universe and so it's not implausible that they might have overlooked God lurking somewhere in the background.  It is no good making any reference to science unless one shows clearly how that can affirm the truth of religious claims.  Chopra, at the start of the interview, claims he uses quantum physics as a metaphor for his faith healing.  What good is a metaphor to prove the efficacy of faith healing?  Anyone can use scientific metaphor but that means nothing.  A voodoo magician can call his needle a laser beam or a nuclear bomb but that won't change the fact that his voodoo needle has no effect at all.  But there is some good in making references to science even if one doesn't show how that can advance the religious cause.  Using scientific jargon in a sermon does lend some respectability to a mindless belief system that is not backed by evidence.  Parishioners usually don't pay close attention to a sermon anyway and there is no time given for questions and answers after a sermon.  Bear in mind that I am not for a moment saying that a mindless belief system that is not backed by evidence is necessarily false and untrue.  I make no pronouncement on its truth; I'm merely explaining the reason for this need to make allusions, however vague and unrelated, to the more difficult aspects of science.

I was once approached by a polite chap while I was walking on the Millennium Bridge and he invited me to see a short movie.  Now, at that time, what I really needed most was the toilet and as any Singaporean knows, as long as you are out of Singapore, it's very hard to find available toilets anywhere outside your hotel.  I thought to myself that if there was a movie, there ought to be a toilet too.  The chap led me to a plush and stately building not far from the Millennium Bridge and St Paul's Cathedral.  It was a building owned by the Church of Scientology.  The toilet was just as opulent as the rest of the building and having visited it, I thought it would have been churlish to just leave the building without at least obliging the guy by watching his movie.  The movie was screened in a small but well-furnished hall and although there were many seats, the only audience consisted of me and a Canadian man who was similarly accosted on the street.

The film with the preposterous title of "Dianetics" was hilarious and silly and it was all about the Church of Scientology's belief in faith healing.  The choice of the word "dianetics" is obvious.  It has a scientific ring to it.  Even the name of the church is calculated to give it a veneer of science.  But the film was far from scientific; it made medical doctors appear like conspirators who were out to harm patients.  The teaching behind the film was simply not to have faith in medical science but rather, to trust in "dianetics", ie their brand of faith healing.  At the end of the screening, the Canadian man and I were invited to buy a book on Dianetics which we of course politely declined.

Pedlars of superstition and faith healing usually resort to masking the silliness of their superstition with science.  They may use names which sound scientific but people should be on the alert when they see mumbo-jumbo dressed in sci-fi garb.  The New Age beliefs draw heavily on such scientific-sounding words.  Whether they advocate the use of the mind to make things happen by magic or they talk about being in direct contact with intelligent beings from other planets - the contact is always a human channeller who endeavours to speak in a strange voice that can be pretty hilarious to the uninitiated - the names and ideas are almost always identical with what you find in science fiction.  Older beliefs aren't so fortunate.  They are stuck to ancient and sometimes barbaric concepts such as the propitiation of a God by blood sacrifice but these older religions too do not let the scientific grass grow under their feet - their defenders and apologists tap deeply into the more difficult and less settled areas of science such as the String Theory and dark matter as I've mentioned above.

If I may go back to the video of the interview of Chopra by Dawkins, notice how Chopra moves from saying that he uses quantum physics as a metaphor for his faith healing to his direct attack on science as "arrogant".  It is clear to any viewer of the video that Chopra starts out intending to accord to his faith healing the respectability of science.   But when Dawkins makes it hard for him to carry on with this charade, he takes a different stance and attacks science with a viciousness that shows quite unmistakeably that his faith healing and science are really poles apart.

A charlatan though he may be, Chopra is probably an honest man.  This is my view of faith-based people.  They genuinely believe the truth of their belief system.  What has Chopra to gain by cooking up a false belief system if he doesn't himself believe in it?  These faith-based people are truly sincere and well-meaning and while they may cloak their beliefs with the respectability of science and may make allusions to science or use scientific jargon as a metaphor, they will not hesitate to attack science altogether if it stands in the way of their faith.

Chopra was a medical doctor before he went into faith healing. Non-medical people are often of the mistaken notion that medical doctors are scientists with a scientific frame of mind.  Time and time again, we see medical doctors believing in ludicrous superstitions and faith healing.  If you scour through this blog, you will see a few examples that I have brought up including that of a brain surgeon who came up with the most nonsensical statement about life after death.  See this.  It is not that medical doctors are more susceptible to believing in nonsense; they are just no different from the average person when it comes to falling prey to evidence-less belief.

I know a medical doctor who is a fervent advocate of creationism including the belief that the earth is only 6000 years old.  Actually, young-earth creationists (as they are called) believe in more than just a 6000-year-old earth.  They believe in a 6000-year-old universe!  All I had to do was to show her the compelling evidence for evolution and for an earth that exceeds 4.5 billion years in age and she immediately accepted the obvious truth.  But not everyone is willing to abandon their cherished belief in creationism even a whole universe of evidence is shown to them.

Some features of the human anatomy mirror the truth of evolution.  To believe that a Divine Being created humans out of nothing or, as Genesis tells us in its allegorical language, out of the soil of the earth is to believe that this Divine Being was guilty of a bad design.  What I find incomprehensible is the fact that medical doctors who are students of anatomy do know all about these anatomical flaws that are perfectly consistent with and explicable by evolutionary theory.  How then can these doctors abandon their knowledge and insist on being creationists?  Her reply was interesting - a doctor's main goal is to heal the body.  When you look at the flaws in the "design" of the human body, you do not ask philosophical questions like "Is there really a Divine Maker who is guilty for such architectural and design flaws?" but rather you address your mind purely to the treatment of the body bearing in mind at all times the flaws that are inherent in our bodies.  They have too much to think of in the treatment of the human body to bother about our origin and to link what they know of the anatomy to evolution or to see the implausibility of creationism.

For Christians who can't read books written by atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, both of whom are evolutionary biologists, a good book to recommend to them is Francis Collins' The Language of God.  Collins is a devout Christian who accepts the truth of evolution.  He's of course the greatest genetic scientist and is the first person to have mapped out the whole of the human genome and his book shows from a genetic standpoint why evolution is absolutely true.

This dissociation of one's knowledge from one's belief is something I have observed for a long time.  When I was a student living on campus, the student in the room next to mine read what was then called "Double Physics".   That means he majored in Physics and did some other Physics course so he was to all intents and purposes an expert in Physics.  One evening, I got a friend of mine who was an expert in Chinese calligraphy to write for me poems for the dead that were used in Chinese funerals and I pasted them on my door.  Now, this Physics student was a Malaysian Chinese and he could not read a word of Mandarin but when he was told the significance of the poems pasted on my door, he was livid.  He told me that I would bring bad luck to my neighbours and since he was just next door to me, he would be the target of the evil one.  I reasoned with him that as a Double Physics student, surely he wasn't superstitious?  He looked startled and confused when he replied, "What has Physics got to do with the evil forces?"

I removed the poems from my door and pasted them on my desk in my room.  Well-meaning friends told me I would fail my exams because of that.  And mind you, they were not joking!  They truly believed that some funereal poem pasted at one's door or desk could attract evil forces.

I really don't know what Deepak Chopra teaches nor do I care.  Those who argue that you must examine in detail a belief before dismissing it are wrong.  I can't examine the teachings of all the 20 million shamans, witch-doctors, bomohs, tang kees, snake-oil pedlars, charlatans and faith healers in order to dismiss each and every one of them.  It's enough for me to dismiss them all unless they can produce reasonable evidence to support their claim of healing through supernatural means.  Give me the evidence for the efficacy of your snake oil and until you do that, have the decency not to align yourself with real scientists or use their terminology or a tacky imitation of it.

The Story of the Beetle Collector

I had signed up for a talk in NUS but I was in no mood to drive there.  Neither was I in the mood to take a cab there.  Public transport was out of the question; it would be far too inconvenient.  The only attractive means of transport for me was... 

THE BICYCLE!

But it was raining (and had been raining the whole day) and I thought I would give the talk a miss, so averse I was to driving.  But I soon noticed that the rain had stopped even though the clouds were still dark.  I took the bike out.

And it was such a pleasant ride. It took me only 30 minutes to get to NUS. Locked my bike at the bike shelter which was just in front of the lecture theatre and took a pic.

There was time enough for me to change into a fresh t-shirt and place my sweat-soaked t-shirt into my bag.

I then listened to the one-hour talk by a man who is truly in love with the subject of his talk, having spent 30 years researching it and who has even contracted malaria in the Amazon where he retraced the steps of his beloved Alfred Wallace.

I took a quick pic (so I could post it in this photo blog of mine) just before the talk.  

At the end of the talk, during the Question-and-Answer session, I felt I had to put in a good word for Darwin.  Didn't Darwin urge the scientific community to give Wallace a pension even though they were reluctant because Wallace was an irrational spiritualist who attended seances?  But the diehard Wallace fan replied that Darwin could very well have done that because he felt bad about having stolen the idea of evolution from Wallace.  Interestingly, there were others who came to Darwin's defence.


Ultimately, it's never safe to accept apocryphal anecdotes.  That the theory of evolution by natural selection is the brainchild of Darwin's is indisputable.  Darwin was brilliant to have come up with this wonderful theory that has been validated by a preponderance of evidence that continues to emerge right up to our time.  


I am also heartened by the fact that in all the academic talks that I have attended in Singapore, I have yet to encounter a single flat-earther who insists that evolution is false or that an intelligent Designer (notice the capital "D") created it all.  I would blush crimson if that should happen.

The evening would have been perfect but for a puncture in my rear tyre on my way home. My wife picked me up in the vehicle I had been trying to avoid.  I was a little upset with the puncture because the carbon emission would have been almost the same if I had driven there and back home.  But the comfort is it's not every day that I have a puncture and I think I'm doing my best to be as green as I can be.

Fin to limb evolution clue found

Here's an article on research into the evolution of limbs for our fishy ancestor.


Click here

When science meets fundamentalism

This afternoon, I bought from Borders this book and am really looking forward to reading it.

Early last year, as soon as I got word that Jerry Coyne's book had been published in celebration of Darwin's 200th or 150th anniversary (depending on whether you're celebrating his birth or the publication of his book), I placed an order with amazon.com for the book.  It's a truly remarkable book.  I'm quite pleased with myself because I recommended the book to someone who's a real dyed-in-the-wool creationist and who's also a deacon in one of the most ultra-fundamentalist churches that I know of and after reading the book, he accepted the truth of evolution and is now a closet evolutionist.  "Evolutionist" is such a needless word.  It's as needless as "gravitationalist" (a person who accepts the theory of gravity) or a "germist" (a person who accepts the germ theory).


Since my blog is intended to be largely pictorial, here's a pic of Coyne's book:

Do Prayers Work?

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 Propping up my bike before going to church

Recently, I had a talk with someone who believed in the efficacy of prayer.  I have for years been arguing that prayers don't work.  One can come to that conclusion through a process of logic but of course a proper study would be helpful.  During the discussion, I recalled a study done by a Harvard research team that showed that prayer was not effective when it came to healing.  I looked up my trusty gmail in which I store facts that catch my fancy and sure enough, I had the link to the Harvard study: Harvard Medical School

If you prefer a more readable newspaper-like article, here's a link to the NY Times reporting this: New York Times

And here are the links to Medline searches on the study: Medline 1
and Medline 2

All I can say is if I'm having a heart surgery I should pray real hard that nobody prays for me.  Or if they do, I should not be told of it.  Prayers can be harmful to healing or at best, they're just plain useless.

Human and Neanderthal Interbreeding

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An exciting article appeared in Nature yesterday:

European and Asian genomes have traces of Neanderthal 


An older article appeared in Nature a couple of weeks ago:

Neanderthals may have interbred with humans 

This is exciting because studies have hitherto led experts in the field to the conclusion that there had been no interbreeding between these two species.