RESPECTFUL INSOLENCE on Denialism Denial

Are one person's iconoclastic views another person's denialism?

By Orac  May 26, 2010

I've had a lot of fun thus far this week expressing more than a bit of schadenfreude over Andrew Wakefield's being ignominiously stripped of his medical license in the U.K. by the General Medical Council, not to mention pointing out the quackfest that is Autism One, I feel the need for a brief break from the anti-vaccine craziness. This is as good a time as any to take care of some leftover business from last week that I had planned on writing about but gotten distracted by all the deliciously bad news for the anti-vaccine movement. Besides, what will be going on in Grant Park in Chicago this afternoon fits into this topic perfectly, because the anti-vaccine movement is but one "flavor" of this particular problem.

I'm referring to denialism, of course.

I must admit, I've had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the term denialism. The reason is simple. As many regular readers may know, my first real foray into online debate involved combatting the particularly pernicious form of denialism known as Holocaust denial. Indeed, an early post on this blog written for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz describes how I discovered Holocaust denial and why I've come to despise this particular form of denial, and Holocaust denial is a topic that, evne now, I still revisit from time to time. It's just that I don't do it as often as I used to, mainly because discussing science in medicine has become my primary focus. Still, my ongoing association with combatting Holocaust denial has colored my subsequent activities in combatting quackery and pseudoscience in that I never liked the word "denial" applied to anything other form of pseudoscience or pseudohistory than Holocaust denial because the word's association with Holocaust denial, which is further inextricably linked to Hitler apologia, anti-Semitism, and Nazi-ism, both old school and neo-Nazi.

Indeed, sometimes I think the very word "denialism" hurts the cause of science because of its association with Holocaust denial. This association makes it very easy for vaccine denialists, evolution denialists (i.e., creationists), HIV/AIDS denialists, anthropogenic climate change denialists, or denialists of scientific medicine (i.e., supporters of unscientific or pseudoscientific "alternative" medicine) to retreat to the cry of the wounded self-righteous, where they claim that the label is in fact tarring them with Holocaust denialism, and all the bigotry and evil that is associated with Holocaust denial. Indeed, the very term "denialism" appears to be an attempt to keep using the term "denial" but to distance it from the the "denial" in Holocaust denial. It doesn't work. In fact, it sometimes even sucks in people who really ought to know better.

People like Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick in the U.K., scourge of Andrew Wakefield and anti-vaccine loons everywhere, not to mention quackbuster extraordinaire, who has written an article for the New Scientist that is so misguided it was painful for me to read it.

I suspect that you'll be able to get an inkling why reading this article caused me pain last week from just its title Living in denial: Questioning science isn't blasphemy. Here's a hint. Whenever you see someone use the word "blasphemy" this way in relation to science in the title of an article about cranks like anti-vaccinationists and HIV/AIDS denialists, you know that it's probably a thinly disguised invocation of Galileo and that the article is likely to contain a lot of amazing nonsense.

In this case, it's a massive straw man argument.

Questioning science isn't "blasphemy"? No scientist I'm aware of says it is. What Dr. Fitzgerald appears to be doing is conflating the very label of "denialism" with that of a church hierarchy enforcing orthodoxy. As I said before, he really ought to know better. It would save him the embarrassment of writing things like this:"

THE epithet "denier" is increasingly used to bash anyone who dares to question orthodoxy. Among other things, deniers are accused of subordinating science to ideology. In his book Denialism: How irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet, and threatens our lives, for example, Michael Specter argues that denialists "replace the rigorous and open-minded scepticism of science with the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment".
How ironic. The concept of denialism is itself inflexible, ideological and intrinsically anti-scientific. It is used to close down legitimate debate by insinuating moral deficiency in those expressing dissident views, or by drawing a parallel between popular pseudoscience movements and the racist extremists who dispute the Nazi genocide of Jews."

Not exactly. First off, note how Dr. Fitzgerald is apparently intentionally using the more inflammatory word "denier" rather than the more commonly used term "denialist," as if he is purposely trying to draw a line between Holocaust denial and the very term ("denialism") that was meant to soften the connection between the two. Second, the concept of "denialism" is not inflexible, ideological, or anti-scientific. Far from it! Denialism describes how ideology trumps science, specifically, how ideologues use evidence and science fallaciously to support their ideology. It does not describe any specific outcome or what science says; it describes how ideology drives people to deny science, often without even knowing that that's what they're doing. Calling someone a "denialist" is not shutting down debate; it's a shorthand for describing unsound techniques of argumentation and presenting evidence. Denialism is a set of techniques of fallacious argumentation used to support ideas that are not supported by science. It is far more than just "questioning" science, and in buying into that particular framing (yes, I'm invoking the dreaded F-word), Dr. Fitzpatrick in essence buys into the crank's world view and then defends it against reality.

More importantly, we're not talking about genuine scientific controversies here. There is no legitimate controversy over whether the theory of evolution is the best current explanation for the diversity of life in the scientific community. There may be a lot of legitimate controversy over elements of evolution: how it happens, the mechanisms by which it happens, what influences it the most. There isn't, however a scientific controversy over whether it happens and whether natural selection and various other forms of selection (such as sexual selection) play a major role in guiding it. There is no serious scientific controversy over whether evolution best explains the diversity of life. Similarly, there is no real scientific controversy about whether vaccines cause autism. The evidence is overwhelming that they do not or, if they do, they do so in such a tiny proportion of the population that huge epidemiological studies have not been able to detect it. The story is the same for other denialisms: HIV/AIDS denialism, support for "alternative medicine" and various other quackery, 9/11 Truthers--the list goes on. There is no real scientific controversy. There is, however, a manufactured controversy, a "manufactroversy."

The problem at the heart of combatting denialism is that many, probably most, people engaging in it are actually quite intelligent and have no idea that they are engaging in denialism. Of course, that's also part of what drives denialism. People who are that intelligent all too often suffer from the "arrogance of ignorance," where they think their self-taught "Google University" knowledge trumps that of scientists. They're often completely sincere about it too, although in some cases promoting denialism is a tool of business interests and ideologues to counter "inconvenient" science. That is what makes education about what represents good science and, more generally, what makes a good argument, is critical. The flip side is showing what represents bad argumentation and pseudoscience is even more important, as is showing why the fallacious arguments used to support various denialist ideas is not sound and not worth taking seriously.

I have a hard time seeing what Dr. Fitzpatrick is arguing next, but I sure find it disturbing to see coming from a person whom I would normally consider an ally in the fight to educate the public about what is good science and what is pseudoscience. First, he describes how scientists failed to respond adequately to the anti-vaccine and HIV/AIDS denialist movements:

"In both cases, scientists were dilatory in responding, dismissing the movements as cranks and often appearing to believe that if they were ignored they would quietly disappear. It took five years before mainstream AIDS scientists produced a comprehensive rebuttal of Duesberg. Though child health authorities were alert to the threat of the anti-vaccine campaign, researchers were slow to respond, allowing it to gather momentum."

All of which is more or less accurate, but appears to have little relevance to the argument he appears to be making. What is Dr. Fitzgerald saying here? What is his point? That we as scientists ignored these movements too long? That's probably true. Scientists have a hard time accepting that anyone could believe pseudoscientific nonsense, such as anti-vaccine views or homeopathy and often view them with deserved contempt. Alternatively, many of them take on a "shruggie" attitude, where they dismiss the possibility that such ideas could catch on and just shrug their shoulders in disbelief. Understandable, but, as we have found out, profoundly misguided. Unfortunately, this confused paragraph is just the lead-in to Dr. Fitzgerald's apparent attempt at a coup de grace against the concept of denialism. Those who call a denialist a denialist, you see, are suppressing free speech:

"Social psychologist Seth Kalichman of the University of Connecticut in Storrs mounts a typical defence of this stance in his book Denying Aids: Conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and human tragedy. According to Kalichman, denialists often "cross the line between what could arguably be protected free speech". He justifies suppression of debate on the feeble grounds that this would only legitimise the deniers and that scientists' time would be better spent on research.

Such attempts to combat pseudoscience by branding it a secular form of blasphemy are illiberal and intolerant. They are also ineffective, tending not only to reinforce cynicism about science but also to promote a distrust for scientific and medical authority that provides a rallying point for pseudoscience."

Here we go with that "secular form of blasphemy" nonsense again! But what about Professor Kalichman? did he really say that? If he did, I'd be profoundly opposed to such an idea. For those of you who don't believe me, let me remind you of my frequent broadsides against laws criminalizing Holocaust denial in the past and my harsh criticism of the imprisonment of David Irving for Holocaust denial in Austria. But Did Kalichman actually say that denialists often "cross the line between what could arguably be protected free speech"?

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A view of Peter Duesberg from up the road: Stanford Gets It!

Strangely Charming: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
 Stanford Daily  By Jack Cackler

Mark Twain, the 100th anniversary of whose death transpired just last month, was never known to be soft-spoken about his opinions. He popularized the phrase, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” caustically opining the view that numbers can be used to dissemble truth. While Twain’s classic snarkiness may elicit frustrated delight from Stats 60 students everywhere, his story is only half formed. As statistics can be a tool for ill-intentioned academics to perpetuate falsehoods, a society well educated in statistics is the best defense against this kind of intellectual trickery. Today we’ll look at a recent case in which statistics were not used honestly, and how to guard against them in the future.

HIV is the definitive cause of AIDS, which kills over 3 million people every year worldwide. This fact has been replicated by studies over and over, and, thanks to scientific research, antiretroviral treatment can now extend life in HIV-positive patients by decades. One of the most vocal scientists disagreeing with this claim has been Peter Duesberg, who was once a bright young cancer researcher at UC-Berkeley (I would jibe the Golden Bear, but what follows is too grave). Duesberg published non peer-reviewed articles throughout the 1980s and ’90s expressing doubt that HIV caused AIDS, and ultimately secured publication in the Journal of Bioscience in 2003 claiming that AIDS was a chemical problem caused by recreational drugs, and HIV was merely a common passenger virus. His paper has several glaring problems that can appear innocuous at face value. For one of his main defenses, he cites a handful of case studies in which people with HIV did not develop AIDS, and attempts to use these cases to counterbalance the millions of cases a year in which people do. By cherry picking a few cases, Duesberg attempts to sow doubt by implying that a few cases in his favor should be valued equally to the millions of cases to the contrary. Another dastardly maneuver Duesberg uses is to analyze a correlation between AIDS patients and drug users, and formulate the conclusion that drug use causes AIDS. Presenting a causal link from simple correlations is another trick that can be used to imply a conclusion that simply isn’t true.

While Duesberg’s “research” was quickly dismantled, he was cited by South African President Thabo Mbeki for scientific proof that HIV did not cause AIDS, which caused an enormous national delay in testing for HIV and distributing antiretrovirals. Mbeki’s successor, Kgalema Motlanthe, was largely elected on the platform of addressing HIV/AIDS, and while the situation is improving, South Africa now has more of its citizens die annually from AIDS than any other country. With lives on the line, it makes no difference whether AIDS denialists’ faulty science resulted from incompetence or malice. Berkeley is currently investigating Duesberg for academic misconduct for dissembling information and not disclosing conflict of interest. It is imperative to scrutinize every aspect of any data you are presented with: who funded it, how big the sample size was, whether they are analyzing all information and if they are using valid statistical methods. Only then should you accept it as fact, and a strong background in statistics will greatly help you in this pursuit.

In addition to debunking faulty research, statistics can also do a tremendous amount of good in the world, and Stanford has been the global leader in statistical research for at least the last half century. The bootstrap resampling method developed by Brad Efron has allowed unprecedented predictive power and statistical inference, particularly in the growing field of biocomputation and statistical genetics. The Classification And Regression Trees algorithm developed largely at Stanford by Breiman, Friedman, Olshen and Stone provided a foundation for modern computational algorithms. David Siegmund’s change-point research gave clinical researchers the tools to determine whether overwhelming evidence early in a trial could be sufficient to end the trial early, and has thus saved many lives. The other contributions from Stanford to the field of statistics are truly too numerous to list, but rest assured that if you are looking for a place to learn more about the field, you’re in the right place.

A century onward, perhaps Mark Twain’s adage is half correct; that statistics can be used by ne’er-do-wells, but they are also the last line of defense against lies and damned lies. The sentiment that numbers can’t lie is simply misguided, and the mathematical knowhow to distinguish when someone is trying to lie to you with numbers is as much if not more important as the intellectual knowhow to distinguish when someone is lying to you with words. Scrutinize every number, every figure and every error bar as closely as you would a word, a claim or a statement. When used properly, statistical analysis is the best resource we have to winnow truth from uncertainty through the scientific method. In the coming decades, each of you will have the power to change the world in your field, and I can only hope that you use the power of statistics for good and for truth. For the few of you who don’t, the rest of us will be watching.

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The Cult of Denialism

 Unreasonable doubt: Climate change, AIDS, GM foods – all have their detractors. But when does disbelief become dogma? 

By  Keith Kahn-Harris, New Humanist Magazine 

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We were supposed to be living in a world in which the methodical, rational, scientific accretion of knowledge would lead us down a path to a better world. That was the dream of Enlightenment, the bedrock of modernity.

But much has happened to challenge this dream. One doesn’t have to agree with Theodor Adorno or Zygmunt Bauman that the Holocaust was the apotheosis of an inhuman Enlightenment rationality to recognise that scientifically grounded bureaucracy can be used to control and slaughter millions. One doesn’t have to be a radical environmentalist to recognise that, from Thalidomide to DDT, the fruits of scientific progress can lead to horrendous unintended consequences. One doesn’t have to be a Richard Dawkins to observe the continued flourishing of religious fundamentalism and conclude that enlightenment has failed to take hold in many parts of the world.

But one of the most serious failings of a rational, scientific enlightenment is its propensity to be turned against itself, as when a firm scholarly consensus is attacked in the name of scholarship. You can find this subversion of enlightenment in quasi-academic claims that there was no Holocaust during World War Two, that other genocides such as the Armenian genocide never happened, that man-made climate change is a myth, that HIV does not cause AIDS, that evolution is a lie. More broadly, you can find it in the attempts of vested interests – industries, politicians and elites – to refute inconvenient scientific findings.

While none of these campaigns has yet managed to completely overturn the consensuses they target, they have had some significant victories: the Holocaust is negated in much of the Islamic world and this helps to harden extremist attitudes to Israel; refutation of the Armenian genocide has helped to ground the more chauvinistic sides of Turkish nationalism; the rejection of mainstream AIDS science found official support in Thabo Mbeki’s South Africa and retarded the necessary use of retrovirals; “climate scepticism” in the US helped to prevent action on climate change during the Bush administration; creationism and intelligent design are orthodoxies in much of America.

I’m talking here about the problem of denialism. Denialism is the systematic, institutionalised attempt to deny a firm consensus established by scholarly, scientific enquiry. The term’s origins are obscure, but it has come to be widely used especially within the blogosphere to describe a collection of organised campaigns of denial.

Denialism has a long history. One can trace its roots back to phenomena as various as 19th-century “zeteticism” that attempted to prove the earth was flat, King Leopold II’s attempts to foster defences of Belgian colonialism in the Congo at the turn of the century and more recently to the tobacco industry’s post-war campaign to undermine the scientific consensus on the harmfulness of smoking. The naming and recognition of the phenomenon of denialism received considerable impetus from the George W Bush presidency and his administration’s support for global warming denialism and more generally from what Chris Mooney called in his book of the same name the “Republican war on science”.

Denialism is not simply the knee-jerk refusal to accept the truth, it is a deliberate and often sophisticated attempt to create a kind of simulacrum of scholarship – what Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes call in their book Merchants of Doubt :How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming “scientific Potemkin villages”. Denialism uses the panoply of scholarly apparatus – footnotes, journals, institutes – and as such is a kind of backhanded tribute to the prestige of Enlightenment scholarship. Denialists and their detractors are united in their respect for the power of science and scholarship to persuade.

A problem soon arises, though, when the term denialism is stretched too far, when it is used to reduce the possibility for debate. Michael Spectre in his recently published Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives runs this risk in his treatment of campaigns against vaccination and GM food as well as activism for alternative medicine as forms of denialism. While there is pseudo-science in all these areas, there are legitimate doubts to be raised about aspects of western medicine and biotechnology and many of those who fall into Spectre’s denialism camp are at least initially motivated by reasonable concerns. Similarly, Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS denialism was arguably initially motivated by legitimate reservations about the pharmaceutical industry, though it continued long past the time these concerns had been addressed, with devastating effects on AIDS sufferers in South Africa (as Seth Kalichman argued in these pages in 2009).

But There can be something oppressive and undemocratic about reducing disagreement – however irrational or ridiculous – to denialism. This raises difficult questions about the political and analytical utility of denialism as a concept.

Sociologist Stanley Cohen is one of the few scholars to have thought systematically about this issue. Currently working on a new introduction to a revised version of his book States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, Cohen has serious qualms about the way in which knee-jerk accusations of denialism have become used as a way to silence legitimate argument, and to suggest that there is equivalence between these very different debates – for example between the Holocaust and climate change. “The global warming case,” he told me when I spoke to him, “is one where the existence of different sides to the argument does not in itself seem to be totally stupid. Global warming is not a phenomenon which has the same empirical validity as the Holocaust and it can’t. One is an established historical fact, the other a debate about possible future outcomes. That’s why there is some legitimate room for discussion. The science does need to be put under sustained scrutiny, and things like the East Anglia emails do create doubts in people minds, which should be addressed. That’s not the case with the Holocaust. You are not going to find an email from Himmler saying there were no concentration camps and overturn the historical consensus.”

While he doesn’t deny the seriousness of global warming, Cohen does suggest that other social problems that are routinely ignored are of equal or even greater importance: “People say that if you don’t agree with their ranking of social problems you’re in denial. I’ve seen the argument that global warming is the most serious challenge of the 21st century. Global warming has completely co-opted and colonised the whole question of ethics. The Observer had a colour supplement called ‘ethical living’ and what is ethical living? Putting your computer on standby. That’s not ethics! Sometimes I feel myself like being a denier, being in agreement with some of the denialist critiques of the excesses of the rhetoric.” What gets lost in claims and counter claims about denialism, for Cohen, is a sense of proportion. “Measles kills more children in Southern Africa than the Holocaust did, but no one is saying this. And no one is denying it either. We are all just looking away.” It is this “hinterland”, where things are neither acknowledged nor denied, merely ignored, where denial in the Freudian sense is one of the key mechanisms at work, which is central for Cohen and he worries that a focus on denialism is a distraction from this more vital area.

Cohen’s argument cautions us against the self-righteousness that can sometimes accompany the “debunking” of denialists. But surely it is still necessary to make distinctions between genuine scientific and factual arguments, and those arguments which seek to question well-established scientific consensus for ideological ends. To use Cohen’s example of measles, questioning the efficacy of vaccination, in the face of clear medical evidence, is a regular denialist tactic, and these arguments need to be properly dispatched as, for example, Andrew Wakefield’s now discredited arguments that the MMR vaccine caused autism were properly exposed by the Guardian’s “Bad Science” columnist Ben Goldacre. How else do we describe such arguments other than as “denialism” – where denial is the unwillingness to look the truth in the face, denialism is a systematic strategy of misinformation. The “ism” indicates the conscious attempt to fool the public into thinking that there is a scientific debate, where none exists.

Fighting denialism is as difficult a task as unravelling the complexities of the human psyche. Perhaps the most important response to denialism is to ensure that scholarship is conducted to the highest standards. The UEA climate change email scandal shows the devastating effect on scientific reputations when legitimate scientists cut corners. But getting one’s own house in order and ensuring that legitimate scholarship proceeds in an exemplary fashion is only the start of the process. Much more difficult is the question of how to respond to denialist arguments.

At the frontline of the struggle are the “debunkers” who work to refute denialisms’ claims. The indefagitable work of the likes of Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptic society in the US and editor in chief of Skeptic magazine, Ben Goldacre in the UK and a myriad sceptical blogs have ensured that denialist claims are continually and rigorously challenged.

One of the most valuable services that debunkers have performed is to have identified techniques that are used repeatedly by denialists in fields as unrelated as medical science (AIDS denialism) and history (Holocaust denial). A useful example of this is Mark and Chris Hoofnagle’s list of “five general tactics used by denialists to sow confusion” at denialism.org (with a brief example of mine in brackets):

·         Conspiracy (eg: “the Mossad organised the 9/11 attacks to gain support for Israel”)

·         Selectivity (cherry-picking)(eg: focusing on the growth of glaciers in some inland Greenland locations, ignoring the wider loss in glacier ice and the fact that global warming theorists predicted glacier growth inland)

·         Fake experts (eg: Fred Leuchter’s “report” on the gas chambers at Auschwitz that claimed to refute the use of Zyklon B to kill Jews – Leuchter is an execution technician with no forensic training)

·         Impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts) (eg: the lack of “transitional fossils” bridging the gaps in the evolutionary record is proof that the theory of evolution is incorrect)

·         General fallacies of logic (eg: the failure to develop an AIDS vaccine is proof that AIDS does not exist).

Denialists not only share similar techniques, in many cases the same denialists are active in more than one area. In their impeccably researched genealogy of denialism Merchants of Doubt, Conway and Oreskes show that a key group of figures in global warming denial earned their spurs in tobacco-industry-funded attempts to discredit the links between smoking and cancer. The “tobacco strategy” has been applied to “a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain and the ozone hole” and now to global warming. A small group of free-market fundamentalist scientists such as Fred Singer and the late Fred Seitz jumped between thinktanks and lobby groups in order to manufacture doubt on scientific consensuses, smearing other expert scientists while doing no original research themselves. Even if they never managed to totally overturn the science – how could they, given that they offered no alternative explanations for the findings whose meanings they contested? – they did succeed in creating the impression among media and policy-makers that the science was not settled, that there was debate where there wasn’t.

The links that Conway and Oreskes reveal between various American environmental and health denialisms demonstrate that once individuals cross the Rubicon into one form of denialism, it’s easy enough to embrace others. Examples abound of “multi-deniers” such as the Revolutionary Communist Party/Living Marxism group in the UK (now centred around the Spiked website and the Institute of Ideas), many of whose adherents have denied everything from anthropogenic climate change, the Bosnian and other genocides, to the idea that it is dangerous to fly in a cloud of volcanic ash. Denial of evolution goes very well with denial of global warming. Denial of the Holocaust is often associated with denial that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda. Once the techniques of denialism have been learned, what results is a strange kind of parallel world in which denialism becomes legitimate scholarship and mainstream scholarship becomes a perversion of truth. The cod science of denialism is picked up and disseminated by allies in the mainstream media, like Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, keen to push their own version of truth and criticise what they see as the sanctimony of liberal culture.

The debunking literature demonstrates both that it is possible to utterly obliterate the credibility of denialist scholarship and also that doing so raises its own problems. Howard Friel’s recent book The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming highlights these problems. Friel’s book takes issue with self-styled “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg, author of a best-selling book of that name, who has been treated as a credible and important figure in the global warming debate. Lomborg does not deny that man-made climate change is occurring; his argument is that its consequences will be much less severe than predicted and that money spent to combat it would be better spent on other more important causes.

Lomborg’s work is replete with scholarly paraphernalia – The Skeptical Environmentalist has over 3,000 footnotes. Howard Friel carefully dissects Lomborg’s claims and combs through his sources and how he represents them. The results are shocking. Not only do many of his footnotes fail to provide any scientific proof for his claims, but he systematically misrepresents those studies that he cites in support. (Contrary to most experts on the subject, for example, Lomborg argues that Arctic polar bear populations are actually increasing.)

It is here though that another problem in disputing denialism becomes apparent. Friel’s debunking of Lomborg involves a minute and careful examination of the sources he uses. This is a time-consuming task that requires considerable skill and fortitude. Whereas Lomborg’s work communicates its arguments clearly, the arguments in The Lomborg Deception are detailed and technical. Debunking arguments are by their very nature complex – you need to know the science, which is often complex, and communicate this to the reader as well as be able to show why the denialist arguments are wrong – and debunking is difficult for “amateurs” to do. However outrageous the claims that deniers make might be, they are dangerously persuasive in their accessibility.

In any case, the debunking of denialism is often of only limited use. While it is important that denialism does not go unchallenged, it is nevertheless largely impervious to that challenge. It may be that the open-minded person looking for answers will be convinced by the debunker rather than the denier, yet deniers and those convinced by them are by their very nature not open-minded people looking for answers. Denialists rarely recant, although they sometimes give up the struggle – the Holocaust denier Mark Webber, founder of the Institute for Historical Review, recently conceded that his movement had made little headway and it was better to focus on fighting “Jewish-Zionist power”. Debunkers and denialists find themselves in a mutually created trap. Neither side can convince the other, they both find themselves desperately fighting for the support of the uncommitted. Both sides are convinced of the value of science and scholarship to support their cause.

Denialism also arises from the pitiless speed of modern life. In Denialism Michael Spectre argues that the rapid pace of scientific progress, together with well-known examples where science has got it wrong, has led to an irrational fear of science. For Spectre, then, denialism arises from a misplaced desire to deal with this fear by rejecting scientific progress and enquiry.

The intractability of denialism can drive activists and scholars to despair. In an article in theGuardian in March this year, George Monbiot mournfully concluded: “Perhaps we have to accept that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science. The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away. If they don’t want to know, nothing and no one will reach them. There goes my life’s work.”

This despair may be understandable, but it reveals the limitations of the approaches used in the fight against denialism. Those who fight denialism tend to be either rationalistically minded debunkers or committed activists. Neither group are particularly well suited to looking at the deeper reasons behind denialism.

The Australian environmentalist Clive Hamilton, in his new book Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, locates denial in our deepest hopes and fears. Hamilton’s starting point is that, with the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen summit, effective action against climate change is now almost impossible. He places the blame not simply on denialists, but on a wider denial present even among those who accept the truth of anthropogenic global warming. Global warming demonstrates that the entire way we live in the modern world is unsustainable and will have to be radically rethought. This is simply too disturbing for most of us to accept and we fall back on the hope that relatively minor actions (such as green consumerism) can save us and that climate change will not be too terrible anyway: all of which, Hamilton argues, constitutes an almost species-wide denial.

Which brings us back to Stan Cohen. He thinks the preoccupation with debunking denialists is part of the problem: “You get the impression from reading the debunking literature that these people are not aware of the last 30 years in the social sciences. They see themselves as old-fashioned rationalists. They’re often actively hostile – they are themselves naive.” Instead Cohen thinks we need “to find a path between a radical relativism that doesn’t allow for any notion of truth and an old-fashioned commitment to the only truth.”

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Living in Denial

This week's New Scientist Magazine is dedicated to denialism. Several excellent articles. Well worth a look. Deborah MacKenzie's article is especially worth reading.

Living in denial: Why sensible people reject the truth

By Debora MacKenzie, New Scientist, May 12, 2010

HEARD the latest? The swine flu pandemic was a hoax: scientists, governments and the World Health Organization cooked it up in a vast conspiracy so that vaccine companies could make money.

Never mind that the flu fulfilled every scientific condition for a pandemic, thatthousands died, or that declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering. A group of obscure European politicians concocted this conspiracy theory, and it is now doing the rounds even in educated circles.

This depressing tale is the latest incarnation of denialism, the systematic rejection of a body of science in favour of make-believe. There's a lot of it about, attacking evolution, global warming, tobacco research, HIV, vaccines - and now, it seems, flu. But why does it happen? What motivates people to retreat from the real world into denial?

Here's a hypothesis: denial is largely a product of the way normal people think. Most denialists are simply ordinary people doing what they believe is right. If this seems discouraging, take heart. There are good reasons for thinking that denialism can be tackled by condemning it a little less and understanding it a little more.

Whatever they are denying, denial movements have much in common with one another, not least the use of similar tactics (see "How to be a denialist"). All set themselves up as courageous underdogs fighting a corrupt elite engaged in a conspiracy to suppress the truth or foist a malicious lie on ordinary people. This conspiracy is usually claimed to be promoting a sinister agenda: the nanny state, takeover of the world economy, government power over individuals, financial gain, atheism.

This common ground tells us a great deal about the underlying causes of denialism. The first thing to note is that denial finds its most fertile ground in areas where the science must be taken on trust. There is no denial of antibiotics, which visibly work. But there is denial of vaccines, which we are merely told will prevent diseases - diseases, moreover, which most of us have never seen, ironically because the vaccines work.

Similarly, global warming, evolution and the link between tobacco and cancer must be taken on trust, usually on the word of scientists, doctors and other technical experts who many non-scientists see as arrogant and alien.

Many people see this as a threat to important aspects of their lives. In Texas last year, a member of a state committee who was trying to get creationism added to school science standards almost said as much when he proclaimed"somebody's got to stand up to experts".

It is this sense of loss of control that really matters. In such situations, many people prefer to reject expert evidence in favour of alternative explanations that promise to hand control back to them, even if those explanations are not supported by evidence (see "Giving life to a lie").

All denialisms appear to be attempts like this to regain a sense of agency over uncaring nature: blaming autism on vaccines rather than an unknown natural cause, insisting that humans were made by divine plan, rejecting the idea that actions we thought were okay, such as smoking and burning coal, have turned out to be dangerous.

This is not necessarily malicious, or even explicitly anti-science. Indeed, the alternative explanations are usually portrayed as scientific. Nor is it willfully dishonest. It only requires people to think the way most people do: in terms of anecdote, emotion and cognitive short cuts. Denialist explanations may be couched in sciency language, but they rest on anecdotal evidence and the emotional appeal of regaining control.

Anecdote and emotion

Greg Poland, head of vaccines at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and editor in chief of the journal Vaccine, often speaks out against vaccine denial. He calls his opponents "the innumerate" because they are unable to grasp concepts like probability. Instead, they reason based on anecdote and emotion. "People use mental short cuts - 'My kid got autism after he got his shots, so the vaccine must have caused it,'" he says. One emotive story about a vaccine's alleged harm trumps endless safety statistics.

Seth Kalichman, a social psychologist at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, understands this better than most: he spent a year infiltrating HIV denialist groups. Many of the people he met were ordinary and sincere. "Denialism fills some need," he says. "For people with HIV, it is a coping strategy," albeit a maladaptive one.

Kalichman, however, feels that everyday reasoning alone is not enough to make someone a denialist. "There is some fragility in their thinking that draws them to believe people who are easily exposed as frauds," he says. "Most of us don't believe what they say, even if we want to. Understanding why some do may help us find solutions."

He believes the instigators of denialist movements have more serious psychological problems than most of their followers. "They display all the features of paranoid personality disorder", he says, including anger, intolerance of criticism, and what psychiatrists call a grandiose sense of their own importance. "Ultimately, their denialism is a mental health problem. That is why these movements all have the same features, especially the underlying conspiracy theory."

Neither the ringleaders nor rank-and-file denialists are lying in the conventional sense, Kalichman says: they are trapped in what classic studies of neurosis call "suspicious thinking". "The cognitive style of the denialist represents a warped sense of reality, which is why arguing with them gets you nowhere," he says. "All people fit the world into their own sense of reality, but the suspicious person distorts reality with uncommon rigidity."

It is not only similar tactics and psychology that unite denial in its many guises: there are also formal connections between the various movements.

Many denialist movements originate as cynical efforts by corporations to cast doubt on findings that threaten their bottom line. Big Tobacco started it in the 1970s, recruiting scientists willing to produce favourable data and bankrolling ostensibly independent think tanks and bogus grass-roots movements (see "Manufacturing doubt"). One such think tank was The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), set up in 1993 by tobacco company Philip Morris (American Journal of Public Health, vol 91, p 1749). TASSC didn't confine itself to tobacco for long. After getting funds from Exxon, it started casting doubt on climate science.

Such links between denial movements are not unusual. A number of think tanks in the US and elsewhere have been funded by both the oil and tobacco industries and have taken denialist positions on smoking and warming.

TASSC folded when its true identity became widely known, but its successor,Junk Science, still rubbishes tobacco and climate research and warns people not to believe any scientist who says something "might be" true or uses statistics - which pretty much covers all scientists.

Perhaps it is no surprise that some industries are prepared to distort reality to protect their markets. But the tentacles of organised denial reach beyond narrow financial interests. For example, some prominent backers of climate denial also deny evolution. Prominent creationists return the favour both in the US and elsewhere. Recent legislative efforts to get creationism taught in US schools have been joined by calls to "teach the controversy" on warming as well.

These positions align neatly with the concerns of the US political and religious right, and denial is often driven by an overtly political agenda. Some creationists have explicitly argued that the science of both climate and evolution involve "a left-wing ideology that promotes statism, nanny-state moralism and... materialism".

People who buy into one denialism may support others for this reason. Dan Kahan at Yale Law School has found that people's views on social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage predict their position on climate science too. This, he argues, is because social conservatives tend to be pro-business and resist the idea that it is damaging the planet (Nature, vol 436, p 296).

But other denialisms suggest psychology, not just ideology, is crucial. There is no obvious connection between conservatism and vaccine or AIDS denial, and flu denial was promulgated by a left-leaning group suspicious of the vaccine industry.

Common ground

Nevertheless, some connections exist that hint at a wider agenda. For example, there is considerable overlap in membership between the vaccine and HIV deniers, says John Moore, an AIDS researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Both movements have massive but mysterious funding.

Consider, too, the journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a lobbying group for private medicine. It showcases nearly all denialist causes. In the past two years it has published articles claiming thatHIV tests do not detect HIV, second-hand smoke does little harm, smoking bans do not reduce heart attacks, global warming presents little health threat and proposals for a US vaccination registry are "not really about vaccines but about establishing a computer infrastructure... that can be used for other purposes later". It repeatedly published discredited assertions that vaccines cause autism.

It is tempting to wonder if activists sympathetic to climate and evolution denial might be grasping opportunities to discredit science in general by spreading vaccine and HIV denialism.

The conservative character of much denial may also explain its success at winning hearts and minds.

George Lakoff, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that conservatives have been better than progressives at exploiting anecdote and emotion to win arguments. Progressives tend to think that giving people the facts and figures will inevitably lead them to the right conclusions. They see anecdotes as inadmissible evidence, and appeals to emotion as wrong.

The same is true of scientists. But against emotion and anecdote, dry statements of evidence have little power. To make matters worse, scientists usually react to denial with anger and disdain, which makes them seem even more arrogant.

Poland has reached a similar conclusion. He has experimented a few times with using anecdote and appeals to emotion when speaking to lay audiences. "I get very positive responses - except from numerates, who see it as emotionally manipulative," he says.

here are lessons here for other scientists who engage with denial. They can only win by learning to speak to the "innumerates", who are otherwise likely prey for denialists.

The stakes are high - and sometimes even personal. Like many vaccine developers, Poland has received death threats. "I get phone messages saying 'I hope your kids are safe'," he says. So has Faye Flam, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who has written in support of climate science.

Denialism has already killed. AIDS denial has killed an estimated 330,000 South Africans. Tobacco denial delayed action to prevent smoking-related deaths. Vaccine denial has given a new lease of life to killer diseases like measles and polio. Meanwhile, climate change denial delays action to prevent warming. The backlash against efforts to fight the flu pandemic could discourage preparations for the next, potentially a more deadly one.

If science is the best way to understand the world and its dangers, and acting on that understanding requires popular support, then denial movements threaten us all.

***Minor correction: I am a Clinical/Community Psychologist, on faculty in a Social Psychology Division. I said it was minor.
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