"Science has sent orbiters to Neptune(Mars^_^), eradicated smallpox and created a supercomputer that can do 60 trillion calculations per second" "Science frees us from superstition and dogma and enables us to base our knowledge on evidence" "Well, most of us" "Previously, I've explored how organized faith and primitive religious values blight our lives" "You take the women and dress them like whores on the street" "I don't dress women, they dress themselves" "They do now, but you were aware it as a norm" "The fault line runs deeper even than religion" "There're two ways of looking at the world:" "through faith and superstition or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence, through reason" "Yet today, reason has a battle on its hands" "I want to confront the epidemic of irrational superstitious thinking" "Would you understand somebody on the spirit side with the name Charles?" "I believe, I did..." "You really believe it?" "I'm really, actually 100% that is true Seriously you believe it?" "Because it's been proven to me against my rationality" "It's a multimillion-pound industry that impoverishes our culture" "Astrology leads toward the divine and the sacred, ... you don't like very much" "And throws up new age gurus who exhort us to run away from reality" "The treeness is the spiritual quality" "Or the rockness" "As a scientist, I don't think our indulgence of irrational superstition is harmless" "I believe it profoundly undermines civilization" "Reason and respect for evidence are the source of our progress our safeguard against fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring the truth" "We live in dangerous times when superstition is gaining ground and rational science is under attack" "In this program, I want to take on the enemies of reason" "300 years ago, in the age of enlightenment scientists and philosophers from Galileo to David Hume had the courage to stand up for intellectual principles and reason" "The rational science they pioneered has given us tangible benefits" "Everything from antibiotics to electricity, sewage systems to Sat Nav" "And it's not just material progress" "Increased life expectancy, health and leisure provided by modern medicine and industrial technology have given more people more time than ever before to educate themselves, express their creativity and ponder existence" "And yet, into this better world that reason has built primitive darkness has coming back a disturbing pick'n'mix of superstitions" "Where better to start my journey than a New Age fair?" "Hello, what do you do?" "(Hello, there.) What kind of readings do you do?" "All kinds." "I do the tarot and then I also do the crystal-ball." "This is George." "Hello, what can you do for me?" "Well, we can take your aura photography All right." "I like that." "Yes." "What do I do?" "Just sit in the front of that?" "Take a seat, please." "Should I take my glasses off?" "What we got here?" "You know, you have got a couple of spirit guides around you at the moment" "Because I think that something in your life's changing" "I think this is about you as well being more comfortable with yourself" "Now what you have here?" "Would you have somebody in spirits really, really close to you and he's got the arms around your neck" "Well, that's very nice to know" "All these people reap the rewards of science and reason but many here revel in a foggy suspicion of scientific thinking" "Ok, so you could teach me how to use my psychic energy?" "(Yes) Is that the idea?" "Yes." "You can rely Much better than on that, than on your head" "Irrationality is woven into the fabric of modern life, we unthinkingly indulge unscientific delusion" "I'm the, rather skitty Gemini" "Aquarius" "Pisces" "Astrology is so pervasive that just about everyone has been indoctrinated with the alleged character of their star sign" "They're fiery, a bit unreliable." "They love traveling" "They're very expansive They're quite spiritual" "Loyal, spend too much money a good leader" "They could be a bit mood swing one way and the other they could be very upbeat at one minute and then a bit down and you'll never know what to get them as my husband says" "A full quarter of the British population claim to believe in astrology" "Day in, day out, astrological horoscopes get far more newspaper column inches than science" "Amusingly, it falls foul of our modern taboo against lazy stereotyping" "How would we react if a newspaper published a daily column that read something like this?" "Germans:" "It is in your nature to be hard-working and methodical which should serve you well at work today" "In your personal relationships, especially this evening you'll need to curb your natural tendency to obey orders" "Chinese:" "Inscrutability has many advantages, but it may be your undoing today" "British:" "Your stiff upper lip may serve you well in business dealings but try to relax and let yourself go in your social life" "And so on, through 12 national stereotypes" "Of course, the astrology columns are not as offensive as that but we should ask ourselves exactly where the difference lies" "Both are guilty of facade discrimination dividing humanity up into exclusive groups based on no evidence" "I always thought that by the 21st century science and reason would have long since cleaned up and yet every day of the week we're encouraged to retreat into the fog the superstitious past" "Astrology is a primitive belief system made into elaborate pseudo-science" "It arrogantly makes humans the focal point of the universe" "The movement of planets is supposed to signify petty developments in our career or love life" "It was developed in the 2nd century AD by the philosopher Claudius Ptolemy and has not moved on since" "Despite the discovery of new planets and despite a shift in the earth's rotational axis that has thrown Ptolemy¡¯s zodiac out by 23 degrees" "You could ask a question You can say, 'Who has stolen my money?" "'" "It never made sense when it was first invented and it makes even less sense now" "Read it off as though, you mean, they get it right?" "Didn't an actual physical influence for planets that somehow beams down and influences us, people?" "I think it's very hard to see that." "I think if you try to understand astrology as a causal agent" "I think that's hard to imagine how that would happen." "I think you have to look at the planets as signifiers" "When you look at the movement of Saturn around the zodiac it's a very strong signifier of what's going on in individual lives" "I don't even understand how they could possibly be signifiers, I mean" "How could the rise of Saturn possibly be a signifier of something that's going on physiologically in a person's body" "The position of planets in..." "How would it work?" "This is what you keep coming back to ask me." "How could it possibly work?" "(How would that work?" "Yes)" "And I told you I don't know." "It's a deep dark mystery" "What isn't a deep dark mystery is why the trite vagaries of newspaper horoscopes seem to chime with readers" "Psychologists have identified what's known as the Barnum Effect where by people tend to believe statements are accurate for them personally while in fact they're general enough to apply to anyone" "We could devise a little experiment where we take your forecasts and then give some of them straight, to some of them randomized" "Sometimes give Virgo the Pisces forecast etc. and then ask people how accurate they were?" "Yes, that would be a perverse thing to do, is it?" "It would be yes, but it isn't, wouldn't that be a good test?" "A test of what?" "Well, how accurate you are?" "I think your intention there is mischief and I think what you then get back is mischief" "Okay, well, my intention would not be mischief, my intention would be experimental test" "(Okay.) Scientific test Well, even if it was mischief, how could that possibly influence it" "I think it does influence it I think whenever you do things with astrology intentions are strong" "I just thought you'll be eager and I just thought you will..." "You see, well, the fact that you're not makes me think you don't really in your heart of hearts believe it" "I don't think you really are prepared to put your reputation on the line" "I just don't believe in the experiment which is so simple" "Well, you're in a kind of no-lose situation, don't you believe it?" "I hope so." "Regardless of Neil Spencer's concerns, I wanted to conduct a simple trial" "We selected 20 people at random" "We asked them to read that week's horoscope for Capricorn" "But as a test, we said it apply to their own star sign" "Not only do you have clever Mercury and ambitious Mars, fortunes and success" "And now the sun is at the same pivotal mid haven angle of your solar chart" "I've no idea what that means?" "Put simply, this means that this is your moment to go that extra miles to become the person you're dreaming of becoming" "Remember however that there will be others who want what you have and will stop at nothing to get it" "Astrologers say this should fit just Capricorn and not the rest but what actually happened?" "Yeah, maybe" "To be honest I felt there's some Mercury energy this week because there's a little arguments around and there's a lot of bad biles" "Yeah, that kind of make sense" "What a lame junk!" "It could apply to me as much as to the next person" "Yeah, in a way, yeah..." "I'm going on a Flamingo course in Spain" "That isn't necessarily pertain to me this week It pertains to me generally" "A pile of rubbish!" "The same number of people agreed that the horoscope was accurate for them as disagreed and similar results are found with proper large state experiments" "Technically all but one of our group should have disagreed namely our only Capricorn" "Not at this moment, no." "Am I taking this too seriously?" "I believe astrology misleads the public, denies scientific progress and belittles our universe" "There's a far richer way of looking at the cosmos" "Astronomy is a triumph of the human intellect a real science constantly enriched by new evidence" "Forget about the astrologer's charts with their constellations and planets move in or out of this house or that house go into a real observatory and look at the milky way or go out into the country on a moonless night" "just lie in your back and gaze up at the stars" "The heart-stopping sight you'd see is 100 billion stars spinning through an expanding universe at a speed of a million miles per day" "The light from some of the closest stars started its journey at the time of the dinosaurs" "You're staring into a deep time machine" "And yet even as science unravels these natural wonders our society is drawn to the slim pickings of supernatural belief" "Half the British population now say they believe in paranormal phenomena" "Over 8 million of us have owned up to consulting psychic mediums" "One way you to do, Richard, pull me, just pull me out eight of them, please" "Simon Goodfellow claims that with these cards he could use his psychic powers to tune in to the spirits of dead people around me" "These voices from the past can apparently give him a glimpse of my future" "Now, Richard, thank you." "Now I feel it's giving me an initial G with his name" "Okay, now I feel with this man as well I feel he was a family member and I also feel very strongly with something to do advertising and it with him, something to do with newspapers with him as well" "Now I do feel with him as well he's telling me about changes that coming up in your life for the moment" "I see totally changes in how you're working so I will be working the future" "The words Simon seems to be fishing for is retirement the obvious next step for most 60-somethings" "It won't be as active, and it won't be as active for you and I do feel it when it..." "This could apply to anyone my age but can Simon back up his more precise statements?" "What was that male relative with the G What was that about you said earlier on?" "I do, the male relative with the G, Well, I do feel with him, I don't feel it was a family member but I don't feel with him now it was some connection" "I thought you said he was a family member" "I did say that he was a family member" "I think you did" "Right, okay." "Let me see if I can feel in him still Yeah, it's okay" "Right, okay, then." "Well, I feel with you now." "I feel he a lot of things." "He was a very strong character" "Another feeling he's giving me." "It was very regimented as well" "I feel it severed and in some forces any the forces you someway as well" "But can you understand anybody with the military background was connected to you" "Well, I got really nobody military in my background at all and actually nobody fitting the G either Right." "Okay" "Spirit G has rung no bells but now another voice comes from the ether ...in which it's given me the initial E with the name" "Now I do feel with her as well as some things to do, well, I feel a grandparent and I want to give you an e-sounded name" "My grandmother had a name beginning with e" "At last something I could identify with" "Yes. e something Tell me more about her, please" "The lady I do feel with her... a lot of cats" "A lot of cats?" "Perhaps not." "She never had a cat She hated cats, matter of fact" "All right She liked dogs, but she hated cats" "Well, I can understand, not everybody the way you've got to so we remember with this as well, not everybody can relate everything the readable thing." "Not everybody" "I mean I've got people like yourself..." "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence but here I seem to get extraordinary excuses." "Because now many people come to this vent for some reason and because they want to close to you in that direction in the line" "And also what you've got to think about which is as well something's very rare to me" "Psychics may believe they communicate with the dead but I've seen no evidence for it" "My concern is that for some people this superstitious nonsense can be far from harmless fun" "There's a network of over 500 spiritualist churches across Britain" "Here, Tuesday night is s¨¦ance night" "And we ask that we can now build a bridge between this world and the next so that we can once again go some way to proving that we survive death and the our loved ones in the spirit are forever with us." "Amen" "Okay, I expect most of you are familiar with spiritualism but those that..." "Spiritualism makes not to god then it descends into a darker world" "The real droll is when the dead start talking inside the medium's head" "Okay, one of the first link I want to do is I feel I got somebody give me the name Charles and I want the gentleman on the spirit side that passed with chest conditions with this and something about a name that sounds like, sounds a bit like Devon" "but I thought I could hear and it could be Dave, Devon or Davenport something like that" "And I feel this site somewhere Can anybody understand this so far?" "The lady close to the bookshelf there would you understand somebody on the spirit side with the name Charles" "No, but I have a home in Davenport" "You have a home in Davenport?" "Okay" "Isn't what you're doing cold reading?" "Well, it depends on what you call cold reading or something got a lot of the rations that come up saying that what you do or you say something can people basically make it fit" "Now, see if I can find the Charles in a minute but let me... give you a few things I can feel about you" "Has that been a few problems with the stomach condition around you" "Because I feel as if I want to go to your stomach and I feel uncomfortable there" "Does that make nonsense to you whatsoever" "What would you understand then a lady that I want to connect with on the spirit side that would suffer with the stomach condition because I'm being given the stomach condition Okay?" "And I feel with this lady I want someone that's a fairly comfortable build I would say a bigger build lady not the slight build lady that's given me this, Yes?" "I think when you really examine the evidence of myself or other mediums do you'll find a large, large proportion could never be explained the way by something called cold reading because there're sometimes such specific details that come through" "I'm saying like a painting or print would be, of a painting looks like a Stubbs painting, you know the ones in the horses in the pigs and things like that" "The lady in the white sits back there I'm not around you, am I?" "I hate you when I can't find the link Let me see if..." "I think if I were talking to someone in the spirit world" "I'd say things like 'what's it like being dead?" "'" "'Can you see the whole of the universe?" "'" "Why do you ask them such banal questions?" "Yeah, good point but I think what happens is that mediumship comes from the non-rational, nonverbal thought parts the brain of the subject thing" "I believe it's a blending of thoughts between myself and the spirit communicator but if only it could be just like a telephone line" "Let me just say what we can get a little more information from her first" "If you've convinced the person that as their grandmother to the point that they're actually crying" "I mean surely those tears enough are perhaps proof that they had proved that really is their grandmother that's making the communication" "It could indicate just desperate wishful thinking perhaps" "Now, I don't fit on with a Steve Bennet for I've got those things I want to bring together somehow with particularly a car crash" "My friend Ben died in a car crash and he's ... on school's day" "Your friend Ben passes and so there's not Bennet as I said it was Ben" "Let me see if I can describe Ben to see if we can..." "Beyond whether it's true or false what concerns me as well is the exploitation of often vulnerable people" "Can I say when you were buying the new shoes have you been on your mind at that time?" "It was on my mind, I know I really buy, yeah" "Yeah, because this is about this particular foul around me at that particular time that's why I felt I've got the connection with that" "And you know his messages really in a whiny sorry, because he can't..." "Do you feel it might actually be damaging to some people stopping them from letting go after they've lost somebody that they love very much?" "It's a good point a lot people bring up that but I believe that it does help people to progress and move forward" "He gives me the feeling that..." "But do people move forward?" "Or do they get addicted to a spiritual hit?" "Most of these congregation are regulars" "Craig Hamilton-Parker's grass peer seems impressive until it transpires that he's already read this bereaved girl before" "He actually had a tire on the left hand..." "this call change before the accident and the police thought there was something to do with that and I had a message from you before saying there was something to do with this toy" "I've given you a message right before?" "Okay, well, I can't remember that" "But anyway I want to sort feel his," "I believe what I do was absolutely true, I believe I gave..." "You're really believe it?" "Seriously you believe it?" "I really absolutely 100% is true" "Because it's been proven to me against what I believe against my rationality" "But it's shown me so many, many times that life continue and personal proved that I've had as give me proves that father passed of continuation of spirit incredible things that I'm, so very personal, subjective they hard to argue a case for" "but for me it's been life transforming and I believe as I was helped I can help others" "Timer again so called psychics  science and evidence" "I have personal proof it's true to me but as with religion if it hangs on private feelings that can't be proved or disproved by science then in what way can it be valid or meaningful to the rest of us?" "I want to show how scientific reason is always the best way to look at the world and explain the dangers of superstition" "I'm often asked how I know that there isn't a spirit world or psychic clairvoyance" "Well, I don't" "It seems improbable but unlike the fixed world views of mystical faith science is always open to new possibilities" "Scientists test and retest evidence, refreshing our understanding of reality" "In the 1940s, the American zoologist Donald Griffin demonstrated experimentally that bats use sonar echo-location of their cries" "Back then, sonar was brandnew military technology and the theory that it was natural to bats outraged some of Griffin's colleagues" "But the more scientists tested the evidence, the more robust the theory became" "They found out exactly what the bat cries were like how they work, how the brain works" "Everything about it added up to a complete picture of mutually supporting evidence that this really was a fact" "It's this cumulative build up of corroborating evidence that distinguishes the discovery of bat sonar from alleged paranormal effects" "The so-called evidence for psychic phenomena is not robust but will o'the wisp" "The more we look at it, the weaker it becomes" "The alleged detection of water through dowsing is not obviously ridiculous it might work but does it?" "The only way to tell is through a rigorous experiment" "How does dowsing work?" "that's the No. 1 question And nobody can answer you" "Well I reckon I'm convinced that something is helping me to dowse" "One of the earlier chaps thinks it's god" "How do you do it till then?" "What¡¯s you principle about it?" "I think of the question and I expect god respond in a way that I understand" "I expect the right hand one point to the camera and the left hand one straight forward, I wanna..." "Yeah, okay." "Look, it finally ramp." "Have you done the test yet in the tent?" "Yes, I did." "What was the result?" "Oh, I'm gonna 6 right, 100%" "Yeah, what happened?" "One." "So what do you make that then?" "God was having his laugh, isn't he?" "He loves a joke, you don't realize" "The psychologist Chris French thinks there may be a simpler explanation" "He has devoted his career to investigating claims of the paranormal" "And now he's set up this test for dowsing -- a properly controlled double-blind trial" "In each of these rows just one container chosen a random holds a bottle of water, all the rest contain sand" "Neither the dowsers nor the tester are allowed to know where the water is until the boxes are opened" "So there were no unintentional giveaways Have another go" "Safeguards like these make the double-blind trial one of the crowning achievements of scientific reason" "What you typically find when you talk to dowsers is they'll give you a lot and lots of anecdote evidence a lot stories about how they discovered a leak there in your neighbor's pipes and so and so forth" "but there're always the possible explanations there, what we're trying to do it a set of conditions which rule out any of those explanations then we get down to the very fundamental basic issue can't the dowsers actually do what they think they can do." "I think it's false" "No, I think it's false" "So shall we see how are you done?" "This is sand." "In that case I can't do this" "This is the water in No. 5" "Sand again" "This time guess was in No. 3 (Correct.) That's water" "Final trial, it's sand again In that case, I'm 100% wrong again" "Well, you got one right and, that was 6 which is what we expect by chance" "So far, they performing pretty much in line with mean chance expectation, in other words, guess work" "So no one has scored more than 2 hits out to 6" "Three." "Three?" "The people you've been testing, do they understand why they're being put through the double-blind procedure" "I don't want to explain it to them then they appreciate why someone who is perhaps skeptical or doubtful about their claims would see that that was necessary." "What's interesting is it doesn't actually tend to dent their confidence at all" "Which you suggest that they're completely sincere" "I think they are completely sincere and they are typically very, very surprised when we run them through series of trials and actually say at the end of the day where your performance is no better than what we would expect just on the bases of a guess work" "and then what typically happens is though make a whole kinds of reasons" "Some might say excuses as to why they didn't pass that particular test" "I feel the whole test is wrong" "I'm shocked on words that this has happened but I did say from the outset couldn't we just sort out some grey blocks and some scaffold boards, so then I can work about it which is what I would routinely do and I've done for 40 years" "Who knows where or what bottles were in what tubs?" "That's the whole point, isn't it?" "That's the whole point" "If you understand dowsing than I do you'll understand that everything is an image" "This state of denial is extraordinary." "Even when confronted with hard fact these dowsers prefer not to face up to truth but retain their delusion" "Rather than adapt to evidence, many of us seems remain trapped in ways of thinking inherited from our primitive ancestors" "Irrational belief from dowsing to psychic clairvoyance has roots in early mankind's habit of attributing spirit and intention to natural phenomena such as water, the sun, a rock or the sea" "The sea has often been thought to be a malevolent force actively out to get you" "In 480 BC, King Xerxes of the Persians built a pontoon bridge across the Hellespont and the rough sea came and wrecked it" "And King Xerxes was so furious that he sentenced the sea to 300 lashes" "I wonder whether there's something of King Xerxes and all of us to this day" "We don't want to believe that things just happen we want to believe that there're some kind of deliberate intention behind everything even when inanimate objects are concerned" "And perhaps that is the key to humanity's belief in the supernatural" "Even in the 21st century, despite all that science has revealed about the indifferent vastness of the universe the human mind remains a wanton storyteller creating intention in the randomness of reality" "The delivery of rewards by a one-armed bandit is determined at random but many gamblers want to think that what they do can increase their chances of winning the jackpot" "They stand on one leg or wear a lucky shirt" "Are these superstitious behaviors a byproduct of our evolution?" "All wild animals have to be kind natural statisticians looking for patterns in the apparent randomness of nature when they're looking food or trying to avoid predators" "There're two kinds of mistakes they can make they can either fail to detect pattern when there is some or they can seem to detect pattern when there isn't any and that's superstition" "60 years ago, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner investigated the behavior of pigeons rewarding them with food when they learned to peck a key in the feeding apparatus" "But then Skinner set the apparatus to reward the birds at random now the pigeons just have to sit back and wait, but that isn't what they did" "Instead the majority developed what Skinner called 'superstitious behavior'" "When an individual pigeon, for example, happened to look over its left shoulder and the reward mechanism just happened to click in at that point" "It would have got the idea that it was looking over the left shoulder that it got its reward so it tried it again" "By sheer luck as it happened the reward mechanism delivered food at the same time again and so the pigeon was reinforced in its idea that looking over the left shoulder was what got it the reward" "And it went on and on and turned into a maniac for looking over the left shoulder" "Humans can be no better than pigeons" "We constantly create false positives we touch wood for luck see faces in toasted cheese, fortunes in tea leaves" "These provide a comforting illusion of meaning" "This is the human condition we desperately want to feel there's an organizing force at work in our bewilderingly complex world" "And in the irrational mind set if you believe in the mystical pattern you've imposed on reality you call yourself spiritual" "Spirituality is a prized commodity" "The media tells us to respect spiritual souls and there are apparently deep insights" "Spiritual self help guides do a roaring trade in the material world outnumbering science books by 3-1" "But what does spirituality actually mean?" "So please take your seat and please come slowly and gently and so that we can start the proceeeding without losing time" "So could you please..." "Satish Kumar is the editor of Resurgence, an ecological magazine at the sandal-wearing end of the green movement" "And he counts amongst his many fans Price Charles and Dalai Lama" "I represent the entire history of evolution" "I was present in the beginning, in the first Big Bang and I'll be here for billions of years to come" "But isn't Satish's spirituality just about imposing yet another superstitious force positive?" "World is made of two elements." "One element is visible element, the other aspect of creation is invisible dimension, things we cannot see" "So what is that element which is invisible?" "I call it spiritual" "When you go in a room, you say there's a good feeling here." "There's a spirit in the room" "Well, now you've changed to something rather different" "There the spirit is very big, and very holistic, and very inclusive world" "It is not defined in a one particular way So when you go in a room you can say the tree has a spirit" "and a rock has a spirit" "It's a living rock for me." "Nature without spirit cannot exist like tree cannot exist without the sun." "Light, it cannot exist without rain, ... cannot exist without soil also it cannot exist without a treeness." "The treeness is the spiritual quality" "Or the rockness" "When you talk about the rockness or the quality of a rock" "I can see as a scientist the rock has hardness, things like that but I think it's not quite what you mean" "It sounded as if what you do mean is something imposed by the human observer" "A rock is actualism..." "But there is a rock quality in the rock" "Well, you, that's a matter of assertion, I mean, you are now simply asserting that" "Asserting?" "I'm understanding it which is my understanding" "Some may understand more fully than others but it is no imposed, it is there" "It all sounds very poetic, but it's not reality Like priests, mullahs, and rabbis, new-age mystics ceaselessly attempt to fill gaps in human understanding with fabricated meaning" "Science and rationality are often accused to having a cold bleak outlook but why is it bleak to face up to the evidence of what we know" "The word mundane has come to mean boring and dull, it really shouldn't, it should mean the opposite because it comes from the Latin mundus, meaning the world, and the world is anything but dull" "The world is wonderful" "There's real poetry in the real world." "Science is the poetry of reality" "And yet today science is under attack" "In the last 50 years, science has put a man on the moon, cloned a sheep, decoded the human genome" "And yet, sadly, the white heat of the 1970s seems to be treated as white elephant today" "What colorkind do you see girls?" "Anything yellow close is okay.." "A prejudice against science is evident in schools" "Physics A-levels have halved in the last 25 years Chemistry fallen by more than 1/3" "University departments are closing all around the country" "This is a betrayal of the enlightenment" "The fundamental problem I think lies with the fashion throughout our educational system to teach students to value private feeling more highly than evidence based reason" "This is rooted in the post-modern relativist agenda" "For relativists, scientific truth is just a patriarchal western orthodoxy that like the old Roman Catholic church stands in the way of other equally valid outlooks on the world" "With things like paranormal, the drive for alternative medicine, all these kinds of movements away from the orthodox in science" "I see a lot as approximately reformation vis a vis catholicism" "Internet in a way, is kind of functioning, is a kind of information source very much like the printing press did in the 15th century, 16th century that is empowering people to sort of look up stuff for themselves" "in terms of different kinds of treatments and things like that and in a way, not trusting the experts any more" "Look, why do I have to trust, you know, the GP, Why do I have to trust The Royal Society?" "I think you're so close to being right, but yet you're darn wrong, you're absolutely wrong" "I would like to take that ball and run with it in a different direction" "We want to question authority." "We don't want to say because this person is the president of Royal Society therefore what he says is right" "We've got to go back to the evidence and find out what is actually true?" "The problem is, of course, people may look at he same evidence and then reach some more different conclusion from what the head of Royal Society reached" "And so that they would say look, you know, I look at the evidence too and I'm not persuaded by this" "That's where you start getting a kind of opening up of science" "Steve Fuller is, of course right, that the internet is revolutionizing how we use and consume information" "But the impersonal algorithms of internet search engines do not weed out robust evidence from unsourced, uncorroborated assertion" "Wikipedia world presents both great opportunity and huge danger" "Paranoia conspiracy theories circulate unchallenged" "Sometimes they're relatively harmless like the rumor that NASA faked the moon landings which is a bit of a joke because the evidence for going to the moon is so strong" "But how about the malicious and utterly unfounded rumor that 4000 Jews were tipped off by Israel agents not to go to work in the World Trade Center on 9/11" "It's one of the nasty lie circulating as truth in the blog community of racists and religious fundamentalists" "Now such people can find each other anywhere in the world instantly whipping up scares and reinforcing their paranoia and delusions" "As evidence is devalued even medical progress has become a target ...through vomiting." "Hundreds of families blame me." "MMR vaccines for autism, brain damage and meningitis" "When one report now widely discredited wrongly linked MMR vaccine with autism" "An innuendo circulated that the establishment was conspiring to risk our children's health" "It led to hundreds of thousands of parents failing to protect their offspring from the threat of measles a serious disease that in Afghanistan kills 35,000 people a year" "This is the world of private hunches and no respect for evidence" "Reason has built the modern world, it is a precious but also a fragile thing which can be corroded by apparently harmless irrationality" "We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those would obscure the truth" "Next week, I look at how health has become one of the fiercest battlegrounds between reason and superstition" "Transcription by Andrew  Hattie"