The past few weeks seem to have seen laments for the decline of journalism and obituaries for old media reaching a critical mass. BoraZ has kindly collected a few dozen so that I don’t have to.

Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been reading Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, and because Davies did the last Skeptics in the Pub, that I have been noticing that the decline of newspapers is reaching this critical stage. Davies is a Guardian investigative journalist, and he’s breaking the rules by telling us just what a state the media is in. Flat Earth News, written two years ago, before the American newspapers started going bankrupt, and British newspapers shed half their workforce, documents the many multiplicative flaws in the system of news gathering, reporting, and dissemination which cause journalists to churn out the crap the passes for newspapers these days.

Davies’ conclusion is that journalism — a noble profession of bright people — has, largely as a cost-cutting measure, been reduced tochurnalism . Instead of spending a week researching a story in great depth and telling us the important facts that we didn’t know, journalists have been reduced to rewriting a dozen wire stories and press releases each day. Journalists no longer have the time, the background knowledge, or the luxury of specialisation, required to find out whether the words they are writing bear any resemblance to reality. Nor do they have the time to establish what conflicts of interest of their sources have and whether they are hiding things — instead, the words can be reported as he-said/she-said, and the report can technically never be wrong.

Indeed, the media and public relationships industry have evolved a sophisticated mutualistic relationship. Newspapers could not fill their papers without press release writers doing all their research (and even choosing their words) for them, and in return, interested parties get their side of the story, or their product, prominently placed in the story.

M’colleague suggested that this thesis sounded a little like a conspiracy theory. I, however, am generally convinced. I am convinced because I have seen it work so many times in the field that I am familiar with — science and medicine. I have seen how the British tabloid (and even broadsheet) newspapers build their oncological ontological database from poorly written press releases. I have seen how interested parties both in industry and pressure groups place their doubt or certainty in news stories about the environment. I’ve seen the basic failure of fact-checking as elementary mistakes in press releases about newly published journal papers are faithfully replaced in all papers. I’ve even seen my own words from Wikipedia appear in The Metro‘s obituary of John Peel. And I’ve seen how successfully our own side has fought back on the media’s own terms, when Sense About Science press released their detox dossier in the slow news week after Christmas.

Flat Earth News provides the overarching explanatory theory for why so much of the news media is, to quote a comment on Friday’s Ryanair-toilets “news story” publicity stunt, “such a great lorry load of cock.” Science bloggers like a good whinge about a bad science or medicine story in the paper, but the problem is much greater than just a few humanities graduates trying to write about science. That skepticism you apply when reading the science stories needs to apply to the politics, foreign events, business, and everything else besides, because the authors of those items know no more about their subject than the humanities graduates covering science do about theirs.

Journalists can cry that democracy is not possible without them; but there’s nothing empowering about a media that churns back the press releases of government departments and military agencies. There is nothing empowering in the Daily Mail.

The central dogma of molecular biology, first described by Francis Crick in 1958, describes the flow of information between DNA, RNA, and proteins.^[1] The central dogma is interesting, but I believe that its use in teaching is somewhat misleading and gives it undue importance. If you’ve come across the central dogma before, it was probably in an undergraduate or perhaps high-school lecture, where it was casually mentioned when explaining that gene expression involves the flow of information from DNA sequence to messenger RNA, and from there to protein sequence and structure. Because we think of gene expression in terms of the information carrying molecule, introductory biology teaches gene expression in those terms: we think of it as a two step process of transcription (DNA to RNA) and translation (RNA to protein).

Gene expression is not a two step process, and of all the steps involved, transcription and translation are not necessarily the most interesting. This week’s Thursday paper is “Pre-mRNA Secondary Structures Influence Exon Recognition”,^[2] by Hiller, Zhang, Backofen, and Stamm, and it looks at a particular aspect of one of the lesser known steps: alternative splicing. The story as told by introductory biology is that DNA is transcribed into messenger RNA (mRNA): a carbon copy of the information in DNA whose sole purpose is to convey the information from the precious DNA archive, which is kept safely in the nucleus, out to the sites where the proteins are produced. In fact, the result of transcription is “pre-mRNA” (or “primary transcript”), which undergoes a series of modifications before it is ready for translation. One such modification is splicing.

When researchers started examining the human genome, they were surprised at how many genes they found — eventually coming down from an estimate of hundreds of thousands, to something around 25,000. But they were sure there were far more proteins than that. The reason proteins outnumber genes is that evolution has stumbled upon an efficient way organising things: make several proteins with a single gene. Thus most genes (in “higher” organisms, anyway) are split into many “exons”, each specifying a different section of the protein sequence, and “introns” (non-coding sequences which contain metadata). Thus the protein coding sequence may be split into sections A, B, and C, and the gene may have, say, three alternative versions of each; the protein can be constructed with A1, B1, and C1, or A1, B2, and C3, or A1 and C1 alone, and so on. Splicing is the process that organises the exons. WhatHiller at al are asking is: how does the gene expression machinery know which exons to pick for the protein desired?

It has already been shown that certain sequences within the pre-mRNA, and even features on the DNA, act as signals for the splicing machinery, by altering how the RNA and splicing machinery interact. At the DNA level, alternative promoter sequences situated at different positions upstream of the gene allow the production of a variety of different primary transcripts. Then there are “enhancer” and “silencer” sites, which occur both in introns and in exons (the four are ESEs, ESSs, ISEs and ISSs), and are collectively known as splicing regulatory motifs.^[3] We tend to talk about the information contained in nucleic acids in terms of nucleotide sequence. However, unlike DNA, which forms the famous double stranded helical structure, RNAs are (usually) single stranded, but can fold into a variety of 3-dimensional structures by forming double stranded sections with distant regions on the RNA strand. Often, this 3-D structure is what determines howRNAs interact with other biological molecules. So, the first question that Hiller et al asked was: what is the relationship between splicing regulatory motifs and 3-D structure?

This question is rather difficult to answer. Very few mRNA structures have been empirically determined, and the methods for determining them remain expensive and time consuming. However, enough is known about how these structures form to allow the creation of computer programs to predict likely 3-D structures. Variables affecting structure include the locations at which protein co-factors bind to the transcript, the length of the double stranded region that is formed by folding, the proximity of the sections which come together to form double stranded regions, and most importantly, energy minimisation. Using this knowledge, each nucleotide in the pre-mRNA is assigned a probability of being unpaired in the folded structure. While structure has to be estimated, the location of the regulatory motifs is on firmer ground: the AEdb database contains gene sequences for which the locations of motifs have previously been determined experimentally. Using the predicted structures of these sequences, it was found that splicing regulatory motifs are far more likely to be single stranded than the average sequence.

Indicative of something interesting, but it’s not very convincing on its own. So Hiller et al set out to show that alternative splicing is affected by the single- versus double-stranded structure of splicing regulatory motifs. They looked at the SXN-minigene, a gene whose splice variants are already well understood, and in which the effect of motif sequences on splicing has already been characterised. They engineered versions of theSXN gene which had either silencers or enhancers (or, as a control, random sequences of equal length) added either within a single stranded section or within a double-stranded section. They predicted that regulatory motifs would be less effective when hidden in double-stranded structures, and this is what they found. Enhancers, whose job is to make sure that the exon is kept, and silencers, whose job is to make sure that the exon is removed, only worked efficiently when located in single-stranded structures.

The conclusion, therefore, is that mRNA structure is part of what they call the “splicing code” (an analogy to the genetic code, which maps nucleotides to amino acids). This conclusion is nothing particularly surprising — it has long been known that many DNA and RNA interacting proteins directly interact with unpaired nucleotides.^[4] But it leads me to make a hypothesis that I’d like to put to the splicing experts — I don’t have enough background in this field, and have not yet had time to read up on whether it’s a plausible hypothesis, or even a novel one. My hypothesis is this: alternative promoters cause a frame-shift of the transcript in terms of the regulatory motifs. Different promoters will therefore be associated with a different set of regulatory motifs because the transcript that they produce has a different 3-D structure. Is such a simple solution possible, and has anybody else considered it?

References

1. Crick, F. (1970). Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. Nature 227, 561-563
2. Hiller, M., Zhang, Z., Backofen, R., Stamm, S. (2007). Pre-mRNA Secondary Structures Influence Exon Recognition. PLoS Genetics, 3(11), e204. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.0030204
3. Blencowe BJ (2000) Exonic splicing enhancers: mechanism of action, diversity and role in human genetic diseases. Trends Biochem Sci 25:106-110. (Cited in Hiller et al 2007.)
4. e.g. S.D.Auweter, F.C. Oberstrass & F.H. Allain (2006) Sequence-specific binding of single-stranded RNA: is there a code for recognition? Nucleic Acids Res 34:4943-4959.

The Herbert Richter HTC Hero mount was pretty good.  The reviews worried me because somebody said that it had failed on the very first ride and their phone had been destroyed.  My experience was far better: I must have done at least 1,000km, in all kinds of conditions and speeds, before the cradle was knocked loose when I hit shoddy roadworks while descending the hill into Melrose in the Borders at 35kmph:

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

I caught the last couple of minutes of Extreme Pilgrim (BBC 2, Friday 9pm) and was intrigued, so fired up the iPlayer to watch the whole thing. It’s Vicar of Dibley meets Ray Mears’ Extreme Survival, all done in the style of an American college student movie. The main character presenter is Peter Owen Jones, a Sussex parish priest who defies the law that Anglican priests may speak no louder than a whisper. His accent is very 1960s public-school, though it also reminded me a little of this Fry and Laurie sketch, which begins to make sense when you learn that before joining the priesthood he was in marketing. There is marvelous rhythm in the way he pronounces “Him-ah-lee-ahs”. It made for a slightly surreal programme when combined with the Alan Davies haircut and constant bewildered/stoned facial expressions.

Jones goes “seeking the spiritual enlightenment that Britain once had” in India. He joins some Sadus at the Kumbh Mela, the massive Hindu festival on the Ganges. The first half of the programme is given over to Jones getting stoned and staying up ’till five in the morning. I wonder what Stephen Green or Mary Whitehouse would make of nice Anglican vicars smoking weed on the BBC. After a wadge of notes has changed hands, the group sit around the camp fire talking of how we should not be seeking rewards in this life, and of how the modern world is too concerned with the economic at the expense of the spiritual. In a marvelous scene with a cross-legged old guru, subtitles pop up to say “give me a hundred rupees”; this is translated for Jones, however, as a stream of spiritual babble about giving up material possessions. Another marvelous scene shows Jones, having been fast-tracked into the job of a Sadu, dressed in the full orange robes and still looking rather spaced. He stands in silence for twenty seconds before wondering aloud “where am I?” When the festival is over Jones sets off for a cave in the mountains with the objective of “purifying your parts with austerity”. Fnarr fnarr.

It’s all very nice. We meet lots of amicable characters preaching peace and charity. But it’s the perfect advert for why peaceful, liberal, friendly, wishy-washy “spiritual” religion is not universally harmless. This is the eastern spiritual utopia that so many Westerners look to as the solution to the problems of our materialist lives in the West? A skeletal shaman runs back and forth across a busy road to kiss the tarmac: “he’s making the energy meet — that’s his philosophy.” In his mountain cave, Jones is visited by the village chief, who comes with offerings and a request for blessings of his daughter’s marriage. Jones is very upset one morning as he confesses to battering a scorpion with a saucepan: “I was a guest on his territory.” The programme closes with Jones observing that he is “a product of a society that values economic well-being as much as spiritual well-being.” Uhuh. And your society has running water, an absence of open-pit latrines in the street, and a distinct lack of amoebic dysentery. I would call that a good thing. And that is the problem with peaceful, liberal, friendly religion: to value “spiritual needs” means to value the next life and the invisible friend above the needs of real people in the one life that they get. A “philosophy” that values disease and starvation does not indicate a care for man’s real spiritual needs.

So while the programme ended up as Vicar of Dibley meets Ray Mears, deep down it was trying to combine the Jesus complex of the git-wizard David Blaine with the philosophical power of rocket scientologist Tom Cruise. The programme thinks that it is making a profound insight into society and nature (the same “profound insights” of stoned hippies everywhere), but utterly fails to make the case. Still, it makes for entertaining television.

If you’ll excuse my tabloid headline writer…

A year ago, I wrote Lies, damn lies, and tissue culture, describing some of the reasons why caution and healthy skepticism are required when assessing the conclusions of tissue culture studies. This is especially the case when the tissue culture studies are being used as part of what Ben Goldacre calls the Daily Mail’s great oncological ontology project of sorting all the world’s inanimate objects into those which cause cancer, and the rest, which surely must cure cancer.

One example I used in that item was Bisphenol A (BPA), a biologically active chemical found in the environment (xenobiotic), including in the plastics used for drinks bottles. Specifically, BPA is thought to be an endocrine disruptor, mimicking some of the effects of the hormone estrogen in the body. Estrogen is known to promote some cancers, particularly breast cancers, and so in the great project BPA looks to be headed for the “causes cancer” box, and regulatory bodies around the world have been keeping on eye on BPA research. Of course, estrogen has roles in several other systems, and another where harmful activity of BPA has been suggested is in fat and sugar metabolism.

So far, much of the research into the effects of BPA on metabolism, and related diseases — such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, collectively, the “metabolic syndrome” — have been very limited in the power of the conclusions which can be drawn from them. Some studies have shown disruption of metabolism by BPA in laboratory animals,^[1] but there are important differences in this system between laboratory animals and humans.^[2] Many additional studies have have shown BPA interfering with signaling pathways in tissue culture, but as previously described, effects seen in tissue culture do not always represent important effects in the human body. A large portion of studies into effects of BPA, either in animals or culture, suffer from the additional limitation that when they do detect such effects, it is at a concentration much higher than would ever be seen in the human body. But the issue is surely one that deserves investigation: though any effect of BPA on the metabolic syndrome is likely to be small compared to diet and exercise, in the current epidemic situation, it could still be important.

A paper from m’colleagues in Cincinnati takes a step towards overcoming the limitations of earlier work and further establishing both the effect of BPA on fat metabolism, and the mechanism for this effect. Eric Hugo et al^[3] looked at the effects that physiologically relevant concentrations of BPA on the release of adiponectin, a key metabolism regulating hormone, in human surgical explants of adipose (fat storage) tissue. In the body, adiponectin is secreted into the blood by the adipocyte cells which make up adipose tissue, and the hormone’s blood concentration is inversely correlated with body fat percentage. Indeed, it has been established that adiponectin regulates fat and glucose metabolism, and also affects insulin sensitivity and resistance.^[4][5] Adiponectin is therefore a good marker to study as a surrogate measure for body fat percentage, obesity, and diabetes.

So Hugo, et al, took a number of surgical explants from both obese and non-obese patients who had surgery for either breast reduction, abdominoplasty (“tummy tuck”), or gastric bypass. They put small lumps of the fat tissue (sadly, no photographs in the paper) into dishes of culture medium, and then subjected these to various concentrations of either BPA, or for comparison, either the principal form of estrogen (estradiol), or a chemical called ICI which destroys estrogen receptors (the molecules in the cell which BPA and estrogen interact with in order to have downstream effects). After six hours of exposure, the culture media was taken for analysis to see how much adiponectin had been secreted by the tissue.

There are a number of methods by which a specific protein can be detected and quantified in such a sample. The particular method chosen this study was an “Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay” (ELISA). In an ELISA, you take a plastic plate containing an array of mini “test tubes”, or wells, and attach an antibody — a protein which recognises and affixes to a specific other protein, in our case to adiponectin — to the plastic wells. The wells are then filled with the experiment samples, and a second antibody with specificity to the same specific protein, but to a different section of the protein is washed over the wells. That second antibody is attached to a fluorescent chemical, which can later be easily quantified. So to recap, in this case, the adiponectin in each sample would be affixed to its well via the first antibody, and when the second antibody, with its fluorescent flag, is washed over the well, it will also become affixed if it finds an adiponectin to attach itself to, creating an antibody-adiponectin sandwich. Ultimately, the more adiponectin in the sample, the more fluorescent flag in the well.

So what did Hugo et al find? Most importantly, they found that estrogen and BPA both suppressed release of adiponectin from the explants, both of breast and abdominal tissue. Interestingly, this effect was clear for low concentrations of BPA, of the sort that might be commonly found in these tissues in the human body, but it disappeared at much higher concentrations. Indeed, at the most environmentally relevant concentrations, BPA was at least as efficient as estrogen in blocking adiponectin release. In most systems which involve BPA and estrogen, the principal cellular effects of these chemicals occur via activation of the estrogen receptors, so what happened when the tissues were treated with ICI, the chemical which is thought to destroy estrogen receptors? One might assume that ICI would have an opposite effect to the estrogen receptor activators, but intriguingly, it appeared actually to have similar effects of inhibition in several of the patients, highlighting that cell signalling is never the simple story we would like it to be. Perhaps it is not “active” estrogen receptor which is required for suppression of adiponectin release, but “inactive” estrogen receptor which is required to maintain normal levels of secretion? Perhaps the effects are not mediated by estrogen receptors at all, or perhaps it is a more complicated story still.

So, this new work adds weight to the hypothesis that BPA can contribute to disruption of metabolism, obesity, and diabetes. But the work is far from powerful enough to close the case on the issue. Like earlier work, the research reported here suffers from a number of limitations. For each category, less than ten patients were studied, mostly women: this is far too few to make general conclusions. This limitation is emphasised by the fact that in the tissue samples, levels of adiponectin release varied as much as ten-fold between patients — perhaps as a result of genetics, sex, age, lifestyle, or pure chance. Additionally, this study only looks at a surrogate measure — adiponectin release — rather than real issue of disease incidence; and the surgical explants, though more realistic than tissue culture or animal models, are still not a perfect reflection of what happens in the human body. But the work does contribute to a body of evidence which makes the case for taking the research to the next stage: a study that looks for patterns in a population of hundreds of individuals.

References

1. Heindel JJ. 2003. Endocrine disruptors and the obesity epidemic. Toxicol Sci 76:247–249. full text
2. Ben Jonathan N, LaPensee CR, LaPensee EW. 2008. What can we learn from rodents about prolactin in humans? Endocr Rev 29:1–41. doi
3. Eric R. Hugo, Terry D. Brandebourg, Jessica G. Woo, Jean Loftus, J. Wesley Alexander, Nira Ben-Jonathan (2008). Bisphenol A at Environmentally Relevant Doses Inhibits Adiponectin Release from Human Adipose Tissue Explants and Adipocytes Environmental Health Perspectives, 116, 1642-1647 DOI: 10.1289/ehp.11537
4. Ukkola O, Santaniemi M. 2003. Adiponectin: a link between excess adiposity and associated comorbidities? J. Mol. Med. 80 (11): 696–702. doi
5. Matsuzawa Y, Funahashi T, Kihara S, Shimomura I. 2004. Adiponectin and metabolic syndrome. Arterioscler. Thromb. Vasc. Biol. 24 (1): 29–33. doi

Declaration of interests: I used to work with three of the authors of the paper, but had nothing to do with this project or paper.

I found on the iPlayer the latest in BBC2′s series of Darwin documentaries, Did Darwin Kill God? This is theologian Conor Cunningham’s attempt reconcile science and religion, and show that their differences are all just a misunderstanding deliberately promoted by 20th century American christian fundamentalists, and 21st century atheist fundamentalists.We could play count the mistakes, but I’ll try to keep it to the most illustrative examples. Firstly, Cunningham wants to show that Darwin himself has nothing to say on science versus religion. In correcting the simplistic idea that Darwin lost his religion entirely because of evolution, Cunningham suggests that Darwin instead lost his religion entirely because of the personal tragedy of his daughter’s death. Uh. I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than either of those. And it’s true that Darwin did, for various reasons, generally try to keep quiet about God and religion, but he knew his work did have a bearing on the field, and, for example, made quips about a loving creator god and the design of parasitic Ichneumonid wasps.

Worryingly, it is not just his history of science that is oversimplified so far as to be plain wrong: his characterisation of his own field looks no better. He seems to think that throughout history creationism was an obscure aberration, taken seriously only by the eccentric fringes of theology — you know, like James Ussher, mere Primate of All Ireland, or theologian William Paley. Real members of the One True Faith followed the “mainstream” teachings of Augustine, and took Genesis as allegory. I am not, and have no interest in being, a theologian. I don’t know enough about the subject to be able to say whose ideas have attracted the largest following throughout history. But I am slightly concerned. In my experience, a theologian placing an idea on the fringe means that modern European academic theologians don’t take it seriously, but that it has probably been the dominant dogma of their church and its laity for most of its history.

Meanwhile, Cunningham’s idea that American creationism was invented during the Scopes trial as a reaction to eugenics is an entirely new one to me, along with the ideas that American creationism was all old-earth creationism until the 1960s, and that young-earth creationism was invented as a reaction to sixties liberalisation of values. Biblicalliteralists are indeed motivated by perceived threats to their moral systems, but I think you’ll find that the history of the movement is a bit more complicated than that — to the extent that Cunningham’s version of history is just plain wrong.

The best part of the programme though, is Cunningham’s attempt to characterise the state of current thinking in evolutionary biology, and show how “ultra-Darwinists” are discredited. Perhaps if I knew as much history and theology as I do biology my jaw would have dropped as far in those sections as it did in this one. The dropped jaw soon turned to laughing out loud, though, when I realised that the work was merely one of incompetence rather than deliberate misinformation. I’ll skip over his bizarre attempt to introduce the selfish gene theory and how the human genome project has disproved it (!), and move on to the part that really had me rolling on the floor: one of the most fantastically absurd non-sequiturs I’ve ever heard.

The topic was memetics: the idea that ideas are replicating units that evolve as they spread from one mind to another. Memetics was originally just a thought experiment about hypothetical units of evolution analogous to genes, but was fleshed out, for example by Daniel Dennett and Sue Blackmore. Now, Sue Blackmore is great, but if Cunningham really knew the state of evolutionary thinking, he would know that she does not really represent even “ultra-Darwinists”. But Cunningham drags her to Salisbury so that they can do an interview in the station car park. Brilliantly, he discovers a fatal flaw in the theory of memes — one that he seems to think somehow has important consequences for the credibility of Richard Dawkins and the God hypothesis: if memes are true, evolution is itself a meme!

… so what?

Well, think about it. If evolution is a meme, it’s just a parasite in our mind, and not true! Memes destroy the truth of evolution!

Uhm. But-

Ultra-Darwinists have never been able to answer this problem!

Oh … kay.

Cunningham clearly really does truly believe that his brain has just done something brilliant. I suspect he is correct in stating that “ultra-Darwinists” have never been able to answer the “problem”, since I have difficulty believing that anyone would ever before have managed to think of it and say it out loud before noticing what an utterly and humiliatingly ridiculous thing it would be to say.

As an aside, it is interesting to consider truth and memes. Under the theory of memetics, the idea that truth is of value would itself be a meme (and a very meritorious one). In the Selfish Gene, Dawkins talks about the need for genes to cooperate, or to put it another way, selfish genes have to be able to survive in an environment that contains many other selfish genes. Analogously, memes have to survive in an environment of other memes. Scientists, for example, host a series of memes for methods of filtering the non-true memes that might be trying to infect them. Skepticism, rationalism, logic, reason, and empiricism are memes that are also meme filters. But many people do not host them. Others fail to recognise the truth in a meme because it conflicts with false memes that they are already hosting. Some people do not even host the truth-valuing meme.

–

Cunningham’s thesis — and, it would appear from the website, the thesis of the executive producer of the BBC2 Darwin season — is that creationists and “ultra-Darwinists” are extremists: two different kinds of fundamentalists abusing Darwin to promote their sinister agenda. Richard Dawkins, for example is an extremist because he believes that there is no need for God. (Not because he believes that religion is a bad thing: merely believing that there is no need for God is enough to get you branded an extremist.)

Cunningham is showing us the two unreasonable, frightening, even dangerous extremes, and telling us that the truth lies in the middle — bang on the spot where Darwin and the Bible are both right, in their own ways. This is apparently the reasonable position. Life on earth evolves, and Christ died on the cross for our sins and rose from the dead. That’s the reasonable, moderate, non-extremist middle ground position to hold.

Perhaps next the Beeb could help us reach a nice reasonable and moderate middle-ground position between those extremists who either demand that pi is ~3.14159 or that it is exactly 3.

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Comments on the original post:

What is it with Channel 4 and the examination of excretions? During How Toxic Are Your Kids (C4, Thurs 8pm) I had to check the television guide to make sure that Armando Iannucci (The Day Today, Brass Eye) wasn’t the producer. Apparently, this is episode two of two, and I’m so disappointed that I missed the first episode. The programme opens with presenter, Sarah Beeny, telling us that “on an average day alone, I’m exposed to over a thousand chemicals.” This is episode two: we’re onto the advanced level stuff. A token ounce of sense — “… natural chemicals (some good and some bad)” — is voice-overed in at one point, but mostly, “chemical” is a synonym for “toxin” and “natural” is a synonym for “healthy”. Indeed, the disclaimer comes after telling us that “prior to the 1950s, we only used natural chemicals.” There’s no evidence for this obviously nonsensical statement, but it’s a fact.

As is standard for mid-evening television “journalism”, we meet some wonderful characters. It’s so much easier to talk to some ordinary people — who are all very willing to play along, in return for their fifteen minutes — than to do some research, or find out some facts. There is the Scottish woman whose interior decoration mimics a neoclassical museum, and who has a selection of air fresheners in every room. “Some people might think it’s a bit excessive,” she tells us. The voice-over comes in with the fact that people who use air fresheners are more likely to suffer regularly from headaches, but the science behind this fact is never explained: do the chemicals in the air fresheners cause the headaches, or are headaches another symptom of the psychoses that these people are clearly suffering from? Journalists these days are so thorough in their investigating that they conduct studies and experiments. The data point in this experiment is a teenage girl who has her make-up and shampoo taken away, in return for some “natural” products. “Everyone’s looking at me like, ‘she’s so ugly’.” No, dear, they’re looking at you like, “look at that girl being exploited by that film crew.” This is a scientific experiment, remember, and so an objective measure for results is required, and since it’s Channel 4, it has to involve analysing waste. But this crew is amateur: they stop at urine, rather going the whole Gillian McKeith. Then there’s the family that won’t eat any cooked food. “Don’t you ever just think, ‘oh, I really want some soup right now’?” Wow, yeah, soup. That’s exactly what I’d miss most if I gave up cooked food.

Pick a light-factual television programme from the archives and it should be possible to date it to within five years of its production merely by looking at the graphics. Graphics go through fashions, influenced by the latest technology. This one makes wonderful use of the virtual studio to create an amusing series of split screen scenes, for example. Either they just had so much to say and so little time that they had to resort to having two streams of information running at the same time, or it was simply the case that the presenter (left) was just so bored by what the scientist (right) was telling us that she had given up and was putting on her make-up instead. Another ubiquitous gimmick is to deliberately make the picture look bad. Bad picture quality is a way of immediately telling us “this is an informal ‘diary’ scene”: they’re the quality you’d get from cheap cameras of the variety one would use for home videos, or outside broadcasts from a cash strapped production company. Except they’re not. Cheap cameras have moved on since the early 1990s, but apparently, our expectations of picture quality haven’t kept up.

Everyone knows that alongside spectroscopic analysis of bodily productions, the way to do research is to conduct surveys. To the street! We get a montage of the people, who, after telling us that they never read the shampoo ingredients label (no shit, really?), all tell us that what they really want is more “natural”, “pure”, “essential oils” and “organic”. “It says 100% pure, therefore I know everything in there is going to be beneficial to me.” The presenter tells us: “nature is powerful stuff.” Yeah. As powerfully capable of harming us as synthetic chemicals. Still, it’s no good just telling us how bad chemicals are, clearly there is a demand for alternatives! “Although the levels of these chemicals aren’t considered dangerous, I’m going to see if I can reduce them.” And so, we get Aloe Vera for breakfast, and salt & lemon juice toothpaste. This is not science, it’s not journalism, and it’s not consumer advocacy. It’s classic infotainment. If Channel Four News is The Guardian of the television medium, the mid-evening slot is the Daily Mail. It’s not just health scares; it’s health scares with “kids” in the headline.

I’m watching Peter Owen Jones’ Around The World In Eighty Faiths. You might recall Owen Jones as the public school hippy ex-ad man anglican vicar from Extreme Pilgrimage.

This time ’round, Owen Jones is on a world tour, looking at the beliefs and rituals of eighty different faiths. It’s fascinating. The beliefs held by these eighty faiths are not in any way compatible with each other, and Owen Jones acknowledges this by not attempting to conjure those pitiful explanations for why they are, in-fact, all the same belief. He’s very respectful of the beliefs as they are described to him. For much of the series, he whispers as though it is an Attenborough documentary, and he must not disturb the wildlife in its natural habitat. He stands at a short distance watching in awe of the rituals. Clearly profound things are up.

But when he goes to Moscow to meet the Russian Orthodox Christians, a brief and sudden angry streak displays itself. He is disgusted with what atheism — not communism, atheism — did to the Russian Orthodox religion under the Soviet regime. But, to tick off another of his eighty faiths, he goes to observe some atheists performing their ritual in a dusty old meeting room. He wants to know “what contemporary atheism has to offer.” What a fascinating way to approach the issue. Not whether an idea is right or wrong; what it has to offer.

Later he visits Damanhur, a “spiritualist” commune in northern Italy. Here he learns about spherocells and environmental transformers, and concludes that there is much creative energy in the vicinity. Hey, in Damanhur, you don’t even need to be sentient to get creative: “Plants can modulate sounds. By making them listen to classical music, they learn to use it better. There is an interaction between our thoughts and the vegetable’s.” To prove the point, Owen Jones strokes a leaf to help the plant with its latest composition.

“Most religions have some wacky stuff in them. We’ve just become socialised into believing that ‘there are some people who believe this, and that’s OK.’ Is that OK? I mean, I think that’s OK.”

Sure, Pete. If you think that truth doesn’t matter.