The Dawk picks on easy targets

Richard Dawkins should look to his own community’s failings, says robert matthews

You'd better be sitting down for this one. Tonight Professor Richard Dawkins, scourge of irrational cobblers, quackery and tosh, will reveal that astrology isn't science. And that's not all: apparently some forms of alternative medicine are questionable too. Oh, and it might not be possible to speak to the dead.

Is there no limit to Professor Dawkins' keenness to put us dimwits straight? Well, yes there is, actually. You won't catch him sticking the boot into the cobblers, quackery and tosh that now routinely appears even in top science journals.

Even we dimwits can spot some of the stuff: the endless claims for health risks based on studies so small they have zero credibility; the identification of whole new human species based on a handful of bones; the use of animals in drug testing, despite the lack of

Is there no limit to Professor Dawkins’ keenness to put us dimwits straight?

evidence they have any predictive value.

But some of most egregious stuff is known only to the cognoscenti Dawkins (left) seems so loath to annoy. There's the routine abuse of statistical methods by scientists desperate to get publishable results. The failure of academia to stamp this out has led to huge amounts of time and money being wasted by researchers trying to replicate 'significant' findings that are actually meaningless flukes.

Then there's the refusal of top medical journals to compel publication of the results of all medical trials. By burying negative findings, researchers have condemned thousands of patients to take part in pointless clinical trials.

Over the years, some academics have tried to draw attention to these scandals, but with little success. They tend to be dismissed as trouble-makers and mavericks. Such epithets clearly hold no fear for Professor Dawkins. How sad, then, that instead of tackling the Augean Stables of science, he chooses to take a broom to the dog-basket of superstition.