Magnus Pyke (1908–1992)

Red Rag to a Bull! and other fallacies explored pretty much reviews itself:

• "Experts are valuable people in their own field, but when they stray into other areas of knowledge ... they are as susceptible to error as anybody else."
• "The fact that [the Astronomer Royal for Scotland] gave credence to Taylor's intrinsically unbelievable speculations is a warning to ordinary citizens that, although they can justifiably attend to what scholars may say about the subjects in which they are qualified to express an opinion, such scholars may be as gullible as anybody else on topics in which their opinion is no more valuable than yours or mine."

Dr Pyke's qualifications were in nutrition, so what he has to say about that in this book is probably sound.

There is really no good reason for you to read the rest of this review: just don't buy Red Rag to a Bull.

The book, first published in 1983, is organised as a series of little articles, from about half a page to a few pages long, on subjects from Astrology to Yeti, arranged alphabetically. This makes it convenient for reading in odd moments. In many cases, the essay is merely a rant expressing Dr Pyke's disagreement with some more or less popular belief, but sometimes he cites evidence. Quite a few of them are simple linguistic quibbles, such as that catgut is not made from cats and that Welsh rabbit is toasted cheese.

When Dr Pyke does give evidence, it is sometimes ill chosen: he supports his contention that cheese is not the optimal bait for mousetraps by describing an experiment in which mice were offered a choice of several foodstuffs not including cheese!

The title essay, Red Rag to a Bull, is a missed opportunity. It points out, of course, that the colour of the bullfighter's cape is irrelevant to the colourblind bull, and it includes a bit of history of bullfighting which, if it is accurate, would not be without interest: however, since Dr Pyke misspells "muleta" as "mulita", I'm not too confident. In a book of popular science, some scientific background would have been more relevant: mammals are generally colourblind, although there is good reason to believe that their Triassic ancestors did have colour vision, and it has been redeveloped in some mammal groups, including, luckily for us, primates.

He really disgraces himself when writing about the effect of the phases of the moon on human behaviour. He concludes by saying, "it seems perverse that people should still cling to the tattered remains of the fallacy that madness, murder, suicide and crime are influenced by how much of the earth's shadow falls on the moon."

By "fallacy", Dr Pyke usually means "delusion". The nearest he comes to fallacy is when he tries to show two invalid mathematical proofs, one that +1=-1 and one that 3+2=0. The first of these he clearly did not understand: he both misstates the argument and fails to say what is wrong with it. For the second, he does say that it fails because of division by zero, but he ends the proof before the step in which division by zero occurs.

So if you do read the book and find that Dr Pyke claims something that you are unfamiliar with, you should look for independent confirmation.… (mer)

We rely on science and technology for food, entertainment, warmth and shelter, health care and much more, so it is a pity that there is so much ignorance of, and even opposition to, the methods and results of science and to the deployment of technology. Butter Side Up aims to educate and to raise more enthusiasm for science and technology, but it has many flaws which prevent me from recommending it.

Dr Pyke writes in a chatty, informal style which, I understand, matches his style as a television presenter. Unfortunately, chattiness sometimes degenerates into sloppiness which detracts from his argument. For example (on the second page of chapter one!): “[I]t may happen that a penny tossed five times falls heads-up five times in a row. But if this happens, the chance of the next five spins giving another five heads is remote” (my emphasis). This is, of course, not true: whether the next five throws give five heads is independent of what happened with past throws.

When Dr Pyke comes to discuss inertia, the book gets much worse: his descriptions and explanations are flat-out wrong. That he insists on referring to inertia as a force might be put down again to sloppy language, but it becomes clear that he confounds inertia with friction, turning back the clock to before scientists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries clearly separated them.

The back cover of my edition features in large red letters the final sentence of the book: “Pull out the bathplug and watch the earth swing round the sun.”. This refers back to his discussion of swirling bathwater, but introduces a new, serious error not found in that discussion: the effect, so far as it exists, is due to the earth's daily rotation about its axis, not to the yearly revolution round the sun. Dr Pyke starts his discussion of bathwater by hyperbolically asserting that water anywhere in the northern hemisphere will tend to spin anticlockwise and anywhere in the southern spin clockwise. He then introduces more and more caveats, eventually pretty much admitting that in everyday life there is no observable effect depending on hemisphere, but that the swirling of water running out of baths or basins is overwhelmingly due to other effects which are as likely to swirl it one way as the other. He then describes experiments which showed, in the early 1960's, that water in sufficiently wide, sufficiently carefully engineered circular vessels, under carefully controlled conditions, left sufficiently long before draining to ensure that any initial rotations die down, will in fact spin clockwise or anticlockwise depending on whether the experiment is done in the northern or southern hemisphere.

There are many more misleading or wrong passages in the book. For example: “basically [an ear] serves the purpose of converting the pulsations of sound in the air into nerve impulses of the same frequency”. There are unimportant mistakes, such as saying that Newton was evacuated from London because of the plague. All in all, if Dr Pyke claims something that you are unfamiliar with, you must mistrust him.

It is a pity that the book is so carelessly written, because Dr Pyke does introduce some interesting subjects and does give some indication of the pleasure and excitement of scientific work.… (mer)