Typically balance article in DM about MMR....

Good grief.

I just posted a comment - You mean children are being taught critical thinking and basic scientific principles! Who'd have thought the GCSE curriculcum was so advanced?

I don't think that question should have been asked. Everything I've seen on mmr alays seems to be ased out one opinion or another and not on fact and a science gcse exam should be factual.

A part of the science GCSE exam is about determining what is reliable and what isn't - of which the whole MMR ballyhoo is a perfect example. The coursework "exam" (it has to be done under timed conditions) is exactly this sort of thing; they get given examples of experiments and asked whether they'd agree with the conclusions on the basis of the information they have - usually the answer is "no" because the sample is too small, the range too narrow or whatever.

Yes the main papers are about facts, but I love the fact that they're being expected to think through what they're told and to be critical about other people's results as well as their own.

The offending paper is here if the massed ranks of Ben Goldacre followers on twitter haven't just crashed the site.

The main written papers also ask questions about How Science Works, asking the students to recognise reliability/precision/accuracy in data and scientific method. The MMR furore is a perfect "real life" example for any application of HSW.

Why on earth shouldn't science papers encourage students to consider the reliability of their research?! Purely factual exams allow kids to pass exams on the basis of rote learning (I should know, I passed my A-Level Economics that way) whereas having to assess things critically actually encourages them to reason.

Blooming DM, I don't know why I still get worked up about it.

If the dm is right (although of course they may not be) then it someone disagrees with the popular opinion then they are wrong. Just becuase someone has a different opinion doesn't mean they are wrong*

*disclaimer - I don't know much about the mmr thing as I don't care although I never had it but had measles etc and am fine.

Well, the phrase "the popular opinion" is hugely misleading because it's long been demonstrated that people will back the view they feel comfortable with even if it flies in the face of all the evidence. In other words, being popular is no guarantee that it's any use.

This is particularly true in this case because we're not so much dealing with opinions as with a scientific argument where one side is overwhelmingly supported by years of intensively peer-reviewed research on sample sizes totalling at least seven figures, and the other is backed by the Daily Mail and "concerned parents" with no scientific training at all, on the basis of an eleven-year-old study with just twelve people whose findings have never been replicated (a minimum requirement to achieve scientific credibility) and which has been comprehensively discredited.

So looking at the evidence presented by both sides coldly and rationally - exactly as the kids taking this exam are meant to do - what conclusion would you draw? Indeed, what conclusion would you have to draw, if you're not to come across as someone hopelessly swayed by media hype over scientific evidence?

But... but... but. If I disagreed with the popular opinion (backed up by credible scientific theory) that the moon is made of rock, not green cheese, I would be wrong.

Even if I found twelve people to pay me to do a study which "proved" a link between the moon and green cheese on the grounds that both existed, I would still be wrong. Even if I got a few ill-informed and not very intelligent journalists from, say, the Daily Mail to stir up hype about the moon, green cheese, political correctness going mad and how it was all Gordon Brown's fault I would still be wrong.

That's pretty much the top and bottom of the MMR thing. The science is there for all to see, if they care, and if they can see past the end of their tin foil hats in the case of the vaccination conspiracy theorists. Whatever your view of conventional science, the GCSE Biology paper which this is from (see link above) is about conventional science and the methods it uses. There is no way that the MMR study could be seen as credible by that measure.

Similarly, the Biology GCSE will contain questions which assume that evolution is an accepted scientific theory. If you answered the questions on Darwin and the finches with "God made them different when he made the world 6000 years ago" you will not get the marks.

Finally, measles mumps and rubella aren't trivial illnesses. So, with respect, the fact that you had measles and were fine would probably not be much consolation to the parents of a child left blinded, deaf, brain damaged or even dead of measles. I hope it doesn't happen, but the way that measles is spreading due to the lowered uptake of the MMR is frightening and makes it more likely that someone will die. When they do, I look forward to seeing Andrew Wakefield and the DM journalists who stirred it all up charged and sent for trial, because it will be their fault.

This is exactly the point of having this kind of question. The media would have you believe that there are two equally scientifically valid viewpoints on MMR. The truth is that there aren't. As PL so eloquently said, however you dress it up, saying that the moon is made of cheese is still wrong. Saying that MMR is dangerous is still wrong unless it's qualified correctly - there is a small chance of a child having a temperature after MMR and a tinier chance still of a febrile convulsion but these chances are several orders of magnitude lower than the chances of the same thing as a result of measles. There is a real and significant risk of death from measles. There is no link between autism and MMR.

So, is "social engineering" the new "political correctness gone mad" ?

Apparently so, at least if some of the more frothy-mouthed comments after that article are to be believed. Once again, some fundamental misunderstandings about [charliebrooker] what's been going on? [/charliebrooker]. Teaching children to look at things critically and weigh up evidence is EDUCATION. Social engineering is probably a few doors down the corridor ?

Has anyone commented about it being to do with health and safety "nazis" and probably all the fault of working mothers (or women who have homebirths) yet? I can't bear to look again, the wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee noise in my ears has only just subsided after the last time I clicked on it.

Zooropa - to add to what Hazel and PL rightly said, the paper doesn't even ask whether MMR is dangerous or not, it gives facts surrounding the original MMR study by Wakefield and asks whether it is flawed in its design (which is undoubtedly is due to multiple factors), and whether the fact that parents and their lawyers were involved in its creation could bias the researcher (which undoubtedly they could have).

To get the points the children have to demonstrate critical thinking and understanding of how science works, what critieria we use to prove a theory and what standards scientists must work by to have credibility and avoid bias.

They aren't being asked to parrot back the government's statements on MMR being safe so why the DM thinks this is a story worth publishing, and why their readers think it's Labour-led "social engineering" is beyond me - unless of course they have absolutely no understanding of science whatsoever or it's a very slow news day. There's a surprise ?

I guess but what does it mean? ?

But that would be ridiculous, I mean what are the chances of... ah, OK. Yup.

Here's a timely illustration of why "the popular view" is to be prodded gingerly with the longest bargepole to hand - a Texas education authority has just voted 11-3 to deny scientific evidence and logic in setting appropriate "models" for science teaching in schools.

I'm sure this is with the support of the parents and voters (that dreaded "popular" raising its head again), but it's utterly deranged otherwise.

This whole "teach the controversy" row is the most outrageous red herring, as it implies both arguments are of equal merit, or that one is only slightly stronger than the other. With issues like the age of our planet, evolution vs creationism or whether MMR causes autism, we're not in that arena at all - with all three issues somewhere between 100% and 99.99999999999999999999% of the evidence backs one side. And if people try to argue otherwise without providing a similar body of peer-reviewed evidence in support, they should be laughed at, not regarded as misunderstood visionaries.

Galileo and Darwin WERE able to provide such evidence, which is why we take them seriously. Granted, they also made quite a few mistakes, which is inevitable if you're exploring genuinely cutting-edge research - but the crucial difference between them and Andrew Wakefield is that the principles underlying their discoveries were rock-solid, replicable, supported by the overwhelming body of subsequent research in the same field, and not now seriously disputed by anyone with genuine knowledge of their fields.

Conversely, Wakefield's research was flawed in terms of methodology, contentious in execution (because he was specifically being paid to discover a link between MMR and autism), has been pretty much disowned by his collaborators and the journal that published it and, most importantly, his findings have never been duplicated by any subsequent research, despite MMR being possibly the most intensively studied vaccine in human history.

Mind you, I'm all for teachers bringing up the controversy - they could devote five minutes to it at the start of term. That's about all they'd need to debunk creationism and Wakefield's work as valid scientific theories, and if anyone wants to argue the point, they're welcome to provide peer-reviewed evidence to justify their postition.

Oh, and good on the GCSE examiners - that's exactly the kind of question they should be asking their pupils. If they're studying science, they have to know how to sift fact from fantasy, and the MMR issue would seem to be pretty close to an ideal subject.

Ignoring the DM stuff this is actually what I'd want GCSE science to be about - getting children to look at why the 'popular opinion' is based on rubbish and scant rubbish at that and how the science isn't

Surely this is going to go a great way to helping debunk these myths that just because some people believe the moon is made of cheese, it may not necessarily be so and that if there is evidence it isn't then the first view, however widely held, is still tosh

Http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/01/measles-mmr-vaccination

I posted this on BT the other day (I am the baby in question's 'godless' mother). Hopefully it will provide a slight antidote to the DM rubbish.

The popular view used to be that the earth was flat and we lived under a giant colander, through which heaven could occasionally be glimpsed as points of light leaking through the holes. Which is a perfectly reasonable belief to hold in the absence of any evidence to the contrary... but as soon as such evidence was produced, and stood up to rigorous testing, the original supposition had to be ditched. And I don't see any particular distinction between creationists, MMR deniers and flat-earthers in this respect.

And I think it's doubly important that science teaches critical thinking skills at the earliest possible stage, since there's so much tosh out there online that's become more easily accessible than it ever was when I was at school. So kids need to know that there's a huge difference between a peer-reviewed article in a respected scientific journal (which should be pretty rock-solid, certainly for citation purposes), a Wikipedia entry (which might be a good starting point but should be treated with scepticism until its claims are cross-checked) or a ranty blog post by someone with no science credentials. Especially as the last of these categories is much easier to stumble across.