John Rock's Error

What the inventor of the birth control pill didn't know about women's health

Two or three of my Christmas presents this year were recommended to my friends and family by our local bookseller (who probably knows my taste in books better than most) including Malcolm Gladwell's latest book "What the Dog Saw, and Other Adventures".

I expect several of the chapters of this book will inspire blogposts, but I wanted to start with the chapter on the Birth Control Pill, because it echoes some of the themes I've been talking about recently.

Partly for religious reasons (he was a devout Catholic), John Rock designed the birth control pill to be a "natural" method of contraception. He believed that the pill was merely reinforcing the established rhythm method, and he was bitterly disappointed when Pope Paul VI banned the Pill along with all other "artificial" contraceptives.

Rock and his colleagues had designed a pill with a twenty-eight day cycle, because they thought that this was the proper menstrual cycle for women, and they wanted to replicate and regulate this cycle in order to make the rhythm method (which only worked effectively for women with a regular menstrual cycle) more effective.

As Gladwell puts it, the Pill was

"shaped by the dictates of the Catholic Church - - by John Rock's desire to make this new method of birth control seem as natural as possible. ... But what he thought was natural wasn't so natural after all, and the Pill he ushered into the world turned out to be something other than what he thought it was".

For when female scientists look at patterns of menstruation, they typically find that the twenty-eight day cycle is not "natural" at all - it is a product of urban modern life. Furthermore, the artificially induced cycle has both short-term side-effects (period pains) and longer-term health risks (cancer).

So here is how Gladwell describes the consequences of John Rock's desire to please his Church.

"In the past forty years, millions of women around the world have been given the Pill in such a way as to maximize their pain and suffering. And to what end? To pretend that the Pill was no more than a pharmaceutical version of the rhythm method."

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I've been exploring different kinds of problem-solving recently, including a common preference for solutions that seem to preserve the structure of the problem. But such structure-preservation often turns out to rely on hidden assumptions - in this case, assumptions as to what counts as "natural".

Describing a solution as "natural" implies that it is safe and unobjectionable and somehow innocent. But when we unpack what counts as "natural", we may find a hidden agenda buried within the allegedly "natural". The Pope refused to see the Pill as an innocent technology, and perceived it as a source of disruption to traditional family values.

So what is interesting here is that Rock and the Pope, two men with very similar religious beliefs and values, both Catholics, should interpret the POSIWID of the Pill in such completely different ways. Meanwhile, Gladwell's interpretation is different again. The purpose of the Pill depends who is telling the story.

Vauxhall Funds Parking Formula

@bengoldacre comments (below an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement) on a formula extracted from a paper on the mathematics of parking produced by Professor Simon Blackburn and printed in several papers. Ben rightly says that just because the "research" was funded by Vauxhall does not automatically invalidate the formula, although it may be a risk factor for "something being dodgy".

Several journalists seem to think that the formula tells you how to park. But as any mathematically literate journalist should be able to see, the formula merely calculates the minimum length required for lazy parking, with no to-and-fro. The formula itself does not work out "the geometry of where a driver should turn", although this is described in the proof of the formula. In other words, the formula tells you WHICH cars you can park WHERE, but not HOW to park.

The potential commercial value would be if Vauxhall could use this formula to show that its cars were easier to park than those of other manufacturers, using the particular parking strategy chosen by Professor Blackburn. Mathematicians working for other car manufacturers could then produce alternative formulas using other parking strategies, and more mathematicians could work out meta-strategies, and we might imagine this would all be excellent encouragement for kids to learn more mathematics.

However, Professor Blackburn's formula is not a profound mathematical breakthrough. I'd guess that a lot of A-level mathematics students should be able to work this kind of thing out for themselves. So what is the point of promoting this as a piece of "academic research"?

Purpose of Denial 2

Why does it matter whether humans caused climate change? The important question surely is whether there is anything humans can or should do to reduce the future damage of climate change.

According to some religious traditions, humans are the trustees of the planet. But you don't have to be religious to believe we should care for the planet. If someone is drowning, we don't stand on the bank arguing who pushed him in, or whether he slipped. Our responsibility to help people is not limited to those we have already harmed.

I am not a climate change expert, but I think that the evidence for humans having contributed to climate change looks pretty convincing. (Good visual summary of the evidence on both sides here.) But even if it wasn't, I don't think it follows that we should just let the planet destroy itself without trying to do something.

But many people (on both sides of the climate change debate) apparently believe that climate change denial leads inevitably to a policy of non-intervention. As if to say - if God wants the planet to get warmer, who are we to stand in His way?

Clearly the factual debate has emotive consequences for international policy and collaboration. But the link is based on rhetoric rather than rational logic.