The persistence of charlatanry irritates doctors, who would much prefer to have a monopoly of foolishness as well as of wisdom. How is it that those who strain at the gnats of science so often swallow the camels of superstition?

Dr Verdo, from the town of Marmande in the Lot and Garonne, set out in 1867 to answer this question….He classified firstly the consumers and then the producers of charlatanry, using his own experience and intuition rather than the methods favoured today. This conduced to brevity, if not necessarily to accuracy.

Dalrymple has a new article for Pajamas Media regarding a recent suit by the Havasupai Indian tribe against Arizona State University for “alleged misuse of blood samples taken from members of the tribe”:

Was not the claim of harm by the plaintiffs in this respect grossly dishonest? The idea that Amerindians have an Asian origin is an old one by now, with much evidence in its favor. So if the tribe’s origin myth were susceptible to destruction by evidence and rational argument, it would have been so destroyed a long time ago. If, on the other hand, myth and science belong to two different realms of thought, then the myth could not have been affected by the study of population genetics, whatever its outcome. Palaeontology, archaeology, and anthropology can refute only the literalist interpretation of the story of the Fall.

This new piece on sentimentality in the Daily Express gives foreign aid as one example of a policy that is based on “preference of what we would like to be true over what actually is true”:

It is justified by the supposed fact that many people and countries in the world are so poor they cannot do anything to improve their situation. Therefore they need our handouts in order to escape poverty.

This is arrant nonsense. Not a single country has ever been brought to prosperity by such handouts but many countries have escaped poverty without them. India still receives British aid, though it has an advanced space programme, turns out more and better engineers than Britain and its businessmen are buying moribund British firms.

Giving India aid is a form of self-flattery. It permits us to indulge in poor-them-generous-us fantasies.

The Times carried this piece from the good doctor on Friday, though we have not read it due to its presence behind a paywall. So if you have a subscription to The Times, click away.