The Limits Of Science

Pushing the Limits of Science, and of Public Relations
By Lawrence M. Krauss
New York Times
http://www10.nytimes.com:80/library/national/science/031400sci-essay.html

Description: 9 NBC Stations Ban New Cartoon
Header: 9 NBC Stations Ban New Cartoon
Trailer: CIS:NEW-95
9 NBC Stations Ban New Cartoon

"God, the Devil and Bob," a new animated comedy that premiered last night on NBC-TV is drawing fierce criticism from a number of religious groups that find the show offensive. At least nine of the 220 NBC affiliate stations nationwide have decided not to air it, saying the subject matter is objectionable. The series, which will be broadcast on Tuesday nights, centers on Bob, an everyman, and the moral questions he faces. Bob meets God in a bar. TV stations in Boise, Pocatello, and Twin Falls, Idaho; Salt Lake City, Utah; Tupelo, Hattiesburg, and Jackson, Mississippi; Shreveport, Louisiana; and South Bend, Indiana, have refused to air the program. "This kind of tasteless and trivial portrayal of God does a disservice to the millions of American television viewers who have deeply felt religious beliefs," said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. NBC responded that the series "deals with the moral dilemma of good vs. evil in each episode. As such, it follows in the long tradition of entertainment vehicles that comedically depict this universal struggle. It was never our intention to offend anyone." Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales says, "The show is blasphemous, but there's another good reason not to air it. It isn't any good." --Cathryn Conroy

According to a new Yankelovich poll, commissioned by People for the American Way, an overwhelming 83% of Americans think Darwin's theory of evolution, not creationism, belongs in science class. That means most people don't live in Kansas (WN 13 Aug 99).

Evolution-creation debate grows louder with Kansas controversy:
http://cnn.com/2000/US/03/08/creationism.vs.evolution/index.html

At Shawnee Mission Northwest High School, in Shawnee, Kansas, students are taught evolution in a biology class as part of the course curriculum
March 8, 2000
Web posted at: 2:41 p.m. EST (1941 GMT)

SHAWNEE, Kansas (CNN) -- In Kansas, where high school science standards that de-emphasize evolution take effect this fall, the issue for educators is how to put those standards into practice. It's a delicate subject throughout the United States, as the country wrestles with what to teach children about the origin of human life. Scientists condemned last summer's decision by the Kansas Board of Education making evolutionary theory optional in the state's science education standards. But creationists considered it a victory. They believe that all life in the universe was created thousands of years ago by a higher being -- a divine power. Creationists don't accept that new species can evolve from older ones -- such as humans evolving from ancient apes -- and consider evolution an unproven theory. The revised standards also omit many references to the big-bang theory -- the idea that the universe is actually billions of years old, born in an explosion of matter and radiation.

Evolution 'is a fact'

Al Frisby, a high school biology teacher in Kansas who now includes evolution in his curriculum, was infuriated by the board's action. "We have fossil evidence for evolution. It's a fact. And I'll dare to say it. It's a fact," said Frisby, who teaches at Shawnee Mission Northwest High School, outside Kansas City. "What else will the state board do? Will they take out verbs from English for some political or religious reason?" The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that states cannot teach creationism. Since then, some creationists have turned to attacking evolution's validity.

'Let the students make up their own mind'

Board member John Bacon said the action taken by his Kansas colleagues puts both positions on an equal footing. "Rather than mandate one theory over another," he said, "we took both off and said, 'Just let the scientific evidence speak for itself and let the students make up their own minds.'" Kansas Board of Education member John Bacon says the board wants students to decide for themselves which theory to believe. Under the Kansas order, local school districts will decide for themselves what is -- or isn't -- taught about evolution and the big-bang theory. But critics of the new standards worry that some schools won't include those subjects because they no longer will be covered on standardized tests given to Kansas students.

A U.S. dilemma

While the Kansas controversy has drawn most recent attention, the creationist position seems to have wide support nationwide. A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll found that 68 percent of those surveyed favored teaching creationism along with evolution in public schools; 40 percent favored dropping evolution altogether and teaching children only the biblical version of creation. The findings, though, are not necessarily a trend. Developments from around the United States following the Kansas decision in August show varying approaches to creationist-evolutionist controversy and how it should be addressed in classrooms: In August, the Kansas Board of Education voted to drop evolutionary theories from the state's science standards

--The Arizona legislature is considering a measure that would require teachers to present scientific evidence that both supports and discredits the theory of evolution.

--Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson ruled last month that a state committee had no authority to require that biology textbooks carry a disclaimer saying evolution is a "controversial theory." The committee said the disclaimer, adopted in November, was added because biology texts do not devote enough space to alternate explanations of how life began.

--A poll of West Virginians released last month found that most people would like more biblically oriented teaching in public schools. A majority (57 percent) said the biblical account of creation is more likely to be the "actual explanation for the origin of human life on earth," while 9 percent selected evolution. Thirty percent said it is most likely that "both are true," while 4 percent were undecided and less than 1 percent said neither is true.

--In Kanawha County, West Virginia, where a policy banning the teaching of "creation science" was approved in 1987, a resolution to reverse the ban was defeated by the school board last December. The measure would have allowed teachers to use their classrooms to challenge theories of evolution.

--Last October, Kentucky's education department deleted the word "evolution" from its standards, replacing it with "change over time."

--The New Mexico Board of Education went the opposite way in October, when it said teachers no longer have to teach creationism alongside evolution. The state education standards had required teachers to "present the evidence for and against" evolution.

Correspondent Patty Davis and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

There is a wonderful new skeptic radio program coming out of Boulder, of all places. "Prove It!" is a two-hour program run every Sunday from 4-6pm. Hosts John Hughes and Peter Jones do a professional job at covering a wide range of topics from Holocaust Revisionism to Aromatherapy. You can tune into KWAB 1490 AM in the Boulder area or listen via the internet at: http://www.workingassetsradio.com/boulder/

London Times, March 9, 2000

Professor W. D. Hamilton, FRS, biologist, was born on August 1, 1936. He died on March 7 aged 63

The evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton was one of the leaders of what has been called "the second Darwinian revolution", and Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, has called him one of the most important Darwinians of the 20th century.

Hamilton, who taught at Oxford for his last 15 years, proposed the theory of kin selection as an explanation of why animals are sometimes altruistic towards each other, despite the struggle for the survival of the fittest. He then moved on to the difficult problem of the evolution of sex from asexual reproduction, and proposed the now widely discussed parasite theory.

He began the now widespread effort among evolutionary biologists to make sense of a set of phenomena - in particular social behaviour, sex and senescence - which at first sight are hard to explain by a simple Darwinian model of the survival of the fittest. This work was initiated by Hamilton's two 1964 papers on The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour, and he was a leader in the field ever afterwards. The papers were the result of his work as a doctoral student, when he was supervised by an economist at the London School of Economics and a statistical geneticist at University College London. Probably neither of them had the remotest idea what their student was up to, for he was always something of a loner.

The problem Hamilton set is easy to pose but hard to answer. If natural selection favours the survival and reproduction of the individual, how are we to explain behaviours such as the bee dance, in which a sterile worker informs an equally sterile sister about the nature and direction of a source of food?

By the time it reached the editor of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Hamilton's 1964 paper had baffled two academic referees, though they admitted that it might be important. The third referee, John Maynard Smith, was at first equally baffled - Hamilton's mathematics are hard to follow now, and were harder then - but when he read the main argument, he pressed strongly for the paper to be published.

The argument began with ants, bees and wasps. These have a peculiar genetic system which results in a female having more genes in common with her sisters than with her daughters, a state of affairs which, Hamilton noted, "is very favourable to the evolution of reproductive altruism". This means that a gene which causes an individual to act so as to favour the survival of a relative will increase in frequency if, on average, more copies of the gene are transmitted to future generations by the individual or its relatives.

Hamilton had formulated the idea in a brief paper in 1963, where he argued that if there is a gene G which causes its carrier to act altruistically, "the ultimate criterion which determines whether G will spread is not whether the behaviour is to the benefit of the behaver but whether it is to the benefit of the gene G". The key is to see the matter from the point of view of the genes, rather than the creatures.

It is reported that when T. H. Huxley first saw Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, he remarked "how stupid not to have thought of that", and many biologists had the same reaction when they read Hamilton's paper, offering as it did a whole new way of thinking about evolutionary questions.

This work became the basis of a continuing attempt to explain altruistic behaviour in terms of relatedness, not only in social insects, but at all levels of the living world, from the origin of life to the origin of human beings. Although first developed to explain self-sacrificing behaviour in animals, Hamilton's ideas became the basis of sociobiology, an attempt to reduce the social sciences to a branch of biology, and the later and less naive evolutionary psychology. Hamilton was sympathetic to these attempts to apply Darwinian ideas to human society, but his own work remained grounded in natural history.

If he had published nothing since 1964, he would still be one of the great scientific minds. But he went on generating ideas, essentially by tackling phenomena that at first sight do not make Darwinian sense. He wrote on the evolution of ageing, and of cases in which the numbers of males and females in a species are grossly unequal (foreshadowing the application of game theory to evolution).

His main preoccupation in later years, however, was the evolution of sex. Again, the problem is easy to formulate but hard to solve. The problem is as follows. Natural selection favours entities that reproduce rapidly. At the cellular level, reproduction is the process whereby one cell splits into two. In the sexual process, two cells fuse to form one. Why bother to do this?

Two classes of solution have been suggested. First, populations that reproduce sexually can evolve faster: secondly, such populations are better at getting rid of harmful mutations. Hamilton preferred the first class of answer, but he was unhappy with any explanation that depends on an advantage to the population rather than to the individual.

He saw that if sex is to be explained by an advantage to the sexual individual, the rate at which the environment is changing, and hence the requirement for an evolutionary response, must be very great. He then suggested that there is one feature of the environment that may change rapidly enough to give sexual individuals an advantage over females reproducing by virgin birth. There is a continuing evolutionary race between us and our parasites, and sexual individuals have an advantage in such a race. The matter is still controversial, but Hamilton's ideas look very likely to be part of the answer.

Hamilton's ability to continue producing original ideas depended on a rare combination of two characteristics: he was a brilliant and clear-thinking inventor of models, and, like Darwin, he was also a passionate and knowledgeable naturalist. The stimuli for his theoretical ideas came from details of natural history. For example, his ideas concerning the evolution of the sex ratio were stimulated by facts about parasitic wasps that few biologists would have known. Analogously, Darwin tells us that his ideas about evolution originated in observations on the finches of the Galapagos.

Hamilton was not a charismatic lecturer - he once stopped in the middle of a talk, staring into space for some two minutes while he tried to think out the answer to a question he had just raised - but at the individual level he was a stimulating teacher of young research workers, provided they did not expect to be told what to do.

He died at an age when he still had so much to offer, from malaria contracted on a trip to Africa in search of new challenges from the natural world that he loved.

William Donald Hamilton was educated at Tonbridge School and St John's College, Cambridge, before becoming a lecturer in genetics at Imperial College, London, in 1964. He moved to the University of Michigan in 1978, and since 1984 he had been Royal Society Research Professor in the zoology department at Oxford. He also held numerous visiting professorships abroad.

He was elected to the Royal Society in 1980, received the Darwin Medal in 1988, the Linnean Medal in 1989 and the Frink Medal in 1991, as well as many other awards and honours.

In 1967 he married Christine Friess, who survives him, along with their three daughters. He is also survived by his partner of recent years, Luisa Bozzi.

By Tom Alex
Des Moines Register, March 6
http://www.dmregister.com/news/stories/c4788993/10719354.html

Mike Roberts came home Tuesday morning and found broken glass and a stranger bleeding on his couch. The man denied breaking into Roberts' house. Brian Waddington told police he could think of only one explanation: Two hours earlier, he had been abducted by aliens in Davenport and placed in the house. Police say that's Waddington's story and, at last report, he was sticking to it.

Nevertheless, Waddington, 37, of 701 S.W. Loomis Ave., was arrested on a charge of burglary. After being treated at Broadlawns Medical Center for cuts on his arms, he was taken to the City Jail and held on $13,000 bond. Roberts, 30, said he knew something was wrong when he noticed a light on at his home in the 600 block of Southwest Creston Avenue.

"I came home about 6 a.m. to feed the dog, and I found the back-door glass broken out. I walked into the house and found water running and blood all over the floor," he said.

Roberts assumed that a burglar had already left, but moments later he found a man sitting on a couch.

"He acted like he belonged there," Roberts said. "I grabbed him and threw him on the floor and screamed at him. He said, 'Don't hurt me, don't hurt me.' "

Date: Saturday, March 11, 2000 8:49:40 PM
From: JamesOberg
Disney's Legendary
'Alien Encounters' Sneak
TV Documentary Quotes
3-10-00

Several years ago, the Disney company aired a major one-hour television Special, with no advance notice, on stations in only 5 US cities. Thanks to a few viewers who were able to roll their vcrs and capture it, we have a record of the startling quotes and statements it contained.

In light of the current, purported 'rift' between Disney and NASA over the content of Disney's new film, "Mission To Mars", I thought it pertinent to revisit those quotes.

My thanks to my colleague Michael Lindemann of CNI News for his file containing the many arresting and downright shocking statements in that Disney special...which appears now, as it did then, to have been a definite probe to measure public reaction to news of the reality of visitation and interaction with various forms of non-human intelligent life.

Remember, the quotes you are about to read were delivered by Disney CEO Michael Eisner and program narrator Robert Urich with straight, matter-of-fact, totally serious cadence and inflection.

Script excerpts from "Alien Encounters From New Tomorrowland" All quotes were spoken by host/narrator Robert Urich unless otherwise noted.

INTRO sequence, over various UFO photos and film: "This is not swamp gas. It is not a flock of birds. This is an actual spacecraft from another world, piloted by alien intelligence, one sighting from tens of thousands made over the last fifty years on virtually every continent on the globe. Intelligent life from distant galaxies is now attempting to make open contact with the human race. And tonight, we'll show you the evidence."

Michael Eisner [standing in front of what looks like a military hangar, guarded by about a dozen heavily armed troops]: "Tonight we celebrate the New Tomorrowland at Walt Disney World in Florida with a television special that's out of this world. Hello, I'm Michael Eisner, head of the Walt Disney Company. At a top secret military installation somewhere in the United States, there are those who believe that the government is hiding the remains of an alien spacecraft that mysteriously crashed to earth. With more and more scientific evidence of alien encounters and UFO sightings, the idea of creatures from another planet might not be as far-fetched as we once thought. In fact, one of you out there could have the next alien encounter. Enjoy tonight's special. I'm going to walk over and see if I can sneak a peak. (soldiers raise weapons) Maybe not!"

Urich: "Scientific verification of extraterrestrial life forms routinel arriving on earth -- top secret reports from ongoing military investigations -- compelling home videos of alien craft captured within the last few months -- world figures who have gone public with their own extraterrestrial experiences -- the shocking history of government misinformation programs designed to prevent widespread panic -- and personal accounts of those who have been abducted and studied against their will...

"From beyond the boundaries of our perceptions, intelligent beings are beckoning mankind to join the galactic community. It's an invitation which is both wondrous and terrifying. This is the nature of alien encounters.

"Now as we approach the new millennium, mankind is in the midst of the most profound event in history -- actual contact with intelligent life from other planets. For nearly years, officials have been documenting routine alien encounters here on earth, and thousands of people have seen or experienced this alien presence. Yet many others still refuse to acknowledge the obvious evidence all around them. What is it like to be confronted by a creature whose intelligence and skill is far beyond the comprehension of mankind? Would it be enlightening? Would it be an exercise in terror? Or perhaps both?

"At the Walt Disney World resort near Orlando, Florida, these concepts are brought to life as guests experience their own alien encounter, a sensory thriller from Disney and George Lukas. We'll give you a sneak preview later in the show. But first, we must prepare you for the future with some shocking insights from the recent past.

"Alien ships seem to arrive in waves, and if the last few years are any indication, planet Earth is experiencing a tsunami of sightings... In the last few months of 1994 and lately in 1995, Gulf Breeze, Florida has been ground zero for alien encounters. Especially during the day, extraterrestrial craft have become common ornaments in the uneasy skies....You would think these alien sightings would be front-page news. So why have they received almost no national attention? The answer is simple. For governments determined to maintain their authority, extraterrestrial contact is pure dynamite.

Kevin Randle: "There's beings from another planet. We don't know where they come from, we don't know what they're doing here. There's nothing we can do about it...Any time a technologically superior civilization comes in contact with a technologically inferior civilization, the technologically inferior civilization ceases to exist. Not necessarily through conquest, not necessarily through invasion, but because the technology changes the underlying social structures of that civilization, and it disintegrates."

Urich: "Those fears are reflected in a 1960 federally funded study by the Brookings Institution, which warned that public knowledge of alien life could cause civilization to collapse."

"Why have aliens chosen to visit our small blue planet, hidden on the distant fringes of an insignificant star cluster? Well, we invited them here.

"When we return: What is attracting alien visitors to planet earth -- Extraterrestrials take aim on America's military -- a crashed saucer becomes a top-secret bombshell -- the nation's capital becomes a cosmic cross-roads -- and later, how Disney imagineers have disigned a way to prepare humans for their inevitable alien encounter."

"There have been reports of alien encounters throughout recorded history, often buried in the obscure poetry of mystics. But since the end of World War II, alien encounters have adopted a darker, more menacing demeanor. No longer just spirited lights dancing in the sky, UFOs turned more brazen, announcing themselves with surprising ferocity."

"Most alien activity on earth in this century seems to have been sparked by the single most profound technological achievement in human history. The atomic bomb did more than blow away every conventional notion of combat. It also saddled mankind with the awesome responsibility of life and death for the entire planet. But what the world didn't know in 1945 was that the atomic bomb's brilliant burst of energy would also be mankind's cosmic calling card, announcing to the universe that a technological society had evolved on a small blue planet in the backwaters of the stars...So as the world celebrated the war's end in 1945, aliens who heard man's atomic trumpet were already charting their course toward earth, responding to our open invitation.

"As early as 1947, the large alien ships began to arrive, navigated by living creatures. Their advanced physics allowed them to traverse the galaxy and pierce earth's atmosphere with amazing speed. The U.S. military immediately went on the alert against the unknown menace. Sightings were perceived as threats to the security still reeling from the edgy consciousness of war. And the sightings were taking place all across the country...

"Occasionally the tables were turned. More than one alien craft crashed and was recovered for secret U.S. military research. The most famous case took place in July of 1947 just outside the community of Roswell, New Mexico -- famous, because local officials openly admitted they had retrieved an alien ship before their commanders instructed them to keep the story confidential. What you can't explain, they reasoned, you must deny.

"This is the actual site where the Roswell saucer was discovered, along with the bodies of three extraterrestrial missionaries who didn't servive the collision. The debris and the dead were impounded and taken away for top secret study, while a classified investigative committee called the Majestic Twelve was organized by President Truman, and a government cover-up was initiated with a calculated disinformation campaign....

"But while the Pentagon refused to publicly admit aliens had arrived on earth, their top secret internal memos told a different story, even detailing the various ships and the creatures they had autopsied...

"By the early 1960s, UFOs were having a chilling effect on our defense operations. Their tremendous speed often caused them to be misidentified as incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles, putting American air bases on red alert. There needed to be some way for the U.S. and the Soviets to distinguish between nuclear attack and alien visitors.

[Newsreel footage about installation of Hot Line]

Clifford Stone: "The Hot Line between Moscow and Washington was set up so that they could go ahead and make last-minute pleas, that 'We're not attacking you, and you're not attacking us.' The purpose of this was to insure that a nuclear war would not be touched off by a UFO appearing on the scopes and being mistaken for enemy aircraft."

Urich: "The Hot Line eased some international tensions, but it didn't halt the intereaction between the military and the aliens, which continues to this day."

Stone: "November of 1975, essentially every SAC base in the United States was visited by UFOs. We have reason to believe that the UFOs went ahead and had some effect on changing the codes within the missiles, within the launch control facility, to change where the missiles would hit. 1976, September, Iran, two F-4s try to intercept a UFO and shoot at one of the UFOs. The weapons systems of the planes go dead, the communications systems go dead. These are just two examples of cases that cound like they came out of science fiction, but in reality, they're from government documentation, documents released by the State Department."

Urich: "Indications are that government, military and scientific leaders will soon release nearly a half-century of official documentation of ongoing alien encounters on earth. Perhaps they feel it would be too embarrassing NOT to reveal the truth, before the truth reveals itself. But these FBI files acquired through the Freedom of Information Act outline nearly fifty years of UFO reports investigated by federal agents all across America, overwhelming evidence that something sinister is at work."

"The fact is, everyone encounters alien lifeforms each day. We've just become accustomed to ignoring the evidence. We expect the first visitors from outer space to arrive in flying saucers. But there are new scientific suggetions that the microbiotic organisms which routinely invade human bodies in the form of viral disease may have extraterrestrial connections. These minute alien life forms may very well be the advance invasion force, leading the way to test earth's environment for more complex and determined creatures....

"Life is plentiful in the universe, and eerily tenacious. Lately, scientists have found extraordinary numbers of unknown organisms which have gained a biological foothold where we once thought survival would be impossible. They grow in deadly ammonia gas. They are resistant to ultraviolet radiation. They thrive inside the radioactive cooling systems of nuclear power plants. And they can even survive the vacuum of space, re-animating themselves when air and water become available. Riding inside the stone cacoon of a meteor, life can travel virtually anywhere, and a good deal of it lands on planet earth.

"But just as we explore the genetic package of alien life, visitors from space are routinely examining human specimens, abducting men, women and children in order to conduct disturbing biological experiments...

[long sequence on abduction, clips of Budd Hopkins and numerous abductees.]

"This particular report from October of 1969 was filled out by Jimmy Carter. He was still Governor of Georgia at the time he witnessed a luminous object suspended in the twilight sky. Later, when he assumed the office of President of the United States, his staff atempted to explore the availability of official investigations into alien contact. As this internal government memo illustrates, there are some security secrets outside the jurisdiction of the White House."

[picture focuses on a few words of a document suggesting info not available to certain officials, but not enough words are visible to determine exactly what is said.]

"Every year, NASA routinely propels about two dozen astronauts into a low earth orbit aboard the space shuttle, a loud, lumbering, somewhat primitive rocket ship. But most Americans will likely explore outer space aboard crafts of alien origin. Statistics indicate a greater probability that you will experience extraterrestrial contact in the next five years than the chances that you will win a state lottery. But how do you prepare for such an extraordinary event?

"Here in the New Tomorrowland at Disney World, scientists and Disney engineers have brought to life a possible scenario that helps acclimate the public to their inevitable alien encounter.

"Welcome to the new Tomorrowland Convention Center in the Magic Kingdom, where humans can enjoy their first taste of the future, as well as advanced extraterrestrial technology, and begin to understand the disturbing facets of alien intelligence...

[scenes of new ride emphasize the "extra-terror-estrial" quality of the event, as both technology and alien life forms run amok.]

[conclusion] "Planet earth has always been a laboratory for alien life forms which can drop in from space or slowly mutate into bizarre fleshy organisms at our feet. [holding a large mushroom] Understanding the nature of these strange creatures from above, and below, is the greatest challenge of our age. We now know that our future, indeed the future of earth itself, rests in the balance of the solid and the ethereal, of common sense and the irrational, in our relationship with alien life as grotesque as a fungus, or as glorious as the heavens."

Courtesy of Dr. Michael Kane from Georgia State University:

LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists say they have cast doubts on the prevalence of False Memory Syndrome and the idea that recovered memories are often bogus ones induced by therapists.

The theory that memories of events which never occurred can be constructed by suggestion during therapy has been used successfully as a defense by those accused of child abuse, to discredit children's testimony.

Researchers at University College London claim their study of data from 236 adults with recovered memories shows many are of true past events.

"There is now consistent evidence that 'False Memory Syndrome' cannot explain all, or even most, examples of recovered memories of trauma," the British Psychological Society said in a statement.

"There is increasing evidence that many recovered memories cannot be explained by so-called False Memory Syndrome. To date there is no convincing evidence for a specific False Memory Syndrome," Dr. Bernice Andrews, who conducted the study, told Reuters.

"What we've shown is that a substantial proportion of these memories have been corroborated," she said in a telephone interview.

Contrary to common belief, she added, not all repressed memories are about childhood sexual abuse. They can result from many types of trauma and not all are recovered during therapy.

"People often come into therapy because they have started to remember things that have happened in the past. In our study around a third of cases were people who came into therapy after recovering memories," said Andrews.

She and her colleagues interviewed 108 qualified therapists about the 236 patients. They said the most common triggers for recovering memories were events concerning patients' own children that they associated with violence or fear that they felt themselves.

Less often books, videos and memory recovery techniques were used to help patients recall the events.

"Therapists in the majority of cases do not use aggressive, suggestive techniques to get their clients to remember things. They (memories) come up just as a matter of course during therapy and are often accompanied by a lot of emotion as though the person is reliving the event in the present," Andrews explained.

The researchers said their study cannot prove that all recovered memories are true.

"You certainly can't explain all instances of people recovering memories in therapy in terms of so-called False Memory Syndrome," Andrews added.