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of your error can compactly be contained within the present letter.

The reason that I am able to assert with some confidence that your conclusion that wine

drinking increases longevity is unjustified is as follows. I have a Ph.D. in

experimental psychology from Stanford, I taught in the Department of Psychology at the

University of Western Ontario for eleven years, and my teaching and my interests fell

largely into the areas of statistics, research methodology, and data interpretation.

Everyone with expertise in scientific method will agree with me that your conclusion in

The French Paradox was unwarranted. It is not necessary to read the original research

papers on which you rely to arrive at this same judgment - even the brief review of the

research data in your broadcast, even the briefer review of your broadcast in the Kim

Marcus quotations above - is enough for someone who has studied scientific method to see

that you were wrong. Below is my explanation.

The French Paradox Research

Cannot Have Been Experimental

There are two ways in which data relating wine consumption to longevity could have been

gathered - either in an experiment, or in a correlational study. If the data had been

gathered in an experiment, then it would have been done something like this. A number

of subjects (by which I mean human experimental subjects) would have been randomly

assigned to groups, let us say 11 different groups. The benefit of random assignment is

that it guarantees that the subjects in each group are initially equivalent in every

conceivable respect - equivalent in male-female ratio, in age, in health, in income, in

diet, in smoking, in drug use, and so on. That is the magic of random assignment, and

we cannot pause to discuss it - you will have to take my word for it.

To groups that enjoy pre-treatment equality, the experimenter administers his treatment.

After constituting his random groups, the experimenter would require the subjects in

each group to drink different volumes of wine each day over many years - let us say over

the course of 30 years. Subjects assigned to the zero-glass group would be required to

drink no wine. Subjects assigned to the 1-glass group would be required to drink one

glass of wine each day. Subjects assigned to the 2-glass group would be required to

drink two glasses of wine each day. And so on up to, say, a 10-glass group, which given

that we started with a zero-glass group gives us the 11 groups that I started out

positing that we would need. As the experiment progressed, the number dying in each

group as well as the cause of death, and the health of those still alive, would be

monitored periodically.

There are many ways in which this simplest of all experiments could be refined or

elaborated, but we need not pause to discuss such complications here what I have

outlined above constitutes a simple experiment which in many circumstances would be all

that is required to determine the effect of wine consumption on longevity.

Such an experiment has never been conducted

And so you can see from my outline of what an experiment would be like that such an

experiment could never have been conducted. We know this without doing a review of the

literature, without having read a single paper on wine consumption and health.

Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is impracticable. We know it

because, in the first place, it would be impossible to get experimental subjects to

comply with the particular wine-drinking regimen to which the experimenter had assigned

them. For example, many of the subjects who found themselves in the zero-glass

condition would refuse to pass the next 30 years without drinking a drop of wine. There

is no conceivable inducement within the power of the experimenter to offer that would

tempt these experimental subjects to become teetotallers for what could be the rest of

their lives. The same at the other end of the scale - most people requested to drink

large volumes of wine each day would refuse, and the experimenter would find that he had

no resources available to him by means of which he could win compliance.

And even if the experimenter were able to offer such vast sums of money to his subjects

that every last one of them agreed to comply with the required drinking regimen - and no

experimenter has such resources - then two things would happen: (1) the subjects would

cheat, as by many in the zero-glass group sneaking drinks whenever they could, and many

in the many-glass groups drinking less than was required of them; and (2) subjects who

found their drinking regimens uncomfortable would quit the experiment. Subjects

quitting the experiment constitutes a fatal blow to experimental validity because it

transforms groups that started out randomly constituted (and thus equivalent in every

conceivable respect) into groups that are naturally constituted (and which must be

assumed to be probably different in many conceivable respects) - a conclusion that I

will not pause to explain in detail.

Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is unethical. And we know

that no such experiment has ever been conducted because it would be unethical to conduct

it, and would inevitably lead to the experimenter being sued. That is, it is unethical

in scientific research to transform people's lives in possibly harmful ways. Most

specifically, it is unethical to transform people's lives by inducing them to drink