The Sun today published an article about the connection between smoking parents and delinquent children. A survey asked 830 teenagers about their parents’ smoking habits and their own criminal activity. Those who reported that their parents smoked were statistically more likely to admit to going off the rails.

Professor Colin Pritchard, of Bournemouth University, offered his interpretation of the data. The conclusion that he drew is that there is a causal connection, that parents smoking causes their children to misbehave. He therefore called for new warnings to be displayed on cigarette packets, detailing the social and psychological effects on one’s offspring that smoking can have.

Pritchard’s conclusion is over-drawn. The mere fact that there is a correlation between parents smoking and children misbehaving does not imply that one causes the other. To suggest that it does is to commit the correlation not causation fallacy.

Besides, if we must conclude that there is a causal connection, why not infer that it is in the opposite direction, that having delinquent children causes parents to smoke? The correlation uncovered by the survey is equally good evidence for this conclusion as it is for that drawn by Pritchard.

In fact, though, it seems more likely that there is no direct causal connection between smoking parents and delinquency; it may well be that the two are independent but have a common cause, such as class.

Working class parents are more likely to smoke. Working class children have higher levels of delinquency. We would therefore expect to find these two things together even if there is no direct causal link between them.

The Tory party today attacked Labour for what it claimed is excessive spending on public relations: over £322 million / year. This includes the wages of over 3200 press officers. Things weren’t like this under the previous government, the Conservatives have pointed out.

As it was reported in a Guardian article, the Conservatives’ complaint was supported almost entirely by a comparison of current and past figures on spending. The article repeatedly contrasted the current figures with those from nine years ago, when the Tories were last in charge.

In 1997 the cost of government PR was just a third of the current £322 million at £111 million, it points out. Back then there were just 300 press officers in Whitehall, compared to around 1800 today, it continues. Tax-payers money is being wasted, it is inferred.

Now the government spending on PR does seem over-the-top. However, simply comparing current figures with previous figures doesn’t prove that.

Things have changed since 1997; the rise in 24-hour news and the increase in demand for news that it has created, for example, means that there is greater pressure on the government to provide information to the press than there was before. Other factors may also justify a rise in spending.

Besides, for all that is said in the article it may be that the Tories were guilty of under-spending on public relations. If all we have is a comparison of two sets of figures, then how are we to decide whether current spending is too high or past spending was too low?

Simply looking at the past and assuming that things should be the same now is a logical error: the appeal to history fallacy. A little more is needed to show that Labour have been over-spending on spin.

One of the phenomena that opponents of religion have to explain is religious experience. If God does not exist, then why do so many people claim to have experienced him directly?

One possible explanation of widespread religious experience is the existence of a “God-Spot” in the brain. There is a theory that just as there is a particular part of the brain responsible for pain, and a particular part of the brain responsible for emotion, so there is a particular part of the brain responsible for experiences of God. According to this theory, our brains are so constituted that they can cause religious experiences whether there’s a god out there or not.

If this is correct, then people having experiences of God doesn’t prove that he exists; an alternative, naturalistic explanation of religious experience can be given.

Scientists from the University of Montreal have claimed to have disproved this theory. They took a group of nuns, and asked them to describe their mystical experiences. As the nuns did this, their brains were monitored to see if there was a peak in activity in any particular part of it. There wasn’t. The scientists concluded that there is no God-spot in the brain.

If this account of the experiment, which is based on that given by BBC News, is accurate, then the scientists have made a fairly basic error. The observational data that they collected simply does not support the inference that they are reported to have drawn.

If we wanted to locate the pain-centres in the brain, we would not measure the brain-activity of someone remembering a time when they were in pain, or describing what pain feels like. We would measure the brain-activity of someone who we were jabbing on the hand with a pin (or something similar), someone who was actually experiencing pain.

Similarly, to find out whether a particular part of the brain is associated with religious experiences, one would have to measure the brain-activity of someone having a religious experience. Measuring the brain-activity of someone describing a religious experience is not the same thing.

If we take the BBC News report at face value, this seems to be a case of misrepresenting the data. Perhaps there is more to the study than made it into the report. Perhaps the scientists’ findings have been misrepresented, or they have offered some explanation of why brain-activity in someone describing a religious experience is a good guide to brain-activity in someone having a religious experience. I hope so.

As it has been reported, though, there is a massive gap between the research and the inference drawn. The evidence given in the BBC article simply doesn’t support the conclusion that it is supposed to.