The score is Wisdom of Popular Culture - 1, Expert - 0

It is always interesting to see how people get tangled up in their own arguments. I saw an example of this in The Imperfect Myth of the Female Poisoner by Deborah Blum.

As is often the case, the issue comes down to definitions and exactly what is the argument being made. Blum starts out by knocking down an easy strawman - lots of poisonings are committed by men. Sure. Men commit 90% of murders and even if they might rarely use poison, the simple fact that men commit most of murders means that most or at least a plurality of poisonings are likely to be committed by men.

But that isn't really Blum's argument. It appears that she wants to refute a different argument.

There’s a popular idea in our culture — certainly an idea promoted by popular culture — that poison belongs to the female killer. In the 1945 Sherlock Holmes movie, Pursuit to Algiers, Holmes (Basil Rathbone) considers it obvious: “Poison is a woman’s weapon.” And you hear that same thought echoing down the decades, surfacing, for instance, in George Martin’s Game of Thrones in which poison is described, as the preferred weapon of women, craven and eunuchs.

So the real issue with which Blum is taking exception is the assertion that when committing murder, women prefer to do so by using poison. We can modify Holme's statement somewhat to make it slightly clearer - Poison is a woman's choice of weapon.

So we need evidence or data regarding which weapons do women use to commit murder. Instead, we have this statement from Blum in the next paragraph. She offers this statement as if it is conclusive evidence rebutting the assertion that women prefer poison as their weapon of choice. But really, this is a red herring and a non sequitur. This paragraph does not address the argument and is irrelevant in determining whether women prefer poison.

We could decry the latter as just a description with a somewhat misogynistic tang. But let’s not. Let’s decry it as simply wrong. Because if you actually bother to scroll back through famous poisoners of history or to check the crime statistics you will realize first that 1) poison is a gender-neutral weapon and, perhaps more central to my point, 2) a greater proportion of poisoners are men. Let’s put this in the context of some relatively recent context. The U. S. Department of Justice’s report on Homicide Trends in the United States (1980 to 2008) offers up this statistical insight: of all poison killers in that time period 60.5 percent male and 39.5 percent female.

The fact that of the few murders committed by poison, the majority are committed by men is irrelevant to the question of whether women prefer to use poison to commit murder. Blum doesn't seem to see the logical disconnect.

But at least she has sources, as so often such argumentative essays do not. She references Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008; Annual Rates for 2009 and 2010 by Alexia Cooper and Erica L. Smith. It makes for quite fascinating reading and makes a mockery of most political and policy debates about crime. It is a serial refutation of multiple bromides, shibboleths, and misperceptions.

Digging through this report, there is no data that explicitly answers the question of which weapons do women prefer when committing murder. However there is one table that hints at the answer, Table 5, Homicide type, by sex, 1980-2008.

From this table we learn that while women commit only 10% of all murders (numbers rounded), they commit even fewer of the murders using a gun. They commit 10% of all murders but only 8% of those murders committed using a handgun. However, they do commit 20% of all murders by arson and 40% of all murders by poison. So what is the means preferred by women for committing murder? Seems like Sherlock Holmes was right and Ms. Blum is wrong - Women prefer to commit murder by poisoning.

So in trying to debunk a popular stereotype, the journalist appears to A) get it wrong, B) provide the data that proves she is wrong, and C) never realizes that she got it wrong. Oh, and by the way, where were the editorial fact-checkers? This appears to be case study #12,387 where someone who is likely a big fan of critical thinking, seems to either not have that capacity or is blinded by some other agenda in a fashion that precludes such thinking. Or rather, one more data point in John Ioannidis' finding that Most Published Research Findings Are False.

Now I may be reading the report wrong, and I cannot claim any expertise in the details and history of poisoning. An expertise we perplexingly are meant to believe that Blum has:

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently the best-seller, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. She writes for a range of publications including Time, Scientific American, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times (and even the literary journal, Tin House). She is currently working on a sixth book about poisonous food.

So what is going on here? Am I wrong? Or does Ms. Blum have some other agenda that is being served? Or is Ms. Blum simply wrong despite having written many books on poisoning. I don't know, but it doesn't inspire confidence in me regarding the factual quality of what is published in certain magazines and newspapers.

It appears to me that the score is Wisdom of Popular Culture - 1, Expert - 0.