od Nicolson's choice of the word 'ecosystem' to describe the dyslexia community is imaginative and apposite because the essence of ecosystems is vicious competition for scarce resources}nature red in tooth and claw and the weak go to the wall. Wasting our energies on parochial competition may explain why progress in understanding dyslexia has been so painfully slow. This is not to belittle advances that have been made; but, it is truly remarkable that given the size of the problem, more resources and talent have not materialized to address it. Up to 10% of all children are dyslexic and more like 20% of adults are barely literate. Thus, one in five of our population say that they got little or nothing out of their schooling, and cannot successfully look up the word 'plumber' in the Yellow Pages. This means that reading problems are almost as common as cancer, but, unlike cancer, they sentence most to low achievement throughout their lives. Yet, cancer research and treatment probably receive more than one hundred times the resources that reading research and remediation do.
In contrast to the gentle disagreements that characterized my neurophysiological research studying the role of the cerebellum and basal ganglia in the visual guidance of movement, I was very unpleasantly surprised and shocked by the hostility which greeted me when I attempted to apply these ideas to dyslexia research; and Rod and Angela and many others have had similar experiences. If one views the dyslexia community as all competing for a larger share of scarce resources then the viciousness becomes more explicable. This ecosystem consists of an explosive mixture of high numbers of the affected, high parental emotion, yet poor understanding of the condition, hence poor definition and unreliable methods for judging the outcome of treatments coupled with low government interest, but high potential private earnings from desparate parents. In short, as Rod describes, the competing interests of parents wanting treatment that works, policy makers trying to save money, yet remain popular, teachers having limited knowledge, time and resources for the single child in the class who has these problems, researchers only knowledgeable in their limited specialism and more interested in aetiology and mechanism than treatment, lead to the competitive viciousness that so characterizes the dyslexia ecosystem.