Skeptico

Iran - 2,000 Years Behind

An mother of two has been found guilty of adultery in an Iranian court. Adultery is a crime? Yes, apparently it is in Iran. Sharia law.  We know she’s guilty though because she confessed after being subjected to 99 lashes. Want to know the best part? Her sentence is death by stoning.

Actually no, that’s not the best part. As CNN report in Iranian mother of two to be stoned to death, she’ll be buried up to her chest first:

Ashtiani, 42, will be buried up to her chest, according to an Amnesty International report citing the Iranian penal code. The stones that will be hurled at her will be large enough to cause pain but not so large as to kill her immediately.

Actually The Guardian reports that if the convicted person manages to free themselves from the hole, the death sentence is commuted. Well that's OK then. Although they also say the victim is buried up to her neck, not chest. (Men only get buried up to their waists.)

In a masterpiece of understatement, the US Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley apparently said:

"From the United States' standpoint, we don't think putting women to death for adultery is an appropriate punishment."

Really? You “don’t think”? Not “appropriate”? Christ, what’s wrong with you? How about this is totally wrong on any level no matter what the crime? And according to Amnesty International, there are several other women in Iran waiting the same punishment.

Amnesty International is trying to pressurize Iran to commute these death sentences. One would hope that the State Department could also muster a somewhat stronger response that that of the lame P.J. Crowley.

Doctor's Data Sues Quackwatch

Here we go again. Another purveyor of a questionable medical therapy, when criticized, rather than refute the criticisms with evidence, attempts to silence its critic with legal action. Via Orac, read how Doctor’s Data ignored Stephen Barrett’s explanation of How the "Urine Toxic Metals" Test Is Used to Defraud Patients, and is suing him to have the criticisms removed.

Doctor’s Data’s test, aims to show that a patient has elevated levels of mercury that need to be lowered with chelation. Chelation that is then provided by the practitioner who ordered the test. Unfortunately, the test itself involves first giving the patient a chelating agent that provokes an increased mercury reading. Since this chelating agent is designed to bind with mercury and excrete it in the urine, it is hardly surprising that urine, tested after administering the chelating agent, has higher than normal levels of mercury.  As Barrett pointed out, the reference range that is used to show mercury levels are too high, is based on non-provoked tests.

Of course, Doctor’s Data’s lawsuit is just an attempt at intimidation. We know that because Barrett replied to Doctor’s Data, asking them to identify exactly what Barrett got wrong in his write up, with explanations as to why he had been wrong. Doctor’s Data’s lawyers ignored this request and instead replied only with more threatening bluster. On June 18, Doctor's Data filed suit against Barrett and his related websites, claiming $10 million in damages. They’re also asking the court to instruct Barrett to remove immediately all criticism of Doctor’s Data pending the completion of their lawsuit (which could take years). As Barrett writes:

Very few people provide the type of information I do. One reason for this is the fear of being sued. Knowledgeable observers believe that Doctor's Data is trying to intimidate me and perhaps to discourage others from making similar criticisms. However, I have a right to express well-reasoned opinions and will continue to do so. If you would like to help with the cost of my defense, please follow the instructions on our donations page.

Barrett’s Quackwatch is a valuable source of information about dubious medical practices.  He doesn’t deserve this sleazy treatment from Doctor’s Data. If you are able, please consider donating to Dr. Barrett’s expenses.

The Vatican - Still Doesn't Get It

First some positive news. It seems the authorities in one country have decided that accusations of raping children deserve a proper investigation. Belgian prosecutors this week raided the headquarters of the Belgian Catholic Church as part of their investigation into child sex abuse claims, as reported by the BBC in Belgian Catholic offices raided in sex abuse probe:

Brussels prosecutors were looking for material relating to allegations of sex abuse, a spokesman for the prosecutors' office said.

"This is a case that the Brussels prosecutors' office received recently, containing a statement of facts in relation to alleged sexual abuse of minors by a number of people within the Church," said Jean-Marc Meilleur.

"The object of the searches is to verify the declaration and eventually gather evidence about these declarations."

Finally, the prosecution body of one country at least has decided that professing belief in a magic invisible sky fairy doesn’t mean that you can rape children without the possibility of being prosecuted. Better late than never. Let’s hope that other countries now follow suit.

Regular criminals, when investigated, usually profess innocence at this point, as they are entitled to do.  The Vatican though, sings a different tune. They are shocked, shocked I tell you, that the authorities dare to treat the church as though they didn’t have a special exemption to the rules that affect everyone else.  You just knew this was coming: Vatican 'indignant' over Belgium police raids

The Vatican has expressed shock at raids, including the "violation" of a cathedral crypt, by Belgian police investigating alleged child sex abuse.

Get that? the Vatican is shocked, not that its priests would rape children, but that the authorities would dare to investigate such alleged crimes. Shocked, not that children were violated, but that a bleeding crypt if you please was violated. It gets better:

The Vatican has summoned the Belgian ambassador to the Holy See to voice anger over Thursday's raids.

I hope the Belgian ambassador told them to go to hell.

And just when you thought they couldn’t get any more hyperbolic, one of their men in dresses tells us Belgium raids 'worse than Communist era'

The Vatican has stepped up its criticism of raids by Belgian police investigating alleged child sex abuse, calling the detention of priests "serious and unbelievable".

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, said "there are no precedents, not even under the old communist regimes".

He goes on to claim that the priests were held for nine hours without food or drink, which if true would be wrong. The accused deserve to be treated according to the law, which should include the rights to food and drink, not to mention a lawyer. But there are “no precedents” for this? “Not even under the old communist regimes”? Doubtful. I think what he means is that there are “no precedents” for treating the Catholic Church just like any other body that is accused of breaking the law. Which may well be true. And it’s about time such a precedent was set.

Allison Dubois Reads Newspaper, Tells Police

On April 8, 2009, eight year old Tori Stafford of Ontario was abducted and murdered.  Her body was found in a field by a police investigator, just over three months later on July 21st.  A sad and too common story.  But not too sad for the vultures to use it for their own ends.

The vulture in question is (yet again) Allison Dubois.  Eager to gain publicity from this tragedy, she is claiming she helped the police working on the case, as reported in Medium depicted Tori's fate to cops:

“It was amazing — Tori had been missing about three weeks, and I was standing, facing her school, noticing things like the senior’s building next to the school and it was at that moment ... that I told the police officer she had met someone whom she had met before, through her mother, and that she had been lured to her death.”

Dubois recalled she described the terrain where they would find the girl’s body and that two people were involved, including a woman who had been used as the lure.

“That’s the only reason Tori went with her, because she was familiar with her,” she said.

[My bold.]

Dubois’s story wasn’t that far off.  Two people – a man and a woman – were later arrested for the alleged murder of the little girl, and are currently facing trial.  No wonder Dubois is talking about it.

Funny thing though.  On April 22, 2009 (for those playing at home, that would be two weeks after the little girl had gone missing and therefore a full week before Dubois supposedly gave her information to the police) - police released a sketch of a woman who was suspected of having been involved in the little girl’s abduction:

This composite image of a woman sought in the abduction of eight-year-old Tori Stafford, based on the unidentified woman seen in a surveillance video leading Stafford by the hand shortly after she went missing.

The father of an Ontario girl who vanished more than two weeks ago said he “strongly believes” he knows the person in a composite sketch of a woman caught on surveillance video with his daughter, but the girl’s mother says she doesn’t recognize the woman.

So a week before Dubois reportedly told police that a woman (possibly known to the little girl) was involved in the abduction, the local papers reported that a woman (possibly known to the little girl) was involved in the abduction.  Hey, you don’t supposed Dubois saw the picture of the alleged abductor in the press, and simply regurgitated the information to the police, do you?  Nah, couldn’t be.  She must have used her awesome psychic powers.  Because only someone with psychic powers could have known that a woman might have been involved.  Well, either that or someone who had, you know, read the local paper the previous week.

Another funny thing, given Allison’s awesome psychic ability, is that it isn’t all that clear that the abductor was “someone whom [the little girl] had met before,” as Allison claimed.  For example, read this report from CTV Toronto:

Although the suspects know Victoria's parents, police don't believe they knew who their daughter was at the time she was kidnapped, sources say.

Admittedly it's not totally clear, but it does appear that the little girl didn’t know her abductors, and so it seems unlikely that “the only reason” the little girl went with the woman was “because she was familiar with her,” as Dubois claimed.  Also, it doesn’t appear that Allison was much help in finding the body, as she implied.  From the National Post:

Stafford's remains were found Sunday by a veteran police investigator searching on his own in a rural field about 500 metres off Concession No. 6, just east of Mount Forest, Ont., about 130 kilometres northwest of Toronto.

The detective, acting on a hunch, found the bones down a lonely dirt track in a secluded, heavily bushed area across the road from a grey, brick house surrounded by rolling, green farmland.

Just regular police work then.  I guess Allison, despite her undoubted psychic abilities, was no help at all to the police.  Just as Allison Dubois was no help in catching the Baseline killer either.  Well, you can’t say she’s not consistent.

Considering this happened a year ago, I wondered why we are only just in the last few days, hearing about Allison's invaluable help in not catching the perpetrators or finding the body.  So I checked and – funny story - I discovered that this story broke just before Dubois is due to visit Canada for a series of speaking engagements starting Monday May 17th - Toronto, ON - buy tickets VIP almost Sold Out!  $150 a pop (“No one attending the event is guaranteed a reading.”)  Obviously a coincidence.  Interestingly, if you Google "tori stafford" "allison dubois" you get four pages of stories, most of which include the line “come face to face with the image of Tori Stafford” – ie it’s all the exact same story reprinted by different media.  A cynic might almost think that Allison’s publicist had done an excellent job with this non story.  In reality, the only remarkable thing about this is how unremarkable Dubois’s supposed psychic predictions actually were.

Thanks to reader Dean for the original link.

More on Allison's awesome psychic abilities

Skeptico on Allison Dubois:

Medium guesses about serial killer

Allison Dubois no help in catching killer

A walking, camera-strutting, fake-ghost-talking joke

Secretary to the dead

Burden of proof

The Two Percent Company on Allison Dubois

Allison Dubois Week

Allison DuBois - Even More of a Hypocrite Than Previously Thought

Polar Opposites

James Van Praagh Missed Barbara Walters' Heart Valve Disease

Pretend-psychic James Van Praagh is claiming success in predicting Barbara Walters’ recent medical problems.  Get a load of this:

Two years ago, psychic James Van Praagh privately warned Barbara Walters about her health, only to be called out later on the TV icon’s daytime talk show, “The View” – and now, with Barbara headed for heart surgery, he has come forward to Access Hollywood to explain what happened.

“I felt very, very bad for her as anyone would,” James told Access’ Tony Potts of Monday’s announcement that Barbara would undergo heart surgery for a faulty valve. “A horrible thing to happen to anybody.”

However, he explained that he felt the news was “a validation of what I got for her at that time.”

[…]

“I tuned into her and I said, ‘Something is bad with your blood,’” James said of their backstage discussion. “It’s not moving correctly… you have to watch it. It might not be right now, it could be in the future.”

He also told her he sensed issues with her white blood cells and her back.

[…]

“She owes me an apology,” he continued.

Let’s review the facts.  Van Praagh predicts that a 78 year old woman has something other than perfect health – specifically “something is bad with your blood.”  Note: her blood.  She immediately had medical tests done that showed there was no problem with her blood – so Van Praagh was wrong.  Here is Walters from two years ago, explaining exactly why Van Praagh was wrong:

Two years later, doctors tell her that she needs surgery for a faulty heart valve.  Note: heart valve.  Something different.  Van Praagh claims success.  This wouldn’t have been an especially impressive guess even if he’d correctly predicted that a 78 year old had problems with a heart valve.  But he didn’t even guess that.  Check out this list of Blood Diseases and Disorders from the National Heart Lung and Blood institute – nothing about heart valve problems.  And you wouldn’t expect to.  Heart valve problems are not caused by bad blood:

There are a number of possible causes of heart valve disease. These include:

• rheumatic fever during childhood - this disease is no longer common in the UK but still affects people in developing countries
• a congenital deformity which means you were born with a defective valve
• ardiomyopathy - if your heart muscle becomes thickened or dilated, it can obstruct blood flow
• age - as you get older, your valves become less flexible, and more stretched or torn

Van Praagh was wrong.

What we have here is the typical situation where the “psychic” retroactively tries to fit his prediction to what actually transpired.  In Van Praagh’s opinion, he was close enough to claim a hit because (presumably) the heart pumps blood and he saw problems with the blood.  He’s also revising what he originally said – see how he now claims that he said “It’s not moving correctly…”  Check out any source from two years ago and there is no reference to the blood “not moving correctly.”  It’s all “problems with blood” and “an abnormality with her white cell count.” 

Now Van Praagh claims Walters owes him an apology.  Really?  An apology?  Let’s review what Van Praagh actually said about Walters two years ago:

"You don't have to be a psychic to know why Star [Jones] and Rosie [O'Donnell] left the show!

Meow.  Nor do you need to be psychic to predict that a 78 year old woman might have some health problems.  Although I do give him credit this time at least for not scoring a hit on Psychic Bingo – a rare occurrence for Van Praagh, to be sure.

Vatican Excuse Bingo

The excuses the Vatican and its supporters have now come up with to justify its systematic cover up of the rape of children have now officially exceeded the numbers required for a 5x5 bingo card.  Consequently, I give you Vatican Excuse Bingo.  Play it when Bill Donohue is on (if you can bear watching that disgusting slime bag) and you will be finished in no time. 

Explanations:

In the unlikely event that you’re not familiar with any of the excuses summarized on the card, I give a slightly more detailed explanation for each, below.

Long Time Ago

It all happened a long time ago and the church has changed.  No fair to keep bringing it up.

Secular Society

It’s the fault of The secularization of society.  If only everyone was a good catholic and kept his mouth shut, things would be just fine.

Women’s Ordination / Abortion / Gay Marriage

The only agenda of the church’s critics is women's ordination, abortion and gay marriage.

Pornography

With so much invasion of eroticism, sometimes it's not easy to stay celibate or to respect children.  Not easy!

Jews / Liberal Media / The Internet / Satan

The Jews are always behind everything as is The liberal media (ie The New York Times).  Oh and Satan.  Yes he exists.

Like the Persecution of Jews

Criticizing the Catholic Church is just like persecution of the Jews because pointing out that the church systematically covered up the rape of children for decades is exactly like murdering six million Jews. 

(Yes we know this conflicts with the previous point.  We hope you won’t notice.)

Hatred of Christianity

What motivates the church’s critics most of all is a pathological hatred of Christianity. 

Homosexuals

Of course, the real problem is homosexuality not pedophilia.  You see, there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia.  That is true.  That is the problem.

Masons

It’s both the fault of freemasonic organizations that portray pedophilia as normal, and also a conspiracy by masonic lodges and big business to undermine the church.  Simultaneously.

Post Pubescent

It wasn’t pedophilia because the kids (most of them anyway) were post-pubescent.  And they wore sexy short shorts.  (OK I made the last bit up.)

Boy Scouts / Schoolteachers

Employers from every walk of life – schoolteachers, boy scouts – all molest kids.  For example, just this month, Rabbi Baruch Lebovits was found guilty on eight counts of sexually abusing a Brooklyn boy.  (Hey, it’s fault of the Jews again.)

Petty Gossip

It really is.  Petty gossip about raping children and systematically covering it up for years.  So annoying.

Therapy

The priests were not reported to the police because they were being put in therapy instead.  It was the zeitgeist of the day you see.  Everyone did it.

Catholic Standards

At least the Catholic Church has the standard that rape is wrong (even if it falls short of that standard), unlike atheists.

You Didn’t Object

Victims didn’t object - most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn’t allow themselves to be molested. So why did you?”

Gold Diggers

These so-called victims are just gold diggers – just out to make a buck off the poor honest church.

Radical Lawyers

The liberal media has teamed up with Radical Lawyers to persecute the church.

Parents

Parents and psychologists are to blame for not reporting the sex abuse in a timely fashion.  Because if they had reported the abuse promptly the church would have acted immediately.

No Smoking Gun

Cardinal Joey Ratzinger knew nooothing about it.  Nooothing, I tell you.  Move along now.

Did I miss any?

(Post Script: If you liked Vatican Excuse Bingo, then you’ll love Cold Reader Bingo and Creationist Bingo.)

Frontline - Jenny McCarthy Changes her Story Again

I watched PBS’s Frontline on vaccines last week, and thought it overall pretty good.  Not perfect (what is?) but the numerous howls of protest from the crank Age of Autism blog (I lost count of the number of their posts) and on the Huff Post, should be enough to tell you it hit the right marks.  Orac has a detailed review, The Vaccine War: Telling it (mostly) like it is about the anti-vaccine movement, so I really don’t need to review it in detail.

There is just one thing I want to highlight, though.  It wasn’t on the actual TV program, but on PBS’s full online Jenny McCarthy interview.  It was this:

[Questioner:] How long after the MMR was that first seizure?

[Jenny McCarthy:] You know, a lot of people think, and probably from me saying in some interviews, that it was after the MMR I noticed changes.

I don't think it was just the MMR shot that caused any kind of trigger with autism. I think it was a compilation of so many shots to a kid that obviously had some autoimmune disorders. So I would say maybe a couple of months, a month or so after the MMR, I started to notice some physical ailments such as constipation, rashes, eczema. That was like the first little sign. And then the train just kind of descended from there.  [My bold.]

Jenny is saying that her son’s autism didn’t start immediately after just one shot (the MMR), but that “some physical ailments” of autism appeared over “a couple of months.”  This was just “the first little sign.”  (Note, just a “little” sign at that point.)  But, here’s the thing, as I wrote in The Two J.B. Handleys, Jenny had, only three years ago, stated quite clearly and unambiguously something very different:

"Right before his MMR shot, I said to the doctor, 'I have a very bad feeling about this shot. This is the autism shot, isn't it?' And he said, 'No, that is ridiculous. It is a mother's desperate attempt to blame something,' and he swore at me, and then the nurse gave [Evan] the shot," she says. "And I remember going, 'Oh, God, I hope he's right.' And soon thereafter -- boom -- the soul's gone from his eyes.  [My bold.] 

Note, not “some physical ailments” or just a “little sign” – back then it was “the soul's gone from his eyes” which, I think you’ll agree, is completely different.  Also not over “a couple of months,” but “boom.”  Different story.

Why does this matter?  Well, Jenny, Handley and the rest have been telling us for years that the reason they know vaccines cause autism is that their kids got autism “boom” right after the vaccine was given.  (With Handley it was after a shot containing Thimerosal, while with Jenny it was MMR which never had Thimerosal, but we’ll gloss over that for now.)  Now that Wakefield’s MMR hypothesis has been discredited, and numerous epidemiological studies have failed to find a link with Thimerosal, the only way to keep their vaccines-cause-autism  claims alive is to move the goalposts.  And you see that in the Frontline program – Jenny says it’s not MMR, or Thimerosal, or too many vaccines at once – it’s “all of the above.”  She actually says she doesn’t know what it is that’s causing autism, but she knows it’s the vaccines, somehow.  But the thing is, if they’re now saying the signs of autism appeared gradually over several months, on what basis are they saying vaccines cause autism?  If autism appeared gradually, and not “boom” after one shot, then they don’t even have the correlation (vaccine immediately followed by autism) to rely on. 

And what’s more, they know they’ve changed their story and they know they’ve moved the goalposts.  Why do I say that?  Well, when I wrote The Two J.B. Handleys less than ten weeks ago, I included a link to the interview with the Jenny “boom” quote on Jenny’s own Generation Rescue site, Jenny: Evan's Story.  Check that link now.  Search Generation Rescue for any part of that interview.  It’s gone.  Disappeared.  Never happened.  Not part of the official anti-vaccine history any more.  (And I know Handley read that post and saw the link because he appeared in the comments four days after I wrote it in an attempt to defend himself.)  If you needed any more proof of the dishonesty and intellectual bankruptcy of Generation Rescue and the anti-vaccine kooks, there it is.  Fortunately for us, there is one thing that George Orwell didn’t imagine when he wrote his famous 1984 novel, and that’s the Wayback Machine – the cache that never lets anyone completely disappear inconvenient facts they want you to forget.  Courtesy of the internet, here again is what Jenny said in 2007, Jenny: Evan's Story – “and soon thereafter -- boom -- the soul's gone from his eyes.”  

The hallmark of the pseudo-scientist and the kook, is they they won’t change their beliefs no matter what the evidence, instead they devise ad hoc explanations and move goalposts to accommodate contradictory evidence.  Jenny and Handley have been caught, again, doing just that.  Rather than re-evaluate their beliefs, they just change their previous story so that it fits the currently known facts.  And they try to cover their tracks by deleting the now embarrassing things they said before.  Rather strangely, they fail to notice that, with their new story, there is no longer any reason to link vaccines to autism.  Either autism occurred “boom” just after the shot (and so they can point to correlation), or it didn’t.  Which is it?  They want it both ways.

Funnily enough, there was one thing in that PBS interview with Jenny, that I though she got right.  It was this:

…that night went on Google and typed in "autism." And on the corner of the screen, in the sponsored links, it said, "Generation Rescue." And I decided to click on it, because right underneath it, it said, "Autism is reversible." And I thought to myself, well, this must be a load of crap, because if it was true, why didn't the best neurologist in the world tell me there's something I could do to reverse autism?

Precisely.  And if she’s only stopped right there she could have avoided making a complete fool of herself.

Nailed It

Nailed it so well, I hope Jesus and Mo’s creators won’t mind me reproducing the whole thing:

Fine Tuning Arguments

Suppose someone is rolling a set of two dice.  He rolls a double six – something with a one in 36 chance of happening.  Which is more likely, that the person rolled a set of regular dice and just got lucky, or that he rolled a special set where both dice have just sixes on all faces?  (Let’s assume you can’t see any but the sides that are on the top.)  You might think that since a regular set would produce a double six in only one out of 36 attempts, he is more likely to have rolled the trick dice with just sixes.  But after a moment’s thought you would probably realize that was wrong.  With just one roll of the dice, you would have no way of knowing.  The person might have been rolling the dice all day, and you just happened to come along at the exact time that he rolled the double six.  Of course, you could stay and see if he rolled the dice again, and if he kept getting double sixes then you would suspect there was something fishy going on.  But with just one roll, there is no way you could tell.  You wouldn’t have enough information.

The same would be true if the guy rolled three dice and got three sixes, or four dice and got four sixes, or five dice… etc etc.  If he only called you over to look when he’d got all sixes, you wouldn’t know if his roll had been especially lucky, or if he had spent hours rolling other combinations, and only called you to look when the result was all sixes.  No matter how many dice he rolled at once, or how high the apparent odds against it happening by chance, you wouldn’t know he was cheating just by looking at the result of one roll.  You also wouldn’t know how many other people are rolling dice at the same time, but who are keeping quiet about it because they rolled uninteresting combinations.  At the very least, you would need to see a few consecutive rolls from this one guy before you could form any conclusions.

It seems to me that fine tuning arguments are similar to the dice rolling guy.  The fine tuning argument is this: the odds of “rolling the dice” to get, by chance, a universe where life can exist, are so low that the universe must have been designed.  But the objections to this are the same as with the dice rolling guy: unless we know how many universes there are, and how many big bangs there have been, we can’t know if our particular universe is very unlikely to have occurred by chance or not.  There might be millions of universes.  And if there are a very large number of universes, then the odds of getting one tuned for life, are very good.  And in that case, there are good odds that in at least one of the universes tuned for life, there evolved intelligent people like us who remark that this universe looks fine tuned for life.

Now, you may say, we don’t have proof that additional universes exist, or that there have been several big bangs.  And I say that’s not my problem, it’s the problem of those making the fine tuning argument.  If fine tuners are claiming that the odds of getting a universe suitable for life are extremely low, then it’s up to them to show that this is the only universe that exists or has ever existed.  Their calculations that show the incredibly low probabilities of a universe suitable for life, assume there is and has only ever been one universe.  Why is this?  Because to get the probability of getting any universe tuned for life, they have to multiply their probability of getting one universe tuned for life by the total number of universes.  They never do this – which means they are implicitly multiplying by one universe.  So, before we accept their claim, they first have to demonstrate that there really is only one universe.  It’s their claim, remember?  They have to justify all parts of it, not just the bits they like.   So as part of their own calculation, they must demonstrate that there is only one universe.  As far as I know, no one has ever done this.

I have heard some say that multiple universes violate Occam’s Razor – one universe is “simpler,” they say.  But this argument misinterprets Occam’s Razor.  Occam’s Razor doesn’t say choose the simplest – if it did then “Goddidit” would be the answer to anything, because Goddidit is simple.  Occam’s Razor actually says don’t make up unnecessary assumptions.  We know that universes exist because we live in one.  Unless there is a solid reason to think that there are no other universes apart from the one we see, it would be an additional assumption to insist without evidence that this is the only one.  To be most generous to fine tuners, the best they can claim is that the assumption of many universes is an equal assumption to the claim that there can only be one, and so Occam’s Razor is a wash – you can’t use it to choose one way or the other.  The burden of proof is therefore still upon the ones making the fine tuning claim.

Of course, we don’t need multiple universes to reject fine tuning arguments.  We don’t actually know enough to be able to calculate meaningful probabilities of getting, by chance, the so-called fine tuned constants of this universe.  We can only examine one universe, and can’t really say for sure what would happen if the conditions were different.  Fine tuning arguments are really just god of the gaps arguments – we don’t know why the constants look fine tuned, so we’re going to use god to explain the gap in our knowledge.  Never a very productive way of trying to learn the truth about anything.  Also, we don’t know what kind of life would have evolved if the universe was very different from this one.  Life as we know it might not exist, but that wouldn’t mean that completely different life forms couldn’t evolve.  Again fine tuning arguments say more about the lack of imagination in the people making the arguments than about the truth of the conclusions they are claiming. 

But even if we ignore these flaws, the burden of proof is still with the fine tuners to demonstrate that this is the only universe that exists or has even existed (or at least, that there is only a small number).  Until they do this, fine tuners are like the person pointing to the guy who just told you he rolled several dice and got all sixes, while failing to investigate all the other people in the world and throughout history, who have rolled dice but didn’t tell you the results. 

Additional Reading

Physicist Victor Stenger has many other arguments against fine tuning, including simulated universes with very different values for the so-called “fine tuning” constants.  He also states that multiverses are suggested by modern cosmological models.

Chaotic Inflation, proposed by physicist Andrei Linde, models our universe as one of many that grew as part of a multiverse… – he hypothesizes that the expanding cloud of billions of galaxies that we call the big bang may be just one fragment of a much larger universe in which big bangs go off all the time, each one with different values for the fundamental constants.

Note: this post was initially inspired by this comment by regular commenter AvalonXQ. 

SkeptiCal 2010

SkeptiCal 2010, the Northern California Science & Skepticism Conference, is being held next Saturday April 24 in Berkeley California.  Speakers include the NCSE’s Eugenie Scott, The Skepbitch Karen Stollznow, Denialism Blog’s Chris Hoofnagle, Science Based Medicine’s Wally Sampson and others.  Here is the schedule for the day: Tickets (just $40) are still available but it looks like registration closes at 6.00am on Tuesday.  If interested, book your tickets here, but don’t wait too long.

Does Seasonal Influenza Vaccination Increase the Risk of H1N1?

Mike Adams thinks it does.  In fact, he’s sure of it.  And boy, is he excited.  Check out his recent column, and compare that with what the actual study says.  First, Adams, with Seasonal flu vaccines increase risk of pandemic H1N1 flu, stunned scientists discover:

The CDC and health authorities were pushing a double-barreled vaccine strategy that demanded people get both a seasonal flu shot as well as an H1N1 pandemic flu shot. Those who questioned the sensibility of vaccines for fighting the flu were attacked as "baby killers" for not kow-towing to the vaccine mythology that drives Big Pharma's profits to record profits nearly every flu season.

[…]

Care to guess what the study found? In short, it found that people who received the seasonal flu vaccine shot in 2008 were up to 274% more likely to be infected by H1N1 swine flu than those who skipped the season flu shots.

[Bold in original.]

Note that the CDC recommended getting both the seasonal and H1N1 vaccines.  Also note that 274% figure that Adams quotes.

What did this study do, and what does it say?  The study is titled Does Seasonal Influenza Vaccination Increase the Risk of Illness with the 2009 A/H1N1 Pandemic Virus?  First, you’ll note it starts “Does..” and ends with a question mark.  Compare that with Adams’s “…vaccines increase risk…” and no question about it.  Adams seems to be a lot more sure than the people who published the actual study.  What did they do in this study?  Well, they took patients who presented with influenza-like illness at  a network of Canadian doctors, and tested them for H1N1 and seasonal influenza.  They also determined if the patients had been vaccinated against the seasonal flu.  They used this information to compare vaccination status among influenza-positive (both seasonal and H1N1) patients with influenza-negative controls.  What did they find?

… receipt of [the seasonal flu vaccine] in the previous season (autumn 2008) appeared to increase the risk of pH1N1 illness by 1.03- to 2.74-fold, even after adjustment for comorbidities, age, and geography [4]. The investigators were prudent and conducted multiple sensitivity analyses to attempt to explain their perplexing findings. Importantly, [the seasonal flu vaccine] remained protective against seasonal influenza viruses circulating in April through May 2009, with an effectiveness estimated at 56% (41%–67%)  [My bold.]

Note, they reported that the increased risk was 1.03 to 2.74 fold. Now, I suppose Adams is technically correct in saying the increased risk was “up to 274%” as high, since the phrase “up to” includes the figure zero.  Technically correct, but intellectually dishonest.  (I guess "more than 1.03 times the risk" wouldn't have sounded so scary.)  Also, note that the seasonal vaccine was 56% effective against the seasonal flu – a tidbit that Adams somehow managed to overlook.  More importantly, note that the study did not show the merits of getting both a seasonal flu shot as well as an H1N1 pandemic flu shot (compared with no vaccine at all) as Adams himself admits was the CDC’s recommendation.  (Presumably they didn’t do this because the H1N1 vaccine wasn’t widely available at the time.)

Still, this did seem (as far as I can tell) to be a decent study, and its results certainly warrant further investigation into this phenomenon.  Does this study prove that the seasonal flu vaccine increases the risk of getting H1N1, as Adams thinks?  Well, not really.  From the report, again:

Given the uncertainty associated with observational studies, we believe it would be premature to conclude that TIV increased the risk of 2009 pandemic illness, especially in light of six other contemporaneous observational studies in civilian populations that have produced highly conflicting results (see Table 1 for details on study design, population sampled, and results) [10]–[15]. We note the large spread of vaccine effectiveness estimates in those studies; indeed, four of the studies set in the US and Australia did not show any association [12]–[15], whereas two Mexican studies suggested a protective effect of 35%–73% [10],[11]. The most recent Canadian study in this issue of PLoS Medicine [4] is clearly at odds with these results, with an estimated average negative effectiveness of −68% based on their Sentinel system. Only one study, set in the US military population, potentially corroborated the findings of the Canadian study [16].

[My bold.]

So there are numerous other studies, many of which show no difference, and two that actually show the seasonal vaccine reduces the risk of getting H1N1. Nothing wrong with that – real world studies are not always as clear cut as we would like, which is why science requires replication, especially where the results are hard to explain or surprising, based on current knowledge.  Strange that Adams didn’t notice that bit, though.  Well, it did come nearer the end of the paper - perhaps Adams got so excited by the first part that he didn’t finish reading.

To summarize Adam’s technique, he:

1. Cherry picks a study that has results he likes, and ignores at least six other studies (that were even reported in the actual paper he cited) that report different results
2. Exaggerates the risk - “1.03 to to 2.74” increased risk becomes “up to 274%”
3. Ignores the fact that the seasonal vaccine is 56% effective against seasonal flu anyway
4. Ignores the fact that the CDC recommendation is to get both the seasonal and the H1N1 vaccine – something that was not covered by this study.  (And presumably the H1N1 will be included in next season’s seasonal fu vaccine.)
5. Jumps from all of this to state that therefore “vaccines are a medical scam, folks! A Big Pharma hoax,” and that the real solution to protect you against the flu is vitamin D.  Seriously.

Adams will quote a scientific study if it supports his point of view (even if it doesn’t, really), but then he rails against the rest of science that doesn’t.  That’s what makes him a crank.  The truth is, this is an interesting but inconclusive study that should probably be investigated further.  Possibly there is some reason that the seasonal vaccine could make people more susceptible to the H1N1 virus.  If so, real scientists would like to find out what it is - although it is almost certainly not that the flu vaccine "weakens the immune system" as Adams claims, but some other reason.  More likely (given the numerous confounding studies), there is no real effect here.  Either way, it will be real scientists doing real science, not cranks like Mike Adams, who will come up with the actual answer.  And you are almost certainly going to be better off getting both seasonal and H1N1 vaccines, than getting neither.

Update

Effect Measure has a good post on this subject this morning, Did getting vaccinated for seasonal flu up the risk of pandemic flu infection?  They conclude, like me, maybe, but you’re still better off getting the flu vaccine especially as H1N1 will be a component of the next seasonal vaccine strain.

Bill Donohue - even more vile than previously thought

I wasn’t planning to write any more about the vile Bill Donohue and his defense of priests raping small children while the Catholic church covered it up.  I really wasn’t.  I thought I had covered Donohue’s disgusting views in enough detail two weeks ago.  But Donohue has surprised me – really surprised me this time – with an even lower even more morally bankrupt defense of pedophile priests.  Donohue actually said on Larry King Tuesday night that when priests rape children, this is not pedophilia because (wait for it) most of the children were over about 13 years of age.  Oh and the problem is really homosexuality, because “that’s what homosexuals do.” 

I found it hard to believe that even Donohue would say such a thing, that these words had been taken out of context or something.  Check out the transcript from CNN (with my added bold):

DONOHUE: It's not pedophelia. Most of the victims are post- pubescent. You have to get your facts straight. I'm sorry. If I'm the only one who is dealing with facts tonight, that's it. The vast majority of the victims are post-pubescent. That's not pedophelia, buddy. That's homosexuality.

ROBERTS: Bill, I don't think, as a person of faith, that you really know what you're talking about when it comes to --

DONOHUE: If the study of criminal justice -- it's not my opinion. Take a look at the social science data. I never said they're homosexuals in that way.

ROBERTS: They said they cut down on --
(CROSSTALK)

KING: Sinead, quickly.

O'CONNOR: Can I just ask very quickly with that gentleman -- sorry, I don't know your name, sir. I'm not quite sure what post- pubescent means. Would you mind explaining that to me

DONOHUE: Explain what?

O'CONNOR: Post-pubescent.

DONOHUE: Post-pubescent means beyond puberty. In other words, you're adolescent. That's what homosexuals do, and of the molesters have been homosexuals in the Catholic church.

ROBERTS: So the boys deserved it because they're post-pubescent.

DONOHUE: If you want to take that conclusion, I think that's scurrilous. I never said that. Why would you say that about homosexuals?

O'CONNOR: Larry, what age does somebody become, you know, become post-pubescent in America, as a matter of interest?

KING: What is the age?

ROBERTS: I don't know. Let's ask Bill. He seems to know.

KING: Well, folks --

DONOHUE: Twelve, thirteen years of age.

Yeah, try that defense in court – “but, your honor, she was over 13” – see how far it gets you.

It’s hard to know what to say after that.  Mind-blowing.  Even the Catholic church has not to my knowledge used such a defense.  All I can really think of to say is, isn’t it time to stop asking Bill Donohue his opinions, to stop having him on network TV as though his opinions were in any way valid or relevant?  He should really be finished as a pundit after this.  Why would any serious news media ever quote this disgusting moron’s views on anything, ever again?

Would Deepak Chopra exist if no one looked at him?

Michael Shermer and Sam Harris recently debated uber woo Deepak Chopra and someone called Jean Houston – the subject being “Does God Have a Future?”  I haven’t seen that debate yet (click the link for a video), but I have read Shermer’s brief description and his account of an exchange (between Shermer and Chopra) that took place afterwards.  Read Shermer’s initial blog post My Debate Date with Deepak (and friends), which includes this:

During the debate Deepak claimed that the moon is nothing more than a soup of teeming quantum uncertainty. No. Subatomic particles may be altered when they are observed, but the moon is there even if no one looks at it.

Deepak apparently read this and replied.  Shermer posts Chopra’s replies in Does the moon exist if there are no sentient beings to look at it?  See if you can spot the equivocation / moving of goalposts:

[Quoting Chopra] When you see an object, the moon being the example you chose, your eyes are not really “seeing” the moon. Your eyes are responding to photons that follow all the rules of wave-particle duality.  […]  There was no moon till it was an experience in your consciousness.

Chopra just can’t be honest.  In the first paragraph, he is claiming the the Moon literally isn’t there (it’s just “a soup of teeming quantum uncertainty”) if no one looks at it.  Shermer calls him on this nonsense.  Chopra, slyly moves the goalposts and replies that now it’s the photons that enter your eyes that exhibit the quantum uncertainty.  He hopes you won’t notice the switch – that he is now talking about photons hitting your eyes (and creating the image of the Moon), and not the Moon itself that is subject to quantum uncertainty.  He has, effectively, conceded that the Moon is still there (and of course it must be – otherwise, where would the photons have been reflected from in the first place?), although he hopes you won’t notice that he actually just disproved his own point. 

Of course, even if we are just referring to photons following all the rules of wave-particle duality, there is still no reason to suppose that consciousness is necessary.  Chopra has a longer piece up on the huff Post - Which Is Real, the Moon or God?, where he makes this claim (if you can be bothered to wade through over 2,000 words some of of the most dense woo I have ever read).  According to Chopra, everything is quantum, which means everything is consciousness, therefore god exists, or something:

The basic understanding of the collapse of the wave function is called the Copenhagen Interpretation,

No, the Copenhagen Interpretation is just one way of looking at the situation.  It may represent reality, it may not, but it is not the “basic understanding” of QM.

in which a non-material observer is involved in quantum measurement.

Except for the “non-material” wording, that is (rather trivially) correct.  Clearly something (could be a human; could be a measuring instrument) has to “measure” something.  There is no evidence that that thing has to be “non-material.” 

John von Neumann demonstrated that an understanding of the collapse of the wave function requires consciousness.

No he didn’t.  As I wrote in my review of What the Bleep Do We Know, the theory of quantum mechanics doesn’t say this. Chopra is confusing the theory of quantum mechanics with an interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is an explanation to help understand what might be going on, but it is not part of the theory because it is not falsifiable: it cannot be tested in such a way that, if it were false, it would fail the test (without falsifying the whole of quantum mechanics, and therefore all the other interpretations too).

To falsify this interpretation you would have to see what would happen without a conscious observer monitoring the experiment. But that’s Catch-22: you need a conscious observer monitoring the experiment to see what happens. You can’t look at the experiment without looking at it so no one can ever know if this interpretation is true.  So although von Neumann may have believed such a thing, he never demonstrated it.

Without an observer, there is no collapse, no particle, no matter, no measurement.

Maybe, but the “observer” can be something non material – a scientific instrument, say.  There is no reason to suppose that consciousness is required.

Alternative quantum theories such as transactional interpretation and many-worlds theory try to get around the need of consciousness or an observer, but fail in the end. Essentially they don't fulfill the requirements of quantum physics because any quantum measuring device still must be physical and ultimately exist as quantum wave probabilities. One set of measuring waves superimposed on other waves to be measured, only leaves more waves, not particles, not a quantified measurement. And as Niels Bohr makes clear, in quantum mechanics, if it isn't measureable it isn't real. So in spite of these newer quantum speculations, no one has been able to successfully dispense with a non-material observer.

Well, of course no one has been able to dispense with an observer.  But it does not have to be a “non-material observer” as Chopra claims.  In fact, Chopra has not even demonstrated that such a thing as a “non-material observer” even exists.  Someone, ultimately, has to look at the measuring instrument to see what the result was.  Obviously.  Someone has to open the box and look at the cat.  But until that person does that , there is no way to know what the result was without consciousness, and so there is no justification for saying that consciousness is necessary.  Sorry Deepak, you don’t understand what you’re talking about.

(Sigh.)  Anyway, back to the original question raised in the post title - if we all ignored Deepak Chopra, would he cease to exist, would he disappear in a soup of teaming teeming quantum uncertainty?  Although we might perhaps wish this to be true, I have to say that, no, even if we all ignored him, Chopra would still exist to spew out more quantum drivel tomorrow, the next day, and the next day ad infinitum.  At least it gives me something to blog about. 

Bill Donohue - Vile and Immoral

Bill Donohue, self appointed cheerleader for the Roman Catholic church, has declared that the problem with the recent child abuse scandal in the church is not the abuse – the problem, according to Donohue, is that people are criticizing the church for the abuse.  Seriously.  Find it hard to believe that anyone could make such a case with a straight face?  Read his article, Criticism of Catholic Church is unfair (oh, boo hoo), which starts:

The rash of stories about priestly sexual abuse in Europe, especially in Ireland and Germany, has put many Catholics on the defensive. They should not be. While sexual molestation of any kind is always indefensible, the politics surrounding this story is also indefensible.

Note the words “While sexual molestation of any kind is always indefensible…” – and consider that is the only indication Donohue gives in the entire 650 word article that sexual molestation of children is bad.  Go on, read the whole thing.  There is nothing else in the whole piece – nothing – that indicates that raping children is wrong, it’s all about how everyone is being mean to the Catholic church.  Incredible.

Donohue starts with the old false equivalence trick:

Employers from every walk of life, in both the U.S. and Europe, have long handled cases of alleged sex abuse by employees as an internal matter. Rarely have employers called the cops, and none was required to do so.

He’s comparing rape of children to “alleged sex abuse by employees.”  Is he saying that companies in the US and Europe have been aware of their employees raping children as a part of their work?  Well, it’s hard to know for sure what’s in the mind of this old idiot, but somehow I don’t think even he is saying this.  What he is trying to get away with is equating workplace sexual harassment – the boss groping his secretary, say – with raping children.  And while it is certainly true that, say 30 or 40 years ago, sexist bosses could get away with things they would likely be sued and/or fired for now (watch Mad Men), this is nothing like what the church is accused of covering up.  Not even close.

Anyone who maintains that in North America or Europe it was common practice for employers outside the Catholic Church to file a police report about suspected wrongdoing by their employees needs to put up or shut up: Where is the evidence?

No one is saying that employers had to file a police report about any suspected wrongdoing by their employees.  That would be ridiculous.  I think most people would suggest that if an employer knew one of his employees had committed rape of a child while doing his job, then the employer should certainly report it.  And most probably would.  And the duty to report would be even greater if the employee’s job was to supervise the child that he had raped.  A job such as, for example, a schoolteacher, scout leader or a bleeding Roman Catholic priest.

Beyond that issue, the focus on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is far out of proportion to the attention given by the media to the sexual molestation of minors when committed by non-Catholic clergymen. According to a report by the New York Times in October, the Brooklyn district attorney's office had filed charges in 26 cases of sexual abuse involving members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

Donohue just has to bring the Jews into it.  Hey, some Jews in Brooklyn abused children, so we can too.  Sorry, not an excuse.  If a Jewish religious community has been abusing children then that is just as bad, and the guilty people should be jailed.  If that didn't receive as much publicity as the Catholic church’s abuses, it’s because the Catholic church has a wider congregation, and the abuse affected many more children.

The reason the church is rightly getting all the criticism is that they claim to be god’s representatives on Earth, and they routinely preach their morality to the rest of us, including those of us who don’t believe their particular fairly story.  They demand obedience from their followers.  They (the priests) as part of their jobs are in positions of authority over small children.  They should be above reproach, but they have been shown to be unworthy of the trust placed upon them.  Most Catholics know this.  Even the pope seems to recognize it (belatedly).  But Donohue, while paying lip service to the “indefensible” nature of such abuse, thinks that the real problem here is with people criticizing the church for the abuse.  He actually says that this criticism – just the criticism mind you – is “immoral.”  If anything is immoral it is Donohue and this vile article.

Celebrities Say the Darndest Things

But “psychics” say even dumber ones.

If you don’t know who Heidi Montag is then (1) you haven't missed much and (2) you obviously don’t watch E channel’s The Soup as much as I do.  Anyway, she’s apparently some sort of reality TV star who has has numerous cosmetic surgeries (see picture).  A couple of weeks ago she hired a “psychic” to be her manager, as MSNBC reported in Heidi dumps Spencer as manager for a psychic:

After the incredible experiences I have had healing my life and truly connecting to my dreams with healer intuitive Aiden Chase, I have officially asked him to become my manager," Montag says. "Having an intuitive psychic leading my team gives me an edge no one else has.

Wow, a celebrity doing something dumb – dog bites man, in the parlance.  Funny thing though – two days ago, she fired him:

A week after hiring Malibu psychic Aiden Chase to replace Spencer Pratt as her business manger, Heidi Montag announced she'll go it alone.

"I have decided to part ways with Mr. Chase both as a manager and as a psychic…

Celebrity shows (albeit temporarily), some sense – that’s man bites dog!

Hum – the psychic got fired after one week.  I decided to check out the website of the psychic, Aiden Chase, and he claims:

my psychic gifts include clairvoyance

Clairvoyance.  And in this interview with Chase, he explains further what this means::

4. He Can See the Future:
"First and foremost I'm intuitive. I'm using that gut instinct, that third eye that we all have. I just have a heightened sense of intuition."

He can see the future.  (You know where this is going.)  But not only did this psychic douche bag not see his imminent firing, he still even now (that’s after the event, for those playing at home) doesn’t believe it’s happened:

"At this time, I am not aware of any change in my business relationship with Heidi Montag"

I guess he can see the future but not the past.

Look into my eyes and repeat after me, I have not been fired!

RFK Jr. - Still Clueless

Robert F. Kennedy Junior has learned nothing in the last five years.  Back in June 2005, Kennedy wrote a scare piece linking Thimerosal to autism, stating that scientists at a CDC meeting had spent days covering up this supposed link. I blogged then about how Kennedy’s article was totally dishonest, and followed up with a post about how Kennedy had quote mined the minutes of an Institute of Medicine meeting to make it appear that scientists were trying to cover up this same supposed link, although as I proved at the time, they were doing the opposite.  (If you don’t want to read that whole post, just scroll down to the “Walt wants” section – the sleaziest piece of all of Kennedy’s sleazy quote mining, and worth a re-read in my totally unbiased opinion.)

Well, he’s back, and as nuts as ever.  Last week he wrote Central Figure in CDC Vaccine Cover-Up Absconds With $2M – a headline that just by itself contains two falsehoods and an unproven assertion.  Here’s what Kennedy is saying, in summary:

1. Danish scientist Poul Thorsen was the central scientist behind studies showing that autism is not linked to Thimerosal or MMR
2. These studies (by Thorsen) are the key studies the CDC relies on to disprove a link between vaccines and autism
3. Thorsen has stolen a large amount of money
4. Point 3 above means that the studies referred to in 1 and 2 above, are no longer valid.

Unfortunately for Kennedy, points 1, 2 and 4 above are demonstrably false:

• Thorsen was not a leading figure, but a junior author on the papers in question
• There are numerous other studies, apart from the Danish ones, that support there being no link between vaccines and autism.  (In addition, Thimerosal was removed from vaccines in the US in 2002 and yet reported autism continues to rise.)
• The alleged fraud has no bearing on the studies anyway. Even if Thorsen stole money, and even if he were the lead author on the studies (which he wasn’t, but even if he were) this would not suddenly alter the studies so they now point to a different conclusion.  (It’s a basic ad hominem fallacy.)

Also, point 3 is just an allegation.  It may be true, but right now we really can’t say.  Kennedy is talking nonsense.

It says a lot about the anti-vaccine crowd that when a leading figure in the MMR causes autism world (Andrew Wakefield), whose study really was the only one (the original, and not replicated) that supposedly implicated MMR – when that person is actually found guilty of medical misconduct in the actual study they are associated with – in that case the response of the anti-vax nuts is of course to support the proven unethical Wakefield.  In that case, the guy clearly must be innocent and his studies must still be valid and good.  However, when a relatively insignificant junior author of one paper among many replicated studies around the world is accused (just accused mind you – not proven yet like Wakefield) of dishonesty in a matter totally unrelated to the study in question – in that case, this puts the conclusions of all such studies into doubt.  You have to wonder at the cognitive dissonance these people must suffer.  Although that would at least explain the hysterical tone of Kennedy’s latest piece.  While his 2005 article did at least give the impression it was written by an adult (albeit a dishonest one), Kennedy’s latest offering is astonishing in its lack of any attempt at a measured or even lawyerly tone.  The falsehoods start in Kennedy’s first sentence:

A central figure behind the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) claims disputing the link between vaccines and autism and other neurological disorders has disappeared after officials discovered massive fraud involving the theft of millions in taxpayer dollars. Danish police are investigating Dr. Poul Thorsen, who has vanished along with almost $2 million that he had supposedly spent on research.

This is, of course, pure hyperbole (to be polite).  The truth is that Aarhus University has recently detected a significant shortfall in their CDC grant money, and Thorsen is suspected of being to blame.  Apparently, authorities are investigating the shortfall, but it’s a little early to be calling it a “massive fraud.”  Right now, we just don’t know.  And Thorsen has “disappeared”?  Actually, no, he has just been unavailable for comment. (Hardly surprising.)  But Kennedy won’t let this lack of a real scandal prevent his lawyerly mind from making this a prosecution.  Watch how he runs with it:

Thorsen was a leading member of a Danish research group that wrote several key studies supporting CDC's claims that the MMR vaccine and mercury-laden vaccines were safe for children. Thorsen's 2003 Danish study reported a 20-fold increase in autism in Denmark after that country banned mercury based preservatives in its vaccines. His study concluded that mercury could therefore not be the culprit behind the autism epidemic.

Er, no, Thorsen was the sixth named author of one study relating to MMR and the fourth named author of a study on Thimerosal.  I’m not sure what your definition of “leading” would be, but for me it wouldn’t be sixth out of a team of eight.

Also note Kennedy’s hysterical “mercury-laden” wording.  No, they weren’t “mercury-laden,” they contained Thimerosal - a preservative that metabolizes to (amongst other things) ethyl mercury, an organic derivative of mercury.  Kennedy writes like a 12 year old.

His study has long been criticized as fraudulent since it failed to disclose that the increase was an artifact of new mandates requiring, for the first time, that autism cases be reported on the national registry. This new law and the opening of a clinic dedicated to autism treatment in Copenhagen accounted for the sudden rise in reported cases rather than, as Thorsen seemed to suggest, the removal of mercury from vaccines.

This is wrong on many levels. 

First, “Thorsen” didn’t suggest anything – he was a junior author of the paper, remember?  Funny how, according to Kennedy, “Thorsen” is now the author, the one suggesting things.  The others (including lead author Madsen) haven’t been accused of a crime, so they don’t count, I guess.

Second, the authors of the study did not fail to disclose the new way of counting.  What Kennedy is talking about is that in 1995, the Danish registry added "Outpatient Clinics" to their count of autism cases – and since outpatient cases are supposedly where 93% of Danish children are diagnosed with autism, that would inflate the reported number of cases after 1995.  But, the authors wrote in the “Results” section of their study (that I’ll link to, although Kennedy doesn’t):

In additional analyses we examined data using inpatients only. This was done to elucidate the contribution of the outpatient registration to the change in incidence.

So they didn’t fail to disclose this factor (as Kennedy claims), they actually specifically mentioned it.  They also attempted to allow for it by doing a separate analysis that excluded the increase due to the outpatients.  And even with this analysis, they still found an increase in autism.

As it happens, reported autism was increasing before 1995 anyway:

Kennedy just hopes you won’t read the study that he didn’t link to (and see that graph), so you won’t notice this.

(As an aside, I find it ironic and hypocritical that Kennedy says the Danish increases in autism don’t count because they’re the result of diagnostic changes and increased availability of services, and not a real increase in autism.  When skeptics give the same reasons (increased diagnosis) for reported autism rising in the US, Kennedy writes (in his 2005 article) that this is “a theory that seems questionable at best.”  Consistency was never one of Kennedy’s flaws.)

Third, the authors never suggested that the increase in autism was “accounted for” by the removal of Thimerosal, as Kennedy claimed.  What they actually concluded was:

Our ecological data do not support a correlation between thimerosal-containing vaccines and the incidence of autism.

I guess that’s a bit too “sciencey” for Kennedy to understand.

Despite this obvious chicanery, CDC has long touted the study as the principal proof that mercury-laced vaccines are safe for infants and young children.

Again er, no.  The CDC has not “long touted” the study (or even short touted it, for that matter) as its “principal proof” as Kennedy puts it.  The Danish studies are just one of many.  For example, here are some more peer reviewed studies from around the world:

USA

USA

USA

Canada

UK

Australia

USA

And one more from Denmark.

Of course, none of these studies has Thorsen as an author so I suppose they don’t count either.

Mainstream media, particularly the New York Times, has relied on this study

This is a good one.  Kennedy must hope that his readers won’t click that link because it takes you to a New York Times page that does not discuss Thorsen, Denmark, or anything related to that story at all.  The link is actually to a story about Andrew Wakefield and the Lancet’s retraction of his terrible paper.  Go figure.

as the basis for its public assurances that it is safe to inject young children with mercury -- a potent neurotoxin -- at concentrations hundreds of times over the U.S. safety limits.

Clearly not, or it wouldn’t be allowed now would it? 

Thorsen, who was a psychiatrist and not a research scientist or toxicologist,

Unlike Kennedy, who is a fully qualified medical doctor and toxicologist.  Oh wait, no he’s not.

parlayed that study into a long-term relationship with CDC. He built a research empire called the North Atlantic Epidemiology Alliances (NANEA) that advertised its close association with the CDC autism team, a relationship that had the agency paying Thorsen and his research staff millions of dollars to churn out research papers, many of them assuring the public on the issue of vaccine safety.

Wow, the CDC paid them to do some work for them.  What a scandal.

Of course, we all know that lawyers work for free.  As did Andrew Wakefield.

The discovery of Thorsen's fraud

Correction: alleged fraud.  Come on Bobby – I know the science is a bit complicated for you to grasp, but you should know the lawyerey bits at least. 

And even if the fraud accusation were true, it would still bare no relation to the study Kennedy is talking about.

[Repetitive accusations snipped]

Thorsen's partner Kreesten Madsen recently came under fierce criticism after damning e-mails surfaced showing Madsen in cahoots with CDC officials intent on fraudulently cherry picking facts to prove vaccine safety.

Kennedy gets even more sleazy here.  Note that the lead author on the papers where Thorsen was a junior author, is now “Thorsen's partner.”  From this very thin connection, Kennedy seeks to connect this story to some supposedly damning emails from Madsen.  But even here, Kennedy can’t be transparent.  The link Kennedy provides is to an article describing numerous things, the Madsen emails being only one.  You have to read the whole article to find the link to the actual email within the article (strangely, linked twice, as though there were two sets of emails, not just one).  To save you the time, I’ll link direct to the email in question.  I’ll also save a copy on this blog too, just in case.  Now, if you read the actual email (as I encourage you to do), you’ll be hard pressed to find what’s “damning” about them.  As I read it, it’s just a CDC researcher asking Madsen for data on autism rates in Denmark (“did the rates increase dramatically from the late 1980’s into the 1990s”), and Madsen replying that no, they did not increase in the 1980s.  Madsen goes on to say that they did increase after 1993 but that the aforementioned change in registration procedures could account for it.  To repeat, this was something they reported on and attempted to control for in their paper anyway so it’s not at all “damning” except in Kennedy’s fevered imagination.

Leading independent scientists have accused CDC of concealing the clear link between the dramatic increases in mercury-laced child vaccinations beginning in 1989 and the epidemic of autism, neurological disorders and other illnesses affecting every generation of American children since.

Which leading independent scientists and what clear link?  Surprise - Kennedy doesn’t say.

Also, note the pejorative “mercury-laced” wording.  This is one of Kennedy’s favorite phrases.  Of course the word “laced” has connotations of adulteration – secretly adding something improper. I guess it would be too much for Kennedy just to say “vaccines containing Thimerosal.”

Questions about Thorsens's [sic] scientific integrity may finally force CDC to rethink the vaccine protocols since most of the other key pro vaccine studies cited by CDC rely on the findings of Thorsen's research group.

As I showed above, no they don’t.

These include oft referenced research articles published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the New England Journal of Medicine and others. The validity of all these studies is now in question.

Nonsense.  The validity of  these studies is not in question.

There have been numerous other posts from the anti vax world (eg this post at the crank Age of Autism blog) crowing about this, but Kennedy’s piece is the most absurd (and that’s saying something) of them all.  Of course, Orac wrote an excellent post on this yesterday - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Poul Thorsen: The fine art of distraction from inconvenient facts, that you should read.  Journalist Brian Deer left a comment that is better than anything I could write to summarize Kennedy’s juvenile style, so I’ll just finish with it:

What struck me about the Kennedy article was the poor calibre of the person who wrote it. I'd naturally assume that someone with those family connections would have some sense of measure in their language, and a general demeanour of intelligence and professionalism. I believe he may have been to law school, also, and have some sense of the difference between, say, a falsehood and a lie, or between "missing" and "couldn't be contacted". Little things, which you find, for example, in the Philadelphia Inquirer report, which was, plainly, the work of an intelligent professional.

But there was none of that. It was like it was written by a college sophomore. Oozing malice and prejudicial, unsupported assertions, it was just of such poor quality. Like you, I've no idea about this Thorsen guy, who is plainly not a major player in the relevant research, but I was shocked by the hysterical tone of this man Kennedy's contribution. It's plain that neither Olmsted nor Kirby are professional journalists, but I'm just left wondering why the heroes of vaccine-autism believers are all of such meagre talent. It's kind of sad really.

Chopra - as bad as ever

Deepak Chopra doesn’t seem capable of expressing anything in a simple, straightforward manner.  And after reading (and trying to unravel) his latest piece of drivel, Only Spirituality Can Solve The Problems Of The World, I think I know why – it’s only with excessive flowery verbosity that he can hope to disguise the fact that he has absolutely nothing of value to say.  See if you can fathom what he’s getting at here:

Before addressing the importance of spirituality in modern times, we should first define it. Spirituality is the experience of that domain of awareness where we experience our universality.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t define universality, so his definition of spirituality is pretty empty.  I’ll have a go.  Merriam-Webster defines universality as “the quality of being universal” – the quality of occurring everywhere (among several definitions of “universal” – see if you can find a better one.)  Which rather begs the question – since Chopra hasn’t shown that we are everywhere.  In fact, I’m pretty sure we’re not.

He does wax more on the “domain of awareness” bit though:

This domain of awareness is a core consciousness that is beyond our mind, intellect, and ego.

Really?  Where is it then?  And, again, does it even exist?  (And how does Chopra know?)  But OK, I’ll play: the domain of awareness is a core consciousness.  And the core consciousness:

In religious traditions this core consciousness is referred to as the soul which is part of a collective soul or collective consciousness, which in turn is part of a more universal domain of consciousness referred to in religions as God.

Jesus, why didn’t he just say that at the start?  Let’s break down what (I think – but who really knows?) he’s saying:

1. Spirituality is the experience of that domain of awareness where we experience our universality
2. The domain of awareness is a core consciousness.
3. So spirituality is the experience of a core consciousness.
4. This core consciousness is referred to as […] God.
5. So spirituality is the experience of God.

As Chopra apparently had to put it:

Spirituality is the experience of that domain of awareness where we experience our universality. This domain of awareness is a core consciousness that is beyond our mind, intellect, and ego. In religious traditions this core consciousness is referred to as the soul which is part of a collective soul or collective consciousness, which in turn is part of a more universal domain of consciousness referred to in religions as God.

Which breaks down to “spirituality is the experience of God.”  Six words.  It took Chopra 70.

When we have even a partial glimpse of this level of awareness we experience joy, insight, intuition, creativity, and freedom of choice. In addition, there is the awakening of love, kindness, compassion, happiness at the success of others, and equanimity. As the turbulence of our mind settles down, our body also begins to heal itself because it also quiets down. The body's self-repair mechanisms are activated when the mind is at peace because the mind and body are at the deepest level inseparably one.

Pure assertion backed up by nothing.  Even by Chopra’s standards, this is weak.  I have to say, I think he’s phoning it in.  Probably PZ had the right idea – he asked Chopra one question: how?

Just to name a few problems of the world: overpopulation, famine, resource depletion, water scarcity, war, and disease. Deepak Chopra, quick, 30 seconds: how will you solve any one of those problems with spirituality?

But if he even knew (and of course, he doesn’t), would he be able to explain it?  Clearly not.  Why does anyone still think this bozo has anything of value to add? 

The Two J.B. Handleys

Seems there are several people with the same name all promoting the notion that vaccines cause autism.  A couple of weeks ago I wrote that there were at least two people with the name “David Kirby” – one from 2005 who thought that decreasing autism rates meant that autism was caused by vaccines, and another in 2010 who believes that increasing autism rates meant that autism was caused by vaccines.  Now it looks like there are two J.B. Handleys too.  For example, read what someone called J.B. Handley from last week, wrote about how autism is first noticed by parents:

It is exceptionally rare that I hear the story, “my son was 100% fine, and at 2 years old after one vaccine appointment he lost everything.” I have heard that story, but very rarely.

A rarely heard story.  Fair enough, but then I found this story from 2005, entitled A child's return from autism Couple eager to share their conviction that mercury poisoning was the culprit:

Jamie Handley was a happy, healthy baby who reached all his developmental milestones until he turned 18 months, his parents said. Then, he started spinning in circles and standing on his toes and no longer responded to his name. They were eventually told he was autistic

[My bold.]

Hum.  An autistic child called Jamie Handley?  Handley?  Surely not the son of J.B. Handley?  Nah – couldn’t be.  Until I clicked on the more images link and got this picture:

 

Caption: J.B. Handley plays with his son, Jamie, who is receiving chelation therapy to reduce mercury in his body and treat his autism.

J.B. Handley?  Oh I get it - this is a different J.B. Handley.  This J.B. Handley’s son met all his developmental milestones until he turned 18 months – then he started spinning in circles, etc.  Clearly, as with David Kirby 2005, this is a different J.B. Handley from 2005, who (unlike J.B. Handley from 2010) doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about.  You see, as J.B. Handley 2010 knows, children just don’t regress all at one time just after a vaccination like the parents of this Jamie Handley from 2005 said.  What douche bags they must be, this J.B. Handley from 2005 and his wife:

But the Handleys and other parents say they noticed symptoms in their children after they got booster shots

And it’s not just J.B. Handley from 2005 who’s got this wrong.  Jenny McCarthy didn’t get the script either.  For example, from Jenny: Evan's Story

[Note: Since writing this post, Generation Rescue have obviously realized that Jenny's previous story conflicts with the version they now want you to read, with the goalposts in their new location, and so they have removed the above link to the story.  Unfortunately for Generation Rescue's attempts to re-write history, you can still read it using the Wayback Machine to Jenny: Evan's Story.]

Jenny says even before Evan received his vaccines, she tried to talk to her pediatrician about it. "Right before his MMR shot, I said to the doctor, 'I have a very bad feeling about this shot. This is the autism shot, isn't it?' And he said, 'No, that is ridiculous. It is a mother's desperate attempt to blame something,' and he swore at me, and then the nurse gave [Evan] the shot," she says. "And I remember going, 'Oh, God, I hope he's right.' And soon thereafter -- boom -- the soul's gone from his eyes.

[My bold.]

So, right after the MMR shot (which to me sounds like “one vaccine appointment”) - “boom.”  I don’t know how you interpret that, but to me “boom” means something happening pretty quickly – all in one go.  And that quote was on the Generation Rescue web site.  Generation Rescue.  The organization founded by J.B. and Lisa Handley.  I guess that website must have been set up by the J.B. Handley from 2005, not the one from 2010.

So let’s recap.  J.B. Handley from 2005 thinks autism occurs quickly – you have a happy, healthy baby who reached all his developmental milestones right up until the point where he starts spinning in circles, etc.  You see, that’s how J.B. Handley 2005 knows the vaccines caused his son’s autism – the child was fine up until the point where he suddenly shows autistic tendencies after being vaccinated.  Also, that J.B. Handley (the one from 2005), reports on his organization’s website about someone called Jenny McCarthy who knows her son’s autism was caused by the MMR shot.  And she knows her son’s autism was caused by the MMR shot because “boom” he became autistic right after the MMR shot.  So J.B. Handley 2005 knows that autism is caused by vaccines because the autism starts right after the child gets the vaccine. 

Then we have the other J.B. Handley (the one from 2010), who knows that autism doesn’t suddenly appear “after one vaccine appointment” (or at least, very rarely does), but rather is a chronic slide over a period of time, and so he knows that vaccines cause autism because…  er wait a minute, if autism doesn’t occur just after the vaccinations are given, why exactly does J.B. Handley 2010 thinks vaccines cause autism? 

One more thing just occurred to me.  J.B. Handley 2005 thinks autism is a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning, and is chelating his son to remove the mercury, while Jenny McCarthy thinks the live MMR vaccine, that never had any mercury in it, is what gave her son autism.  So which is it – is it mercury or is it MMR?  Because they’re different things.  Hey, you don’t suppose there are really three J.B. Handleys do you?  Because, you know, that would be weird.

Andreas Moritz Cancer Cures Quack

Here we go again.  Another quack responds to criticism by threatening legal action.  And yet again, a craven ISP (Wordpress) caves and suspends a blogger’s account.  This time, the quack is someone called Andreas Moritz.  Check out his website.  He thinks cancer doesn’t kill people, rather it’s the patient’s “conflicts, guilt and shame” that “paralyze the body’s most basic functions” and allow the tumors to grow.  That’s right – it’s the patient’s fault for allowing the cancer to grow.  So obvious.

But not to fear, because Moritz has the cures.  Or rather, he can sell you the cures.  Seriously.  Just check out the woo he has for sale.  My favorite?  A tough choice, but high on the list would have to be the Mongolian Holy Stones:

Mongolian Holy Stones are proactive healing stones that are mined in Inner Mongolia where most of the world's Rare Earth compounds are mined. The locals call it "holy" because it heals on contact. Years of testing by six recognized International Research Institutes provides us with the information on how the Mongolian Holy Stone produces its miracles. Some of this information is included later in this section.

Here’s a picture of them - $40 for one 4” x 3” stone:

And what of the “Years of testing by six [six!] recognized International Research Institutes” that will be “included later in this section”?  Clearly, he must have details of these years of tests, as he claims?  Well, not so much.  All we actually have, is this:

What is "Holy"?

Infrared energy at .98(+/-) microns is "holy." It is invisible and it heals.

Well, that’s OK then.  It’s invisible and it heals.  Phew, I’m glad we’re not dealing with just some inert stone that does absolutely nothing.

Not convinced by holy stones?  Want to try something more tangible?  Something that will produce a definite measurable result?  Well, you’re in luck because Moritz also sells The Colema Boards Home Enema Kit – just $278 (plus $45 shipping) to “simplify self-administration of an enema in the privacy of your own home.”  Here’s a picture of what you get (toilet, chair and bucket not included):

But that’s not the best part.  If you want a really good laugh, click on the enema board “how to” video for how to set up and use it.  Seriously.  Funniest thing I’ve seen all week.  Trust me - the sound effects are especially hilarious.

I think that’ll do.  If you still think Moritz has something worthwhile to offer, you’re probably beyond help.  Read Orac’s post Andreas Moritz and trying to shut down valid scientific criticism: A sine qua non of a quack for the detailed explanation of all that is wrong with Moritz’s numerous claims.  Also in that post you’ll read the full text of Moritz’s threatening email to the original blogger – the threat that includes this gem:

My investigations show me where you live and where you study (Augusta, Amine)...

Because, “I know where you live” has always been a compelling scientific argument.

Additional Information

Here are some links to additional articles about Andreas Moritz:

Orac on Andreas Moritz, Cancer Cures Quack.

Steven Novella on Christopher Maloney naturopath quack and Andreas Moritz, Cancer Cures Quack.

PZ on Andreas Moritz, Cancer Cures Quack.

Orac’s earlier post on Andreas Moritz, Cancer Cures Quack.

And from the original threatened blogger himself (on what is apparently a different blog that has not been pulled), Michael Hawkins on Andreas Moritz, Cancer Cures Quack.

Oh, and if I had my blog with Wordpress, right now I’d be doing all I could to move it elsewhere, pronto.

Mike Adams Fails Again

Since signing up for Mike Adams’s newsletter the other week (to get this full post from him), I’ve been getting a daily load of “Health Ranger” woo in my mailbox.  I’ve been ignoring most of it, but I thought it worth deconstructing Wednesday’s rather dangerous piece of Adams misinformation (some redundancy there, admittedly).  Adams thinks he has found something that shows vaccination against the mumps means you are more likely to get the mumps than if you forego the vaccine.  He’s wrong,of course (as I will show below).  All it shows is that Adams doesn't understand his own numbers.

First, check out Adams’s post, Mumps outbreak spreads among people who got vaccinated against mumps:

To hear the vaccine pushers say it, all the recent outbreaks of mumps and measles are caused by too few people seeking out vaccinations. It's all those "non-vaccinated people" who are a danger to society, they say, because they can spread disease.

Reality tells a different story, however: It is the vaccinated people who are causing these outbreaks and spreading disease!

Just this week, an outbreak of mumps among more than 1,000 people in New Jersey and New York has raised alarm among infectious disease authorities. The outbreak itself is not unusual, though. What's unusual is that the health authorities slipped up and admitted that most of the people infected with mumps had already been vaccinated against mumps.

In Ocean County, New Jersey, county spokeswoman Leslie Terjesen told CNN that 77 percent of those who caught mumps had already been vaccinated against mumps.

[Bold in original.]

What he is saying is that more vaccinated kids (77%) than non vaccinated, got the mumps, therefore you are more likely to get the mumps if you are vaccinated.  He is wrong, because he is asking the wrong question.  He is asking, “did more vaccinated kids get the mumps than non-vaccinated?”  (Answer – yes.  77% v 23%.)  The question he should be asking is, “if you are vaccinated, are you more or less likely to get the mumps?”  A subtly different question.  The answer to that question is “less” – you are less likely to get the mumps if you are vaccinated.  In fact, if you are vaccinated you are one seventh as likely to get the disease, compared with the unvaccinated.  As I will now demonstrate.

Adams is quoting this CNN report as the source for his “77%” New Jersey figure, so that’s what I will go with.  From this CNN report, we know that:

The mumps outbreak also spread to Ocean County, New Jersey, where 159 confirmed cases have been diagnosed since September, county spokeswoman Leslie Terjesen told CNN.

[...]

Of the New Jersey cases, 77 percent were vaccinated, Terjesen said.

Now, if you look at this CDC table you will see that 96.1% of New Jersey kindergarten pupils are fully vaccinated against the mumps.  I’ll round this down to 96%.  That means, the number of vaccinated children is 24 times (96 divided by 4) the number of unvaccinated.  Remember that figure.

Now consider this: if in New Jersey, 159 children got the mumps, and 77% of those were vaccinated, then that means that 122 (159 x 77%) vaccinated children got the mumps, while 37 unvaccinated children got the mumps.  Hold those numbers too.

Suppose 1,270* children were exposed to the mumps.  We know that 96% of these (on average) were vaccinated – that’s 1219 vaccinated children.  51 children (4%) were unvaccinated. 

I’ll remind you again that 159 children in New Jersey were infected, and that 122 of these (the infamous 77%) were vaccinated.  So, what is the answer to my question, if you are vaccinated, are you more or less likely to get the mumps?  Some elementary arithmetic:

Vaccinated and got the mumps

122 / 1219 = 10%

Unvaccinated and got the mumps

37 / 51 = 73%

Answer – if your child is unvaccinated, he or she is seven times more likely to get the mumps.

So how do we explain the 77% figure?  Easy: more vaccinated children got the mumps because there were more vaccinated children to start with.  24 times more as many, to be precise.  If the vaccine were completely useless and offered zero protection against the mumps, we would expect 24 times the number of infected children to be vaccinated, compared with unvaccinated. (Since both groups would be infected equally, but the vaccinated group is 24 times larger.)  The fact that we only get about three times (77/23) the number of vaccinated children with the disease, demonstrates how effective the vaccine actually is.

Ironically, the higher the vaccination rates, the higher is the proportion of vaccinated children out of the total who will get the disease.  For example, suppose we have 100% vaccination rates.  Obviously this would never happen in reality, but just suppose for argument's sake that the vaccination rate is 100%.  Also suppose the vaccine is not 100% effective (which does reflect reality - the mumps vaccine is only about 90% effective).  What percentage of infected children will be vaccinated?  Obviously 100%, since there are zero unvaccinated children in our hypothetical.  Now imagine instead that 0% of children are vaccinated.  What percentage of infected children now will be vaccinated?  Obviously 0%.  So the higher the vaccination rates, the higher the proportion of vaccinated children out of the total who get the disease.  Which is, of course irrelevant.  The relevant fact is that with higher vaccination rates, fewer children overall will get the disease.

I’ve tried to show this in a table:

Group	Total	% of Total	Infected	Group % of Infected	Infected % of Group
Vaccinated	1,219	96%	122	77%	10%
Un-vaccinated	51	4%	37	23%	73%
Total	1,270	100%	159	100%

Adams is looking at the percentage of each group (vaccinated v. unvaccinated) that are infected.  This error is what causes him to write nonsense like this:

Vaccines may actually increase your risk of disease. Notice that far more vaccinated children were stricken with mumps than non-vaccinated children?

But, as I’ve shown, that’s irrelevant.  The relevant information is the percentage in each group that will become infected.  And seven times the number of unvaccinated children, compared with unvaccinated, get the mumps.  While I understand that this 77% figure can be confusing for people who aren't used to thinking about these things, Mike Adams does this for a living and so he has no excuse.  And it's not as if this is a new phenomenon - I remember discussing this exact same thing eight or nine years ago on the JREF forum.  The answers have been out there for a while, so why does Mike Adams still promote these kinds of false conclusions?

(* I chose the 1,270 figure because according to the CDC the effectiveness of MMR against mumps is approximately 90% after two doses – which matches the calculated 10% infection rate with 1,270 children.  The ratio (1:7) works out exactly the same though, no matter what number of children you assume.)

David Kirby, King Of Denial

Since I posted my second annual Golden Woo Awards winners, it seems to me as though every woo in the world has been making their best efforts to get nominated for an award in 2010.  Case in point – David Kirby just wrote a startling un-self-aware piece in (where else), entitled The Lancet Retraction Changes Nothing.  (Yeah, I knew you’d say that David.  Over two years ago you wrote a similar thing – see Results Are In / Debate’s Not Over.)  It seems Kirby is trying hard for a “most persistent refusal to face reality” honor – and I have to tell you, he’s the front runner so far.  He starts off with an assertion that I partially agree with, although not in quite the way he means:

I believe that the public lynching and shaming of Dr. Wakefield is unwarranted and overwrought, and that history will ultimately judge who was right and who was wrong about proposing a possible association between vaccination and regressive autistic spectrum disorder (ASD).

Well yes, history probably will be the judge about who was right and who was wrong on this.  And I’m pretty sure it will show David Kirby to be wrong.

That was just for starters.  Barely worth a rebuttal, but fun to do anyway.  Here’s where it got me re-reading what Kirby had written before:

The evidence that autism is increasing at alarming rates, and that some thing (or things) in our environment is wreaking havoc on a vulnerable one-percent of all US children is now so irrefutable that, finally, the federal government is climbing aboard the environmental research bandwagon - way late, but better than never.

Kirby is reacting to the claim that autism may not really be increasing, or may not be increasing as much as people think, and that the reported increase may really (or mainly) be a result of the widening of diagnostic criteria, and more attention being paid to the issue.  Kirby is saying this is not true, and the increase is real.  If the increase is real, he says, then environmental factors must be to blame, and that includes vaccines.  (Actually, when you break down the weasel wording, he’s really saying it is vaccines.  More on that later.)

Get that?  If autism is really increasing, then vaccines must be to blame.

But, and here’s a funny story, in 2005 someone called David Kirby posted (same place) Autism, Mercury and the California Numbers, where he wrote:

For months now, a mantra of the thimerosal defenders has been as follows: “Mercury was removed from vaccines years ago, and we have not seen a drop in autism rates.”

It looks like they might have to find a new slogan.

Freshly reported numbers out of California show that new cases entering that state’s disability system (children who are three-to-four years old and newly diagnosed with autism) have indeed dropped since 2002, marking the first decline in new autism cases since California began tracking the mysterious disorder.

See, this David Kirby guy from 1995 thought that decreasing autism rates meant that autism was caused by vaccines.  Of course, that David Kirby was “author of “Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic” (St. Martin’s Press 2005)” – unlike the David Kirby from yesterday, whose post mentions nothing about that book.  Different guy.  I’ll bet that David Kirby, the one writing yesterday, thinks that David Kirby from 2005 is a real douche.  Hey, want to know something else that David Kirby from 2005 wrote?  See this in the New York Times in June of that year:

Because autism is usually diagnosed sometime between a child's third and fourth birthdays and thimerosal was largely removed from childhood vaccines in 2001, the incidence of autism should fall this year

That David Kirby (in 2005) believed that falling rates of autism would prove that vaccines caused autism.  David Kirby from yesterday believes that rising autism rates prove that vaccines caused autism.  How to explain this seeming contradiction?  The only sensible conclusion is that these are two different people, both of whom just happen to be called David Kirby and who both believe vaccines cause autism.  That’s the only explanation.  Because if they were actually the same person, then that person would be saying that whatever happens to autism rates – going up or going down – they both prove vaccines cause autism.  Nothing could ever, even theoretically, get that person to change his mind.  What an idiot that guy would be.  If he were one and the same person.

Back to current day David Kirby:

This long-overdue paradigm shift will leave many in the scientific community with some proverbial but nonetheless uncomfortable egg on their increasingly irrelevant faces: Those who have protested with shrill certainty that autism is almost purely genetic, and not environmental in nature, and therefore not really increasing at all, will hopefully recede from the debate.  [My bold]

Well, I certainly hope that David Kirby guy from 2005 is embarrassed about all that uncomfortable egg on his increasingly irrelevant face.  He was certainly wrong about Thimerosal.  Perhaps he will, now, hopefully recede from the debate.  I’ll bet David Kirby 2010 hopes so too.  But there is one more thing about that paragraph.  See the word “will” that I bolded?  As in “will leave…”  The word “will” expresses the simple future tense – in this case a general prediction about the future.  The paradigm shift Kirby is talking about once his proof is in, will occur in the future.  The future, when vaccines, Kirby claims, will be proven to cause autism.  The future, when (as Kirby tells us) “history will [future tense] ultimately judge who was right and who was wrong.”  Now read what follows:

And that begs a nagging question: If those people were dead wrong about environmental factors in autism, could they also be mistaken in their equally heated denials about a possible vaccine-autism link? More bluntly, why should we heed them any longer?  [My bold.]

Kirby takes speculation of what might be proven in the future, to make a firm assertion about people who he claims were “dead wrong” in the past.  Sheesh – did he not think anyone would notice he just made an unsupported assertion based on speculation about the future?  It wasn’t that hard to spot – the one followed directly after the other.  Either that or Kirby is in possession of a time machine to know for certain what history will tell us.  (Perhaps he could use it to go back to 2005 and talk to that other David Kirby before he makes a complete fool of himself.) 

I mentioned before the weasel wording, to claim it’s not really vaccines.  Here we go:

We need to examine a host of environmental factors (air, water, food, medicine, household products and social factors) and how they might interact with vulnerable genes to create the varying collection of symptoms we call "autism." But these triggers almost have to be found in every town of every county of every state in the land - from Maine to Maui.

Are vaccines the only contributing factors to autism? Of course not. Other pharmaceutical products like thalidomide and valporic acid, as well as live mumps virus, have been associated with increased autism risk in prenatal exposures, so we already know that a variety of drugs and bugs can likely make a child autistic.

So it’s not just vaccines.  “Of course not,” he says.  How could we be so dumb as to think he’s just blaming vaccines?  Oh, I don’t know, but it might have something to do with what directly follows:

• Claims of six cases of autism caused by vaccines
• Hannah Poling – claims autism caused by vaccines
• Bailey banks - claims autism caused by vaccines
• Study in the Journal of Child Neurology – claims autism caused by vaccines
• Another review in PLoS Online - claims autism caused by vaccines
• 1,300 cases of vaccine injuries paid out in vaccine court
• Asks “is it not reasonable to ask if [vaccines] can cause similar injuries that lead to autism?
• Claim that the federal government is interested in “including a few studies that take in vaccines and the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal”
• Kirby asks Thomas Insel if the IACC would ever support direct research into vaccines and autism

(Read Orac today – The martyrdom of St. Andy, part 2: David Kirby rides to the rescue (sort of) - for an explanation of why those claims listed above, the studies, Hannah Poling etc etc – do not show an association of vaccines to autism.)

If it’s not just vaccines David, why did you follow it up with nine points concerning vaccines causing autism and nothing on any non-vaccine causes?

So this is what it’s come to.  Some years ago, Kirby (or was it the other Kirby?) wrote a book saying autism is caused by mercury in vaccines.  It has now been shown beyond any reasonable doubt that it does not.  But Kirby is too invested in this that he just can’t let it go.  If it’s not mercury then it’s something else in the vaccines.  Or  some environmental factors (vaccines, vaccines).  Wakefield has to be supported because he claimed the MMR vaccine caused autism (even though everyone knows MMR never had any mercury in it), and anyone who is against vaccines must be OK.  The science is coming up with nothing to support Kirby’s position so he writes that science is increasingly supporting his position.  Denial truly is not just a river in Egypt, it is where David Kirby lives and breathes.  While ignoring the uncomfortable egg on his increasingly irrelevant faces*. 

* Not a typo.

Andrew Wakefield Unethical so Age of Autism Stands By Him

The British General Medical Council (GMC) has just announced its verdict in their investigation into Andrew Wakefield, ruling that he had acted dishonestly and irresponsibly:

The verdict, read out by panel chairman Dr Surendra Kumar, criticised Dr Wakefield for the invasive tests, such as spinal taps, that were carried out on children and which were found to be against their best clinical interests.

The panel said Dr Wakefield, who was working at London's Royal Free Hospital as a gastroenterologist at the time, did not have the ethical approval or relevant qualifications for such tests.

[…]

Dr Kumar said he had acted with "callous disregard for the distress and pain the children might suffer".

He also said Dr Wakefield should have disclosed the fact that he had been paid to advise solicitors acting for parents who believed their children had been harmed by the MMR.

[My bold.]

In 1998, Wakefield claimed to have found a link between the measles virus in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract of children (following the MMR vaccine), and autism.  Wakefield’s small study, popularized by idiotic news media, led to an MMR-autism scare, a significant drop in vaccine rates and a resurgence of measles in the UK.  Wakefield may claim he didn’t say that MMR causes autism, but he certainly implied it strongly enough (and again, with the help of the press), that many people believed (and still believe) that the MMR vaccine causes GI problems which causes autism.  The evidence though, from a panel of 28 experts, clearly showed that this was not true.  The GMC have now, with this ruling, confirmed that in addition to Wakefield’s conclusions being false, he also acted unethically.  We still have to wait to see what sanctions they hand down.

Various vaccines-cause-autism groups immediately revised their positions, based on the conclusions of this independent expert body, and stated that they were wrong previously to claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

Ha – just kidding.  Of course they haven’t.  Nothing would ever convince these people that their previously determined conclusion could ever be wrong.  Just take a look at the flurry of activity from the Age of Autism blog in the last three days:

A Sad Day for the Future of Children – where they “unequivocally renounce the GMC’s findings” – no evidence, nothing they can say that is wrong with the GMC’s findings – they just renounce them because, well, because they do, so there.

Then from Mark Blaxill we have Naked Intimidation: The Wakefield Inquisition is Only the Tip of the Autism Censorship Iceberg - where he smears the witnesses in the case, oh and anecdotes, anecdotes I tell you (un-sourced) about anti-vaccination scientists being censored.  And “the only thing for the autism community to do now is stand by Andy Wakefield” – because clearly “the only thing” you can do when a discredited doctor is also found guilty of ethical violations, is to “stand by” him.  That’s “the only thing” you can do.  No other options, obviously.  Their hands are tied, you see.

And if that wasn’t clear enough, we have National Autism Association Supports Dr. Andrew Wakefield – the title says all you need to know.

Celebrity idiot Jenny McCarthy’s charity chimes in with Generation Rescue Supports Dr. Andrew Wakefield - (beginning to see a trend here).

Finally, we have fearless conversation advocate and fearless litigant to anyone who disagrees with her, Barbara Loe Fisher, who writes Vaccines: Doctor Judges & Juries Hanging Their Own – a touching story of the first time she met Wakefield.  (Why?  Who knows.)

And a couple more that I couldn’t be bothered to read.

Nothing could possibly ever convince these people that they might have been wrong.  Nothing.  Ever.  If you want to read some good sources on the GMC’s verdict, see below.

Further Reading

Steven Novella writes Andrew Wakefield “Acted Unethically”.

Investigative reporter Brian Deer (writing a year ago) MMR doctor Andrew Wakefield fixed data on autism – on how Wakefield changed and misreported results in his research:

Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the [MMR shot], in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.

Ben Goldacre The Wakefield MMR verdict.

And finally, there is the GMC’s actual report.

Mike Adams – Pyromaniac in a Strawman Factory

(Unfortunately I didn’t invent that phrase.  I wish I had, but I didn’t.  It seems to fit Adams so well though.)

Mike Adams is going nuts.  (Possibly the word “going” is superfluous there – I’ll let you, gentle reader, decide.)  Following his meltdown after being disqualified from the “Shorty Awards” for cheating, he has just had another meltdown – this time about us evil skeptics - What 'skeptics' really believe about vaccines, medicine, consciousness and the universe.  This is a list he claims he pulled from various skeptic websites, although not one link is provided to show that any skeptic actually holds the positions he says we do.  It’s mostly a list of fairly obviously absurd straw man skeptic positions, plus a few actual skeptic positions that do actually make sense (eg we are opponents of homeopathy – well duh).

Here’s just one example of Adams’s idiocy:

Skeptics believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective (even if they've never been tested), that ALL people should be vaccinated, even against their will, and that there is NO LIMIT to the number of vaccines a person can be safely given. So injecting all children with, for example, 900 vaccines all at the same time is believed to be perfectly safe and "good for your health."

Well, I don’t think I ever said that all vaccines are necessarily safe if they haven’t been tested, and I’ve certainly never been in favor of forced vaccinations against anyone’s will.  But the puzzling thing is the “900 vaccines all at the same time…” bit.  Why 900?  Where did that come from?  Why not round it up to 1,000 and be done with it?  In a rant that makes no sense, “900 vaccines” isn’t even wrong.

I’d go through the whole thing line by line, but fortunately I don’t have to because Tom Foss already did.  Read Tom’s line by line take down of Mike Adam’s rant on skeptics.  It’s a classic.

Addendum January 25:

We’ve certainly riled Adams up.  Today he has yet another post up about skeptics.  More hilarity ensues, although you should probably shield your irony detectors before reading it.

This article succeeded wildly in infuriating the "skeptics" across the 'net by simply reminding them what they believe.

No, we weren’t infuriated at all.  Astonished by the stupidity and number of blatant straw men, to be sure.  But most of us found it hilarious.

They then resorted to their same old dirty tricks to attack me by doing things like joining our Facebook page then posting a message that says, "That article made me so mad, I'm quitting this forum!"

That’s pretty funny because, as you’ll read in a comment below, Tom Foss tried to leave a comment at Adams’s site, but Adams deleted it.  That’s how confident Adams is in what he’s writing – no one is allowed to criticize Mike Adams.  And if you do it's a dirty trick!

Here’s where you’ll need to shield your irony meter:

They also tend to jump to false conclusions about what people are really saying. In my previous article, for example, I never stated whether I believed in God, or whether I was an athiest (sic), or whether I followed organized religion and yet people read the article and they leaped to conclusions, assuming I was promoting organized religion, for example, or that I was condemning atheism.

Actually I never stated my position on those matters in the article at all, but the skeptics leaped to the conclusion that I did. This speaks to their tendency to warp all incoming information and restructure it to conform to the beliefs they already carry about the subject at hand.

Yes, Adams is annoyed because he thinks skeptics have misrepresented his positions.  Because, you see, misrepresenting an opponent’s position is something Mike Adams would never do.

Steven Novella also responded today: Mike Adams Takes On “Skeptics”

As did Orac: A pyromaniac in a field of straw man or a black hole of burning stupid incinerating every straw man in the universe? Mike Adams attacks skepticism

As Good As Dowsing

For once we have some news of rationality winning – although it took a while.  Jim McCormick (pictured right), maker of the useless ADE-651 “bomb detection” device, was arrested yesterday in the UK on suspicion of “fraud by misrepresentation.”  An export ban on the device will come into force next week.  To which I add – about time!

It’s not as if this is new information.  The ADE-651 is just the latest incarnation of a device that was previously called “The Mole,” and before that the “Quadro Tracker.”  They’re all the exact same device and they have all consistently failed tests designed to see if they work.  Back in October 2008 and again in November 2009, James Randi challenged the makers of the ADE-651 to apply for his million dollar prize to prove that it worked.  Of course, as with all the other charlatans and quacks Randi challenges, they didn’t apply.  Well, now we know why – the makers were selling these pieces of junk to the Iraqi government for $40,000 a pop or a total to date of $85 million!  By my count, that’s over 2,000 not bomb detectors not detecting bombs in Iraq alone.  Randi’s $ million must have seemed like small change. (I have to admit I am still a bit skeptical about this $85 million figure.  It is the figure that is consistently being reported by all media, although they are probably just repeating each other, so we can’t be sure.  Still, we have nothing else to go on right now.  If it is confirmed it is certainly a massive fraud for such a piece of junk.)

The BBC reports that there are concerns that the devices have failed to stop bomb attacks that have killed hundreds of people.  Actually, a little more than just “concerns.”  There have been several successful bomb attacks in Iraq recently in areas where they were apparently relying on this bogus device:

And an attack in December killed over 120 people, prompting Iraqis to ask how the bombs could have got through the city's security.

Attention is increasingly focusing on the ADE-651, the hand-held detector now used at most checkpoints in Baghdad.  [My bold.]

Get that?  This useless device is used at most checkpoints in Baghdad in place of physical inspections of vehicles.  Remember, this is a device that has no memory, no programming, no working electronics, no batteries and no known way it could possibly ever work.  It has consistently failed to work in all controlled tests.  And yet they go for $40,000 each!  Over 2,000 of them.

Strangely, I find I do agree with one thing McCormick has to say about his product:

"the theory behind dowsing and the theory behind how we actually detect explosives is very similar".

Yes, dowsing and the ADE-651 are similar in that they are both complete bullshit. 

Randi’s blog today has a post, Randi Responds to the Arrest of James McCormick, that includes a video of Randi explaining the history of this device and the JREF’s role in exposing it.  (Although I don’t often recommend long video clips, this one with Randi is worth the time.)  Astonishingly, the Quadro Tracker (which, to repeat, is the exact same product as the ADE-651) was tested back in 1995 and was described back then by the FBI as “a fraud.”  Fifteen years later, McCormick gets arrested.

The Iraqi officer who appeared at a press conference with McCormick recently, Major General Jehad al-Jabiri, apparently said he did not care about the failed tests of this device.  I join Randi in hoping the Iraqis investigate this Iraqi officer’s connection to the manufacturers of the device.  Apparently it has been sold for $16,500 (still a rip off for something that does nothing), although it was sold to the Iraqi military for up to $60,000.  Would the Major General’s bank accounts reveal kickbacks received from McCormick’s company?  There would have been enough spare cash from that $85 million to pay off any number of intermediaries.  Perhaps the threat of jail time (Iraqi jail – nice) would motivate the Major General finally to care if the damn thing works or not.  One can only hope.

Praise should go to the JREF for doggedly exposing this fraud for at least the past 15 years, according to Randi.  (Shame on the media and law enforcement for allowing it to continue, without criticism, for so long.)  Don’t forget all the other frauds and charlatans who also refuse to take Randi’s $ million test because they know they would fail.  (And ditto.)

Who Lies?

You’ll remember that Barbara Loe Fisher is suing Amy Wallace et al for (as I understand it, mostly) the following piece that Wallace wrote about Fisher:

Fisher, who has long been the media's go-to interview for what some in the autism arena call "parents rights," makes him particularly nuts, as in "You just want to scream." The reason? "She lies," he says flatly.

You’ll note the “she lies” part, which seems to have been what got Fisher’s goat.  Of course, accusing people of lying can be problematic – unless you can read minds, you don’t really know if the person is actually lying or if they just mistakenly but honesty believe something that is false.  Regardless, that seems to be what Fisher is suing Wallace for.

Well, want to know something funny?  I just spent all of five minutes Googling and I found this piece written only two months ago by anti-vaccine supremo J.B. Handley, in the same Age of Autism blog that Fisher writes in.  The post was about (guess who?) Amy Wallace, and is entitled How Wired Magazine’s Amy Wallace Endangers Our Kids.  Guess what he says:

I know I speak for many when I say that we, as a community, are irate (sic) by the one-sided lies that Wired Magazine allowed Ms. Wallace to put in print.

Amy Wallace’s one-sided lies.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Wired Magazine and Amy Wallace should sue J.B. Handley for calling them liars, oh no.  I never would.  Not at all.  Couldn’t recommend that at all.  No way.  Never.  Absolutely not.  Never crossed my mind.

Casey Luskin Wrong on Tiktaalik

Casey Luskin over at the Disco-Tute’s blog is getting all excited about the recent discovery of fossilized tetrapod (four footed vertebrate) footprints in Poland, dated 395 million years ago.  What?  The Disco-Tute is excited about new scientific discoveries?  Well, yes, but only because they think it disproves evolution, or something.  Luskin’s post is entitled Tiktaalik Blown "Out of the Water" by Earlier Tetrapod Fossil Footprints, which should give you an idea.  Briefly, the transitional (between fish and tetrapod) fossil Tiktaalik was found in rocks 375 million years old, but these new tetrapod fossils are 395 million years old, so this newly discovered tetrapod wasn’t a descendant of Tiktaalik.  Luskin claims this means Tiktaalik isn’t a transitional form, even though it clearly has features of both fish and tetrapods (more on that below).

Here’s Luskin:

The fossil tetrapod footprints indicate Tiktaalik came over 10 million years after the existence of the first known true tetrapod. Tiktaalik, of course, is not a tetrapod but a fish, and these footprints make it very difficult to presently argue that Tiktaalik is a transitional link between fish and tetrapods. It’s not a “snapshot of fish evolving into land animals,” because if this transition ever took place it seems to have occurred millions of years before Tiktaalik.  [My bold.]

Of course, Luskin’s reasoning is wrong – if Tiktaalik is an intermediate between fish and tetrapods, then the discovery that this evolution also occurred earlier doesn’t suddenly magically mean that Tiktaalik isn’t an intermediate between fish and tetrapods anymore.  The evidence that Tiktaalik is an intermediate is still evidence that Tiktaalik is an intermediate.  Luskin doesn’t understand what an “intermediate” is – he thinks it has to be something on a direct line from (in this case) fish to existing land animals; it’s actually just a fossil that shows evolutionary change within lineages.  (It has features of both a fish and a tetrapod, so it shows evolution happening.)  Luskin thinks evolutionary theory says this happened only once.  But evolutionary theory doesn’t say that.  Transitional forms don’t have to be direct descendants of living species, they just have to be transitional between species (“cousins” of our ancestors, if you like) – that is, they just need to demonstrate evolution occurring.

PZ has a good post up, Casey Luskin embarrasses himself again, where he explains that Tiktaalik's status as a transitional form does not depend on us slotting it in a specific chronological time period as a link between two stages in the evolution of a lineage.

Why ID Is Useless

An interesting thing about Tiktaalik, is how Neil Shubin (its discover) managed to find it using a prediction of evolutionary theory.  In his post, Luskin quotes Shubin.  I’ll repost what Luskin quoted, but I’ll add a piece that he missed, from Zimmer and Shubin on Tiktaalik:

What evolution enables us to do is to make specific predictions about what we should find in the fossil record. The prediction in this case is clear-cut. That is, if we go to rocks of the right age, and the rocks of the right type, we should find transitions between two great forms of life, between fish and amphibian.

[…]

What we see when we look at the fossil record, at rocks of just the right age, is a creature like Tiktaalik.  Just like a fish, it has scales on its back, and fins. You can see the fin webbing here. Yet when we look at the head, you see something very different. You see a very amphibian-like thing, with a flat head, with eyes on top. It gets even better when we take the fin apart. When we look inside the fin, as in this cast here, what you’ll see is bones that compare to our shoulder, elbow, even parts of the wrist—bone for bone. So you have a fish, at just the right time in the history of life, that has characteristics of amphibians and primitive fish. It’s a mix. 

[My bold to indicate the bit that Luskin didn’t quote.]

Tiktaalik is undoubtedly transitional.  With gills, scales and fins it is a fish, but its fins, instead of having the many tiny bones normally found in fish, had fewer but sturdier bones in its limbs – bones similar in number and position to those of every land creature that came later.  Also, it had a flat head with eyes on the top like a modern amphibian, and it had a neck (which fish don’t have).  It also had spiracles (breathing holes) on the top of its head, which suggests it had primitive lungs, and it had stronger ribs that allowed it to pump air into these lungs.  Normal fish don’t need these because they breathe through their gills.

Luskin misses the point of all this with his “Tiktaalik, of course, is not a tetrapod but a fish” comment.  Typical creationist – scientist finds a transitional form (fish to tetrapod) and creationist insists it’s not transitional because it’s still either a fish or a tetrapod.  (Fish, in this case.)  Nothing would satisfy Luskin – regardless of what new fossils are found, according to Luskin they’ll either be a fish or a tetrapod but never a transitional.

Also, it is beyond question that Shubin used evolutionary theory to predict where he would find Tiktaalik.  He reasoned that if there were lobe finned fish but no terrestrial vertebrates 390 million years ago, and terrestrial vertebrates 360 million years ago, evolutionary theory would predict that you would find fossils of the transitional form in rocks around 375 million old (ie in between the two).  And you would find them in a freshwater area, since both lobe finned fish and early amphibians lived in freshwater.  So that’s where he looked.  And guess what?  That’s exactly where he found it. So evolutionary theory predicted where the fossil would be found.  Again, this all flies right over Luskin’s head:

The New York Times presaged Shubin's argument, first reporting on Tiktaalik that "the scientists concluded that Tiktaalik was an intermediate between the fishes Eusthenopteron and Panderichthys, which lived 385 million years ago, and early tetrapods. The known early tetrapods are Acanthostega and Ichthyostega, about 365 million years ago." But would neo-Darwinism have predicted true tetrapods from 397 million years ago? Definitely not

No, but then neither would Intelligent Design (ID) have predicted this.  The same way that ID didn’t predict Tiktaalik.  These new fossils were discovered by real scientist doing real science, not by creationists using “Intelligent Design.”  What this demonstrates is that science expands our knowledge while ID is completely vacuous and useless.  ID didn’t predict anything (neither Tiktaalik nor these new fossils) since ID is nothing but a bunch of ignorant whining about evolution.

Where do we go from here?  Well, clearly the creationists at the Disco-Tute will continue to miss the point entirely and claim that this discovery by real scientists somehow invalidates discoveries made by other real scientists.  Meanwhile, actual real scientists will use this new information as a springboard to investigate and learn more.  Philippe Janvier from the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris (reviewer of the paper on the newly found fossil) told CNN:

"The divergence between the tetrapods and their closest fish relatives is much younger than previously thought and it obliges us to find actual evidence -- skeletons or complete fossils -- in much earlier strata that could enlighten us between this divergence."

Real scientists will now do actual research on these new fossils so we can learn more about our past.  The difference between this and creationist poseurs such as Luskin, couldn’t be clearer.

Additional Reading

Jerry Coyne’s excellent book Why Evolution Is True has more on Tiktaalik and on transitional forms in general.

Barbara Loe Fisher wants A Fearless Conversation About Vaccination

Damn!  That’s another irony meter blown.  And it was the industrial version too.

Readers of Orac’s blog will already know that anti vaccinationist and founder of the The National Vaccine Information (sic) Center Barbara Loe Fisher is suing Dr. Paul Offit, Amy Wallace, and Condé Nast for libel, for their very reasonable (and factually correct) article in Wired about the anti-vaccine militia: An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All.  As Orac wrote, suing people who you disagree with, instead of presenting evidence to support your case “sums up the attitude of all too many anti-science activists. They can't win on the science; so they try to suppress criticism through legal action.”  And as Orac wrote, Fisher’s selection of Virginia as the state to file her suit, means that the suit will not be thrown out under a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) statute – one designed to prevent lawsuits designed solely to silence debate – because Virginia doesn’t have such a statute.  (Hum.  Funny how she chose Virginia to file the suit when the three defendants live in Pennsylvania, California and New York.)

So why did my industrial strength irony meter blow?  Well, Barbara Loe Fisher just wrote a piece on the Age of Autism blog, entitled 2010 Needs A Fearless Conversation About Vaccination.  Well, yeah, because we’d all love to have a conversation free of the fear of a freaking lawsuit from Barbara Loe Fisher and her anti-vaccination loon friends.  It takes some serious chutzpah to call for a fearless discussion on your pet subject in the same week that you took out a lawsuit to silence the opposition.

Fisher’s post is quite astonishing.  In it she lists all the things she says people were scared about in the last decade – basically it’s just terrorism, but she draws it out by listing weaponized smallpox scares and bioterrorism, but also manages to include her pet project – vaccines.  So does she mean the false scare stories about vaccines – the false claims that they cause autism, or other problems?  You know, all the anti-vaccine scaremongering that has been covered on this blog and elsewhere?  Well, no.  Of course not.  Get a load of this:

The Decade of Fear began on September 11, 2001, a day of indescribable loss that marked the ending of so much. Among the losses was the end of a civil and substantive conversation about vaccine safety that had taken shape during the previous two decades 4 but which - after September 11, 2001 - was hijacked by fear.  [My bold.]

Zing!  Vaccines linked to 9/11 in one step.  (I hope she paid Rudy Giuliani his royalty.)

She ends:

Hopefully, 2010 will be the beginning of a fearless and fierce search for the truth about health and vaccination that will enlighten us all.

Yeah, “hopefully” scientists reporting the facts will be able to do so without fear of intimidation.  Unfortunately the new decade hasn’t started out with that hope, thanks to Fisher and her lawyers.  Of course, what Fisher really means is that she should be free of fear to promote her anti-vaccine nonsense.  People who disagree with her though – that’s another matter.

As a final irony in the “and fierce search for the truth” arena, I tried to leave a comment on Fisher’s blog pointing out quite politely that the conversation about vaccines might be more fearless if people like Barbara Loe Fisher didn't sue people who publicly disagreed with her.  Guess what happened.  (No prizes.)  It never made it through moderation.  I guess Fisher has found a way to deal with her fear of contradictory views – she just ignores them.

It’s only January 7th and we already have our first nomination for a 2010 Golden Woo.  Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

 

The Golden Woos #2

It’s the first post of the new year, and so time for the second annual Golden Woo Awards for outstanding work in the promotion of Woo in the previous year. These awards have been compared to the Golden Globes, and to Randi’s Pigasus Awards.  Admittedly, I am the only one making this comparison but no matter – the comparison has been made and therefore my statement is true.  So with no further ado, I give you The Golden Woos of 2010.

The scientist or academic who said or did the silliest thing related to Woo

For the second year running the award goes to Michael Egnor.  His article last January, Materialism of the Gaps, would have been enough by itself to win this award outright.  As I explained in my post Egnor's Dualism Of The Gaps, his silly arguments for dualism included:

1. Misuse of the “god of the gaps” argument: for some reason he thinks it applies to people who see no reason to propose dualism.  (As I wrote, it is a fallacy to insist that your explanation must include some unproven entity that you just made up; it is not a fallacy to exclude made up entities)
2. Circular reasoning: the mind must be non-material, because materialism can’t explain the mind because the mind is non-material.  Seriously.
3. Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

As I said, enough to win the award by itself.  But then he wrote Climategate: a Word of Advice to the Scientists – in summary, some scientists (may have) lied about global warming, therefore evolution is false.  Just breathtaking in its stupidity.

If Egnor wins this award again next year I’ll have to rename it “The Egnor” in his honor.

The funding organization that supported the most useless Woo study

The award is given to the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council for their $400,000 study on emergency room acupuncture.  This study is useless because it is not randomized, it has no blinding, there is no sham acupuncture and standard medical procedures will be used in addition to acupuncture.  Plus, we also know from numerous studies that have already been done, that acupuncture is nothing more than a placebo.

The media outlet that reported as fact the most outrageous Woo claim (aka the “Larry King” prize)

After some considerable thought, I’ve decided to award The Larry to the entire media for their reporting on Rom Houben, the Belgian man who allegedly was fully conscious during a 23-year long coma.  I realize “the entire media” is a bit of a cop out, but honestly I haven’t been able to find any mainstream media outlet (maybe you can find one) that reported on this rationally. 

The outrageous woo claim here was not that the man had been conscious throughout the 23 years (opinions differ about how conscious he actually was/is); the woo claim is the “facilitated communication” (FC) – where a “facilitator” moves Houben’s hands across a keyboard and types out messages supposedly from him.  See these videos of this on CNN and on MSNBC – clearly the “facilitator” is doing the typing. Her eyes are constantly on the keyboard as she moves his hand from letter to letter; Houben's eyes are staring into the distance.  The best reporting I saw on this story was by Campbell Brown of CNN, but even she just left it that there was “skepticism” or “a controversy” around the FC.  (And she really has no excuse since we know her staff had contacted Hank Schlinger of the JREF, and had the whole FC nonsense explained to her in detail.)  But there is no controversy over whether FC is genuine – it is not.  Big epic FAIL from the entire media.

The Woo responsible for the most drivel containing the most logical fallacies (aka “The Chopra”)

Named for Deepak Chopra, for his achievements supporting woo with nothing but logical fallacies, above and beyond what can reasonably be expected of any human being.  As I wrote last year, Chopra is excluded from winning this award, otherwise no one else would ever stand a chance.  (Although that didn’t stop him from trying.)

The Chopra this year goes to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and Dinesh D’Souza for their reliance on pure assertion coupled with arguments by analogy (but zero actual evidence) in the debate on the conflict between science and religion, “La Ciudad de las Ideas 2009 Re-Evolution” Festival debate.

Now, you can click that link and watch the actual debate if you want, but it is two hours long (and loads slowly) so probably most people won’t want to bother.  It does have some good arguments put forward by Sam Harris and Chris Hitchens, so take a look if you have the time.  But for those who don’t, I’ve highlighted just one of the poor arguments (from many made) from each of these clowns.

First, we have Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (1 hour 4min in) on why morality does too come from religion:

I know that Daniel Dennett is a very moral man, I know Sam Harris is a very moral man, and I know Christopher Hitchens is a very moral man, but their morality COMES FROM RELIGION.  It comes from the ten commandments” “do not murder, do not steal, do not commit adultery”…

Stunning!  Boteach’s entire argument to support his contention that morality comes from religion, is to state in a loud voice that morality COMES FROM RELIGION.  And it must be so because Boteach says it is.  Case closed then.  Wow, I never knew that debate could be so simple – just assert what you say is true and it’s true and the other person is wrong.  Period.  If only I’d known that when I started this blog, I could have saved myself a lot of effort in constructing valid arguments, reading papers, citing studies, etc.  I could have just asserted that I was right and be done. Wow – is my face red now.

Even better (and by that, I mean even more lame) is Dinesh D’Souza (28 min in), on why agnosticism is the “dumbest position of all” to take.  Get a load of this:

[Agnosticism] is actually the dumbest position of all.  And here’s why.  Imagine if you are dating a woman and trying to consider the question of, should you ask her to marry you.  Now the fact is you could use all the reasonable knowledge at your disposal but if you say “what is life with this woman going to be like for the next 50 years,” you can never know. So you say, “OK, since I cannot know I’ll be an agnostic – I’ll wait for the data to come in.”  But the data will never be in.  If you keep waiting, she will marry someone else or you’ll both be dead.

To start with, this is just argument by analogy (the weakest form of argument), with absolutely no evidence presented (as Sam Harris pointed out at least twice).  But even by argument by analogy standards, it’s weak.  In fact, it’s not even a valid analogy because D’Souza is making a category error – comparing two things that are actually not comparable because they are in different categories.  The question “does God exist” is a truth claim – either God exists or he doesn’t.  The question “should you ask a woman to marry you” is a plan of action – you’re trying to decide what to do in the future, what plan of action to take.  D’Souza’s muddled mind is comparing a truth claim to a plan - two things that are not comparable and so obviously can’t be analogs.  What D’Souza probably meant was to compare belief in God with whether I believe the woman will say yes if I ask her to marry me.  (I could be wrong – but I’m trying my hardest to construct a coherent argument from what D’Souza actually said.)  This is so obviously a false analogy, because if I want to know if the woman will marry me, I just have to ask her and presumably she’ll tell me and then I’ll know.  But if I want to know if God exists, there is no one I can ask – well, plenty of people I can ask, but no one who actually knows the answer.  (OK, D’Souza and Boteach think they know the answer, but they don’t, any more than I do.)  So even by D’Souza’s usual standards, this is a really bad argument.  And that’s saying something.

For these and the numerous other “arguments” put forward in that debate, Shmuley Boteach and Dinesh D’Souza are worthy recipients of this year’s Chopra.

Irony Award, for being completely oblivious to the hypocrisy of their own actions or words in defense of Woo

To Bill Maher for his piece in the woo journal of choice, The Huffingtom Post, entitled Vaccination: A Conversation Worth Having.  Some snippets:

…its just that mainstream media rarely interviews doctors and scientists who present an alternative point of view. There is a movement to stop people from asking any questions about vaccines…

He’s complaining that the “alternative point of view” is not considered.

I feel its unnecessary and counterproductive to try and silence people with condescension.

Silencing with condescension is bad.

It may be the case that the vaccine should have been used anyway to finish polio off, but there are some interesting facts on the other side.

Should report “the other side.”  More in a similar vein, at the link.

So why is all this hypocritical?  Well, read what Bill had to say about the teaching of intelligent design, in his New Rules segment in August 2005:

And finally New Rule: You don't have to teach both sides of a debate, if one side is a load of crap.

[…]

…There aren't necessarily two sides to every issue. If there were, the Republicans would have an opposition party.

And an opposition party would point out that even though there's a debate, in schools, and government, about this, there is no debate among scientists.

[My Bold.]

Hey Bill Maher from 2005, go and tell that to Bill Maher in 2009 because that dude doesn’t have a clue!

Note, the award isn’t given to Maher because he doubts the value of vaccines.  It’s given because his argument is that we should consider the anti-vaccine point of view just because “the other side” should be heard.  If he gave real arguments against vaccines, his position wouldn't necessarily be hypocritical (it’d still be wrong, but not hypocritical).  But he doesn’t.  He just argues that both sides should be heard because, well, because they should. Except when they shouldn’t.

Maher shares his award with the Atheist Alliance International for awarding Maher the 2009 Richard Dawkins Award which is for (inter alia) increasing scientific knowledge.  Because what could be more ironic than presenting an award for increasing scientific knowledge to an anti-science kook like Maher?

Hitler Zombie Award (aka “The Godwin”) for appropriating Hitler to make the most outrageous Woo claim

The Godwin goes to The American “Tea Party” groups for their response to Obama’s (supposed) tax and health policies.  Examples are numerous, but I’ll choose the one below from the Huffington Post’s (yeah I know – they’re not necessarily wrong on everything) 10 Most Offensive Tea Party Signs:

Personally I don’t find it offensive, just stupid.

I’m not, in giving this award, commenting on whether I think they are right or wrong on these issues, and perhaps opposition to higher taxes / health reform isn’t technically woo.  But their repeated comparisons of Obama to Hitler in place of any valid arguments to support their case, means in my view that they are woos.  They are getting the award for their ridiculous and repeated arguing their case by making comparisons of Obama to Hitler. 

The most persistent refusal to face reality

The award goes to homeopath Thomas Sam, the who watched his daughter die of a curable disease while he repeatedly ignored what he was told by real doctors, to treat her only with magic water.

Of course, allowing his daughter to die that was was terrible, but understandable if you really believe in homeopathy, right?  We all make mistakes, yes?  Well maybe.  But Sam’s persistent refusal to face reality can be seen in his words, spoken just after he had been found guilty of his daughter’s manslaughter:

Conventional medicine would have prolonged her life ... with more misery. It's not going to cure her and that's what I strongly believe.

Yeah, because conventional medicine (you know, stuff that works) would have been even worse.  Sure.  Moron. 

The most ridiculous or bigoted act using religion as its justification

The award goes to Pope Ratzinger for arguing against condom use to prevent the spread of AIDS, as reported in Pope claims condoms could make African Aids crisis worse:

The pontiff said condoms were not the answer to the continent's fight against HIV and Aids and could make the problem worse.

[…]

The timing of his remarks outraged health agencies trying to halt the spread of HIV and Aids in sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 22 million people are infected.

Rebecca Hodes, of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, sums up why Ratzinger deserves this award:

[Ratzinger’s] opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans."

… Or anything else.

Finally, a new category this year:

The Occam

For the woo responsible for the most egregious violation of Occam’s Razor.

An argument that violates Occam’s Razor is not necessarily wrong, since Occam’s Razor can’t prove something right or wrong.  But it is a principle that should not be violated without a very good reason.  If you do, it means you have invented some unnecessary entity or assumption that does not add anything to the explanation.  That is, your additional assumption does not explain anything any better, nor does it make any additional predictions, compared with the explanation that did not have the additional assumption. Consequently, your additional assumption is not useful in any way (so why make it?).

The inaugural Occam goes to (who else) Deepak Chopra, for his insistence that the brain does not create the mind.  Discussed here, also speaking at an Indian Astrology Conference Western science is frozen in the superstition of materialism: Deepak Chopra (the last link via PZ).  Chopra’s “everything that we call reality is in consciousness” (etc etc) does not add anything to our understanding of consciousness, and does not make one single additional testable prediction compared with the hypothesis that does not include a non-material mind.  We may not (yet) fully understand consciousness, but Chopra’s made up drivel doesn’t help us understand anything.

That’s it for this year.  Please link to any other woos you think deserve an honorable mention, in the comments.

January 2013 – Edited to add:

I just noticed that this post had been deleted somehow in 2012. I did have a copy saved that I was able to re-post, but unfortunately all the comments have been lost. My apologies – there is nothing I can do about that. If you want to read the comments, you can still see them via the Wayback Machine – click Golden Woos #2 with comments to see them.

Chopra - Gets Snippy but Still Misses

Deepak Chopra has a surprisingly antagonistic article up (at the usual place) entitled Woo Woo Is a Step Ahead of (Bad) Science.  In it he calls out Michael Shermer for… well take a look.  Chopra is referring to a recent Larry King Live show where the two clashed:

Afterwards, however, I had an unpredictable reaction. I realized that I would much rather expound woo woo than the kind of bad science Shermer stands behind. He has made skepticism his personal brand, more or less, sitting by the side of the road to denigrate "those people who believe in spirituality, ghosts, and so on," as he says on a YouTube video. No matter that this broad brush would tar not just the Pope, Mahatma Gandhi, St. Teresa of Avila, Buddha, and countless scientists who happen to recognize a reality that transcends space and time. All are deemed irrational by the skeptical crowd. You would think that skeptics as a class have made significant contributions to science or the quality of life in their own right. Uh oh. No, they haven't. Their principal job is to reinforce the great ideas of yesterday while suppressing the great ideas of tomorrow.

At least he admits he expounds woo – by definition, extraordinary beliefs for which there is insufficient extraordinary evidence.  He also claims Shermer stands behind bad science, except he gives no evidence that Shermer supports bad science.  (In reality, he just doesn’t support Chopra’s pseudoscience.)  Chopra follows with a lame appeal to authority (the Pope, Mahatma Gandhi, St. Teresa of Avila, Buddha, etc), and the claim that skeptics, by rejecting false ideas, are somehow suppressing great ideas.  Seriously.  Chopra’s grasp of logic clearly hasn’t improved any.

For we have reached the state where Shermer's tired, out-of-date, utterly mediocre science is far in arrears of the best, most open scientific thinkers -- actually, we reached that point 60 years ago when eminent physicists like Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger applied quantum theory to deep spiritual questions. The arrogance of skeptics is both high-handed and rusty. It is high-handed because they lump brilliant speculative thinkers into one black box known as woo woo. It is rusty because Shermer doesn't even bother to keep up with the latest findings in neuroscience, medicine, genetics, physics, and evolutionary biology. All of these fields have opened fascinating new ground for speculation and imagination.

[My Bold.]

Yes – speculation.  Chopra gets close, but then misses completely.  Speculation is great for forming hypotheses to test.  Chopra, though, treats these speculations as though they were already successfully tested and were now proven facts.  They’re not.

Skeptics feel that they have won the high ground in matters concerning consciousness, mind, the origins of life, evolutionary theory, and brain science. This is far from the case. What they cling to is 19th Century materialism, packaged with a screeching hysteria about God and religion that is so passé it has become quaint. To suggest that Darwinian theory is incomplete and full of unproven hypotheses causes Shermer, who takes Darwin as purely as a fundamentalist takes scripture, to see God everywhere in the enemy camp.

I don’t think that any evolutionary scientist would argue that the the theory of evolution is complete – if it were, there would be no need for anyone do do evolutionary science any more because we'd already know everything.  (So that’s a straw man, for those who are counting.)  But “full of unproven hypotheses”?  Really?  “Full” of them?  If there are so many, why doesn’t Chopra list a couple?  Talk about “screeching hysteria.” 

Anyway, this shrill screed made me want to see what he was talking about – so I looked up the transcript of the Larry King show in question (which also included Dinesh D’Souza – so you know it’s going to be good.  And by “good,” you know I mean “bad”).  Here are some examples:

CHOPRA: First of all, there's a lot of interesting science now that is suggesting -- and by no means is this clear. There's a lot of controversy of -- about this. There's a lot of interesting science that our consciousness, which is the place where we perceive, think, emote, imagine, have insight, intuition, choice-making -- that this part of us is not a product of our brain.

Chopra admits the science just “suggests” this, and that the evidence “by no means is this clear.”  You wouldn’t believe this though from what follows, or from his HuffPo article.  Note how all the “not clear” and only “suggesting” references disappear in what follows:

Yes. The -- the -- the mind, that consciousness, the one I'm talking to right now is not a product of the brain, but is localizing itself through the brain, just like people who are seeing us right now on their screens, you know, we're not in their television boxes. We are coming through these airwaves and they are perceiving us. But if they open the box, they wouldn't find Deepak or Jeff or anyone there.

So if I look inside you, I won't find your soul because it's not there. In fact, your body is experienced in your consciousness. Your mind is experienced in your consciousness. And the evidence is pointing out that this consciousness is non-local, which means it exists outside of space-time and therefore, mathematically, it's impossible to destroy this consciousness.

Typical Chopra bait and switch.  The doubt from the bait section is gone, and the switch is in to “…is not a product of the brain.”  No doubts, no suggestions, no unclearedness – the mind just isn’t a product of the brain any more.  Period.  It is now also “impossible” to destroy consciousness.  Note – impossible.  No doubt any more, no mere “suggesting.”  And it must be so because Chopra tells us it is.  Even though (also according to Chopra) the science is by no means this clear and is only suggesting of these things. 

Also note another favorite argument of the woo – argument by analogy.  I’ve heard this analogy to the TV set before – our brain is like the TV set but our mind is somewhere else (by analogy, the TV signal).  But the analogy fails.  In fact, it’s more than that, if anything the analogy demonstrates the mind is not like the TV signal.  We know that if you damage part of the brain, the functions associated with the damaged sections of the brain will be reduced or disappear altogether. This is not like a TV at all.  If you damage part of your TV set you won’t find that you now only get the commercials but not the programs, or that you get game shows but not documentaries.  That would be a true analog of what happens when the brain is damaged.  No.  If you damage your TV set, either it still works (you didn’t damage anything significant) or it stops working altogether. 
(For the most part, anyway.)  And if you disrupt the signal, by disconnecting the cable box, or by shielding the aerial, again the TV again stops working completely.  You don’t find that you now get the programs but the remote doesn’t work any more.

Chopra follows this with an old chestnut you will recognize if you have ever tried to debate idealists or dualists:

But if I ask you to imagine the color red or look at the color red, there's no red in your brain. There's just electrical firings.

True but irrelevant.  Yes, your brain interprets certain visible light wavelengths as “red” and yes I don’t know if what you see as “red” is what I see as “red.”  But show me a red card and (in a separate room) show Chopra a red card and we’ll both say it’s “red” (assuming neither of us is color blind), and we’ll do that because there is a real external phenomenon in the physical world that our brains see and interpret as “red”; it doesn’t mean there is a non-material mind signaling the brain.

Well, I have to say of Michael that he is very superstitious. He's addicted to the superstition of materialism. The first thing he said about the brain, you know, that you destroy a certain part of the brain and that function will not come back -- he hasn't kept up with the literature. There's a whole phenomenon called neural plasticity. There's gene regulation.

Chopra massively overreaches.  Yes, neural plasticity means the brain can re-wire itself, given time, to perform some of the functions it lost when it was damaged. But it takes time, and while it’s doing so the brain doesn’t have the functions it lost.  This is not evidence for a non-material mind; it is evidence that the physical brain can eventually repair itself to some limited extent.  I’m not sure what gene regulation has to do with this, but that also has a material explanation and doesn’t require a non-material mind to function.  As Steven Novella wrote:

…all the evidence we have suggests that the mind is a product of the brain. There is no mind without the brain (despite the unsubstantiated claims of paranormalists). If the brain is not biologically active, there is no consciousness. If the brain is damaged, the mind is altered. As brain function changes through drugs, lack of sleep, fever, or some metabolic derangement – so changes the mind. No reliable observation or experiment has been able to separate the mind as a phenomenon from the brain.

Throughout this whole thing, Chopra keeps asking Shermer what he clearly thinks is a killer question:

CHOPRA: ...are we talking to you, Michael, or to your networks right now?

CHOPRA: OK. When you said you'd like to believe in an after- death, was that your synaptic network speaking or was it you?

CHOPRA: OK. So what -- you know, when you say I'm skeptical about this, who's the "I" that's skeptical?

CHOPRA: I know it doesn't work for you. Who's the you that's talking to me right now?

CHOPRA: You are saying that's the way our synaptic networks should -- who's you?

I could ask Chopra the same question, and Chopra wouldn’t know the answer either.  Although that wouldn’t stop him making one up.  Of course, the sensible answer is that as far as we know, the “I” that we all feel we are is an emergent property of the neurons firing in our extremely complex brains.  Or as Steven Novella wrote:

I would describe the subjective sense of self, of existence, as the real-time processing of the brain that is constantly taking in external stimuli while engaging in an internal conversation – generating thoughts and feelings and comparing those processes to memory and sensory input. We know that in order to be awake the brain needs to be constantly activated (a process of the brainstem activating system), which suggests that this constant brain activity is necessary for consciousness, probably because it is consciousness.

Admittedly, Chopra’s brain might not be complex enough to accomplish that task, but that’s no reason to suppose the rest of us need a non-material mind to get the same feeling.

The host (who despite the name of the show, was not Larry King) asked one sensible question (although he also tried to answer it himself in a less sensible way):

PROBST: Why not believe?

Why -- why are you focusing so much -- because if you're wrong...

The answer is, that we should reject ideas that are wrong, because it is only by rejecting ideas that are wrong that correct ideas will flourish.  I was reminded here of the words of Antony Hoare (senior researcher at Microsoft Corporation), who explained what he though was the one thing everyone should learn about science:

…scientists start by trying very hard to disprove what they hope is true. When they fail, they have a good reason for believing what they hope is true, and can even convince others of its truth.

Do you imagine that Chopra has ever tried (very hard or even not so hard) to prove that the mind is not a separate entity from the brain?  Would he even consider doing that?  He gave us the TV set analogy – the brain is like the TV set but the mind is like the signal.  Do you think he has ever thought of testing this to see if he could prove it false – by shutting off the signal (analogous to disconnecting the cable box) or disrupting it (by analogy, putting the TV aerial inside a Faraday cage), to see if the brain stops providing consciousness when the signal from the mind is disrupted?  Has he even thought of doing this?  You know the answer – of course he hasn’t.  He never would.  He isn’t interested in trying to prove his pet theory wrong; he’s only interested in posturing on the Larry King Show and on the pages of the Huffington Post.

Chopra called for a formal debate with Shermer, a debate he claims Shermer has avoided.  Funny, I seem to remember they already had a debate, and that Chopra’s arguments were the usual weak logical fallacies that he always trots out.  (Click that link and you’ll see that Chopra’s arguments haven’t improved any.)  Should Shermer agree to debate him?  Well, that’s up to Shermer, but science isn’t decided by debates, even among scientists (which Chopra isn't), and we know from debating creationists that the woo side has the advantage in that they don’t have to restrict themselves to facts, good scientific evidence or valid logic.  Still, if he does, Chopra’s side of the debate is sure to give me material for some more blog posts.

Climategate or Deniergate?

In June 2005, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published an article in Salon and Rolling Stone where he claimed that a an ethyl mercury compound called Thimerosal, used as a preservative in vaccines, was the cause of an autism epidemic.  As his proof, he pulled several quotes from the minutes of a conference of government scientists at the Simpsonwood center, as well as from an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report.  Kennedy’s article caused quite a stir at the time, with proponents of the Thimerosal-autism link essentially claiming a conspiracy of scientists to cover up the “truth” about childhood vaccines.  I decided to read both the full minutes of the conference, and the IOM report, and I discovered that the quotes Kennedy was relying on were taken completely out of context, and that the quotes in context (and in fact the full reports) showed the exact opposite of what Kennedy was claiming.  The quotes, and the full reports, were in reality just indications of the uncertain business of science, some careless wording and (mostly) dishonesty in the way the quotes were manipulated and misrepresented by Kennedy.  My two posts back then, Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s completely dishonest thimerosal article and Lies, damn lies, and quote mining showed the true meaning of (respectively) the Simpsonwood minutes and the IOM report.  Science isn’t decided by taking quotes from scientists (in or out of context), it is decided through experiment and publication, so even if the quotes had not been out of context it still wouldn’t have “proved” that Thimerosal causes autism (although it would have raised some serious questions). In actuality, all the article showed was that someone with a preconceived conclusion can dishonestly manipulate small pieces of out of context data to prove whatever they want, and that gullible people (many also with preconceived views) are likely to believe them.  Unfortunately, many still do.

I was reminded of the Kennedy/Thimerosal fiasco when I looked at the recent Climategate hacked emails. You know the ones. The leaked emails that proves, just proves I tell you, that global warming is a hoax, a conspiracy of lefty scientists, environmentalists and Al Gore.  I’m not going to repeat the whole story.  If you’re not familiar with the details read Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?  It’s written by proud libertarian James Delingpole, who (according to him) “writes brilliant books and brilliant articles” and “is right about everything,” so you know you can trust him.  Go read his article if you haven’t already read the quotes the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGM) dissidents are so thrilled about.  He’s got them all.

The first thing I thought when I originally read those quotes was, “is that it?”  I mean, seriously.  The hacked emails are said to consist of 1073 emails, or about 1 million words in total.  Delingpole quotes more of these emails than most, and yet by my count only 506 words.  That’s 0.05% of the total. I can’t help wondering what’s in the other 99.95% of the words they don’t quote.  They’re ignoring 99.95%!  Presumably they aren’t as damning (if at all) as the 500 words Delingpole and many others have quoted (since presumably he pulled the “best” ones).  And these 500 words aren’t really all that damning anyway.  For example, much has been made of the phrase “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick […] to hide the decline…”  Of course we all know that the word “trick” can often mean a shortcut, or a clever method of doing something, and doesn’t have to mean anything improper.  And even if that were not true, a cherry picked 0.05% of some hacked emails doesn’t magically change everything so that the planet isn’t warming anymore and glaciers aren’t melting now like they were before the emails were leaked.

And that would be true even if the phrase "hide the decline" actually meant hide a decline in temperatures, when in fact it referred to a decline in tree-ring density – yes, the anomaly was that temperatures had increased (global warming) while tree ring density had decreased. So not only was this quote out of context (a trick is not necessarily something wrong), and irrelevant (since the world is still warming, regardless), it’s also factually incorrect (in that it doesn’t refer to a decrease in temperatures) too.  To be wrong so many different ways takes some talent. (Actually, come to think of it, no it doesn’t.)

Back in June 2005, I decided to read the long Simpsonwood minutes and IOM report to determine for myself what they really meant.  It took, as I recall, a couple of weekends of my time. I’m not going to that much trouble this time, and instead I’m going to wait for the results of the independent investigation.  In the mean time, The Associated Press just got five reporters to examine the emails, as is reported in AP IMPACT: Science not faked, but not pretty.  In summary, they say the leaked emails don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of human activity.

In looking at how the so-called AGW “skeptics” have reacted to these emails, I’m reminded of a post of mine from February, Global Warming Denial.  In it I referenced Denialism Blog’s What is Denialism.  Of the five general denier tactics, I see two being used here, namely conspiracy and cherry picking:

Conspiracy:

But how could it be possible, for instance, for every nearly every scientist in a field be working together to promote a falsehood? People who believe this is possible simply have no practical understanding of how science works as a discipline.

Nothing more need be added there, I think.

Selectivity (Cherry Picking)

Quote mining is also an example of "selective" argument, by using a statement out of context, just like using papers or data out of context, they are able to sow confusion.

Given the way these emails have been reported by the so-called skeptics, that paragraph is quite prescient. 

It’s clear that the AGW “skeptics” are in full AGW denier mode over this.  No science, no evidence that global warming isn’t happening; instead they cherry pick quotes out of context to claim a conspiracy of climate scientists to hide the “truth” about global warming.  Again, I refer you to my opening paragraph about how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quote mined scientists to claim a conspiracy to hide the “truth”.  And in that case the scientists knew their words were being transcribed and would be published.  Imagine if Kennedy had been able to get his hands on some emails they thought would remain private.  In reality, all this shows that kooks of the right (AGW deniers) are no different in the way they behave from kooks of the left (Kennedy, et al). The ever reasonable Steven Novella calls for calm and a cautious approach from the AGW “skeptics”:

For global warming dissidents I recommend that you put your rhetoric in check. The witch-hunt frenzy so far in evidence cannot possibly serve you well. If it turns out there was real fraud at the CRU, you will still be criticized for being prematurely shrill and you will lose credibility. Also, the more extravagant your condemnations, the more likely it is that the reality will not be as bad as you are stating – and therefore even if some indiscretions come to light, you will have actually softened the blow because they will not be as bad as the worst hysterical claims. And of course, if it comes to light that no real fraud occurred, the credibility of AGW dissidents will have been dealt a severe blow.

Yeah, well good luck with that idea.  In my experience with AGW deniers, putting their rhetoric in check does not come naturally.  Or at all.  Furthermore, regardless of what the independent review reveals, I fully expect the AGW deniers (just like the mercury causes autism militia) to ignore any results that contradict their preconceived certainty that AGW is a fraud, and to smear anyone who does not agree with them.  In fact, it’s already happening: the smears are already in on the authors of the AP review I referenced above.  (Took less than a day.)  Pretty funny – the so called “skeptics,” who have in the past criticized me for not being skeptical enough about AGW, have showed absolutely zero skepticism before launching into full blown “AGW is dead” mode.  And for that, I call them “deniers” and make no apology for doing so.  It’s not ad hominem (as they will undoubtedly claim); it is a simple statement that describes the way they are behaving.

I’ll reserve my final opinion on the leaked emails until the independent review is in.  If it concludes that there was serious wrongdoing then I will certainly modify my opinion and comments to fit the new facts. But in the meantime, it isn’t clear if this is really Climategate or Deniergate (ie deniers overreaching).  I suspect the latter.  Unfortunately, although the scientists involved are going to be held to the highest standards (as they should be), the AGW deniers will get away with the usual logical fallacies, smears, lies and half truths.  Whatever the results of any independent review, you can bet that there will be no one calling for an investigation into any dishonesty or fraudulent activities of the AGW deniers over this story.  Whatever the result, they will get away with “Deniergate” (see if any news media outlet even uses that term, although they were quick to add a “gate” to “climate”).  And, of course, that's what they are relying on.

More Reading

The New Scientist: Why there's no sign of a climate conspiracy in hacked emails

Harry_read_me.txt: the climategate gun that does not smoke

RealClimate on The CRU hack

And finally, for some light relief, read Carbon Fixated’s Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Renaissance and Enlightenment ‘thinking’.  Gravity – what a hoax that was.

Where’s Skeptico?

Several people have emailed me to ask if I’m still here, if I’ve given up blogging, or what.  Of course, I’m touched that you all noticed.  The truth is, I’ve just been having trouble recently finding the motivation to write anything new.  I seem to have covered all the major topics I wanted to cover when I started this blog, plus many more (What The Bleep!? / The Secret) that I never even envisioned back in February 2005.  And now, when I see some more nonsense by, say, Bill Maher or Deepak Chopra, it looks like the same old crap I’ve debunked before, and that others (I’m looking at you Orac) have already done an excellent job of taking down already.  So I decided to take a break for a while. I’ve not gone away (as you can tell from the comments) and in fact I do have another brief post planned on astrology, as well as year 2 of The Golden Woos to consider. But it is true that I won’t be posting as often as before, at least for a while.

In the mean time I’ve decided to catch up on some reading, notably Why Evolution Is True and The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution – both excellent by the way. And I also have a book by Chris Hallquist - UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God: Debunking the Resurrection of Jesus - to read (and review Chris.  I know).

I’ve also been reading a lot of blogs.  For example, TechSkeptic just posted the latest Skeptics’ Circle. Here are a couple of others I found interesting recently – some of which you have probably read but a couple perhaps you haven’t.

First, check out Whirled Musings on the sweat lodge deaths at James Arthur Ray’s Sedona retreat: Sweat lodge deaths: is the heat on Secret star?  I’ve had differences with Whirled Musings’ Connie before, but I have to say that few are more persistent than she in debunking New Wage cults such as The Secret and its fellow travelers. This post is very long, with many additions as new information came in, but it is really worth a read.  A couple of snippets:

While investigators are still sorting out all of the factors that led to the deaths of two participants [now three; see Oct. 18 addendum below ~CLS], and the injuries of numerous others, at James Ray's recent Sedona disaster, it seems abundantly clear by now (at least to me) that the very nature of the retreat – and the manipulative techniques James Ray used – were factors in those deaths and injuries. Numerous accounts I have read said that even though participants were told they could leave whenever they wanted, those who recognized their limitations and tried to exit the sweat lodge were, in some cases, chided by James (he called one guy a "wimp") and they were encouraged to stay and experience the event "full-on."

Also, quoting the San Francisco Examiner:

People are flailing in seizures; others are vomiting violently, or foaming at the mouth. Bodies are lined up unconscious, some are blue from lack of oxygen, but for some it is too late, they are already dead. Survivors that are barely able to stand struggle to help the others, they have had almost no food or water for nearly three days, even longer without sleep. It looks like a war zone, but for the incongruent figure of James Arthur Ray (a contributing author to The Secret) who exits the sweat lodge and stands tall with a big smile, the only one able to stand on his own volition. He is not concerned with the medical emergency going on full swing around him. He is not worried about the health and well-being of his followers who have paid $10,000.00 (tack on an additional 5,000.00 or so if you include flights, room and board, and camping supplies) to attend his retreat. In fact, he and his team urge people to stop taking care of others and focus on their own journey, assuring them they are fine and only “purging”. Someone finally realizes James Ray is not in control of the situation and calls 911.

A new blog about genetic engineering that I have been reading is Biofortified.  There is certainly a lot of nonsense talked about genetic engineering, but the writers of Biofortified are refreshingly evidence based.  Check out Terminator 2: My Mission is to Protect You – on the subject of “terminator” technology and why it is not the evil bogeyman that the anti-GE people like to claim it is. In fact, although terminator technology is not actually in any commercially available GE crops, it is a part of some non GE crops including some organics:

There is a very widely used and accepted conventional analog of Terminator GURTs that most of us have eaten – they’re called Seedless Watermelons. These are generated by manipulating the number of chromosomes in watermelon cells to give them three copies of each chromosome instead of two. (For more on how this works, you can watch a video I made about it here.) The resulting “Triploid” Watermelons sponteneously abort their seeds, leaving a juicy, seedless fruit. The seeds have to be regenerated year after year from other plants, and farmers and consumers obviously cannot replant seeds that don’t even exist!

Ironically, while genetic engineering is not allowed in organic agriculture, Seedless watermelons are. Nevermind the fact that the chromosome numbers are artificially manipulated using chemicals – it appears that this early form of direct genetic manipulation has been grandfathered in.

My point in bringing up the seedless watermelon is this: It results in exactly the same thing as genetically engineered GURTs – and that is it effectively prevents the plant from generating fertile seeds. The argument is often made, most vociferously by Shiva, that GURTs are immoral because they interrupt the traditional practice of seed saving. Shiva and others must therefore agree that seedless watermelons are also immoral for the same reason. Why is there no call for a moratorium on seedless watermelons? Well, that would be the pits.

Keeping with the GE theme, Scienceblogs recently added Tomorrow’s Table, written by Pamela Ronald, Professor of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis.

And just so as you know I haven’t gone soft, I’ll link to Orac’s takedown of two wooful posts in (where else) The Huffington Post.  First, Bill Maher’s attempt to distance himself from the criticisms that he’s anti vaccine (where on Earth could we have ever gotten that idea?): Vaccination: A Conversation Worth Having. I’m not going into that post paragraph by paragraph (Orac has already done it – see Bill Maher flames out in a pyre of stupidity over vaccines—again), but I just wanted to highlight one line:

In addition, my audience is bright, they wouldn't refuse a flu shot because they heard me talk about it…

Oh no – the Oprah defense: I may be talking crap or I may not – it doesn’t matter because my readers will decide.  Come on Bill. Man up – either engage your critics with evidence and facts or shut the hell up, but quit hiding behind the skirts of your readers with this lame argument.

Finally, trust Deepak Chopra to chime in with more drivel just when we need it.  Orac responds with Deepak Chopra and his Choprawoo translated: "Skeptics, take my ill-informed speculations seriously!"  Sheesh, I may have to break my rule and award Chopra a Golden Woo after all.

Skeptico - A "Top Resource" in Astrology

Talk about missing the point.

I received this email from the email address of Ryan Flaherty, although confusingly it was signed Mark Cutler.  The subject was “love your site” – well, who could resist that?  Here’s the email:

Our website Sunlightfoundation.org is a Professional Database that is used by over 100,000 users in the astrological/psychic world monthly to seek  psychic or astrological advice. We make this possible by updating the information daily and keeping up to date on recent astrological news. We take pride in being one of the largest websites in the industry and take what our users and affiliates say into account to make this website much more user friendly. We recently ran a poll asking the users that are most familiar with the site what types of informational resources they use to keep up to date or even to simply find great information. Our users primarily are interested in blogs and websites Such as yours. I have reviewed your information and must say, I absolutely love the content you have made available to the public and would like to make your site a link on ours. I would like to offer you our Featured Resource badge that can be posted on your site, which recognizes you as a top resource in the psychic/astrology field or simply a text link within your site (Psychic Reading). I would also like to post your site in our resources page with a FULL banner to make your site  available to my thousands of users. Thanks again for the great information and I look forward to the great responses your site will receive from my users!

As you can imagine I was thrilled, not to say a little proud that I was being recognized as a top resource in astrology!  I figured that all my work in this area had finally paid off.  Excitedly, I replied:

Ryan:

I'm glad you like my blog.  Please feel free to link my site on yours.  You can use my blog url, or perhaps the url to just my astrology articles would be better:

http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/astrology/

Please send me your Featured Resource badge, that you described in your email. It would be great to be recognized as a top resource in the psychic/astrology field, as you mention.

Several days have passed and yet I haven’t received my Featured Resource badge, as Ryan/Mark promised. I hope he hasn’t had second thoughts.  Nah – I’m sure it’s on its way.

Roseneau Is Projecting Again

He’s at it again.  Josh Rosenau has another post up On accommodationism.  He ends with:

…I've occasionally used the term "enabler" to describe the folks who oppose whatever accommodationism might be.

(Sigh.)

I called Josh on this piece of projection before.

Think about this.  Considering a drug addict, say - which is the enabler:

1. The one who helps the addict get drugs, lends him money to get drugs, who tells him drug addiction is not that bad, tells him you can do drugs and live a normal life, would never tell him to give up, or
2. The one who tells the addict to stop doing drugs, says doing drugs is stupid, hides his drugs, hides his drug money, points to studies saying drugs are bad, gets angry at the addict when he’s high.

Clearly the enabler is #1.

Now, question for the class, which one (# 1 or # 2 above), by analogy, is the accommodationist, and which the new atheist?

As I wrote in a comment on Josh’s blog:

“You (the accomodationists) tell the addict (religious believer) that their religious delusions are OK and totally not inconsistent with science at all.  You (the accomodationists) are the ones who actually do enable the addicts (religious believers) by providing them with their drugs (reasons why religion and science are compatible).  I realize you are acting out of love for the religious people you come into contact with, but in reality, you’re making the problem worse.  That’s up to you, but you really should stop this dishonest labeling of the non-accomodationists with what you are actually doing yourself. It’s called projection.”

Of course, Josh is under no obligation to respond to what I wrote, to justify his use of the word.  But, if he’s not going to respond, then he should at least have the intellectual honesty to stop parroting this nonsense.

Buffy and the Enablers of the NCSE

Scienceblogger Josh Rosenau has a post up where he claims that there are other valid ways of knowing, apart from science.  Regular readers will know that woos make this claim all the time, which is why I think this subject is pretty important.  So much so that I wrote about the fallacy that is The appeal to other ways of knowing - the claim that the tools of critical thinking and science are not sufficient to evaluate the believer’s claim; therefore the believer's claim has validity despite the lack of evidence for it.  It’s generally not worth making a new post about this every time someone mentions it, but Josh, as well as being a blogger with the generally awesome Scienceblogs, is also Public Information Project Director at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), the organization that works to keep evolution in US public school science education.  So when Josh suggests that religion might provide one valid way of knowing, it’s relevant.   

Josh’s (first) post on this subject is On vampires and ways of knowing.  It was written in response to Jerry Coyne’s post How many “ways of knowing” are there? (which is how I found it).  You have to scroll down a few pages in Josh’s post before you get to where he starts to support his “other ways of knowing” argument.  If you read those two posts (especially Jerry’s), you’ll realize that what’s behind this discussion is the recent argument about so called “accommodationism” – the idea that science and religion need not conflict.  Accommodationists think that the “new atheists” with their harsh criticisms of religion, are making it harder to get people to accept evolution.  (I’m simplifying the discussion.  If you’re been reading PZ, Larry, Jason or Jerry Coyne, you’ll know what I’m talking about.)  The accomodationist stance does appear to be the NCSE’s position, although Josh’s post is not an official NCSE statement.

The reason for that preamble, is that before Josh gets to his “other ways of knowing” arguments, he takes a dig at the people who don’t approve of accommodation, or as Josh refers to them, “enablers”:

This is all part of the long and tedious battle between a clique of atheists who seem intent on enabling creationists in their muddling of the nature of science (enablers) and people who think it's possible for science and religion to exist without meaningful conflict (so-called accommodationists).  [My bold.]

He repeats this “enablers” wording later, and in comments.

First of all, you’ll note that Josh in no way demonstrates that the new atheists are “enabling creationists,” (he even says that they only “seem intent on…”) and yet he immediately follows by assuming his point is proven and henceforth labels the people he disagrees with as “enablers” – which is ad hominem, since he didn’t justify the wording.  As a further sign of his dishonesty, he doesn’t even use the much less pejorative (and more accurate) description of his own side, which would be “accommodationists.”  Instead he uses “so-called accommodationists.”  Weasel wording at best, and hardly a positive sign. 

More to the point, “enablers” seemed like a strange label to apply to the anti-accommodationist people.  It’s a specific term used by psychotherapists and the like, and has a specific meaning.  I looked up “enabler” in several places.  This one is fairly typical, where it defines enablers as people who:

…allow loved ones to behave in ways that are destructive. For example, an enabler wife of an alcoholic might continue to provide the husband with alcohol. A person might be an enabler of a gambler or compulsive spender by lending them money to get out of debt.

In this fashion, though the enabler may be acting out of love and trying to help or protect a person, he or she is actually making a chronic problem like an addiction worse. By continuing to lend money to the gambler, for example, the gambler doesn’t have to face the consequences of his actions. Someone is there to bail him out of trouble and continue to enable his behavior.

Looking at that explanation, it seems to me that if anything, the real enablers are the accommodationists.  Think about it.  They (the accommodationists) tell the addict (religious believer) that their religious delusions are OK and totally not inconsistent with science at all.  They (the accommodationists) are the ones who actually do enable the addicts (religious believers) by providing them with their drugs (rationalizations for belief in both religion and evolution).  They are certainly protecting religious believers from having to face the consequences of their beliefs.  I’ll leave you to decide which side is actually making a chronic problem worse.  Regardless of what you think, it’s pretty clear that Josh has made no attempt to justify calling his opponents enablers.  His argument by label is lazy and not a little sleazy.  And since he’s really describing what his side does, it’s actually also projection.  (Hey, I can do psycho-babble too.)

OK, so what are Josh’s other ways of knowing?  Essentially, it’s what we get from fiction:

…telling stories about vampires is a great way to convey certain truths about the world we all live in. These aren't truths that science can independently verify, but they are still true in a meaningful way.

No one should watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer they (sic) way they would watch a documentary, but they should certainly watch the show. It's brilliant, and it uses this exact sort of literary truth to tackle tricky subjects like drug addiction, spousal abuse, peer pressure, bullying, and the challenges of adolescence in late 20th century America with a sophistication and humor that would be impossible in any other form.

Oh dear.  It’s hard to believe a smart person could make such a bad argument.  He’s saying (and he further clarified this is the comments and in subsequent posts) that works of fiction tell us truths, make us think of things, or in a way, that perhaps we wouldn’t be able to otherwise.  Maybe, but he’s confusing a way of knowing something with a way of having it explained.  Reading fiction may be a way of understanding something – but it’s just an explanation of what is already known by some other means.  It’s not a way to determine what is true in the first place.

For example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of the characters gets so heavily into magic that it messes up her life.  Nothing else has meaning for her anymore, she lies to her friends, she puts herself and her friends in danger, nearly gets someone killed, damages her own physical and mental health.  This is obviously an allegory about drug addiction.  From this we learn that drug addiction is bad.  But we don’t know that drug addiction is bad from this episode of Buffy.  We know that drug addiction is bad from stories about drug addiction, from people we have known who were addicts, from reports on addiction etc.  We already knew this from some other way of knowing – one based on observation, verification and replication (aka “science”).  The fictional Buffy the Vampire Slayer just explains this – gets us to remember and understand these facts that were already known before by some other means.  But we only get the allegory, and register the fact that addiction is bad, because we already know addition addiction is bad.  If we didn’t already know addition addiction was bad, the allegory wouldn’t make sense.

Buffy also tells us things that are not true.  For example, that vampires exist.  And yet we don’t learn from Buffy that vampires exist - we already know they don’t.

Josh must know this, but he digs himself in deeper in one of his follow up posts, Defining terms:

To return, then, to ways of knowing, I'll define them as systematic methods of evaluating truth claims against new sources of knowledge

For once I agree.  But how do you use Buffy to evaluate the truth or otherwise of the statements:

1. Drug addiction is bad
2. Vampires exist.

You can’t do that from watching Buffy – you have to go outside of the fictional TV program, and check what they’re telling you against the real world.  That is, you must do some form of science (informally defined), to check what Buffy is telling you – to “know” what is true, if you like.  Therefore Buffy is not a way of knowing, by Josh’s own definition.

The peculiar irony here is that the talk Jerry is complaining about was delivered at DragonCon, a science fiction/fantasy convention filled with people celebrating the truth of unreal things. I didn't see Genie's talk because I was manning NCSE's booth, watching a parade of costumed fans wait in line to get autographs from William Shatner (James T. Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Spock), Kate Mulgrew (Star Trek Voyager's Capt. Janeway), and Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard). These fans are devoted to the various incarnations of Star Trek, and were willing to spend $40-75 for just one signature from one of the Star Trek captains. And they don't all want the same signature. Some think Picard is the greatest captain in the Star Trek Universe, some think Kirk is the better captain, and a few prefer Janeway.

These, again, are truth claims…

Again, oh dear.  No, these are not truth claims.  These are opinions. 

In any event, science as a "way of knowing" does not produce truth. People have known that since the failure of logical positivism in the early 20th century; science can lead us away from untruths, and lets us narrow in on the truth, but science can only approach truth asymptotically, and rarely as any sort of smooth function. Furthermore, the truths that other "ways of knowing" aim to provide are of a different sort than scientific claims. As a scientific claim, "vampires fear crosses" is as meaningless as "Picard is a better captain than Kirk" or "The Cubs are the greatest team in baseball's history," and none of those is any more scientifically meaningful than "Jesus is my personal savior."  [My bold.]

Tell that to people who believe, literally, that Jesus is their personal savior.

"Picard is a better captain than Kirk" is an opinion only, not a scientific claim as Josh proposes.  "The Cubs are the greatest team in baseball's history," might be just an opinion, or perhaps it could be verified empirically by tabulating numbers of games won or lost, numbers of home runs scored or whatever.  Then it would be a scientific claim.  If it were, then it would clearly be more meaningful, scientifically, than the Jesus statement.  Either way, Josh is wrong again.

I like novels. I like TV. I like art. I like baseball. I think there is truth to be found in such endeavors, and I think any brush that sweeps away the enterprise of religion as a "way of knowing" must also sweep away art and a host of other human activities. I've tossed out the comparison before, and have yet to get any useful reply to it.

OK, here’s a reply.  Novels and art are not ways of knowing – they can be ways of explaining what is already known, ways to make us think, or pure entertainment only, but they are not ways of knowing.  So when we say religion is not a way of knowing, we clearly do not need to sweep away novels or art as a way of knowing, because they were not ways of knowing in the first place.

Novels and art do not usually make empirical claims.  In the rare cases where they do (for example, many people believe The Da Vinci Code is based on fact), those claims can be tested.  Where they are false, the claim can be dismissed, but that doesn’t require us to “sweep away” the rest of fiction that is just fiction. 

I hope those replies were useful.

Josh continued to defend his idea in comments, and in further posts.  (You should read the comments – most disagree with Josh.)  In one comment, Josh writes

How do we decide that some non-empirical ways of knowing are OK, while others are incompatible with science?

The only basis Coyne offers, and the only one I can recall being offered by other enablers, is that religion and science are incompatible because religions can make false empirical claims.

No, that’s not it.  The problem with religious ways of knowing are:

1. There is no basis for making most religious claims.  They were essentially made up, usually by ignorant ancient peoples with no idea of how the world actually works.  Some of these claims are actually known to be wrong, and
2. There is no mechanism to change religious claims when new information is discovered that shows they were wrong.  On the contrary, religious believers go to great lengths to cherry pick the things that they think supports their position, while ignoring what contradicts it.  And then they lie about the whole thing.

Obviously, science works in the exact opposite way from points 1 and 2 above.  It’s disturbing that someone who works for the NCSE (and blogs at Scienceblogs) doesn’t know this.

Jerry Coyne ends his post with:

As for “ways of knowing,” my response is always, “What do you find out? What do you “know”?  And how would you know if you were wrong? Was Jesus the son of God?  Christians’ “way of knowing” tells them, “Yes, of course!” But Islamic “ways of knowing” say, “No, of course not, and you’ll burn in hell if you believe that.”  Revelation, dogma, and scripture are not in fact ways of knowing; they are ways of believing.  There are no “truths” that religion can produce which are independent of truths derived from secular reason.

Precisely.  Josh’s piece is a totally muddled post relying on little more than equivocation between different things that can appear in fiction, compared to things you can find in religious texts.  He just took a blog post from someone he says is an evangelical Christian, and repeated that blogger’s points uncritically (and at great length).  It was such a poorly thought out piece that Josh wrote four more posts in the three days following the original one, to try to reply to criticisms raised in the comments and rescue the jumble of the original post.  Which wouldn’t matter if Josh were a regular blogger, but he’s Public Information Project Director at the National Center for Science Education!  While he does state that his blog is not official NCSE policy, it gives a worrying insight into the way they may be thinking.

In my view, the only interesting thing to come from Josh’s piece was the insight that the NCSE and other “so-called accommodationists” are enablers – that is, they’re enabling religious people to continue with their destructive delusions.  Apparently it’s a part of being codependent.  (I didn’t “know” that from Josh’s post, by the way.  I had to check external sources.)

Other bloggers on Josh’s post:

Jason Rosenhouse - Ways of Knowing

Ophelia Benson - Ways of whatting?

Blair Waffle Project

Via Ophelia I was unfortunate enough to find this piece of drivel written by British ex-PM Tony Blair, entitled Without God's Truth at its centre, no community can fulfil its potential.  Really?  “No community can fulfil its potential”?  None?  I guess the Danes and the Swedes must be pretty unfulfilled, then.  Oh wait, no they’re not!

But Blair doesn’t need facts, or even a valid argument.  See how he starts by invoking something he thinks we can all agree on - the recent financial crisis:

The limits to individualism are in one sense plain. We only need to contemplate the financial crisis to understand that the pursuit of maximum short-term profit, without proper regard to the communal good, is a mistake and leads to neither profit nor good.

A reasonable point to make.  Arguments could be made for this point or against it, and we could certainly compare their merits and decide if the pursuit of maximum short-term profit was to blame or not.  But Blair isn’t going this route.  Instead, the waffle starts:

Yet, at a deeper level, the case against a purely individualistic or materialistic philosophy has to be made. Young people today have access to technology, to opportunity, to experiences good and bad on a scale my generation never knew and my father's generation would find fantastical, like something out of science fiction.

“Yet, at a deeper level…”?  What does that even mean?  What “level” is he talking about?  Deeper than what?  Measured how?  Why does this case have to be made?  What does modern technology have to do with it?  Will Blair tell us?  Of course not.  His argument has no explanation (nor logic or evidence), just assertion:

The danger is clear: that pursuit of pleasure becomes an end in itself. It is here that faith can step in, can show us a proper sense of duty to others, responsibility for the world around us, and can lead us to, as the Holy Father calls it, caritas in veritate.

Of course – this is where faith can step in.  Obviously.  Because what we need is obviously to believe in more things that are not backed by evidence. That’s the ticket.  Accepting more things without a shred of evidence, or even in the teeth of evidence, is just what we need now.  After all, it worked so well in the past.  Note that Blair has shown absolutely no connection between this and the financial crisis he started his article with.

After the experience of fascism, Soviet Communism or viewing life in North Korea or the cultural revolution in China, it is easier for us to grasp the dangers of a too-powerful state.

Agreed.  Also, religiously controlled Iran, Saudi Arabia, The Taliban, Sudan...  And don’t forget, Hitler was religiously inspired.  No dangers of a too-powerful state there, no siree.  Phew, good job that faith “stepped in” to prevent the dangers of a too-powerful state.  Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) my ass.

Of course, the regimes of Soviet Communism, China or North Korea were/are not exactly bastions of rationality and critical thinking either.  They were/are quasi religious regimes based largely on faith (no evidence their systems worked). They just required faith in something else, not the things Tony Blair has faith in, so that was the bad faith, not the good faith, right Tony?  Right.

But I would argue that even the concept of community has its limitations. We use the word in two senses: one to distinguish it from government, to emphasise civic society if you like; the other sense is just to describe the general community of public opinion. In politics, of course, especially in a democracy, "the people" are the boss; public opinion is to be courted and if not surrendered to, as (sic) least managed.

“The people" are the boss”?  Funny, I didn’t think the people of Britain supported the war in Iraq.  In what sense were the people “the boss” when that decision was being made?  But at least Blair admits that the only thing politicians have to do is manage public opinion, not actually, you know, listen to it in any way.  Otherwise known as spin.

Of course, Blair is saving up for his big finish, where faith and belief in god is the only thing that can save us:

It is here that Faith enlarges and enriches the idea of community. The recent Papal Encyclical is a remarkable document in many respects. It repays reading and re-reading. But one strand throughout it is a strong rejoinder to the notion of relativism, to the description of the human condition in society as just some amoral negotiation or set of compromises with modernity; or even just obedience to the majority opinion. Not that it is anti-technology or anti-modern; or indeed anti-democratic. But it widens and deepens the relationship between individuals and the community in which they live. It puts God's Truth at the centre of it. In one passage, it describes humanism devoid of faith as "inhuman humanism": "Without God, man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is."

Blair’s catholic church had such a strong moral compass that it allowed multiple serial pedophiles to prey on innocent children in church while protecting the predators from the law, and the rape and molestation of thousands of children in over 250 catholic schools for decades.  Hey Tony, do those articles I just linked repay reading and re-reading too?  Caritas in Veritate.

Faith is such a good moral guidance that one in every 33 women who attend worship services regularly has been the target of sexual advances by a religious leader.  In what sense did faith enlarge and enrich the idea of community for those women?  Do tell.

Of course, I see it now.  The 9/11 hijackers were motivated only by “a purely individualistic or materialistic philosophy” and “pursuit of pleasure.”  If only they had had some religious faith instead, all that horror could have been avoided.  Yeah, what we need is more faith in the world.  How could I possibly have missed this obvious conclusion?

And this twit was Prime Minister? 

One Giant Embarrassment

Trust The Onion.  Two Bangladeshi newspapers recently took that statement quite literally, which was a big mistake.

The Onion recently ran a Moon landing conspiracy piece - Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked, featuring a spoof interview with Neil Armstrong, who supposedly only now realizes he had been fooled into thinking he had actually walked on the Moon:

According to Armstrong, he was forced to reconsider every single detail of the monumental journey after watching a few persuasive YouTube videos, and reading several blog posts on conspiracy theorist Ralph Coleman's website, OmissionControl.org.

"It only took a few hastily written paragraphs published by this passionate denier of mankind's so-called 'greatest technological achievement' for me to realize I had been living a lie, " said a visibly emotional Armstrong, addressing reporters at his home. "It has become painfully clear to me that on July 20, 1969, the Lunar Module under the control of my crew did not in fact travel 250,000 miles over eight days, touch down on the moon, and perform various experiments, ushering in a new era for humanity. Instead, the entire thing was filmed on a soundstage, most likely in New Mexico."

"This is the only logical interpretation of the numerous inconsistencies in the grainy, 40-year-old footage," Armstrong added.

More at the link.

Pretty funny.  Except that journalists and editors at a couple of Bangladeshi newspapers thought The Onion was a real news site, and the Armstrong interview was real. They re-published the story as though it were fact:

"We thought it was true so we printed it without checking," associate editor Hasanuzzuman Khan told the AFP news agency.

"We didn't know the Onion was not a real news site."

Hey, I’ve got a couple of other real news sites these newspapers could use as a source for their articles.  For example:

The Landover Baptist Church

The Society for DNA Free Food

Dihydrogen Monoxide Research

The British Veterinary Voodoo Society

I guess the moral is always check your sources.  And yes, I did check a couple of other sources before I wrote this post.

Maher-Woo

David Gorski, writing today at Science-Based Medicine, has a comprehensive post detailing Bill Maher’s various woo beliefs – specifically his anti-science views about medicine and (most) vaccinations.  It’s a long piece, but worth a read, and worth referencing – all Maher’s faulty thinking detailed in one place.

The Ontological Argument for God

I’ve never understood the supposed difficulty in refuting the ontological argument for god’s existence.  Apart from the fact that it’s an argument from logic and reason alone, rather than from any actual verifiable evidence – which should rule it out as an argument to be considered seriously anyway in my view – it never seemed to make any sense.  Still, some people apparently believe it, including one recent commenter who listed it among the numerous “proofs” that god exists, so I thought it was time I deconstructed it.  As you’ll see, it didn’t take long to locate the logical fallacy that’s at its heart.

The ontological argument was originally put forward by Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century.  Wikipedia has two versions of it, but I’m going to refer to what I think is a better version at The Internet Dictionary of Philosophy: “The Classic Version of the Ontological Argument” as they call it, which they say can accurately be summarized thus:

1) It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (i.e., the greatest possible being that can be imagined).

2) God exists as an idea in the mind.

3) A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.

4) Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (i.e., a greatest possible being that does exist).

No.  Correction - if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then all this means is that we can imagine something that is greater than the idea of God in the mind – not greater than a God who actually exists.  Anselm’s argument relies entirely on equivocation - the misleading use of a term that has more than one meaning, while glossing over which meaning is intended at a particular time.  Specifically, Anselm relies on there being two meanings of the word “God,” and he slips between these definitions as it suits him.  What are these two meanings of the word “God”?  They are (1) a god who exists in reality and (2) a god who exists only in the mind.  In point 4 above he uses the “god who exists only in the mind” version, but in point 5 he tries to make you think he was talking about the “god who exists in reality,” because point 5 is:

5) But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)

Yes, but “the greatest possible being that can be imagined” is not God who exists only as an idea in the mind – so there is no contradiction.  It only seems to be a contradiction because Anselm is equivocating between the different meanings of the word “God” and has glossed over which meaning he is using at different points in his argument.

6) Therefore, God exists.

No.  Epic FAIL.  Therefore nothing.  All this shows is that we can imagine something greater than a God who exists only in the mind. But “God who exists only in the mind” is not “a being than which none greater can be imagined.”  In fact, premise 3 specifically states there can be something greater than this – a God who exists in reality - and so the argument is contradicted by its own premises.  “God who exists only in the mind” is not God, as defined in premise 1, and so it is possible to imagine something greater, without violating premise 1.

Anselm’s mistake will become clearer if we define his terms in a less ambiguous way.  I will rename Anselm’s different versions of God, as God-1 and God-2:

God-1 = God who exists in reality (the thing whose existence we are trying to prove).

God-2 = a God who exists only as an idea in the mind.

Now we can rephrase the argument:

1. Nothing greater than God-1 can be imagined
2. God-2 exists. 
3. God-1 is greater than God-2
4. If God-1 does not exist then we can imagine something greater than God-2 (i.e., God-1)
5. But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God-1
6. Therefore God-1 exists

You can see quite clearly now that the argument is bogus.  Point 4 is where it goes wrong.  It only appears to work because Anselm equivocates about the definitions of God-1 and God-2.  This is what he is doing.  He is trying to make point 4 sound like, “If God-1 does not exist then we can imagine something greater than God-1” (which would be a contradiction to point 1).  But point 4 only makes sense as “…we can imagine something greater than God-2 (i.e., God-1),” as in my version.  (Otherwise he is actually saying “If God-1 does not exist then we can imagine something greater than God-1 (i.e., God-1),” which is gibberish.)  He hopes you won’t notice he changed God-2 to God-1 in point 5, setting up the contradiction to point 1.  But he wasn’t talking about God-1 in point 4, so there is no contradiction.  Consequently, point 6 “Therefore God-1 exists,” just doesn’t follow.

Not only that, but now we’ve deconstructed it, we can see it doesn’t even make sense.  Consider this.  Point 5 is just a restatement of point 1.  So if you leave out this repeated point (you don’t need it here since it’s already been stated), the last two points (4 and 6) are:

• If God-1 does not exist then we can imagine something greater than God-2 (i.e., God-1)
• Therefore God-1 exists

To simplify even further, we can cut out what this allows us to imagine, which leaves:

• If God-1 does not exist then …
• … God-1 exists

To go back to the phrasing of the original argument, he is saying, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then God exists in reality. Or, put it even more simply, if God doesn’t exist then he exists.

I have read several versions of Anselm’s argument, and they all fall apart for exactly the same reason - the logical fallacy of equivocation.  The only surprising thing about this argument, in my view, is that anyone thinks it should be taken seriously.

Skeptics' Circle

The Skeptics' Circle has just been published at Ionian Enchantment.  It's a special Chiroquacktic edition!

Lame Pet Psychic Tricks

Of all the fake psychics (some redundancy there), the lamest has to be the pet psychic. Think about it.  If a psychic deals with people, at least they have to have some basic skills in cold reading, they have to be able to read the person to some extent, and know the sorts of guesses to throw out and how to follow them up.  Most importantly, they need to know how to extract themselves from the inevitable wrong guesses, and leave the victim still thinking they guessed right. But the pet psychic doesn’t have to bother with too much of that.  After all, Rover is hardly going to sit up and say, “no, I never thought of chasing rabbits,” now is he?

Even lamer than the pet psychic is the reporter reporting credulously and with no skepticism at all about the pet psychic.  For evidence of this, see what somebody called Julia Lyon wrote recently in The Salt Lake Tribune: Utah pet psychic would 'rather talk to dogs'

"I'll go to a barbecue and people will have their dogs there -- I'd rather talk to the dogs,"

Yeah, I’ll bet the other people there are happier that way too.

Raider, a Jack Russell terrier, loves his name but doesn't want to wear dog clothing. And that big black dog he sometimes visits? Yes, that's a friend.

A black dog?  Four of my neighbors have dogs and three of them are “black.”  Well, they are black enough and big enough that they would fit the description “big black dog.” I guess that’s the dog equivalent of “do you know an ‘M’ or a ‘J’ name?”

With each passing "communication" between Davis and Raider, she looked hard at the dog and then looked away. Raider didn't seem in the zone at all. He was busy straining at the leash and watching all the excitement from a neighboring dog racing course.

But Mary Tuttle, his owner, was not disappointed.

"You hit many things right on the head," the Cottonwood Heights resident said. "I'm very open to that."

And as with the psychic who reads humans, the pet psychic is also given a free pass by a credulous human – this time the pet owner.  The dog quite clearly doesn’t want anything to do with the crazy lady; the dog owner wants to believe anyway.

The pet psychic does say one thing I agree with though:

"If I can do it, anyone can do it,"

Yeah, probably true.  Most people just wouldn’t.

Rrrrrough, get me away from the crazy woman!

Astrology Still Fails

I’ve written before about Shawn Carlson’s “A Double-blind Test of Astrology”, published in the journal Nature, in 1985.  To recap, 116 people completed California Personality Index (CPI) surveys and provided their natal data (date, time and place of birth). One natal chart and the results of three CPI surveys (one of which was for the same person as the natal chart) were given to an astrologer who was to interpret the natal chart and determine which of the three CPI results belonged to the subject whose natal chart it was. In only 40 of the 116 cases did the astrologers choose the correct CPI.  This is the exact success rate expected by random chance.  The conclusion: the test gave us no reason to suppose astrology works.

That was 24 years ago.  As far as I am aware, no serious challenge has been made to Carlson’s conclusions, perhaps until recently.  I have now been informed that Suitbert Ertel, professor of psychology at Göttingen University, has claimed to have found serious flaws in Carlson’s paper.  Ertel’s paper is apparently not available online, although I have read a summary of it by Ken McRitchie: Reappraisal of 1985 Carlson study finds support for astrology.

Normally, articles in Nature, or any scientific journal, are peer reviewed before publication. The peer review process subjects scientific beliefs and claims of fact to critical analysis by qualified experts. Yet, even though the Carlson study makes claims of scientific fact, it had not been peer reviewed. Nature had published the article as editorial content in the Commentary section, a detail that undoubtedly has been overlooked by countless authors who have cited the study and regarded it as definitive.

I found this a strange if interesting claim – some Nature articles are not peer reviewed?  The “commentary” section is somehow less “definitive” than if it had been published elsewhere in the journal?  I emailed Shawn Carlson to see what he had to say about this.  His reply began:

In general I stop reading an article when I come across the first absurdity.  Ken McRitchie states that my paper was not peer reviewed.  Not so. It survived a rigorous peer review that included a famous psychologist whom I will reveal in a later publication. To the best of my knowledge, Nature never publishes research articles that have not been properly reviewed, and I doubt that any serious scientist thinks otherwise. I talked personally with then Editor-In-Chief John Maddox about whether or not the "Commentary" section was the appropriate venue and he assured me that they often published original results there that they believed were likely to be of general public interest.   

So it was peer reviewed, and the commentary section is not reserved for non-definitive reporting.

I have to say, I found McRitchie’s criticisms here to be laughable, especially considering that Ertel’s “reappraisal” is published in the so-called Journal of Scientific Exploration – a journal that includes papers by Dean Radin and Ian Stevenson among others. Ertel’s paper is rather laughingly referred to as “peer-reviewed.”  Well yes, but if his “peers” are the likes of Radin and Stevenson, I’m unimpressed.  According to Wikipedia, the journal is not indexed in Web of Science, an indexing service for leading scientific journals, that covers over 10,000 of the highest impact journals worldwide.  Of course, that doesn’t make Ertel’s paper wrong, but it shows this criticism of Carlson’s paper to be absurd at best.

Instead of presenting the astrologer participants with pair choices, which is the normal format for such tests, and the format followed in an earlier well-known astrological study by Vernon Clark (1961), Carlson presented a three-choice format, consisting of one genuine object and two selected at random. This three-choice format, Ertel notes, is less powerful than a two-choice format.

Maybe, but that doesn’t mean the one in three choice is invalid.  If astrology were real, it should have been possible for the astrologers to pick out the correct one with greater odds than you would get with just guessing.  They didn’t.  If you were to pay money to an astrologer, would you be happy to be given advice based on an interpretation of your horoscope that, while not accurate for you, was accurate for the second closest person?  I doubt it, and this certainly isn’t what astrologers claim.

Ertel is also critical of Carlson’s piecemeal analysis of the sampled data, in which only sub-samples are examined instead of the total effects. The correct analysis for a three-choice format, Ertel asserts, is to calculate the proportion of combined first and second choices according to the normally accepted protocol. Carlson initially states his intention to do this but then disregards the protocol for no given reason. Re-analysis shows that the astrologers correctly matched CPI profiles to natal charts better than would be expected by chance with marginal significance (p = .054). This positive result, Ertel found, was replicable with even better results (p = .04) for the astrologers’ ten-point rating of profiles fit to birth charts, a procedure that Carlson requested of the astrologers but ignored in the end, again without giving reasons.

Firstly – Carlson didn’t ignore the “ten-point rating of profiles.”  He uses the ten point rating results and concluded (page 424):

Next we took the weights into account, by a method established before studying the data. 

[Snip] 

The scientific hypothesis predicts that 1/3 of the choices at any weight should be correct choices.  Figure 4 shows the percentage correct for each weight with the appropriate error bars, and the best linear fit with slope – 0.01 +/- 0.02.  The slope is consistent with the scientific prediction of zero slope.

In other words, the astrologers’ confidence that they were right (on a scale of 1 to 10) did not fit the actual correct choices any better than the incorrect ones.

Regarding the correctness of the second choice options, the Nature paper (page 424) states:

The correct CPI was chosen as the second place choice at the 0.40 +/- 0.044 rate which is also consistent with [random chance].

It looks to me as though the astrologers' first and second choices were consistent with guessing, rather than with any information provided by astrology.  In addition, Carlson did use the ten point rating scale (despite what Ertel claims), and I see nowhere in the Nature paper where Carlson initially states his intention to calculate the proportion of combined first and second choices but then changes his mind, as Ertel also claims.  (If anyone can see where he says this, I’d be interested.  I’ve read the paper several times, and I can’t find it.)

The eminent psychologist Hans Eysenck, late author of the book Astrology: Science or Superstition, argued that the CPI explicitly states that it should be interpreted only by trained and experienced users, and the astrologers lacked the necessary qualification. Other critics questioned whether the CPI and astrology evaluate personality in the same ways, and whether there was enough common ground for astrologers to make valid matches.

This one really had me rolling my eyes.  McRitchie really needs to make his mind up.  Is the CPI a valid way of testing astrology or not?  Because if it isn’t, then Carlson’s whole test is invalid regardless of what any “reappraisal” of the statistics tell us, which means that Ertel can’t claim that Carlson’s test now supports astrology.  He can’t have it both ways.  Which is it?

Of course, if the CPI is not a valid way of testing astrology, then all this means is that there is still no evidence astrology works.  Remember, proponents of astrology are the ones making the claim, and so they are the ones with the thing to prove.  Null hypothesis, anyone?

Furthermore, if the CPI is not a valid way of testing astrology, and if asking the subject which natal chart interpretation is correct (Carlson’s test #1) is not valid (as Carlson concluded), then how should astrology be tested?  It’s a bit rich for proponents of astrology to criticize a method of testing astrology to see if it works, if they don’t have a valid way of testing it themselves.  As I wrote in January 2007 in Testing Astrology – Again, if none of these methods are acceptable, and therefore if astrology can’t be tested, then this means that astrology is almost certainly bogus. For one, astrology’s doubtful provenance (no known method by which it is supposed to work, no known way its rules were derived, its absurd premises), means we need extraordinary evidence that it works.  By this I mean better evidence that we demand for many other things.  And we certainly don’t have this extraordinary evidence.  And for two, if astrology can’t be tested, then clearly no one would ever have been able to work out all the detailed rules astrologers use. How would they have been able to work out the rules if there is no way of ever testing them to see if they were right?  On what basis do astrologers claim that astrology works?  How do they know?

Proponents of astrology want to have it both ways – they  claim astrology can’t be tested, and yet they also claim they know it works.  And you can see this mindset in all its absurdity with this from Ertel:

“The results are regarded as insufficient to deem astrology as empirically verified,” Ertel warns, “but they are sufficient to regard Carlson’s negative verdict on astrology as untenable.”

- which is an epic FAIL. If the results of Ertel's study are insufficient to deem astrology as empirically verified, then astrology failed the test. The null hypothesis is that astrology doesn't work. Come on, this is basic experimental design. Ertel, with this comment, shows himself to be a pseudo-scientist who is clueless about how real science works.  This is further confirmed by the fact that in Ertel’s “reappraisal” methodology, he decided to change the things that he thinks the test should have been looking for in the first place.  This is a strict no no in experimental design.  In a well designed test, you state your objectives clearly before you do the test, and you compare the results with what you stated at the beginning you would be looking for.  What you should never do, is do the test, decide the results were not what you wanted, and then go looking for something else that might show the result you did want.  It’s well known that this technique is likely to return false positives, which is why it is never done by real scientists.  Or as Carlson wrote in his email:

I could go on at length about Dr. Ertel's flawed analysis.  I will take up that effort at a later time.  For now, let me just point out that a scientist never figures out how to analyze his data after the fact with all the data in view. This leads to selection biases that can skew the results to favor the experimenter's hopes. Apparently Dr. Ertel has done just that and from many possible approaches he has selected a particular method of analysis that gives him a result that he says is "marginally significant" in favor of the astrologers.  That won't surprise anyone who understands statistics and knows how certain subtle pitfalls often turn a "great discovery" into a fool's errand (and sometimes vice versa).

To get there however, Dr. Ertel ignores the direct and extremely significant null result that I obtained using data analysis methods that were perfectly reasonable and selected before the fact. The astrologers failed directly--thereby refuting the notion that astrology is so effective as a discipline that a selection of astrologers who are held in high esteem by their peers can gain access to vital information that is not available to ordinary psychologists.

This is the best astrology proponents can do after 24 years – no new information, no new tests that show astrology can do anything, just some dishonest and scientifically dodgy sniping at a comprehensive test that all involved (including the astrologers) agreed before the test was done, was a valid test.  Proponents of astrology are the ones who need to show evidence that their magic fortune telling system is real, and yet even after 24 years, and after the efforts of a university professor with a history of writing papers supportive of astrology, the best they can do is say, and I quote again:

The results are regarded as insufficient to deem astrology as empirically verified

If Ertel, or anyone else, believes that astrology works in any measurable way, then they need to stop sniping at Carlson’s well designed and genuinely peer reviewed test, and they need to design and perform their own experiment, have it peer reviewed and published in Nature or another real scientific journal.  As Carlson notes, such a successful test would undoubtedly win its author the Nobel Prize.  If astrology is real, it should be possible to design and conduct such an unequivocal test.  Why don’t they? 

The thing that made the things for which there is no known maker

I don’t normally post YouTube videos, but after some thought I decided I would post this link to The thing that made the things for which there is no known maker, that was originally linked by commenter PaulJ on the Atheism is Not a Religion post.  It’s a bit long at just over nine minutes, but you’ll get the idea after less than a minute into it.  It demonstrates the fallacy of thinking that if you can’t explain where something came from, then god must have done it.

In future, when some theist says something like, “what is the origin of life and/or the origin of the information" necessary to bring life into existence?” you can answer with: “The thing that made the things for which there is no known maker and that causes and directs the events that we can't otherwise explain and which doesn't need to have been made and is the one thing from which to ask for things that no human can give and without him we can't be fully happy and is unlimited by all the laws of physics and never began and will never finish and is invisible but is actually everywhere at once and who is so perfect that even if he killed millions of people, including babies, he still would be perfect and who is so powerful and magical that he can even make a virgin pregnant if he wanted to."

Which is, of course, just as meaningful and useful an answer as “god.”

Other Videos

It’s also worth checking out the other You Tube videos from NonStampCollector.  For example, What Would Jesus NOT Do?, ATHEIST!!!!!!!, How amazing is God's Forgiveness? Not very, and The Great Debate.

Skeptics’ Circle

The Skeptics’ Circle has just been posted by TechSkeptic – including several interesting pictures.

Atheism is Not a Religion

This is a refrain I’m hearing a lot from religious apologists – atheism is a religion. Also its equally fallacious siblings, science is a religion and evolution is a religion. It’s a sign of their desperation that the best argument they have is not that atheism is wrong, or that god does exist (supported by evidence of course), but that atheism is a religion too. A strange argument for a religious person to make on the face of it.  Is it supposed to strengthen the atheist’s position or weaken the theist’s one? In reality it’s a sign they have run out of arguments.

Still, this argument is widely made, and so it needs to be addressed. Atheism (and here I mean the so-called “weak atheism” that does not claim proof that god does not exist), is just the lack of god-belief – nothing more and nothing less. And as someone once said, if atheism is a religion, not collecting stamps is a hobby.

That really ought to end the discussion right there. Clearly, a mere lack of belief in something cannot be a religion. In addition, atheism has no sacred texts, no tenets, no ceremonies. Even theists making this argument must know all that. So they must have something else in mind when they trot this one out, but what is it? What are they really thinking? Well, if you look at various definitions of religion, the only things that could possibly apply to atheism would be something like this:

6. Something one believes in and follows devotedly

or this:

4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.

Obviously I don’t know if that’s what they mean – I don’t read minds. But I can’t see what else it could be. They must be referring to certain activities of atheists – writing books and blogs, financing bus ads, joining atheist groups, etc. They think atheists are “religious in their atheism” as one person put it to me – the word “religious” being used here colloquially to mean something felt very strongly, or followed enthusiastically. But this definition of religion is so broad that virtually anything people enjoy doing very much, or follow strongly or obsessively, is a religion. It’s a definition of religion that is so broad that it’s meaningless. In reality, most of the things that people follow enthusiastically, are just hobbies. And ironically, although not collecting stamps is not a hobby, getting involved in atheist activities (writing books and blogs, attending atheist meetings) might well be a hobby for some people. But it is a hobby, not a religion.

What Is Religion?

I’m sure that argument won’t convince all theists to abandon this rhetorical trope they love so much.  To really address the argument, we have to define religion, and then see if atheism fits the definition. While I don’t think I can define religion completely, I think I can state the minimum that religion has to have to still be a religion. And it seems to me that there is one thing at least that is common to all religions. It’s this. In my view, religion at a minimum, has to have the following characteristic:

Religion must include something you have to accept on faith – that is, without evidence commensurate with the extraordinary nature of the belief.

Most religions will include other things too, but they must require faith. Of course, not all things that require faith are religions, but all religions must require faith.

The minimum definition covers all the religions I’m familiar with. For example, it includes any religion that involves belief in god or gods – something you have to believe in without evidence. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism… all require you to believe in god or gods as a minimum, without evidence. The minimum definition would also include religions that don’t require belief in god, but require faith in other things. For example, I believe it would include Buddhism, which (for example) includes the belief that living beings go through a succession of lifetimes and rebirth. It would also include Scientology – no evidence for Xenu, that I’m aware of. Maybe you can think of some actual religions that would be excluded, but I haven’t been able to so far.

So religion requires belief without evidence. And by that definition atheism cannot possibly be a religion because atheists do not have to believe in anything to be an atheist – either with or without evidence. QED.

Now, some religious people may say, “but that’s not my definition of religion”. To which I say, OK, then give me your definition. Give me your definition of religion, that doesn’t require belief without evidence, that includes your religion, the others I named, and atheism. And it needs to be better than the two dictionary definitions I cited above.  Give me that definition. Because here’s the thing. The problems I have with religions are:

1. They are not based on fact or on any reasonable evidence commensurate with the claims they make. In many cases, the claims they make are plainly absurd and are actually contradicted by the evidence.
2. Religious proponents demand respect, and adherence to their delusions by others. This despite (1) above.

Those are the aspects of religion that I object to. Clearly atheism doesn’t fit 1 (or 2) above, so it is nothing like any of the religions I object to. If your religion does not require belief without faith, then I probably wouldn’t have a problem with it. Assuming, of course, all the tenets of your religion are actually backed up by evidence extraordinary enough for the extraordinary claims your religion makes. But they never do. 

In my view, theists will have their work cut out to deny this minimum requirement for religion.  Come on – they even refer to their religion as “my faith”. 

Evidence and Extraordinary Evidence

Some religious people will claim that their religious beliefs are backed by evidence. This is where it gets tricky, because many religious people genuinely believe their religion is rational and backed by evidence. For example, one Christian I debated cited that the evidence Christianity was real, was (and I quote), “the resurrection of Christ”. Of course, the resurrection of Christ, if it had actually happened, would be pretty good evidence for Christianity. But, unfortunately, there is no good evidence for the resurrection. Certainly, nothing close to the extraordinary evidence we would need to accept this extraordinary claim.

Extraordinary Claims

This needs explaining in more detail. Why do extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Well, all claims require exactly the same amount of evidence, it’s just that most "ordinary" claims are already backed by extraordinary evidence that you don’t think about. When we say “extraordinary claims”, what we actually mean are claims that do not already have evidence supporting them, or sometimes claims that have extraordinary evidence against them. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence because they usually contradict claims that are backed by extraordinary evidence.

So why is Jesus’ resurrection an extraordinary claim, and why is the Bible not extraordinary evidence for it? Well, the resurrection goes against all the evidence we have that people do not come back to life, spontaneously, after two days of being dead. Modern medicine can bring people back from what would have been considered in earlier years to be “dead”, but not after 2 days of being dead with no modern life support to keep the vital organs working. In fact, it is probably reasonably safe to say it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that people cannot come back to life after being dead for two days without modern life support. So, extraordinary claim it is.

On the other hand, the evidence we are offered in support of this extraordinary claim consists only of accounts written decades after the event, by people who were not there when the events described were purported to have occurred. We are offered nothing but hearsay anecdotes from superstitious people with a clear reason for wanting others to think the story true. This is hardly acceptable evidence to counteract the fact that this never happens. Christians might ask, what evidence would an atheist accept for such an extraordinary claim? And in reality, it is hard to imagine that there could possibly be any evidence good enough for us to accept the resurrection as true. Christians may claim that this is unfair, or that we are closed minded, but the fact that you are unlikely to find extraordinary evidence for this event 2,000 years after the fact, is hardly the non-believer’s fault. The real question, considering the weakness of the evidence, and the wildly extraordinary nature of the claim, is why would anyone believe any of it in the first place?  The truth is, they accept it on faith.  In fact, the acceptance of this story on faith alone is usually considered to be essential to the true believer. And although that was just Christianity, the same lack of evidence, and belief based on faith alone, applies to the claims of all the other religions that I’m familiar with.

Religions require belief in extraordinary claims without anything close to the extraordinary evidence that is required.  Atheism requires no belief in anything.  The contrast couldn’t be clearer.

But the believer has one final shot – one last desperate rhetorical item to fling at the atheist.  Here we go.

More Faith To Be An Atheist?

The final argument many religious apologists throw into the mix is it takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to believe in god. That certainly took me by surprise the first time I heard it. I think what they’re trying to say is this. Atheists think matter just appeared out of nowhere, that something came out of nothing. But where did the matter come from? To think that matter appeared out of nowhere requires more faith than to think a creator made everything. Why is there something rather than nothing? To think that matter just appeared by itself, requires faith.

Atheists don’t think matter came out of nowhere. Atheists say we don’t know where matter came from; we don’t know why there is something rather than nothing. Maybe one day we’ll know, or maybe we won’t. But we don’t know now. Theists are exactly the same. They don’t know either, but the difference is they make up an explanation (god). But it’s just a made up explanation – they have no reason to suppose it’s true, other than that they just like it.

And it’s a useless explanation. Unless they know something about this “God” – how he created everything; why he created it; what he’s likely to do next - it’s a lack of an explanation. It’s just a placeholder until a real explanation comes along. Except that the theist won’t be open to the real explanation when and if science is able to provide one. The god placeholder prevents investigation into any real tentative explanations. The theist who says god created everything, is the one with the faith – faith that “god” is the explanation and that no other is possible. The atheist is content to say “we don’t know”. For now, anyway. And it’s obvious that saying “we don’t know,” requires no faith.  That may be a hard thing to do for people who want all the answers, but it certainly isn’t religion.

One last thing.  Some theists have responded to the “if atheism is a religion, not collecting stamps is a hobby” argument by pointing out that non stamp collectors (aphilatelists?) don’t write books or blogs about not collecting stamps, don’t post anti stamp collecting ads on buses, don't ridicule stamp collectors, etc.  This is meant to demonstrate that the “stamp collecting” analogy is weak.  It actually demonstrates that the analogy is very good, since it highlights one of the main problems atheists have with many religious people.

Here’s the thing they are missing, and the real problem most atheists have with religion.  If stamp collectors demanded that people who don’t collect stamps obey their stamp collecting rules, started wars with groups who collected slightly different types of stamps, denied non-stamp collectors rights or discriminated against them, bullied them in school, claimed you had to collect stamps to be a suitable person to run for public office, tried to get stamp collecting taught in schools as science in opposition to real science, demanded that people be killed for printing cartoons that made fun of stamp collectors, claimed that non-stamp collectors lacked moral judgment, made up ridiculous straw man positions they claimed non-stamp collectors took, and then argued against those straw men positions etc etc, - then non-stamp collectors probably would criticize stamp collectors in the way atheists criticize many religious people. And with good reason. Not collecting stamps would still not be a hobby.  Or a religion.

Emergency Acupuncture

I thought Battlefield Acupuncture was a joke.  (Sadly, it wasn’t.  Well, not in the conventional meaning of “joke”.)  Now, from reader Joe, I learn that a hospital in Australia is planning to use acupuncture in emergency departments to treat acute migraine, back pain and ankle injuries after its “success in lowering pain levels in patients attending a busy public hospital”.  What was this “success”, you ask?  This is the description of the pilot study, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Dr Parker said patients who turned up at casualty were given the option to be treated by final year or graduate acupuncture students from RMIT in conjunction with standard medical treatment.

Regular readers will have no problems seeing the problems with this study, and the reasons that it does not show that acupuncture does anything, which are:

1. Not randomized – participants self-select to receive acupuncture, meaning that probably only those who start off believing it will do something, will be included in the trial.
2. No blinding – participants know which group they were in (acupuncture or no acupuncture).
3. No sham acupuncture.
4. Standard medical procedures were used in addition to acupuncture – so patients received the benefits of pain medication that actually works in addition to the magic needles.

And yet on the basis of this patently useless pilot study, more than $400,000 (Australian) has been allocated for a three-year clinical trial.  This despite the fact that we know acupuncture is a placebo that provides no difference in pain intensity. 

So, yet another useless acupuncture pilot study followed by (undoubtedly) another useless acupuncture study.  And after that, you can bet that yet “more studies” will be called for.  I’d put money on it.

More Acupuncture Links

Articles by Steven Novella:

Does Acupuncture Work or Not?

Acupuncture Does Not Work for Back Pain

Acupuncture and Back Pain - Part II

Orac’s Yawn...another overhyped acupuncture study

Several posts by me:

Placebo - pregnancy pain cure

Acupuncture does not cut blood pressure

Still no evidence acupuncture works

Acupuncture – it really really doesn't work

No point to acupuncture on animals

Equivocation on acupuncture

One More Time - Acupuncture Does NOT Work

Acupuncture - Still Doesn't Work

Proof That God Exists (Not)

From PZ I found Proof That God Exists – a series of questions designed to force the conclusion that (you guessed it), god exists.  The site presents a series of yes/no questions about whether laws of logic, science and absolute morals exist – questions to which I answered “yes”.  Sure, I guess “absolute moral laws” might be debatable, but I thought, murder is always bad and so I answered yes.

When I answered the last question with “I do not believe that God exists”, I got the following “proof”.  Well, not so much.  I imagine the logical fallacies employed will be obvious:

Denying the existence of God is not unbelief but an exercise in self-deception. You may know things, but you cannot account for anything you know.

And neither can you.  The difference is that you make up an answer - “God” – and put him in the place where you have no answer.  But it’s just a made up explanation – you have no reason to suppose it’s true, other than that you just like it.  And it’s a useless explanation. Unless you know something about this “God” – how he created everything; why he created it; what he’s likely to do next - it’s a lack of an explanation. It’s just a placeholder until a real explanation comes along.

Arguing against God's existence would be on par with arguing against the existence of air, breathing it all the while.

False analogy.  If a living animal is deprived of air, it will die.  This is a repeatable, reliable and undoubted observation.  I wouldn’t have to put up some lame 20 questions website to prove it either.

You use the universal, immaterial, unchanging laws of logic, mathematics, science, and absolute morality in order to come to rational decisions, but you cannot account for them. These laws are not the only way God has revealed himself to you, but they are sufficient to show the irrationality of your thinking, and expose your guilt for denying Him.

Pure assertion, unsupported by arguments presented so far. 

There is a reason that you deny the existence of God and it has nothing to do with proof. I can show this to you. Examine what your initial reaction was to the proof of God's existence offered on this website.

OK.  My initial reaction was… “let’s list the logical fallacies you’re using and put up a blog post”.  What’s your point?

Did you think that you could continue to deny God because you are not a scientist, or philosopher but 'Surely somewhere, sometime, a philosopher or scientist will come up with an explanation for universal, immaterial, unchanging laws apart from God?' Did you try to come up with an alternate explanation on your own?

No – see above.  I don’t need to come up with “an alternate explanation” – you’re the one making the claim so it is up to you to support that claim.

OR Did you even consider that the proof was valid?

First – it wasn't proof.  Proof only exists within math.  This was an attempt to prove something using logic only.  Even if the logic wasn’t flawed (which it was, but let’s say it wasn't), it would still not be “proof”, or even particularly good evidence.  Logic is great, but at the end of the exercise when you have your logical conclusion, you still have to test your conclusion against reality to see if it is true.  Science is full of experiments that seemed logically sound but failed the experiment and were discarded.  When I agreed the laws of logic exist, I didn’t agree that logic is always correct and will always lead you to the correct solution.  So for many reasons, your “proof” is quite obviously not valid.

Hoping that an alternate explanation for universal, immaterial, unchanging laws can someday be found apart from God, is a blind leap of faith, or wishful thinking. Isn't it interesting that this is exactly what professed unbelievers accuse Christians of?

Yeah, but that’s not what I did.  I’m just saying that if you or I don’t have the answer, you don’t get to say “therefore God” by default.

Please examine the real reason why you are running from God. It is my prayer that God will open your eyes and change your heart so that you may be saved from your sin, embraced by His forgiving love, and come to know the peace which passes all understanding.

I’m not running from something that (probably) doesn’t exist.  And we know that prayer is useless so go on, knock yourself out, pray for me.  Pray for some better logic while you’re at it.

The whole website was an exercise in argument from ignorance – you can’t explain it, therefore God.  Throw in an argument by bad analogy, some confident assertion that you have proved your point, and the customary attempt to assign motives to disbelief (“running from God”) and it’s the same standard vacuous religious drivel we’ve all heard before.  Nothing to see here.

Cargo Cult Religion

Several bloggers have commented on this article by Tom Stern about Ken Ham’s creation museum published in The Point magazine.  While Stern’s article was generally OK in its presentation of Ham’s museum as pseudoscience unsupported by facts, he spoils the ending with a false conflation of science with religion.  And although he claims he isn’t doing this (“Of course science isn’t a faith: it builds bridges…” etc), he really is and in a most intellectually lazy way.  This is what you find towards the end of the article:

I was taught the earth is four billion years old and, going around the Museum, I realized I don’t actually know how “they” know that.

This isn’t the tired retort, often aimed at Dawkins et al., that science is just another faith. Of course science isn’t a faith: it builds bridges, it puts Americans on the moon and finds extraordinary new ways for us to kill each other. But it has more in common with faith than either the religious or scientific community would like us to admit. For Nietzsche, this was particularly evident in the consideration of scientific methods: there’s something comforting about the repetitive rituals of the scientific and technical life, which mimics the priestly cure of the Hail Mary or morning prayer. And there’s something silencing, too, about the way facts are presented to the public—as fossilized nuggets of information not to be questioned. Where once we used to turn to the priest for advice and guidance, now we turn to the scientific expert; we bend to the stamp of his authority, his status, his style—compare the expert witness in the courtroom to the priest at the hanging.

So science isn’t faith, but Stern doesn’t know how we know the age of the Earth and Nietzsche wrote something about the rituals of science being like religion, and so science really is like faith, except it isn’t.  I find it telling that Stern finds the the time to mention Nietzsche seven (count them) times (why?) but apparently doesn’t have ten seconds to put earth is four billion years old into Google and find out how we know the age of the Earth.  (If he had, he would have soon found this nice explanation of Isochron Dating.) 

So what if there is “something comforting” about the rituals of science?  Many secular activities include comforting things.  The rituals of baseball are comforting to fans, the ritual of cooking a meal for friends can be comforting, the rituals associated with Star Trek fandom can be comforting to trekkies… you get the idea.  But that doesn’t make these things religions.  Or if it does it uses a definition of religion that is so wide as to be virtually meaningless.  If everything is like religion, then nothing is.  In reality, the “rituals” of science (which are not “rituals”, but procedures), since they are performed for a reason, are further from religion than the rituals of baseball etc.  And frankly, I imagine many of the detailed procedures necessary for many science experiments are more tedious than comforting, anyway.  So Stern is wrong here in at least two different ways.

This idea that science has religious-like “rituals”, scientists are “priests”, or “men of the white cloth” (lab coats), science journals are “holy scriptures” etc etc is something I have heard a lot of recently.  It’s old, tired drivel.  Science can be questioned.  And, amazingly, this applies even to subjects that Tom Stern does not fully comprehend.  Science is questioned by both scientists and non scientists.  Only, unlike with religion, there is a basis for questioning and determining what scientific theories we accept and what we don't – the evidence.  What do they use in religion to determine what to accept?  Well, nothing really, other than what some authority just happens to think.  They have no externally verifiable basis for determining what is true and what isn’t.  By comparing scientists to priests, Stern is just lazily looking at the surface – what might appear to be happening – without delving any deeper.  Then it occurred to me this is just cargo cult religion. 

In 1974 Richard Feynman gave a lecture at Caltech where he described what he called cargo cult science - work that has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing the things necessary for real science:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land. [My bold.]

It struck me that referring to scientists as “priests”, or science journals as “holy books” is cargo cult religion.  Stern is examining scientific things that look similar to religion and using this to conflate the two.  But this conflation of science and religion is cargo cult religion the same way as pseudoscience is cargo cult science.  It may have the semblance of religion, but is missing the things necessary for real religion.  (Thankfully.)  Although science may have the appearance of some aspects of religion, it is different in all the ways that actually matter.

Of course, in an ideal world we should not just accept everything scientists tell us, but should examine their arguments to see if they are valid.  But not everyone has the time or the inclination to do this with every claim they hear.  Stern himself is proof of this.  And even scientists cannot be experts in fields that are not their own.  But just because each one of us hasn’t personally performed every scientific experiment ever performed in the history of the world, that doesn’t mean our acceptance of scientific knowledge is like religion.  We trust what science tells us because science has a track record of being right more often than any other method of inquiry.  But trust is not faith, and trusting experts in areas where we are not experts, is not religion.

Few if any of the similarities between science and religion are interesting or useful.  On the other hand, the differences between science and religion are profound.  Stern spoiled what could have been a reasonable expose of Ken Ham’s silly museum by dragging out this discredited canard once again.

Do You Have Frog's Legs?

…Then hop over the bar and get me a drink.

Ba-Boom!

A frog that constantly changes color is being worshipped as a god in India:

Hundreds of people are flocking to Reji Kumar’s home in India daily to pray and ask for miracles.

[…]

The frog was a dazzling white colour when Reji, who is from Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala, in south India, first spotted it.

Then it changed to yellow and had gone grey by the time he got it home.

“By night the frog was dark yellow, and then it became transparent so you could see its internal organs," Reji, a life worker, reportedly said.

"It seemed like a miracle to me that this frog had so many different coats. So now people come to see him and pray to him.”

I suppose it’s about as much use as praying to any other god.  Which is to say, completely useless.  There is a more serious problem though – it seems the frog won’t eat anything:

My one problem is that this frog does not appear to eat. I keep trying to feed it but it doesn’t eat anything. I don’t know what else to give it

Yeah that's right - they're worried he might croak.  (Croak.  Frog - croak.  I kill myself sometimes.)  But why?  Hey, it couldn't be down to the fact that he's keeping the damn thing in a glass jar could it?

Seriously - that's no way to treat your lord and savior.

I pray that you buggers let me go.

Oprah Dissembles

Several bloggers have reported on the recent Newsweek story that exposed some of the dangerous nonsense and pseudoscience that Oprah Winfrey insists on including in her TV show. From obviously crackpot ideas such as The Secret to dangerous pseudoscience such as the anti-vaccine nonsense spouted by celebrity idiot Jenny McCarthy, Newsweek did a pretty good job of calling nonsense nonsense.

Now Oprah has responded with a statement, as reported by EW.com:

I trust the viewers, and I know that they are smart and discerning enough to seek out medical opinions to determine what may be best for them.

This is a highly dishonest statement from Oprah.  You’ll note there is no attempt to justify any of the bogus* medical advice given on her show; no evidence that any of the quackery* she features actually works or is valid in any way.  So what is she saying, exactly?  That, yes, my TV show includes crap but my audience will realize it’s crap?  No, sorry, not good enough. If you have the sort of power that Oprah  has to influence opinion, you have a responsibility to make sure that the advice you give is good.  You should not just show any old crap and expect your viewers to do their own research to determine what is real and what is not, you should determine for yourself if it is real before you feature it in front of millions of viewers.  And you should then be able and willing to defend what you have promoted and rebut any criticisms with facts and evidence, or retract and admit you were wrong.  Instead Oprah hides the truth of what she is doing behind this sham claim that she trusts her viewers to discern what is real and what is not. It’s dishonest, unethical and cowardly.

You only have to read the comments to that EW story to see that many of Oprah’s viewers are neither smart nor discerning enough to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. Just a couple of comments in and you will read the regurgitated lies and logical fallacies of the anti-vaccination loons, repeated in all their idiotic glory.  Those comments are, unfortunately, proof of the damage that Oprah has already done.  Her lame self serving statement does not even begin to address her critics.

More on Oprah’s support of pseudoscience:

Combatting the Oprah Effect

Say It Ain't So, O

Oprah's ugly secret

The Oprah-fication of medicine

* Deliberate deception not implied.

Moron

That’s the word to describe Thomas Sam, the homeopath pictured above who watched his daughter die of a curable disease while he repeatedly ignored what he was told by real doctors, to treat her only with magic water.  Sam and his wife have just been found guilty of manslaughter for this crime, although my guess is it’s the husband who should shoulder most of the blame.

I won’t labor the details - read Orac’s earlier posts on this: A real death by homeopathy and Homeopathy kills a child.  But here are some brief lowlights:

The court heard the couple took Gloria to various health professionals, but while they abandoned each conventional medication she was prescribed within a short time of starting it, they solidly pursued homeopathic remedies.

[…]

By the time she died, she was the weight of an average three-month-old, her body was covered with angry blotches and her once black hair had turned completely white.

[…]

A general practitioner booked them an appointment with a dermatologist they did not attend because they took the child to India instead, a course of action the doctor told them was "cruel".

They also visited two doctors in India, but discarded the advice of one to return to him every second day, instead consulting a succession of homeopaths including Thomas Sam's brother, who had recently completed his dissertation on eczema.

The arrogance and stupidity is breathtaking. This homeopath decided it was more important to him to treat his sick child with his own brand of magic water and/or sugar pills than to seek real treatments.  And even after this experience he had still not learned his lesson, as can be seen from this quote:

"Conventional medicine would have prolonged her life ... with more misery. It's not going to cure her and that's what I strongly believe."

Yeah, I’m sure he believes this.  Unfortunately for this child, just because her moron father believed that homeopathy was real medicine, that didn’t make it so.

September 28, 2009 Edited to add:

The parents were just sentenced to six years (the father) and four years (the mother): 'Cruel' parents jailed over baby's death.