Science Education FAIL

This video has apparently been around for a while but today is the first time I've seen it.

Wow. Just ... wow.

They Really Knew What Was Best

Where Geology And Religion Collide

I bet you didn't know that women engaging in promiscuous behavior like wearing their head scarves low enough to expose their hair, and show off their figure under knee-length coats, are actually causing earthquakes.  The sluts.

See, you didn't know that because you don't have the benefit of Muslim religious scholarship:  "Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes," says Hojoatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, Iran's acting national Friday prayer leader.

Which would make Sedighi the Iranian equivalent of Pat Robertson.  See, wacko religious thinking isn't exclusive to any particular religion.  It's not the flavor of the religion one subscribes to, it's one's propensity to take its ancient mythologies literally, to impute one's own personal morals to the deity, and to view any dissent as heresy worthy of violent retribution.  The more fanatical you are about your religion, the more you gind yourself agreeing with patent nonsense like Sedighi's or Robertson's.

I'd hope the Iranian people laugh off Sedighi the way most Americans laugh off Robertson.  Problem is, some influential people do not laugh at this stuff, they take it seriously and use it to make policy.  That's why it's important for non-religious people to speak out.  That's why it's important for people who subscribe to more moderate versions of their religions to consign nutjobs like this off to the fringes rather than welcoming them as co-religionists.

I Really Think He Was Sincere

In this exchange concerning the deployment of additional forces to Guam, I challenge anyone, whether Democrat or Republican, to not cringe at the 1:15-1:20 mark of questioning from Hank Johnson, Democrat representing Georgia's Fourth District (just east of Atlanta) concerning the environmental impact of an additional Marine brigade being sent to Guam...

...which would pretty much nominate Congressman Johnson for consideration as a mid-grade moron. 

You can see that the Admiral responding to Johnson's questions paused for just a moment, anticipating laughter or getting ready to "make a funny" as well, and he stopped himself for just long enough to realize Oh shit, he really meant that and this guy holds a vote on my funding so he instead decided to take the question at face value and that turned out to be the safer road for him to go down.

Okay, on reflection maybe I was a bit harsh on Johnson above, when I said he was a "mid-grade moron."  He did manage to get himself elected to Congress, after all, suggesting that he is probably actually pretty smart.  He might have just been having a bad morning and didn't think through to the point that he would realize that islands are part of the surface of the Earth and therefore are incapable of capsizing.  This isn't a matter of being uneducated, it's a matter of not using his native intelligence and education, of letting a desire to assume a particular posture get in the way of constructing reasons to support that posture.  Results-driven reasoning can lead you to do that, which is why I think Johnson's remarks are, in all seriousness, better classified as "antiscience" rather than simple idiocy.

Hat Tip to Doug Mataconis. UPDATE: I considered the possibility that this might be an April Fools' joke. But Johnson's exchange was made more than a week ago.

Christopher Maloney is a Cowardly Quack (UPDATED)

It's never a sign of the strength of your scientific idea when you have to resort to censorship to prevent criticism of it.  Which is the first clue that perhaps elderberries do not actually provide any material protection against the H1N1 virus, despite the spurious-sounding claims of a "naturopath" to the contrary.  If you want to claim that elderberries are effective against H1N1, great.  Go round up some pigs, set up a double-blind test, and publish your results in a medical journal -- the way a real scientist would do it.

More importantly, the bigger picture is that these dispensers of so-called "alternative medicine" consume money and resources that could better be spent on actual medicine, grounded in real science, and not inducing a false sense of confidence and well-being that conceals a real problem.  As a commenter on P.Z. Myers' blog inspiring the title of this post points out:

Naturopaths divert people from seeking proper medical attention. If that vague unease and intestinal distress you're feeling is cancer then the time you wasted taking herbal supplements just might mean your death. The anti-vaccine nonsense has killed or disabled how many children? Naturopaths are no better than homeopaths.

Which is exactly right.

While I hesitated to title the post as I did for fear of defaming this Maine naturopath responsible for that oddly-colored video linked above, in fact the contents of the title suggested by Prof. Myers are true.  Christopher Maloney misused the law to censor someone who had offered legitimate scientific criticism of his proposal, rather than to defend his claim on its merits, which makes him a coward.  And hHe sells woo instead of medicine, which makes him a quack.  And even if those are not objectively-verifiable facts, they are well within the scope of legitimate expression of opinion.  So I think I'm good here.  Sue me, dude.  I dare you.  And remember, you have to come to my forum to do it, so you probably ought to read this before you talk with the clerk of court.

UPDATE (complete with actual science goodness):  Maloney responded to Prof. Myers, which response is reprinted in full, here. Most of it is whining, but as to the scientific merits of his claim, he says:

In terms of poor maligned elderberry, the medline citation is "The H1N1 inhibition activities of the elderberry flavonoids compare favorably to the known anti-influenza activities of Oseltamivir (Tamiflu; 0.32 microM) and Amantadine (27 microM). (Phytochemistry. 2009 Jul;70(10):1255-61) While this is a test tube study only, please keep in mind that we had no vaccine and were at the peak of the pandemic here in Maine. I never suggested elderberry as a vaccination but as a possible home treatment for sick children.

Prof. Myers responds by pointing out that a single test-tube study is simply insufficient evidence for prescribing treatment regardless of the level of desparation; at most a single study "shows promise" for future kinds of treatment.  But there is some suggestion that a third party from South Carolina, and not Maloney, was the person who got the original critical blog pulled off the internet rather than Maloney himself, so for now, I'm striking out the references to the "cowardly" bit -- because it's not clear whether this person was Maloney himself, an agent or a proxy for Maloney, or was a true officious intermeddler.

Liberate Prometheus

What need have we of the Gods?
We have conquered their domains
As they conquered the Titans.

I look about my own land
And I see the elements
Harnessed, domesticated.

Wind and sun are made lightning,
A lightning shorn of thunder,
Jewels bring it where we bid.

The earth yields rock, which is now
Transformed into fire, and fire,
Our old servant, is made tame.

Glass and sand are transformed to
Birds of prey, with wings wider
Than the ancient Sphinx is long.

And our birds, breathing rock fire,
Fly faster than sound itself
And become invisible.

Swift Hermes could not outrace
The speed of a message sent
Around the globe -- by a child.

Loathsome diseases and plague,
Which once felled entire nations,
We cure with needle and pill.

If a river is needful,
There it shall be, and its
Water then made pure and sweet.

In my short days, I have seen
The air turned to brown poison,
And then made wholesome again.

The chariots of the Gods
Could not transport so many
So fast or so far as we.

This parade of miracles
Grows seeming endless; and yet,
We take it all for granted.

The shepherds of the Bronze Age
Could not have even dreamt of
Our wizardry done daily.

So we’ve no more use for tales
Of magic, gods, or demons.
Our own wonders do astound.

Knowledge of good and evil
Was called the forbidden fruit.
Yet who would not have eaten?

It’s better, I say, to know
Right from wrong, and make mistakes,
For only thus will we grow wise.

We are not masters of all,
And cannot claim power with
No limits. But truly, could Zeus?

That Titan who brought man fire
Was given eternal pain
For betraying that secret.

We should now repay the debt,
And use the gift that he gave
To set Prometheus free.

The gift he gave was knowledge,
And using it has shown us
That the Gods are obsolete.

For now is humanity’s,
Air, earth, fire, water, wind,
And even life and death, our tools.

Not yet do we grasp all for
Which we reach and desire,
But I see the day we will.

Easy Money!

This is a sucker bet if I've ever seen one.  Easier than taking candy from a baby.

Getting The Science Wrong

The international news reporting firm Al-Jazeera ought to be ashamed of itself.  No, my conservative friends, I don't take Al-Jazeera to task today for painting America in a bad light, although I dislike that they do that, too -- Al-Jazeera is allowed to have its own editorial slant on politics, the same way Fox News is allowed to have its own editorial slant.

But having an editorial slant does not mean that a news agency is behaving within acceptable boundaries when it just plain gets the facts it reports wrong.

So Al-Jazeera should be ashamed of itself for letting one of its reporters write about something he or she doesn't understand and thereby disseminating ignorance and objectively incorrect conclusions:

“Ardi Refutes Darwin’s Theory,” Al Jazeera announced, in an Oct. 3 article not available on the English version of the website. “American scientists have presented evidence that Darwin’s theory of evolution was wrong,” the article opened. “The team announced yesterday that Ardi’s discovery proves that humans did not evolve from ancestors that resemble chimpanzees, which refutes the longstanding assumption that humans evolved from monkeys.”

Creationism!  Thy face is now Muslim.

Let's get this out of the way first.  The errors built in to Al-Jazeera's story include:

1. Darwin did not theorize that humans evolved from monkeys. He theorized that humans and monkeys had a common ancestor. Ardipithecus is not that ancestor; its living descendants are homo sapiens and no other species, not even our closest evolutionary relatives, the chimpanzees.
2. Ardipithecus does not refute the theory of evolution. No credible scientist would make such a claim, because the opposite is true. Ardipithecus is strong evidence of the fact of human evolution. That would be akin to claiming that the use of a compass refutes the theory of magnetism.
3. Ardipithecus is not exactly a brand-new discovery -- fossilized Ardipithecus bones were found as early as 1992 in Ethiopia, and they were classified as such in 1994.  What is relatively new is the discovery of a nearly-complete Ardipithecus skeleton, tellingly, including its skull. Al-Jazeera, however, gives the impression that less than a few months ago there was no knowledge of this hominid form.

But then again, why should the phenomenon of denial of evolution motivated by religious fundamentalism be particularly surprising to anyone here in the West?  Even though fundamentalism's diverse adherents may regard one another as dangerously different and violent, susceptible of wearing funny clothes, using the wrong name for God, and worst of all praying in the wrong way and with the wrong language, they really have more in common with one another in the things that are really important than they have differences. Most significantly, they all labor mightily to preserve an anachronistic cultural and social structure, one modeled after the one that existed in the Fertile Crescent during the Bronze Age, when their holy books were written.

Why should the fact that it is a different religion -- one that worships the same deity, the god of Abraham, albeit as "Allah" rather than "Jehovah" -- motivating the ignorance and denial of science be at all remarkable? I see a strong identity between the Islamic and Christian versions of a mindset that encourages its adherents to turn the dials of time back to an earlier age when the teachings, controls, and power of religion were greater than they are today; to adhere to a literal interpretation of an ancient holy book written in a time when science and rationalism were not part of the cultural dialogue; and to conflate the cultural norms of that time with the moral imperatives of a religion.  This, I tell you, is the dominantly apparent characteristic of fundamentalism as opposed to mere religion; non-fundamentalist religionists are able to separate morality from culture and find ways to apply their religions' moral teachings to the realities of contemporary life.  Fundamentalists, however, cannot reconcile the two and elect to dispense with the unpleasant incidences of modern society rather than their literalist religious teachings.

As an inevitable result of this choice, all monotheistic fundamentalists -- Christian, Jewish, and Muslim -- are right to fear evolution as an existential threat to their ultimately depressingly similar creeds.  Because they insist that their holy books are literally correct and refuse to concede the idea that even their creation myths should be understood in an allegorical sense, they must construct elaborate fantasies and apologia, ultimately resting on deception and denial of objective reality, to address the overwhelming accumulation of scientific evidence that their creation myths are not literally true. The study of evolution really does lead to skepticism of religion, at least of religion that makes ridiculous and easily-disproved claims like the idea that women have one more rib than men.  Fundamentalists fear science and knowledge because they take away the ability of people to put their faith in their simplistic versions of religion.

That is not to say that religion and science cannot co-exist.  My claim is more modest than that: fundamentalist religion and science will ultimately clash.  Those of us who eschew theistic thinking entirely, of course, find no discomfort with science whatsoever.  But I readily see that those theists who are willing to set aside the literal truth of their holy books to search for deeper and more sophisticated Truths therein might find a comfortable accommodation between their faith and the evidence that modern science provides.

In the meantime, we should hardly be surprised that fundamentalist thinkers intent on preserving a Bronze Age mindset in modern times should be distressed at the overwhelming accumulation of evidence that their foundational holy text is -- at least when read literally -- a risible collection of fairy tales.  What we should be surprised at, and alarmed by, is the pervasiveness of this way of thinking and the willingness of so many people around the world to prefer its demonstrable falsities to the facts which science offers us.  Al-Jazeera's propagation of that kind of willful ignorance is at once a vivid portrayal of the extent to which this kind of willful ignorance exists, spreading like a vile and slippery fungus across our cultural landscape -- and an example of that spread in action.


Hat tip to Tiny Frog.

Define Science

Part of my continuing series of "bashing my head against the wall with apologetics" posts.  Please take a look at this exchange, Readers, and tell me what I'm doing wrong here.  Or if there is anything I could possibly say that would help out here.

"Empiricism is not science"?  What do you say to something like that?  Seriously, this is a doomed discussion, isn't it?

Intermediate Fossils

It occurred to me that the usual anti-evolution protest of "There are no intermediates in the fossil record!" is kind of like looking at a spectrum cast out of a prism:

Optics-Denier:  "Well, I see red and I see blue, sure, but there are no transitional colors."

Optics-Proponent:  "How about yellow?"

OD:  "Well, see, now you've actually made the problem worse.  Now there's a gap between red and yellow and a gap between yellow and blue."

OP:  "Okay, well, how about green?  Look, there's green right there."

OD:  "What green?  Where?  I see yellow and blue.  There is no such thing as green light coming from white light.  Show me a blue light that reflects red, and then I'll believe what you claim about optics."

OP:  "Arrgh!"

Now, the analogy isn't perfect.  Each individual color has a "common ancestor" with the others -- the white light hitting the prism.  But we can't really say that green is a closer relative to blue than is red, since the colors all diverged from the white light at the same time.  But aside from that, dealing with deniers of evolution is a lot like this.

It wouldn't matter if this was fringe stuff.  But lots of folks claim to disbelieve evolution.  It's like disbelieving gravity -- how long can you listen to someone say something like that without speaking out?

A Party Of Antiscience

Rick Moran has been running a great series of posts at Right Wing Nut House about the decline of intellectualism in modern conservatism.  And I can think of no more telling symptom of that problem than this tidbit pointed out by David Hume:  it appears that all of the likely Republican Presidential candidate for 2012 are creationists and deny evolution, and favor the "teach the controversy" position:

Bobby Jindal "...has suggested that teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution may not be out of place in public schools."  He put his money where his mouth was on that issue, too, authorizing public school teachers to teach intelligent design and criticism of evolution.

Tim Pawlenty is on record as defending Sarah Palin thusly:  "Intelligent design is something that, in my view, is plausible and credible and something that I personally believe in but, more importantly, from an educational and scientific standpoint, it should be decided by local school boards at the local school district level."

Former Governor Palin herself has said of the subject:  "Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information.  Healthy debate is so important and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

Mike Huckabee, for his part, tries as hard as he can to not answer direct questions about teaching intelligent design, which is what we lawyers call "tap dancing."  But there's little doubt that he actively disbelieves in evolution.

Of the prominent Republicans out there right now, only Mitt Romney comes closest to actually embracing science -- and with trademark style, he tries to have things both ways:  "I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body."  Of course, in doing this, he is missing the point of evolution entirely -- if God guided evolution, then evolution isn't natural selection at work, but rather artificial selection, the way a dog breeder creates a daschund out of successive generations of larger hound dogs.

For a guy who is in the middle of reading Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show On Earth, reciting mountains and mountains of evidence -- not just fossils -- for evolution, this is a bitter pill to swallow indeed.  No likely GOP candidate understands science and most of them subscribe to a "teach the controversy" policy platform.

Teaching the controversy sounds like a politically palatable compromise, but there are plenty of "controversies" we shouldn't teach in public schools because the "other side" of the "theory" is simply not worthy of credulous presentation -- some of which at one time were accepted as the unimpeachable scientific truth and the state of the art of human knowledge.  These include:

• Intelligent falling
  
• The geocentric model of the solar system
• Alien construction of the Great Pyramids
• Cryptozoology (that is, Bigfoot, Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, Chupycabra, etc.)
• The "stork theory" of human reproduction
• Human health as the balance of the "four viscous humours" of phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, and blood
• Santa Claus
• Jerusalem-centric tricontinental global cartography

There is no need to teach any of these "opposing theories" or subject the "conventional" theories to which they are opposed, because these "opposing theories" are laughably and demonstrably not science.  We should take into account a candidate's endorsement of teaching mythology in science class when evaluating that candidate's world view and suitability for office.  Treat a candidate for office who insists that both intelligent design and evolution should be taught in science class the same way you would treat a candidate who insists that the "stork theory" be taught in sex education.

Which portends very poorly for the Republican party indeed.

Heckler's Veto

If you subscribe to a religion that does not instruct you to disavow science and participation the real world, fine; you are not the target of this morning's rant. Take moral and social solace from your religion and go and harm no one with it. But if you believe in a religion that promotes ignorance and antiscience, then I'm aiming this post right at you. To decide if you should be offended at me or not, you need to take a careful look at what your religion actually teaches. I should warn you in advance that you may not like the result if you do.

Now then. Let's begin.

Can you spot the offensive religious reference in the T-shirt logo illustrated to the left? I, for one, cannot. But apparently one is there, because parents of students attending the Missouri high school in question complained and the school will no longer permit students to wear this T-shirt.

Here's the heckler's veto in raw form -- quoth a parent: "I was disappointed with the image on the shirt, ... I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school." Excuse me? You don't think science should be associated with a school? What would you say if I said I didn't want to see a high school associated with algebra? Algebra is, after all, the creation of foreign Muslims. As for "associating" evolution with the school, isn't evolution necessarily included in the the list of mandatory subjects for study in the science curriculum?

The principal's justification for giving in to the heckler's veto is "If the shirts had said ‘Brass Resurrections’ and had a picture of Jesus on the cross, we would have done the same thing."

Hear me now. The principal should censor the T-shirt illustrating Jesus on the cross, and should not censor the "evolution of the trumpet player" T-shirt. The reason is simple -- one is religious advocacy and the other is a reference to science. There is no equivalency between advocacy of science and advocacy of religion. They are different. The school is in the business of teaching science. The school is required to remain neutral about religion.

There is a pernicious notion that evolution is a religion. This is a deeply, deeply incorrect idea, propagated by people who should know better and bought into by people who should be intelligent enough to understand that they are being lied to, but who turn off their normally-acute critical thinking skills when a bizarre notion comes wrapped in the swaddling of their preferred religion. You will also notice that the only people who advance this idea are deeply religious themselves, and the vast bulk of them are Protestant Christians. Why do you suppose there aren't any Hindus pounding the tables about how evolution is a religion? The notion of evolution does not particularly offend Hindu theology.

Religion by definition involves the relationship of man to the supernatural; at minimum, it involves a search for the purpose of existence. There is nothing supernatural or religious about evolution. Religion, particularly the monotheistic religions descended from the patriarch Abraham, promote Manichean world views in which there is Truth and there are Lies, and nothing in between. They are about immutable, eternal truths which are found in their holy books. There are no immutable, eternal truths in science. Darwin's theory has undergone such substantial revision he would barely recognize it today -- which does not mean he was wrong, by the way. He was as right as the evidence available to him allowed him to be. He did not know about DNA and genetic sequencing; the modern synthetic theory does a much better job than Darwin's writings of explaining the phenomenon of evolution. Evolution specifically, and science generally, offer no answers to the questions about the reason we exist or the reason the universe exists. They offer no guidance on issues of morality -- just like your refrigerator does not offer such guidance and you'd be an idiot to ask your refrigerator for forgiveness of your sins. That's not what it's for.

The result of this politically-motivated bit of outright deception is the idea that there is any sort of equivalency between science and religion. To understand why, imagine if the T-shirt had illustrated an apple with a trumpet on it falling onto Isaac Newton's head, with the caption "The band has tremendous gravity" or something like that. Anyone who complained about that on religious grounds would immediately and universally be thought of as an ignorant buffoon. They would be mercilessly mocked, and eventually counseled to obtain rudimentary science education. They would complain that their religion was being ridiculed -- but if the religion inspired disbelief in gravity rather than evolution, almost no one would suggest that it was rude or impolite or even inappropriate to ridicule such a religion.

Yes, there is equivalence between the theory of evolution and the theory of gravity. They're both only theories. Both help us understand indisputably real phenomena. They've both been superseded by advances in scientific experiment and thought. But they are both science and they are both important for a person to learn and understand if they are going to navigate the world in a meaningful, intelligent way. And if someone who insists on worshiping a Bronze Age sky god claims that advocacy of either theory is incompatible with religion, well, it's religion that should lose that fight.

For the record, my perspective is as follows: science = good (saves lives, makes people smarter); religion = superstition (sometimes harmless, but sometimes inspires violence and keeps people ignorant). Also for the record, the parents who complained should not be subject to any kind of governmental sanction; the parents have freedom of speech to complain or be offended about whatever they like.

But the principal made a bad call by prohibiting the T-shirts. In doing so, he ceded to the idea of a heckler's veto, which itself is pernicious to the idea of free speech. In doing so, he advanced the idea that evolution is religion, which it is not. In doing so, he not only failed to remain neutral about religion, he has effectively advocated for religions that promote antiscience because he gave in to people who subscribe to a particular religion and thereby effectively delegated control of this issue to them. He has cast his school in particular and schools in Missouri generally into disrepute by choosing ignorance over science. And he cost his school and the band money by doing it.

Evolution is not religion. Get it right.

Homeopathy: The Drama

Whoa. That's strong stuff.

Hat tip to Science-Based Medicine.

Why Religious People Should Stop Telling Omar Stories

I came across this story arising from near Portland, Oregon today and was moved to finally understand something I've read about and resisted in the past.

[Fifteen-month-old] Ava Worthington died March 2, 2008, after her parents and other members of the Followers of Christ tried to treat her with faith healing.

Ava's father, who goes by Brent, his middle name, described what happened:

Ava came down with what appeared to be a cold or the flu on a Tuesday. By Saturday, her breathing became labored and the family turned to its traditional faith-healing rituals, praying, fasting, anointing the body with oil, administering diluted wine and laying on of hands.

By Sunday, Brent Worthington said he thought there was "a possibility" his daughter was so sick she could die. Then, after a final session of laying on of hands at about 5 p.m., "she perked up," he said. She grabbed her bottle and "took some food."

"She was peaceful; she was rested," Worthington said.

Two hours later Ava was dead.

What's missing here? Doctors, that's what. You can imagine that one of the first questions police asked when investigating the death of this infant was, "Why didn't you take her to a doctor?" The father responded:

He said no one in his immediate family has ever been to a doctor or used prescription or over-the-counter medicine. "It's not something we believe in."

Her parents have been charged with manslaughter. It is an odd feeling indeed to feel very sorry for this couple, who lost a daughter they clearly loved, and at the same time feel so angry at them for letting this happen. But they clearly deserve the prosecution.

It took six days for this girl to die, and if you read the story in detail you'll see that they were aware of a growth in the girl's neck that obstructed her breathing -- it was a benign tumor, the autopsy demonstrated after her death, but still a problem because it made breathing difficult for an inexperienced and weak breather (as all infants are).

This shows that the parents were very aware that their daughter had serious medical problems. They paid attention to her and attempted a misguided form of assistance. But the assistance they offered was primitive, ritualistic magic. It got dressed up as religion but the form of the religion hardly matters. They could have been sticking pins in a doll, rolling dice made out of chicken bones, or mixing bat gall with boiling mercury for all I care. They should have taken her to a doctor. If they had, it is probable to the point of near-certainty that she would be alive today.

Pneumonia and blood infection are easily treatable with antibiotics and the success rate of such a treatment is phenomenally high. The success rate for prayer as a medical treatment is statistically identical to the success rate for no treatment at all. Which is no wonder -- because in reality, prayer alone is no treatment at all.

As I read this and wrote about it, I began to think about friends who reported prayer working to cure seemingly terrible diseases. I've heard these stories more than once, from people I like, people I trust, people I know would not lie, people of greater than average intelligence. The story always takes a particular form, and so it is possible for me to write an amalgam of them, describing a hypothetical patient I'll name "Omar" for storytelling purposes:

Omar was very, very sick. He had been diagnosed with Stage IV leukemia and was advancing to Stage V. That's the point where the doctors stop trying to cure you and just give you painkillers until you die. They said he only had a few weeks and he was making arrangements to put his estate in order before he passed. But in doing that, he asked for some us from the church community to gather around his hospital bed and pray with him. I'd only known Omar a little bit from church, but me and a lot of other congregants got together and came to the hospital with our pastor. We held hands and the pastor led us in a prayer. We asked God to heal Omar and to make him better, we asked to keep him with us for a while longer, and the pastor reminded us that we were praying in Jesus' name. I felt such an outpouring of love for Omar there in that room. Over the next couple of weeks, Omar began to get stronger. Eventually, he started walking again. The doctors were amazed, they had no explanation for what happened. About a month after we prayed over Omar, they couldn't find any trace of the leukemia in his blood at all, and they sent him home. Omar is alive today and it's because of the power of prayer and the miraculous intervention of Jesus.

It would defy my belief if you, good Reader, had not heard this story at least once before reading it here -- probably told to you by someone you know personally and maybe by someone whose judgment you otherwise would trust. I've been told this story at least twenty times in my life, by personal friends.

(Oh, it's also almost always cancer, by the way. It's never an amputation. Faith healing doesn't seem to work on amputees. That should be the test: what evidence would I need to see in order to start believing in God? If I saw a group of people gather and pray for an amputee, and that amputee grew back a missing limb, then yes, I'd seriously consider the possibility of divine intervention. Not an idea original to me, but it's a good enough one that I'll adopt it.)

In the past, I've discounted the stories but not made strong challenges to them. After all, the people in question derive strength, pleasure, community, and moral fortitude from their religions, so their religious activity can't be all bad. A misguided vestige from a more primitive time in history, but still serving an important social function nevertheless.

And my friends who have told me these stories aren't crazy people -- they aren't handling snakes, they aren't stockpiling weapons and building fortresses, they aren't sacrificing live animals, they aren't strapping bombs to their chests and blowing up train stations. They aren't suggesting that "Omar" was wrong or foolish to have sought conventional medical treatment. They're just saying that conventional medical treatment wasn't enough in his case; what Omar needed, in the story, was the intervention of God with the help of prayerful friends.

I want to remain friends with these people because they are good people, good friends. So the most I've done in the past is to point out that maybe we don't fully understand cancer yet, and maybe some other treatment reached a critical point and the disease went into remission right about the time of the prayer session. This invariably fails to convince the religious person -- the idea that maybe fifty treatments of drugs took several weeks to cumulate in a patient's system, and even after stopping the drug treatment the medicine that had accumulated continued to work, and that the medicine, through a mechanism not understood by modern medical science, caused such a sudden turnaround, is not nearly as sexy an idea as prayer.

These religious folks want to believe the prayer worked. Consequently, the cause-and-effect relationship seems immediate and therefore irrefutable. Selection and timing fallacies enter their thought. And the idea that the doctor doesn't know everything about cancer while still treating the patient is somehow terrifying. Another preference fallacy there -- I don't want the doctor to have limited power, therefore he doesn't, and therefore he represents everything science knows and will ever know.

Unlike God, Doctors are not omniscient, medical science is an impressive but still finite body of knowledge, and there are challenges that are yet beyond their ability to resolve. There always will be. Also unlike God, doctors and medical science are real, not just comforting fairy tales. Also unlike God, medical science can produce results, not dead fifteen-month-old babies.

What this story has moved me to understand is that my well-meaning friends -- those nice people who gather around and pray for people like "Omar" -- are enabling the crazies. Their stories of gentle, prayerful, and miraculous cures provide intellectual and moral support for the more crazy and extreme claims of magic-dressed-up-as-religion. If there weren't tens of thousands of "Omar stories" out there, there would be a lot fewer stories like the one from Portland where a deeply-religious parent eschews medical treatment entirely to resort to incantations to cure a readily-treatable disease.

By telling "Omar stories," these well-meaning, otherwise-reasonable people are implying that the decision made by these Portland parents was reasonable. After all, in this guy's personal experience, prayer and ritual had always worked in the past. He had no reason to think it wouldn't work on his daughter. But he should have been in an environment were there were people around him who would have told him that he was acting unreasonably. He should not have been in an environment were he was constantly told, again and again, that prayer alone can heal grave illnesses. This notion should never have seemed reasonable to him. And "Omar stories" make that sort of idea seem reasonable. That is the harm of telling "Omar stories," what Richard Dawkins called the "enabling" effect of moderate religion in The God Delusion.

Yes, it's possible for a religious person to use common sense and good judgment, and take their sick children to doctors. The vast majority of them do just that. They don't stop being religious when they do it, either. But here's my prediction: the rate of successful treatment for religious parents who use medical science in addition to praying for their sick children will be statistically identical to the success rate of non-religious parents who use medical treatment alone. I'll predict further: the rate of successful treatment for parents who use religion alone, and no medical science, to treat their sick children, will the statistically identical to the success rate of parents who do not treat their children at all.

Anyone want to put some money down on those predictions? Any takers?

Hat tip to Hemant Mehta.

Life Guided By Fallacies

Techskeptic has a nice thought on what it is to be a "denialist." It is, in essence, an approach to an unpleasant subject guided by the Nirvana fallacy. He writes of those who would deny global warming, but his thought seems to apply to a periennial exchange with which I am more familiar: evolution.

The fossil record does not, upon examination, produce an exactly-as-expected picture of smooth transitions from one form of an organism to another form; there are gaps and few transitions. Therefore, because the evidence is not precisely as evolution would have predicted, evolution is false. Frequently from there, other logical errors come in to play -- since evolution has been "proven" false, creationism is therefore proven true.

One might be surprised, unpleasantly, to learn how often poor logic like this is used in the law. And in a great many other human endeavors. I'd venture to say that for a lot of people, significant portions of their lives are guided by fallacious thinking.

Read The Article

One of my big gripes about journalism is when headlines are deceptive and do not accurately summarize what is described in the article. Today brings a good example: judging from the headline in this article from the Associated Press ("Alternative Medicine Goes Mainstream"), one might think that "alternative medicine" is gaining significant acceptance by the mainstream medical establishment.

It is not -- at least, not in the sense that any real doctors think it actually does anything. Read the article and you'll see why. Nearly every paragraph in the article contains facts which indicate why you should not use alternative medicines, why big hospitals are irresponsible for offering woo and calling it "treatment," and why the public and insurance premium payers are being bilked by the providers of this woo:

Government actions and powerful interest groups have left consumers vulnerable to flawed products and misleading marketing.

Dietary supplements do not have to be proved safe or effective before they can be sold.

Some interfere with other things you may be taking, such as birth control pills.

...many of these products are made by big businesses.

Ingredients and their countries of origin are a mystery to consumers.

hey are marketed in ways that manipulate emotions, just like ads for hot cars and cool clothes. Some make claims that average people can't parse as proof of effectiveness or blather, like "restores cell-to-cell communication."

Even therapies that may help certain conditions, such as acupuncture, are being touted for uses beyond their evidence.

...more than $2.5 billion of tax-financed research has not found any cures or major treatment advances, aside from certain uses for acupuncture and ginger for chemotherapy-related nausea. If anything, evidence has mounted that many of these pills and therapies lack value.

...some offer treatments with little or no scientific basis, to patients who are emotionally vulnerable and gravely ill. The Baltimore hospital, for example, is not charging for Reiki but wants to if it can be shown to help. Other hospitals earn fees from treatments such as acupuncture, which insurance does not always cover if the purpose is not sufficiently proven.

Health insurers are cutting deals to let alternative medicine providers market supplements and services directly to members. At least one insurer promotes these to members with a discount, perhaps leaving an incorrect impression they are covered services and medically sound. Some insurers steer patients to Internet sellers of supplements, even though patients must pay for these out of pocket.

A few herbal supplements can directly threaten health. A surprising number do not supply what their labels claim, contain potentially harmful substances like lead, or are laced with hidden versions of prescription drugs. [¶] "In testing, one out of four supplements has a problem," said Dr. Tod Cooperman, president of ConsumerLab.com, an independent company that rates such products.

...spending money for a product with no proven benefit is no small harm when the economy is bad and people can't afford health insurance or healthy food.

Cancer patients can lose their only chance of beating the disease by gambling on unproven treatments. People with clogged arteries can suffer a heart attack. Children can be harmed by unproven therapies forced on them by parents who distrust conventional medicine.

at least there are regulatory systems, guideline-setting groups and watchdog agencies helping to keep traditional medicine in line. [¶] The safety net for alternative medicine is far flimsier. ... Some states license certain types, like acupuncturists; others do not.

Some studies suggest that vitamin deficiencies can raise the risk of disease. But it is not clear that taking supplements will fix that, and research has found hints of harm, said Dr. Jeffrey White, complementary and alternative medicine chief at the National Cancer Institute.

The Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act of 1994 exempted such products from needing FDA approval or proof of safety or effectiveness before they go on sale. [¶] "That has resulted in consumers wasting billions of dollars on products of either no or dubious benefit," said [Bruce Silverglade of the consumer group Center for Science in the Public Interest.]

People need to keep a healthy skepticism about that magical marketing term "natural," said Kathy Allen, a dietitian at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla. [¶] The truth is, supplements lack proof of safety or benefit. Asked to take a drug under those terms, "most of us would say 'no,'" Allen said. "When it says 'natural,' the perception is there is no harm. And that is just not true."

I didn't write any of that, it's all from the article. I've quoted 616 out of 1818 words in the article -- more than a third of it. My point is to demonstrate that the headline does not accurately explain the contents of the article, which any reasonable person would read and think to not use alternative medicine.

Now, what would be interesting to learn is just how much money is spent on woo, how much of it is paid by insurers, and how much of it is being paid by the government.

God WIll Provide And He Has A Plan

Tinyfrog gives an example of how callous and uncaring nature really is. There are crater lakes in Africa which, by accident of their altitude, geographic situs in calderas, and the geology below them, trap immense amounts of pure gaseous carbon dioxide, which periodically burst to the surface of the lake and release tens of thousands of tons of this gas into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is heavier than the nitrogen-oxygen-other stuff mix we call "air" and therefore flows along the ground until it disperses. Since most animals, including humans, cannot breathe oxygen, they find themselves blanketed by a flood of carbon dioxide.

This has to be an absolutely horrible way to die. Carbon dioxide is colorless and odorless. You're just walking along outside, enjoying a beautiful day, when suddenly the air around you no longer nourishes your lungs. Instead, it suffocates you. The more you gasp, the more poison you're forcing into your body, until you pass out and asphyxiate to death. Drowning while above ground. And then it passes, and when people come by later, they see you're dead but without advanced forensics, there's no way to figure out how it happened.

Holy crap, no wonder people in that area beileve in evil spirits and demons.

The answer, though, is not religion. It is not prayers to appease the evil spirits and demons. It is not faith in a sky god. The answer is science. Drill holes and plant pipes to the bottom of the lake, to vent the carbon dioxide. No bubbles of the gas builds up, then, because it's always being vented in small, effectively harmless amounts. Once again, education and science provide the approach that provides an effective solution to a problem and saves lives; religion would obscure the truth, permit the problem to persist, at a cost of unknowable amounts of death.

Search For A Platform Continues

Andrew Sullivan's conservative credentials are suspect these days. On the other hand, the very fact that his credentials are suspect is a symptom of something wrong with the right side of the political spectrum. Still here's what he has to say for himself:

On most issues, I side with what used to be the center-right, but the GOP is poison to me and many others. Why?

Their abandonment of limited government, their absurd spending under Bush, their contempt for civil liberties, their rigid mindset, their hostility to others, their worship of the executive branch, their contempt for judicial checks, their cluelessness with racial minorities and immigrants, their endorsement of torture as an American value, their homophobia, their know-nothing Christianism, and the sheer vileness of their leaders - from the dumb-as-a-post Steele to the brittle, money-grubbing cynic, Coulter and hollow, partisan neo-fascist Hannity.

Sullivan is maybe a little harsh in his criticism of Michael Steele -- I'd agree that while he has not articulated himself well, he has raised some decent points to consider. I'd describe him as "clumsy" based on what I've seen so far, but not "dumb-as-a-post."

"Know-nothing Christianism?" you cry, "What the hell does that mean?" The answer is, it's that contempt for education and knowledge in favor of faith and religion, it's what kept Congressman Mike Pence from being able to answer some relatively simple questions about science. It's not that Pence is dumb or because he doesn't know the scientifically right answers, but because he's afraid of offending his constituency and therefore doesn't know the right political answer:

But aside from that quibble, Sullivan is spot on. It seems to me that there are enough voices are out there crying for a real platform to emerge. When will someone actually put something on the table?

Swine Flu: You May Already Be (Partially) Immune

Panic over the swine flu is starting to be tedious. I heard yesterday that a client who is a school bus driver saw about half the number of kids as normal going to school this week. Half? There's that much panic out there over this?

Has no one noticed that despite the fact that there is considerable human traffic between Mexico and the United States, we've had one and only one death from this flu so far? In Mexico, there have been twelve deaths. Proportionally, that's a much larger ratio. Still, it's thirteen people dead in about a two-week period. Compare that to the biweekly mortality rate of, say, driving automobiles. Or owning swimming pools. Or smoking.

So here's the thing. Do you get flu shots? Have you had a touch of the regular flu in the past couple of years? If so, there is a reasonable possibility you have already been vaccinated against swine flu. Not 100%, but an appreciable possibility and even if you're not already immunized, chances are you'll just suffer regular cold and flu symptoms and not, you know, die. Money quote:

In the flu vaccine — for more than the past 30 years — we’ve had an H1N1 strain in the standard flu vaccine that everyone gets… at least since 1976 when we had the last swine flu scare. So the theory goes that if you’ve had a vaccine that has a N1 in it... when you encounter a slightly different H1 (which is what the swine flu is) that you will be protected from severe illness and death, but not from getting a cold or a bad cold from that flu strain.

So calm down out there, people. Look, there's certainly a potential for something serious here. That's what all the warnings are about, so medical professionals can get ready, coordinate their resources, and prevent the bad stuff from happening. Certainly I agree that should be taken seriously.

But come on. This isn't 1918, it's 2009. We have the benefit of ninety years of science. We have the benefit of worldwide public health organizations. Vaccinations. Antibiotics and immune system boosters. Sanitation. And did I mention vaccinations?

Lots of Twelve people have died in Mexico. That's because Mexico has only recently emerged as a middle-income, industrialized nation. It's not yet free of its legacy as a third-world country. There is still a substantial underclass there who live in grinding poverty and it's quite likely that those people have no access to any kind of medical care and live in very unsanitary conditions. I'm not saying that all of Mexico is like that and I'm very happy for the Mexicans (and for ourselves, because we benefit from it too) that those conditions are not the norm for most people there. Nor am I saying that we don't have problems like that here in the States, either. These are the kinds of challenges that all nations face to varying degrees.

What I'm saying is that I strongly suspect that when the chips are down, we'll find out that the people who have died from swine flu are overwhemingly from one of two categories of people: 1) those who have to live in unsanitary conditions without access to basic medical care, and 2) those who have eschewed vaccinations as a component of the health care they do receive.

What's stunning to me is that despite the high degree of affluence and access to the benefits of science that we enjoy here in the States, there are people who voluntarily put themselves in class 2 and who so love their self-induced panic that they will spend the next several weeks putting themselves through mental gynmastics to rationalize away the quite obvious facts that this is an ordinary disease that can be prevented and controlled through simple, painless, and affordable vaccinations.

Simple lessons here. Don't panic. Vaccinate. Send your kids to school.

Junk Science And The Law

Coming across this article from a New York criminal defense attorney who is also a mighty law blogger, seeing a similar issue addressed in one of my new favorite blogs (happily, chronicling a solid ass-drubbing the anti-vaccination crowd got in the Court of Claims), and having an issue set up in the mock trial competition that I'm coaching a team through right now, I'm reminded that the issue of pseudoscience, junk science, and generally lazy thinking is not confined to matters of medicine and quasi-religion. It infects our courts, too, and in so doing, it degrades the quality of justice served up to us as citizens.

Begin with a proposition that any professional with experience in the courts accepts as a given -- an attorney who looks around for a reasonable amount of time will be able to find some kind of an "expert witness" who will, for a fee, offer testimony in support of pretty much any proposition. Medical doctors are the direct target of this cynical proposition -- it's not for nothing that lawyers sneer at a certain well-populated class of M.D.'s as "whores."* The sorts of medical releases and notes that I've seen in my career are astounding -- shockingly serious-sounding diagnoses, accompanied by releases from and restrictions to work sufficient to indicate that an able-bodied patient's life is completely ruined forever, all based on subjective complaints of what appears to be rather mild pain.**

Now, understand that this proposition extends well beyond the realm of medicine. Greenfield describes a sincere and wide-eyed "expert" testifying that it's just impossible to wipe fingerprints off of a chromed handgun. He's exaggerating for effect, but such obviously wrong testimony could rather easily skew the result of a criminal trial. Certainly there's a lot of questionable forensic science out there, and especially with half of America addicted to police procedural shows on TV, there is a very distorted sense of what forensic science can and cannot prove. Yes, the science can do amazing things, but it is also quite limited in other respects.

But the power, oh the power, of putting someone up on the witness stand, calling her an "expert," and having the court agree with that characterization. It builds up huge credibility in a jury's estimation, it leaves a jury agreeing with anything that the "expert" says. But what is an "expert" witness anyway?

Federal Rule of Evidence 702 defines an "expert" as someone who has "knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education" in "scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge." The cognate provision of California law, Evidence Code § 720(a) defines an expert as someone who "has special knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education sufficient to qualify him as an expert on the subject to which his testimony relates." That's actualy a less helpful definition than the Federal rules, but it gets at the same thing -- anyone who knows more than the average schlub off the street about something. By that definition, I am an expert on the subjects of ancient history and laying hardwood floors -- flooring because I've had the experience of doing it, and history because I've made an armchair hobby of learning about it. I don't need a Ph.D. in history to know more about it than the average bear.

Well, clearly, no one is going to call me as an expert on laying hardwood floors even though I've done it a couple times as a DIY'er. The sorts of experts who make convincing witnesses are the ones with lots of letters after their names, years of experience in the relevant area of expertise, publications in relevant journals, and so on. The question then becomes -- how is a court, whether in the form of a judge or a jury, to know when a so-called "expert" is giving good science in her testimony, whether she's bloviating, or whether she's advancing a bunch of crap and calling it "science"?

The judge, who is not a scientist, has to apply a legal test to evidence because that's what judges are capable of doing. So in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals (1993) 509 U.S. 579, the Supreme Court gave us the legal test: the judge has to look at testimony from experts in the relevant scientific field and decide if the science being used by the expert is "generally accepted" by the relevant scientific community. This does not mean that there is a numerical majority of scientists who subscribe to it; the quality of the scientists who say "yea" or "nay" to a particular method is also considered. In theory, if you've got one guy who's the ultimate, be-all, end-all expert who says, "No way, this is junk," and ten thousand lesser lights who say "Yeah, this stuff is really good science!" then the judge has the discretion to say, "The one guy with the super-awesome credentials is right and I'm excluding the evidence."

The reason is, Daubert requires the Court to also independently determine if the process in question has been subject to the scientific method. In that vein, a court is guided to determine from expert testimony if the process has been subjected to both field and laboratory testing; if the error rate for the technique is both known and very low; if the process has been subjected to peer review (and if so, what the results of the peer review process were); and if objective control standards exist.

These are all good sorts of questions to ask when a questionable technique is advanced. The problem is, they are also the sorts of questions that legitimate scientists include in basing their decision to accept or reject a technique as valid. So it can be subsumed back into the old test anyway. I should mention, while speaking of the "old test," Daubert is a tougher standard than the one it replaced, which relies only on the acceptance of the technique in the scientific community (and which is still the standard in California state courts, see People v. Kelly (1976) 17 Cal.3d 24, affirmed post-Daubert, People v. Leahy (1994) 8 Cal.4th 587). Polygraphs, for instance, do not meet this standard.

What really happens, though, is that courts do a search through other case law to see whether another court has addressed this kind of scientific technique before, and then rubber-stamps that decision. This is stifling to innovation and new techniques, because a court that denies New Method X largely on the basis of its novelty and lack of peer review (which is a result of its novely) will then guide future courts to reject New Method X even if the New Method X is subsequently vindicated in field tests and peer review.

Then, there is another problem -- what happens when a bunch of "experts" submit affidavits signing off on a bunch of what is objectively junk science? In the MMR vaccine case Popehat linked to, the court took the time to delve deeply into the issue and found the "experts" (who had impressive-enough looking credentials) to have poor foundations for their opinions. But it takes an unusually perceptive and knowledgeable court to do that; not all judges have the right kinds of backgrounds to make those kinds of evaluations. I do not think I would. Even in the MMR case, the Court based its decision in part on the following:

The expert witnesses presented by the respondent were far better qualified, far more experienced, and far more persuasive than the petitioners’ experts, concerning most of the key points.

The issue, though, ought not to be which side of a dispute can accumulate the most affidavits from the most impressive experts. If experts can be found who will sign off on most anything, it can become something of an arms race to see which side is simply willing to write enough checks to the largest number of scientists willing to whore out their credentials.

Here's what I suggest. A court is not equipped, on its own, to evaluate science. It needs the assistance of experts. But the issue of whether a proposed method has "acceptance in the scientific community" is fundamentally flawed, and redundant of the validity of the science in question anyway. I say, let's dispense with the "general acceptance" part of this test altogether.

Instead, have experts testify directly about the scientific validity of the test in question. We have guidance from Daubert about what scientific validity is -- has the process been subject to double-blind, objectively falsifiable, controlled testing? Has it been subject to peer review and analyzed in relevant professional literature? Does the process produce reliable results, both in the lab and in practical application? If so, legitimate scientists will sign off on the method anyway. So let the experts explain why the technique is or is not valid, and let the court's inquiry be not about the opinions of a body of experts but rather the substance of what the experts are talking about.


* Obviously, not all doctors deserve this label.
** You don't believe this? I've got one word for you: Fibromyalgia.