The Skepticality podcast has been doing a real bang-up job of covering the controversy over “Intelligent Design” propaganda piece Expelled, mostly be interviewing the various scientists touched directly by the controversy. The most recent interview was one of the most frustrating—Dr. Randy Olson, who moved from being a biologist to being a filmmaker. Dr. Olson has a lot of criticisms of people he calls “evolutionists”, but I got the feeling he was more interested in knocking heads than really being right, and he might do well to reconsider some of his own ideas. Even though he agrees with people who accept the theory of evolution, he insists throughout the interview in using the term “evolutionist”. This is short of calling someone a “Darwinist”, but it’s still falling for a right wing frame. The right wing frame is to suggest the the controversy is over a clash between two belief systems of equal evidential validity: Christianity and “Darwinism”, much like their other favorite clash, between Christianity and Islam. And that the battle is merely to be won on faith. But evolutionary theory is not a belief system, and nor is it necessarily in conflict with Christianity, since most mainstream Christian churches accept it the same as they accept that the Earth goes around the Sun, contrary to Biblical claims otherwise. It’s a well-established theory with no real evidence against it, and mountains of evidence for it. Mind-boggling, impossible to tally amounts of evidence for it. Using terms like “evolutionist” undermines this reality. Dr. Olson would not call people who accept the reality of gravity “gravitationalists”, so why buy into the right wing frame on this one?

Obviously, you can’t just call the defenders of evolutionary theory biologists, because more than biologists defend it—the larger scientist community and non-scientists like me are avid defenders of the importance of accepting reality. And of course, this group has religious and non-religious people in it. So what to call them? I suggest “reality-based community”, which has more syllables than “evolutionists”, but rolls off the tongue more easily. The best part about it is that it reframes the debate in more accurate terms: As one between people who accept evidence and appreciate knowledge, and people who insist on viewing the world through a magical lens.

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Another edition of “What’s Cary Tennis been smoking?” He’s been a lot better lately, so there’s not been any reason to write posts wondering about the potency levels of his preferred smoking materials, but today’s column is a doozy. The guy who writes in has a Bible-thumping friend, and the letter writer is an atheist, and they have fun with their contentious differences. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, right?* Now his friend, who teaches at a church school, is being pressured to teach young earth creationism to the kids, and the guy is fixing to do it, after going through a hefty process of convincing himself that he’s really considered the evidence, which is impossible, because honest engagement with the evidence in this case leads to one conclusion—evolution is the reality. I don’t say this lightly. We all have biases and prejudices that color our views and in many cases, the evidence is hazy enough that people can have real disagreements with no real conclusion. This isn’t true in the contentious debate between evolutionary theory and Adam and Eve. Objectively, one side has marshaled an irrefutable amount of evidence and the other is blowing smoke out their asses.

So what his friend is doing is that he already decided to bend over for the bullshit and is looking for a rationalization for it, so he doesn’t have to admit that he’s a wanker. Our letter-writer, however, is livid. He thinks teaching creationism is a form of child abuse, and while I think the term is overheated, I agree that using children in service of whack-a-doodle ideologies is cruel to children, especially in cases where your lies to them could have serious, long-term negative consequences on their job prospects. (The whole classroom, for instance, is automatically seeing any chance of going into sciences plummet through the floor because of this stuff.) Tennis, however, has one of his goofier answers, which is for this friend to dispassionately treat the misuse of these children as if he’s reading a book on anthropology.

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And I thought Bush’s lie that he gave up golf in solidarity out of respect for U.S. soldiers killed in the war was the winner of the dumbassery remark of the year. Boy was I wrong.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula points to an incredible statement by the movie critic, right-wing Clown Hall writer and radio show host. First, I love PZ’s opening.

Did someone declare this National Flaming Racist Idiot week, and I just didn’t notice until now? You have got to read Michael Medved’s latest foray into pseudoscience: he has declared American superiority to be genetic, encoded in our good old American DNA. Because our ancestors were immigrants, who were risk-takers, who were selected for their energy and aggressiveness. Oh, except for those who are descended from slaves.

Oh yes, Medved did, friends. I guess the best thing we can say about the following statement is that he probably wasn’t emitting the spittle Pat “A Brief for Whitey” Buchanan did yesterday when he was on Hardball. Medved even makes the gutsy move of explaining that the DNA shaped by our borders and risk-taking requires governing by Republican policies:

The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide - between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits.

…Senators Obama, Clinton and other leaders who seek to enlarge the scope of government face more formidable obstacles than they realize. Their desire to impose a European-style welfare state and a command-and-control economy not only contradicts our proudest political and economic traditions, but the new revelations about American DNA suggest that such ill-starred schemes may go against our very nature.

Wow. Talk about junk science — so now Americans are a “race”? Holy smoke, this is incredible. Actually, Medved’s working from the same playbook as Buchanan — slavery was a good thing for the darkies, after all, those bringing the slaves over as cargo didn’t have genocide on their minds, they needed that cargo alive because good hard money was paid for them.

Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave “cargo” who perished from disease or overcrowding during transport from Africa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean. By definition, the crime of genocide requires the deliberate slaughter of a specific group of people; slavers invariably preferred oppressing and exploiting live Africans rather than murdering them en masse.

H/t, Oliver Willis.

A reminder to Americans with short fucking memories.

The number of anti-vaccination cranks out there on the interwebs seems to be multiplying. It seems you can’t make reference to any kind of vaccination lately without people, sometimes pretending to be liberals (sometimes actually misguided liberals) wailing and moaning about how terrible vaccinations are. It’s the new fluoridation. I’m somewhat surprised that no one wailed and moaned that I mentioned on Pandagon a tetanus vaccination I got the other day, but rest assured, while my arm has been kind of sore, I haven’t yet developed autism.

I have very little patience for cranks as a general rule (which is why working for this site is so fun, because it’s about pushing back against anti-choice cranks), but I reserve a special contempt and loathing for anti-vaccination cranks. They remind me of nothing so much as women who make their living as professional anti-feminists in terms of denial and idiocy levels. Anti-feminist professional women create a special kind of loathing, because they don’t acknowledge that their very ability to be out there earning a paycheck lambasting feminism would not be possible without feminism giving them the right to be women in the public sphere. Anti-vaccination cranks have a similar parasitic relationship to the existence of vaccines. If it weren’t for vaccination, our country would have far more immediate infectious disease health concerns to worry about that the largely imaginary health drawbacks of the vaccination wouldn’t have a chance to ruffle any feathers.

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You want to read a book that will make you uncomfortably reexamine the kind of rhetoric you use, right down to your choice of metaphors? Well, if you don’t, you should: Jeffrey Feldman’s new book Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. It’s a convincing argument that the right wing punditry has adopted a violence stance, tone, and choice of words and media battles that undermines the concept of deliberative democracy. And while deliberative democracy can be unbelievably frustrating for liberals, a step back shows that it does work in our favor, because slowly over time, Americans have really become a more liberal (read: gentle, considerate people).

I can hear the bristling, but think about it. Liberals, for instance, have won the ideological war about equality. Conservatives have to find another way to frame issues when they’re arguing against equality, and thus have created empty concepts like “abortion is murder” or “reverse racism”. Those phrases burn, but it’s wise to remember that they’ve been forced into a dishonest territory because liberals have won the argument over equality. Conservatives can’t win in a fair debate where all sides present their views to be hashed out in the public forum, and they clearly know it, because instead of submitting themselves to the debate, the right wing pundits have instead turned to fear-mongering and reimagining our objectively peaceful country as a war zone. Think of how the gun control debate goes down, an example Feldman turns to early in the book. There’s not much of an honest debate about gun control in this country, because right wingers skip the facts and go straight for the mythologizing about how every Republican man is besieged by a bunch of gun-wielding maniacs, attacking him in airports and fast food joints, and even coming into his home to rape his wife, and if he wasn’t able to periodically litter the landscape with bullets, it would be worse. That this doesn’t reflect reality seems inconsequential to this image, probably because the image of violence has so much power over reason.

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I’ve been hanging onto this awhile, but I knew it would come up: the Anti-Defamation League has condemned Expelled for using the tragedy of the Holocaust in service of an anti-science agenda.

Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

It’s initially bizarre to see creationists—who are largely fundamentalist Christians—hide behind Holocaust accusations on this issue, since the major factor that led Jews to be the scapegoated group was centuries of Christians scapegoating Jews, accusing them of killing Jesus and of course reserving them the place of the especially not-saved, ideas that would pretty much die if fundies didn’t keep them alive. But it’s not actually that big a surprise to anti-choice movement watchers like myself, because the Holocaust allusions are big with the anti-choice nuts.* And in the annals of wingnuttery, abortion (and birth control for some) and evolutionary theory are like the same thing pretty much, so of course they’re going to use the same language to describe them. The two get conflated all the time, like in this trailer for Expelled.

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In the past, I’ve tripped over the fact that it really upsets people to suggest that free will is an illusion, even though it’s hard for me to see how you could arrive at any other conclusion. The problem of free will is this: If you could make two absolutely identical people, with the exact same experiences and thoughts and lives, and give them a choice—any choice at all, from abortion or not to chocolate or vanilla—would they choose differently from each other? The only way I can see that being possible is if the choices presented were of equal value to the person, and then the different choices would be more a matter of chance than will.

Most people probably don’t think about that sort of thing much, but one of those who does is the blogger writerdd at Skepchick, who denies that we are either ensouled (which is important and I’ll come back to it) or that we have free will. And she has some scientific evidence that’s unsettling to people attached to free will.

ou may think you decided to read this story — but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it.

In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people’s decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.

The decision studied — whether to hit a button with one’s left or right hand — may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion?

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So I just listened to a recent edition of Radio Lab about bioengineering and chimeras and the possibilities of blending genes, and in the show was this really amazingly cool story. Basically, this woman they interview needed a kidney transplant. (That’s not the cool part.) They go to family members first, of course, and they tested their DNA for a match. And they found that her sons…..were not her sons. They were her husband’s sons, but they weren’t a genetic match to her. So they retested her, same result. So they desperately tested a lot of different tissues around her body, after she demonstrated that she did in fact give birth to these boys, and they found out that the reason for all this was some of her body had one set of DNA and another had another. Her blood had one, but her reproductive system had another.

I felt bad for the lady. Obviously, this whole situation unnerved her and rattled her to the bone, and it’s too bad. I can’t help but think that if I found out that I’ve got the genetic material to make two people, I’d be stoked.* What great cocktail party banter! You could probably convince people you had superpowers and shit. I don’t truck with the more superstitious need to have individuality strongly defined in religious or biological terms—a person is a social construct that I think is best defined around the concept of the lived experience of having your consciousness and your body and your memories. But most people probably don’t think very much about the constructed nature of identity, and thus a revelation like this was pretty rattling. Most people think what you are is what you are, that your race and ethnicity and gender are set in stone and that your unique personhood is something special. But really, it’s not. Human beings are what we socially define them to be, and the boundaries can be blurred as the social understandings of these things are blurred.

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You can tell they’re happier, because these drawings are smiling. Case closed.

Anti-feminist blathers vs. science and facts today on Pandagon! I hate to keep hammering at this stuff, but the articles about how women are naturally simple-minded, inferior, and not cut out for being untied from the stove just keep on coming. If you perceive an uptick, as you should, I’m going to hypothesize that the point of bashing women non-stop in mainstream and conservative journals is aimed square at making people think that Hillary Clinton is crazy or incompetent, of which neither is true. Attack a candidate’s strengths—it’s an old war and campaign tactic, and Clinton’s strengths are her stability, her experience, her intelligence, and yes, the fact that she’s got a shot at being the first female President.

But not only are these articles hateful bullshit that hurts all women, not just Clinton, they’re also bullshit in the sense of not adhering to facts or truth. To start with, for your reading pleasure, I offer Media Matters’ shining takedown of the now-infamous Charlotte Allen piece about how women are so dumb. She offers baseless assertions and allusions to silly TV shows, but they offer you the facts.

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Pope says some science shatters human dignity. Prada Papa Razti bleats that artificial insemination, among other things, “questioned the very concept of the dignity of man” in a speech to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In an address to members of the Vatican department on doctrinal matters, Benedict said the Church had a duty to defend the “great values at stake” in the field of bioethics.

The speech was the latest in a series in which the conservative Pope has told his listeners that scientific progress should not be accepted uncritically.

Benedict, who headed the same department for years before his election in 2005, said the Church was not against scientific progress but wanted it based on “ethical-moral principles“.

He said this included total respect for the human being as a person “from conception until natural death,” and respect for the natural transmission of life through sexual intercourse.

How can Benedict raise ANY issues about human dignity or moral principles? He allowed priests to rape and molest children (and women) unchecked, enabling the criminal activity to continue by moving them around, and bought off destroyed families to protect the church from exposure.

Foot tattoos: Morally offensive?

Ampersand links to this interesting article by Steven Pinker about how there’s five moral themes that seem to exist cross-culture, and might be biologically “programmed”. (I hate the word “programmed”, even if there’s a legitimate reason to think something is inborn to us. It implies both that the tendency is not malleable and that the culture-specific manifestations are somehow inborn. There’s a bit of Pinker’s eagerness to overdo the “programming” talk in this article, but it’s not too bad.) This particular article avoids generalizing the specifics to our culture by making it clear what is considered “immoral” is extremely flexible, even if the way that it’s understood stays the same—people have emotional rejections of the immoral act and then rationalize it, instead of reasoning about it. The examples in the story are culture-specific, but mostly because they need to be for the reader to understand.

Ampersand drew up short when he read this one example of how the five moral categories manifest in our culture.

The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. Haidt asks us to consider how much money someone would have to pay us to do hypothetical acts like the following:

Stick a pin into your palm.
Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know. (Harm.)

Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.
Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)

Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.
Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation. (Community.)

Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.
Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.)

Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.
Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.)

In each pair, the second action feels far more repugnant.

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“Evolution has falsely become the foundation of our society. We need the studio to advocate Genesis across this land in order to remove this falsehood which presently is destroying the church foundation.”

Was this quote from some whack job in fundie land? Sadly, no.

A UK charity, AH Trust, plans to build its version of the Creation Museum across the pond, a “Christian
Theme Park” with a 5,000-seat television studio where the group can produce and show family-friendly religious films. And the above quote was in its report on the plans for the theme park. Here’s a description of the facilities:

In the Evenings, the television studio will be used:

Saturday – Invite 5,000 people to watch the recording of a television show. Thursday - Musical Concerts and drama sketches.

Sunday afternoon will be an opportunity for Church Leaders to hold a service in the Studio which will be recorded free of charge and broadcasted on National Television. This will also provide trainees the necessary training to produce DVDs, and help train them to meet the Television Broadcasting Companies demand for high quality recordings.

One thing you won’t find anywhere on the site, and it isn’t particularly surprising, is the usual homophobic or ex-gay conversion nonsense you might normally see on a stateside project like this. The facilities and services will be open to both the general public and all church dominations denominations.

Below the fold is the reaction of some who don’t think that England will see a rise in Christian fundamentalism.
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The pinnacle of human evolution?

There is exactly 0% chance that this news that humans are not only still evolving but that our evolution has “sped up” after we developed what we think of as culture is going to make even close to a dent in the bullshit about how men and women’s brains are calcified into patterns set during a mythical hunter-gatherer time that suspiciously resembles the value systems of 1950s America. Armchair evolutionary psychologists were already treating “The Flintstones” like the greatest work of anthropology/biology ever concocted. The evidence that they’ve relied on, besides sitcoms, to argue that men evolved to go out in the world and do things whereas women evolved to have babies in between bouts of housework has always amounted to, “I should automatically win any argument with a feminist because I’m a man and god, aren’t women’s voices irritating?” Exhibit #1: The “martyrdom” of Larry Summers. The beauty of evidence-free “science” is that it’s impervious to any new evidence.

I’ve often wondered if our brains are hardwired or just culturally constructed to idealize some kind of mythical era of Eden. It’s beyond clear that the main appeal of the bullshit theories that evolution “stopped” during some hunter-gatherer era is it gives certain kinds of men a fantasy of living in a time when women knew how to just clean up and shut up about it, and that there was no end of non-reciprocal sexual favors being supplied men in exchange for mammoth meat or whatever. Cooking, cleaning, baby-tending, and blow jobs all for the non-price of spending all your time out hunting with your buddies and quaffing Budweiser (Of course cavemen had Budweiser! What else does one drink while sitting in a mammoth blind?)—that’s the way life is supposed to be, and if feminists quit their bitching and just started cleaning something, they’d be happier in their natural environment. Surely.

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Chris Mooney emailed me, asking me to sign this call for the Presidential candidates to have debates specifically about their attitudes towards science, and I was really happy to join in. Click the link to see some prominent names that are making this demand and what a general debate on science would look like.

Chris at Mixing Memory is skeptical, like a proper scientist should be I suppose.

The thing is, I’m just not sure I see the point. Several of the issues that would, I assume, be central in any science-related debate have already been central in the general debates of both parties, including stem cells, the environment, health care, and education. Each of the major candidates has laid out plans and programs related to these issues, either in the debates themselves or elsewhere. What would a science-only debate accomplish? What would we learn about the candidates that we don’t already know? Or if the purpose is to make science issues more salient to the general public, isn’t the fact that they’ve already been central in the debates enough to do that?

I think I can answer this. A presidential race, for better or for worse, functions as a year-long (now longer) “state of the nation” time of reflection on national values, identity, etc. Which is why the media obsession with Clinton’s pantsuits, Gore’s nerdiness, Bush’s have-a-beer-with-ability, Huckabee’s sense of humor,* etc. are so dangerous, since they affect the national character, helping push us towards a people that are increasingly shallow and materialist. And ignorant, above all, which is why the science debate needs to be framed as if it’s in fact about science. It’s true that all these issues are touched upon during other debates, but I don’t think many Americans (most are still unfortunately not addicted to blogging) really think of reproductive rights, education, the environment, etc. as issues that have “science” in common. And they need to.

When wingnuts bellyache about the culture wars, they prefer to pretend it’s all about preserving “Western civilization” against barbarian hoardes who would tolerate intermarriage, long hair on men, and “fuck” on the TV. While that’s a part of it, it’s a much smaller aspect, and I’d argue that one of the much more important battles is the one over ways of knowing. Authoritarians rightly see science as a threat to authority, because it breaks up their ability to define “truth” as what it needs to be for them to hold onto power. The common thread to various wingnut stances on everything from education to health to the environment is their belief that when science and received wisdom concocted to uphold their authority clash, reality must submit to their fantasias. And all too often, in the name of “balance”, the media will present someone who is essentially making shit up vs. someone who is invested in proof and evidence as equals on TV, not revealing to the audience that some kinds of knowledge are gained differently than others. And I suspect Americans, being a generally pragmatic people, would be much more pro-science if they had the entire clash defined that way. I suspect the right wing nuts know this, too, which is why putting forth a science debate as such will inevitably scare the shit out of them.

Too bad. Americans have a right to engage in the debate as it is, and not just to pick up on a hint here and a hint there—inevitably distorted hints, no less—from the TV. We live in a country where huge percentages of otherwise smart people fall into thinking global warming is a conspiracy theory, that scientists want to pursue stem cell research out of sadistic baby hate, and that there’s any real debate between creationists and reality-based biologists. This kind of systematic ignorance needs to be addressed for what it is, a science debate could help move us in that direction.

*Which I’ve come to believe is mostly remarkable because we think of stick-up-the-ass patriarchs as humorless, except for indulgence in occasional unfunny jokes about having to tolerate women. You just expect cranks to be uptight, I guess.

A quick preface to my upcoming gushy review: I love cognitive psychology. I love that it’s so scientific, so effective, so pragmatic, and I even love how some of the findings of it upset our more romantic views of human nature. A lot of people recoil at the idea that our brain is a highly complex, self-directing computer, but I think that’s really quite cool. And Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) was written by Carol Tavris And Elliot Aronson, two social psychologists who know their shit and can write about it in a fascinating, readable way. They’re also wildly pro-feminist, which will come up later in this review as important. (Tavris wrote Mismeasure of Women.)

The book is about the cognitive processes that lead people to get into loops of self-justifying behavior after they make mistakes, often burying themselves deeper and deeper into the mistake rather than reversing course, colloquially known as “throwing good money after bad”. They apply cognitive dissonance theory to it, basically saying that what happens when someone makes a mistake is that this information conflicts with their belief that they are a smart/good/decent/etc. person and then they spin into a loop trying to justify the mistake, often digging in their heels and committing more time and energy to the mistake in a futile effort to prove that it’s so not a mistake.* Obviously, the inspiration for the book is the war on Iraq, but they have a number of fascinating case studies of people stuck in self-justifying loops, using this theory to explain everything from people who believe there were abducted by UFOs to explaining how marriages that should be happy can spiral into miserable nightmares.

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In my post below, I suggest that Laura Session Stepp’s determination that college girls by and large want to stop having sex and go on chaste, quite possibly chaperoned dates, is based on some very flawed evidence. The evidence? Four out of five college women will raise their hands when asked if they want a return to “dating” (i.e. going on dates without the possibility of sex during the evening) after hearing a hard sell about how the only way you’ll avoid dying a lonely old cat lady is by “dating” the way Stepp prescribes. Since, by the time the question is asked, it’s clear that, “Do you want a return to dating?” means, “Do you want to have love and happiness within this lifetime?”, the only option in a group pressure situation is to raise your hand and affirm that you do not have a freakish desire to die a lonely old cat lady, even if you may have objections to the bullshit about how ladies without hymens never find true love.

I find the use of group pressure dynamics in the anti-choice movement to be fascinating. The Dark Avenger sent me this link about the inefficacy of virginity pledges, which is mainly information we already knew. (The kids who take them rarely follow through, etc.) But I found this particular bit of information quite telling:

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Yesterday on the Blend I posted an unbelievable press release by a San Diego-based licensed clinical psychologist named Trayce Hansen, who attempted to portray marriage equality as somehow dangerous to children. As reader drsivana99 put it, in Latin one would call it bunchaassolus fullashitimus.

Thanks to another Blender out there, word got to Dr. Thomas Marra, also a practicing clinical psychologist and author, who decided he couldn't let Hansen's diatribe sit out there unchallenged.

Both are below the fold.
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Harvard recently hosted the ceremony of the Ig Nobel Awards, given out to dubious achievements in research, celebrating "the unusual, honour the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology."

The top winner in the "Peace" category was the U.S. Air Force Wright Laboratory, which spent precious tax dollars on ridiculous research on the effectiveness of creating a non-lethal weapon that would make enemy combatants amorous toward their same-sex colleagues — allegedly distracting and upsetting unit cohesion.

From my earlier post on the "research": In the report ("Harassing, Annoying, and "Bad Guy" Identifying Chemicals"), some of the outlandish proposals for non-lethal weapons to use against enemy forces included :
* a spray to inflict "severe and lasting halitosis";

* a chemical that would cause bees to behave more aggressively and sting them;

* a weapon that would make the enemy very sensitive to sunlight;

* and the aphrodisiac chemical designed to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other and cause widespread homosexual behavior (a "distasteful but completely non-lethal blow" to affect troop "discipline and morale"). These plans were part of a six-year project that would have cost $7.5 million of your tax dollars.

Other winners of the Ig Nobel awards are below the fold.
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This article in Salon by Robert Burton about a woman in what doctors thought was a permanent vegetative state—but who shows indications that she can conjure fantasies when asked—is interesting in light of the anti-choicers attempt to turn Terri Schiavo into a cause celebre to demonstrate (fallaciously) that they care about all sorts of human beings that aren’t embryos. It’s interesting because of the science involved, but also because he makes mention, though doesn’t necessarily agree with, a lot of myths that sprung up from the anti-choice side and got wide circulation. I’d like to quickly put down those myths.

Myth #1: The decision whether or not to terminate life support was about Schiavo’s specific condition.

Their extraordinary conclusions are beyond provocative; they raise profound questions about the very notion of consciousness. What’s more, they could throw thousands of families and doctors into utter turmoil. As with the Terri Schiavo controversy, patient advocacy groups, self-serving lawyers and politicians with personal agendas could use the study’s stamp of certainty as a given.

Burton doesn’t state that directly, but his statement here about how this study could “influence” the landscape invokes the anti-choice myth that this is about a very specific, unique circumstance in medicine, and it’s not really. The case was decided on two merits: Who has the final decision-making capabilities for the patient on life support and what were the patient’s wishes about the situation. The main relevance of her condition was whether or not she was far gone enough to put the decision to terminate in the family’s hands; but that fact wasn’t really up for dispute anymore. The real axis was whether or not Michael Schiavo got to decide or Terri’s religious nut parents.

Myth #2: Wingnuts really give two shits about “life”.

Burton pokes a hole in this, even though it seems unintentional.

This is not simply an academic question applicable to a single patient. Tens of thousands of patients in a persistent vegetative state linger in long-term care facilities. Others remain under the radar, being cared for at home by their families.

Tens of thousands of patients, many of whom are not getting the care they or their families would have desired due to lack of funding. (Thus, the at-home, under the radar stuff.) Tens of thousands. And wingnuts made a fuss over exactly one. To understand why, you have to look at the big picture and, I dare say, through patriarchal eyes. Through those eyes, we see a battle between patriarchs over final “ownership” over the female body. By the rules of the patriarchy, the wealthier, older father got final say, not the younger husband. There was also a big, heaping dose of the bizarre anti-choice love of making other people suffer for their ideologies—just as they don’t want the pregnant 15-year-old to have another chance by allowing her an abortion, nor did they want Michael Schiavo to be allowed a chance to do what widows should be allowed to do, move on and start new relationships.

Basically, they can’t mind their own damn business. It’s always about meddling in other people’s affairs, especially if there’s a hint of sex involved. That’s why they’re not standing up for the people being denied life support because of funding, but they do meddle with the death with dignity cause, which allows people to choose for themselves when to die when faced with end of life issues that involve non-stop pain and suffering. If you have a personal choice to avoid suffering, they’re going to get involved and deny that choice to you. If your suffering is from socio-political reasons, like you’re a soldier dying needlessly in Iraq when everyone wants to keep you alive, don’t expect the “pro-life” wingnuttery to lift a finger.

Myth #3: The axis for these decisions is the amount of brain activity involved.

The focus on brain activity really goes to show how much the Terri Schiavo fiasco was borne from the meddlesome nature of anti-choicers who are primarily concerned with denying birth control rights and wanted to find a “pro-life” foothold to demonstrate (fallaciously) that they’re more interested in “life” than in meddling with other people’s business. Brain activity has become a rallying cry for anti-choicers who hope that the sooner you can detect something that looks like it in the womb, the further you can strip away women’s rights. Which is a shame, because fetal development should be a consideration for individual women making their own choices. But now fetal development has been used as a rhetorical tool to draw attention away from the true concern, which is the right to control your own body and the right to have health care.

In abortion and in right-to-die cases, brain activity is a minor concern compared to the major issues of bodily autonomy and who decides. That there’s flickering in the brain of some vegetative patients isn’t an argument against the right to die in my eyes—hell, I’d rather have the life support pulled if I was trapped in some sort of hell where I could think and feel but not act in any way. The issue is that I want to decide or have my appointed decision-maker decide, not the anti-choicers and not Congress and not some relatives with a political agenda.

Truly, that is the argument of this creationist video.

Ha! They showed those scientists with their test tubes and their literacy!

(Hat tip.)

Sherri Shepherd proves what political consultants know all too well — too many Americans are woefully ignorant — and, worse, apathetic about their ignorance — and that makes it easy to manipulate the sheeple with "truthiness" and repetitive marketing to drill the desired "opinion" into their feeble brains.

This exchange says it all — Whoopi Goldberg asked Ms. Shepherd, who does not believe in evolution, whether the world is flat.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: Is the world flat?
SHERRI SHEPHERD: Is the world flat? (laughter)
GOLDBERG: Yes.
SHEPHERD: …I Don't know.
GOLDBERG: What do you think?
SHEPHERD: I… I never thought about it, Whoopi. Is the world flat? I never thought about it.

The following day she clarified her remarks by saying she had a “senior brain-poopy moment.” I'm not sure that Elisabeth Hasselbeck helped her out much with this additional defense:

HASSELBECK: I don’t think you have to learn to be perfect either… you’re just yourself. I thought you handled that so well yesterday. You said ‘You know I actually, my mind is full of what’s my son doing right now, what am I going to feed him for dinner, I’m a mom.’ Like I think that’s completely fine to say ‘You know what, today I don’t care if the earth is round or flat. I may not care tomorrow, I just wanna know that…’

I don’t want to believe this actually happened, but unlike the new co-host of “The View” Sherri Shepherd, I have a strong inclination to side with the empirical evidence.

The first human-racist fuckwad hybrid?

In the 2006 State of the Union address, W made a case against

creating human-animal hybrids

in response to which was much hilarity.

In Washington, there is a lobby for everything except apparently mermaids and centaurs.

But damn, who knew Bush was so prescient?

Regulators have agreed in principle to allow human-animal embryos to be created and used for research.

But scientists wanting to use hybrids will still need to make individual applications, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said.

No, I’m not talking about Bush’s foresight in realizing there would soon be a market for this kind of thing. But one could argue that Bush’s speech was a piece in the puzzle of a BBC article in which the word chimera doesn’t appear once.

A little more background:

Bush doesn’t know or doesn’t care that molecular human-animal chimeras are an integral part of legitimate, mainstream research that saves lives. Human-mouse chimeric antibodies have been approved by the FDA and are currently on the market:

* Abciximab, approved for prevention of clotting during surgery;
* Rituximab, approved for treatment of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma;
* Basiliximab, approved for prevention of kidney rejection after transplant;
* Infliximab, approved for Crohn’s disease and the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis;
* Trastuzumab (Herceptin), approved for the treatment of metastatic breat cancer.

More at-the-time mirthmaking:

Now in fairness we can’t expect presidents to be experts in everything, but we can expect their speechwriters not to embarrass them with their own ignorance. President Bush was poorly served by his staffers, who apparently don’t know the difference between a hybrid and a chimera. All they had to do was Google the terms and they would have discovered that a hybrid is the offspring of two genetically different animals, like a mule, which is the sterile product of a male donkey and a female horse.

Poorly served like a fox. The BBC article uses the term “hybrid” throughout, as though this were a brand-new area of medicine and not simply an extension of previous methods. Human cells are already in LIVING mice - is an embryo really that much of an ethical difference? Bush’s speechwriters were, in fact, geniuses - they framed a debate eighteen months before it even happened.

Chris at Mixing Memory kicks around the story that was reported in the media as “scientists find women are born liking pink better! so get back in the kitchen” and finds that the reports of the findings were off. By a lot. In essence, when given something like a spectrum, men and women showed basically the same color preferences on average, but women liked things on the red side of the spectrum just a little more. There’s some science mumbo-jumbo, but Chris does what he’s so good at and summarizes for those of us who don’t have his training:

Interpretations? Both men and women like blueish colors more than yellowish ones, while only Chinese women prefer reddish ones to greenish (while British men seem to dig the greenish colors)…..

Not inconsistent with this… story, is an earlier finding by Bimler et al. that women are better at making distinctions on the red-green dimension. Bimler et al.(2) gave participants three colors at a time, and asked them to selected the color that didn’t go with the other two. Using this task you can figure out how good people are at discriminating colors by looking at the distance (on the color spectrum) they need to distinguish between two colors (and thus pick one of the two out as the one that doesn’t belong). And for colors on the red-green axis, their female participants were better discriminators than the males.

In a sense, then, it seems as though women might just have better color vision than men, a hypothesis further supported by the fact that the vast majority of individuals with color blindness are male, with the majority of those being red-green color blind in some way. This could be a result of women’s role as gatherers back in the Pleistocene, or it could be a result of the fact that the genes responsible for color vision seem to be on the X chromosome. Who knows? I suppose it doesn’t bode well for the women-as-gatherers hypothesis that they prefer blue to yellow (with the British females actually preferring it more than the British males), what with their needing to find the yellow fruit and all.

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I have my suspicions that when the Republicans talk up “tort reform” to stop “nuisance lawsuits”, they’re not exactly talking about stuff like this:

Some of you may have heard about the latest in frivolous lawsuit madness: PZ Myers and his blog’s mothership, Seed Magazine, have been sued for FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLARS.

He’s been sued in New York’s Southern District Court because he panned a book by Stuart Pivar, a tool of creationists who has sinned against the truth by writing books denying that Stephen Jay Gould—yes, that one—didn’t really believe in evolutionary theory, specifically defined as believing that selection was a “creative” force. I love when people speak for the dead, knowing full well that the dead can’t defend themselves, such as the people who erroneously claim that Margaret Sanger’s main motivation was eugenic in nature (which means that you can’t have your basic rights, wouldn’t you know?).

My first inclination was to fear for the blogosphere if the next strategy is abuse-by-court strategies, but looking over the complaint (PDF), I suspect this will become a dog and pony show that will end up being most humiliating for the plantiff, even if it gets aired in court. And this has “thrown out by the judge” written all over it, so we may not even get that far. Generally speaking in the U.S., the standards for libel are pretty high. Pivar would have to prove he’s definitely not a “classic crackpot” as PZ called him, and if I’m not mistaken, he’d have to prove that PZ knew he wasn’t a “classic crackpot” when he called him that. Which, if the case doesn’t get thrown out right away, could mean that Pivar’s theories get aired in court, which is hardly what he wants if he wants people to take him seriously.

Pivar would have to argue in court that there’s nothing crackpot-ish at all about claiming that prominent biologist Gould was the victim of some sort of academic censorship/oppression of his theories. The entire situation seems to be like a classic creationist wedge. That there’s a rather obscure, nit-picking disagreement between biologists about the exact patterns of evolution is being trotted out as a reason to believe that the theory is about to collapse on itself. I have my theory as to why creationists or global warming denialists act like minor disagreements on the particulars would collapse an entire scientific theory. It’s the infallibility of the Bible thing—a lot of people are familiar with the idea that the Bible is infalliable, which would mean a single erroneous sentence would cause their “theory” to implode. It’s easy to frame scientific theories that way. But since no one claims that global warming theories or evolutionary theory is the received word of god, brought to us perfect and in no need of tweaking or further research, their infallibility framework doesn’t quite work.

If you haven’t seen too much about this on the blogs, it’s because the science bloggers at Seed are all holding their keyboards until this is over. So if those of you not under their umbrella would like to blog your support of PZ and of science blogging, particularly that kind which pushes back against political enemies. In the meantime, the Dover case—where creationists humiliated themselves by creating a situation where they had to put their pseudo-theories side by side with the real theories of biology in court and demonstrate how their “theories” aren’t really theories at all—is instructive reading on why it’s probably best for opponents of evolutionary theory to refrain from bringing their ideas into the light.

Estrogen creates rose-colored glasses?

A couple of points today about the generation, use, and misuse of statistics. The first link from Nezua—MTV and the AP joined forces to poll a bunch of young people ages 13 to 24 about happiness, a term that should set off a few alarms because of the distressingly vague and fleeting nature of that thing we call happiness. They found a big gap between white kids and black and Hispanic kids in reported levels of happiness.

Also, research showed that non-Hispanic whites are happier than blacks and Hispanics. While 72% of whites say they are content, just 56% of blacks and 51% of Hispanics did.

With a 20+ point gap there, it’s pretty hard to deny that something is going on, though what is hard to say. One problem with the concept of happiness is that the pressure to claim you’re happy is often a bigger factor in whether or not you’ll claim you’re happy than how you actually feel. That said, the most likely explanation that comes to mind for the gap is that it dovetails with the way that white and non-white kids don’t have the same average wealth or personal opportunities for education, etc. It’s easy to be dismissive of the importance of money to happiness, but money buys security and opportunities, and those things are in fact pretty critical to happiness.

They found another fact you can be sure will be trotted out by anti-choicers from now until the end of time.

Sexually active young adults, as a rule, indicated “lower levels of happiness,” the research partners said.

How much and what the other factors were aren’t mentioned, but it does well to remember correlation doesn’t mean causation. Since the span was ages 13-24, I’m suspicious on this issue. A sexually active 13-year-old and a sexually active 24-year-old are much different beasts, and grouping them together on this issue is simply misleading.

This bit of silliness that has a mainstream media-ready hook has been all over the feminist blogs.

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Most hurricane damage is caused by flooding from storm surges.

I really wanted to see the science bloggers panel at Yearly Kos, but Jill was on a panel scheduled at the same time, and so I decided to see hers instead. Tough decisions abounded at Yearly Kos, but that was the worst, because I think that science blogging has a great deal of potential to help scientists communicate better with the public. So I can’t report on the panel, but I did read Chris Mooney’s book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming this past week and can report back on that. For those who don’t know, Chris is a science writer and blogger who writes for The Intersection, and he’s primarily interested in hurricane science and in creating relationships between scientists and the public. This book addresses both issues and well.

The book might seem dry on the surface, since it’s ostensibly about the scientific debate over whether or not global warming is affecting hurricane frequency and intensity, but it’s actually a captivating read, because this debate has been dramatically intensified by the fact that there’s a lot of laymen invested in both sides of the debate for blatantly partisan reasons. But I hate that word “partisan”, because it implies that Mooney is running with a six of one, half a dozen of another story, and he’s not. Being no fool, Mooney supports the environmentalists that are in the right about global warming, and his quarrels with them are about tactics, not content, and while he’s sympathetic to the fact that some global warming “skeptics” aren’t bad people or necessarily bad scientists, he also uses scare quotes around the word “skeptic” to remind the audience that skepticism comes from a pro-science attitude and anyone who dismisses the overwhelming evidence out of hand is no skeptic.

Hurricanes are an interesting angle of attack. As Mooney points out, even though there’s other consequences of global warming that are more severe and more certain than intensified hurricanes, the rapid-fire destructive potential of hurricanes tends to draw public attention. With 50% of Americans living within 50 miles of a coastline, intensified hurricanes are an irresistible ploy to get people to care about global warming. I’d add, though he doesn’t go into this, that the relationship between hurricanes and global warming is also very easy to convey to people who don’t get science too well. The theory behind why global warming will intensify and increase hurricanes is easy to convey in a simplified form. Basically, hurricanes get their power from the heat in the ocean. You don’t even have to explain the mechanics of it because most people are aware that hurricanes form in warm weather and break up once they hit land and are deprived of their energy source. If ocean heat is the fuel of hurricanes, then the more heat in the oceans, the more fuel for the hurricanes. The drama and the simplicity of it are arresting, even as there are other potential consequences of global warming that are much more alarming (widespread drought, for instance, is far fucking scarier if you think about it).

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Salon has an interview with the creepy weirdo “Mystery” who makes his living teaching pick-up artistry to embittered, lonely men who often have a healthy dose of misogyny and entitlement.* You know, Nice Guys®. In my idle hours this weekend, I thought some about pick-up artistry after reading this fascinating article by Neil Strauss, who’s just self-aware enough to be likeable, about how he used Mystery’s methods to get Britney Spears to open up in an interview. (Via.) Strauss used one of Mystery’s more acceptable, mundane methods, which is the fascinating notion that if you approach a woman by making yourself interesting instead of simply bullying her into bed, she’ll probably like you better. Reading that, it was hard not to get what Strauss has been defending pick-up artistry for a long time because it gives lonely men a little confidence. If it hasn’t occurred to you yet that women will be more open to talking to someone who says something interesting than someone who doesn’t, you need help.

But reading the article about Spears, the thing that jumped out at me was that even this method that’s the least creepy and cruel is kind of stupid—Strauss admits eventually what you’d probably expect, that Spears is hardly the model of “woman that’s hard to talk into bed”, since she radiates desperation. His method of hitting on her (sort of—he’s just trying to get her to open up to an interview) is nothing but a psychobabble-laden version of saying, “Hey baby, what’s your sign?” Which probably would have worked on Spears as well.

The interview with Mystery confirms that he’s not too bright and a sexist pig who thinks very little of women to boot.

A man’s circuits are calibrated primarily to respond to a woman’s replication value — to her hip to waist ratio, facial symmetry, breast shape and size, health characteristics, and all that, right? And a woman, her attraction mechanism is evolutionarily calibrated to respond to more of a man’s social value. In other words, when I hang out with a woman, I don’t hang out with her because I need to be protected. Men, we respond to her replication value. Women, they respond primarily to a man’s survival value or social value. The purpose of life is to survive and replicate and we’ve got 28,000 days — all of us — approximately, give or take, to make that happen.

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Natalie Angier’s new book The Canon is out, and I really want to get around to reading it when it shows up at Half-Priced Books, but in the meantime, the release reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read her 1999 book Woman: An Intimate Geography for a long-ass time now, ever since Lauren recommended it to me probably over a year ago. For those who are sick to the teeth of the Steven Pinker/David Buss/Robert Wright half-witted evolutionary psychology that exists mainly to excuse male dominance as too instinctual to overcome, this book is a welcome respite. Angier makes it very clear from the beginning that her book is a “fantasia”, in the sense that she’s willing to entertain outlandish theories as well as delve into much more scientifically proven material, but her respect for science pushes her to be very clear when spelling out this theory or that whether or not there is substantial evidence for it or if it’s mostly conjecture at this point.

The book is best described as an ode to the biology of the female body, and it’s absolutely fascinating. It really drove home to me how little I knew about the biology of even my own body. While the parts of the book about the biological basis of human behavior were interesting and all, I was just as fascinated by the sections that simply describe the complex processes behind female body functions. (The non-gestating uterus, an organ that looms large in the political landscape of this country as many right wingers bemoan its very existence, is actually very small and charmingly floppy. Why that fact makes me happy, I can’t say, but it does.) Angier spends the first big chunk of the book examining the female body part by part, looking at the biological and social implications of each piece, from the human egg (the part where she describes the layers of protection the egg has to make sure that it’s fertilized by only one sperm that must be human is so cool) to the breasts and all the parts in-between. She talks about the controversy over hysterectomies with a sympathetic eye to both sides of the debate and definitely towards the women caught in-between, suffering from both a desire to hang onto the uterus and a desire to get rid of the fibroids. She makes an amusingly feminist argument for the idea that breasts evolved for aesthetic reasons that poo-poohs the 20th century male-centered notion that the particularly favored breast implant shape today is somehow a marker of fertility. (Her point is that the entire body has a lot of superfluous curves and protrusions that appeal to the eyes, so why should breasts be any different?) Just the body part by body part sections would justify this book.

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Friday, June 22, 2007

Yesterday, to mark the annual coming of the summer, the anti-solstice advocacy group the Recovery Institute issued a press release demanding that public schools cease teaching that the summer solstice marks the beginning of summer and start teaching the controversy about when the summer begins instead.

“Your average child graduating high school today is likely to take the notion that the first day of summer falls in late June as the gospel truth, completely unaware of the growing body of evidence against this theory,” stated Recovery Institute president Brice Chaphide. “If a student brings up in class that he thinks a better day to start summer would be June 1st, he’s as likely as not to get shushed by the teacher, instead of allowed to turn class time into a debate period of his perfectly defensible, scientifically-backed views.

“Solsticism is a dying theory,” Chaphide continued. “Look at all the contrary evidence! After all, you can’t wear white shoes until Memorial Day. If summer started on June 21st, don’t you think that would be the official day to start wearing white sandals? Most public schools end the term in mid-May. If anything, the official beginning of summer is nearly a month behind when it really starts.”

Critics contend that contrary to appearances, the Recovery Institute is not a scientific institute advocating a legitimate theory. “From what I can tell, the Recovery Institute is a bunch of fundamentalist Christians who oppose the summer solstice because they think it’s a pagan holiday,” said Philip Plait, astronomer at Sonoma State University and popular science blogger. “They’re not really into research as much as they are into issuing press releases, which tends to strengthen my opinion that they’re not really a scientific organization, even if they do appoint fellows. I wasn’t aware that they really taught a ‘first day of summer’ theory in public schools, anyway, so I’m not sure why th