Blue Collar Scientist

Here is an excellent example of how the antiscience movement harms people and stands in the way of their happiness. This video is from the IEEE Spectrum Online, and it is about a prosthetic arm currently under development. A really amazing, very cool prosthetic arm, so please watch.

The best bit is toward the end:

Amputee: I’ve been able to do stuff with this that I haven’t, seriously, I haven’t been able to do in 26 years.

Interviewer: Like what?

Amputee: Pick up a banana. Peel a banana and eat it, without it squishing….

A few seconds after that, he mentions something else he could do with the prosthesis that he hasn’t done in 26 years….

What would have happened here if the engineers and amputees that are working on this prosthesis had taken an antiscience approach to their work? Simple: They wouldn’t even have tried to build this thing. There’s way too much mysterious technology at work here - footpad input systems, sensory feedback devices, multiple parallel processing, closed loop positioning systems¹…. It all comes from science, and you can’t hate science and have anything to do with developing something like this.

An antievolutionist, applying the logic of their worldview to this problem, would have said “we don’t know how to make an artificial arm like this, so it can’t be done.” And they might well have said “If someone loses an arm, God meant it to happen, for his own mysterious reasons.” Or perhaps they would blame the victim: “if only the amputee had enough faith they would be healed.” This isn’t wild, unfair conjecture on my part, Christians actually say stuff like this.

Such as Exhibit A:

This guy says that amputees would be healed if only Christians had enough faith, and if good spiritual leaders would arise. Amputations wouldn’t be a problem, see, if we just all agreed about god, and were all holy and spiritual. If that happened, then we wouldn’t need those pesky engineers who are working to give people their arms back right now. If only we were better Christians, amputees could have their arms back, you know, whenever we might get around to being good enough Christians and all that….

This next guy says that amputees do heal. What he means is that they don’t bleed to death; that the blood clots, scar tissue forms, the wound heals over, and they don’t die. Apparently not dying is considered just as good as “getting your limb back.”

He also says people who disagree with him are ignorant of science and are in “violation of the philosophy of science.” Whatever that means. Why should I even listen to it, or think about his point at all? There’s a really simple fact in place here. Engineers who embrace what science tells them about materials and energy have actually created a really outstanding artificial limb, and the kid broadcasting from his bedroom is nattering on and on about how the rest of us misunderstand science. Well, I think I’m going to go out on a limb here, and embrace my alleged stupidity, because I think the engineers are doing a good and creditable thing, whilst the antiscience folks are just bellyaching into webcams² from their bedroom.

If we leave it up to these antiscience people, the amputees will be sitting outside the city gates dressed in rags begging for coins while we all try to join the perfect church and raise up some kind of ideal spiritual leader who will make everything better. This has never worked before. These are terrible, terrible people, with a crass and uncaring attitude toward their neighbors.

Who do I like better? Duh. The person who looks around and says, “holy crap, that guy doesn’t have an arm, let’s figure out how to make him one,” and then goes to work building it. Those are the people who have chosen to join us in civilization, those are the people who have exhibited a grasp of and commitment to morality, and those are the people who are actually helping their fellow man. Let’s hope the antiscience people get a clue and join us in this endeavor.

1. Ok, that’s not mysterious at all - that’s part of my stock in trade. But much of the rest seems daunting. [↩]
2. The irony, that webcams come from science, is not lost on me [↩]

I was just looking around on Casey Luskin’s web site, and I noticed that on one of the pages he says:

“God isn’t merciful enough to forgive us when we screw up” which is why “good things always happen to good people and bad things only happen to the bad.”

Is this true? Did Casey Luskin actually say such a blasphemous thing?

No. He didn’t.

Both sentence fragments come from different parts of his web page on Judaism, but I’ve re-arranged them and put them together so that they make up a misleading statement. Nothing on his website suggests that he thinks anything like this at all, and he certainly never wrote such a thing on his website.

So what is the point of this exercise?

Well, it’s to show Christians like Luskin why it is wrong to do something like this. What I’ve stitched together is pretty innocuous, but I bet I can stitch together unrelated quotations of Luskin’s that would seem to promote genocide, or imprisoning Christians, if I wanted to. And the only thing stopping me from doing it, and passing it off as real, is that I have morals and principles about such things.

One would think that the ninth commandment¹ would be enough to provide devout Christians with a similar set of morals and principles. We all understand lying is wrong, but it appears they disagree. Luskin recently did this very thing when quoting the National Academy of Science book, Science, Evolution, and Creationism.

Luskin wrote:

In January, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this debate, declaring that “[t]here is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution,” because neo-Darwinism is “so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter” it. As an undergraduate and graduate student taking multiple courses covering evolutionary biology at the University of California San Diego, that is what I was told as well. My science courses rarely, if ever, allowed students to seriously entertain the possibility that Darwin’s theory might be fundamentally flawed.

This quotation is crafted to suggest that even if new evidence were introduced that refuted neo-Darwinism, scientists would not accept it or change their opinions. This is of course false - over the century and a half that evolution has been scientifically tested, a number of evolutionary hypotheses have been discarded by scientists as incorrect (including, ironically, something called neo-Darwinism), and a number of at first seemingly implausible ideas have been shown to have merit and are now part of mainstream evolutionary theory. Scientists have changed their thinking in response to evidence, as part of the long and painstaking human process of learning more and more about how the world works.

So Luskin is lying, the same way I was lying when I said Luskin had written that God is not merciful and bad things only happen to bad people. The difference, of course, is that I openly crafted a lie for the sake of discussion and told you I was lying right up front - whereas Luskin secretly crafted a lie with deliberate intent to deceive, and as of this writing has still not confessed his sin².

Luskin got the first half of his quotation on page 52, close to the end of the book:

There is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution. In this sense the intelligent design movement’s call to “teach the controversy” is unwarranted. Of course, there remain many interesting questions about evolution, such as the evolutionary origin of sex or different mechanisms of speciation, and discussion of these questions is fully warranted in science classes.

Notice that he took an entire sentence from the source, but misrepresented it as only part of a sentence when he quoted it. And notice also that the sentence is in a paragraph that specifically advocates teaching about controversies associated with evolution - and that it has nothing to do with neo-Darwinism.

To get the second half of the quote, he had to go backward 36 pages to the beginning of the book. In his use of the material, he implies that he’s quoting related text - perhaps from the same sentence, or at least a nearby sentence - in order. But he’s not. He’s not even quoting text about remotely the same subject.

Many scientific theories are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the Sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics).

Here, Luskin has taken a sentence fragment about theories other than evolution, and grafted it in a Frankenstein-esque manner to an unrelated sentence so as to apply it to evolution. This is a great way to mislead people about the meaning of the author being quoted!

Now, Luskin has a page on his website about intelligent design creationism, where he says:

Many critics of intelligent design have promoted false, straw [man] versions of intelligent design.

He then goes on an eleven paragraph rant whining about how unfair it is that people misrepresent intelligent design creationism³. Meanwhile he stitches together quotations from science books so that they appear to mean whatever old thing he wants them to mean.

Hypocrite.

If intelligent design creationism had any legitimacy at all, they wouldn’t need to misquote science books to promote it.

1. Eighth commandment in Roman and Lutheran traditions. [↩]
2. I’d just say what he did was wrong, not that he had sinned. But I’m willing to adopt his religious standards out of respect for his beliefs. [↩]
3. Just for the record, I disagree that many of his examples of “misrepresentation” are in fact misrepresentative. [↩]

The Bad Astronomer recently brought to my attention Jenny McCarthy’s advocacy of using nutritional supplements and dietary restrictions to treat autism. McCarthy has claimed that diet and nutritional supplements help autistic kids, saying:

“I’ve been speaking to moms across the country who are all shouting out the same thing: ‘This (diet and supplement intake) is working.’”

“It’s so heartbreaking to see the medical community not support something called diet and vitamins. And it pains us, city after city after city. I see this heartbreak on these mom’s faces.”

“Autism isn’t covered by [medical] insurance. If things like diets and supplements are working, then why not support it? These kids are getting better and I will not shut up and will not stop fighting about it.”

This parallels a larger set of claims from the DAN and biomedical folks who claim that certain interventions can cure autism. As is well known, Jenny McCarthy and her fellow-travelers are wrong. Diet and supplements don’t cure autism.

There are lots of people who don’t know this, however, and they hear the kinds of crazy things said by McCarthy, the mercury militia, the biomedical quacks, and sundry other nutjobs, and they wonder about this stuff. Occasionally, they ask, well, why couldn’t diet and nutritional supplements help?

When asked, you could trot out the data and go over the statistics. And that would be a great idea in certain situations, such as if you were addressing a conference, or if you were a physician going over the evidence for an interested parent, or if you were a genuine expert blogger who was going over the data for the rest of us.

For the rest of us, though, we encounter these kinds of questions from our acquaintances - those who know we are rational thinkers, who might be under the impression we are knowledgeable or smart, or at least who know we are likely to have an opinion. What’s the best way to respond to these people?

For my part, I admit that diet restriction and vitamin intake could help. Exercise could help. Avoiding sun exposure could help. Wearing special underwear could help. Appealing to a magic sky-god could help.

But then I change the rules of the discussion and take them on a journey through common sense. Here is what I tell them:

The question is whether it is really likely to help.

Let’s have a look at this question rationally. Autism is a neurological disorder caused by disrupted early brain development. Autistic persons’ brains are characterized by differences in size and mass, excess neurons in certain locations, abnormal synapses and dendritic spines, structural differences in mirror neurons, and a differently-functioning cingulate cortex. Genetic differences have been found in autistic persons. The biological evidence suggests the disorder is a result of genetics and environmental interaction during brain development, which results in the fetus “building” a brain which is anatomically and functionally different from that of a typical human.

Now, there are also people who, due to a combination of genetics and environmental influences, develop abnormal hands, feet, palates, noses, kidneys, pancreases, stomaches and other pieces of anatomy.

Do we find those people’s hands/feet/etc attain normality if they consume a specific diet and take vitamin supplements?

No.

As much as it would be nice if nutrients could rebuild a brain into a standard configuration, there’s no reason to think that they could, if they can’t even rebuild other, simpler organs in a similar way.

Another line of evidence makes it unlikely. We do know about thousands of chemicals that can cause the body to reorganize entire organs and body systems into new configurations. Those chemicals are (a) not nutrients, and (b) deadly. The few that aren’t deadly are highly specialized pharmaceuticals that need careful dosing so as to not cause more harm than good - and most of them work despite their tendency to cause organ development to go haywire, not because of it. Potentially, one or a combination of these chemical compounds, if given in the right dosages over a period of time, might possibly result in re-organizing the brain in such a way to ameliorate autism. The problem is, none of these kinds of chemicals are found in any significant amounts in a normal diet, or in supplements.

So the question becomes: why research nutrients? Why think they might work? There’s already tons of evidence that it would be pointless. In the meantime, there are other avenues of research that we have plenty of reason to think could be helpful. Perhaps neurological drugs could result in more-normal brain functioning. Perhaps some kind of surgical intervention could do the same. Perhaps genetic-environmental interaction research could reveal risk factors, resulting in preventive strategies to bar autistic brain development.

All of these techniques have been proven to be effective in other disorders that have origins similar to autism. Whereas nutrition has been proven ineffective in other disorders that have origins similar to autism.

In a world where resources were unlimited, I’d do formal, double-blind, large-n trials of nutrients. In the real world where resources are limited, however, I’m going to spend my money in the place that prior knowledge shows it is most likely to do good. And similarly, I’d be placing my faith in proven or at least plausible treatments, rather than disproven ones that don’t make any sense in the first place.

S. Walker at Inconcinnus Sermo has posted some excellent observations about intelligent design creationism and organism behavior.

Has anyone ever wondered why intelligent design never really talks about anything but complexity and molecules or just complain about all the ‘holes’ in evolution (NOT)?

Walker continues:

How about infanticide? How would intelligent design explain infanticide? This would be a real test of the ID paradigm.

Indeed. Does intelligent design creationism predict and explain infanticide?

Evolutionary theory does. Here in Alaska, any brown bear sow with a cub will go to considerable trouble to avoid interaction with a male, because the male will frequently attempt to kill the cub. It makes sense that the bear would do this - the chances of a particular cub being his offspring are very small, so eliminating a cub almost always eliminates the genes of a competing male. It also makes the sow sexually receptive more quickly, thus increasing the male’s chances of mating. By this means males who commit infanticide make their genes more frequent in the population. In other words, in this case, the genes that make infanticidal bears perpetuate themselves in the gene pool.

What about infanticide in humans? There are many cultures in which people committed infanticide under various circumstances. Some cultures set deformed children out of doors to die by exposure. While not morally defensible in our culture, in a society in which resources are scarce, doing this makes a certain amount of perverse sense - you want to expend what little in the way of crops that you have on children who are healthy and vigorous. Evolutionary theory predicts that those parents who expend the least on children of low fitness will better perpetuate their genes. Just because a baby is lost this year, doesn’t mean you can’t try again next year, or the year after, when crops are good.

In addition to these well known forms of infanticide, other cultures have committed infanticide for other reasons. The ancient Israelites killed¹ all of the children of the city Ai in a military assault. In a society based on genetic relationships², killing all the inhabitants of a city you wish to take by force means that your clan can avoid competition with the remnant of a competing clan. By eliminating the children, they eliminate long-term resentment that can work against them in the future. But it also eliminates the conquereds’ genes. Evolutionary theory shows that what at first might seem to be merely a political policy also has a genetic effect: genes that influence people to kill “enemy” children - if any - will have an advantage over the genes of peaceful people - they will, on average, be slaughtered by the former, not vice-versa.

While evolutionary theory explains this brutality, it also suggests a solution to the problem. Knowing that the natural process of evolution encourages some nasty behaviors in our fellow man is a powerful realization. While very few people condemn competition, virtually everyone believes competition should be fair. It is pretty obvious that in the genetic lotteries, killing helpless children is an unfair tactic - you reap a big genetic reward with little cost and little risk³. Without evolutionary theory, we wouldn’t have this insight - the only thing standing in the way of people killing their neighbor’s babies would be a vague distaste over the noise, or perhaps the mess. There’d be an emotional reluctance, perhaps - but we wouldn’t have any knowledge about why such a thing is wrong.

Evolutionary theory also suggests ways that society can respond to this bloodthirstiness and suppress the killing of children. One potential way to do that is to found a religion in which an all-powerful sky god condemns the killing. Unfortunately, the god of the most popular religion in the United States is depicted as being pro-infanticide⁴. I guess that explains why this idea hasn’t worked out.

Obligatory good art: Giotto’s Massacre of the Innocents.

Another way is to create a government that (1) protects each of the society’s productive members right to exist, and (2) allows them to make effective decisions about when to reproduce. There’s a potential evolutionary advantage to leveling the genetic playing field in this manner. By ostracizing and penalizing child-killers, their genes will be less perpetuated in your society’s gene pool. As a result, your gene pool should be more diverse, rather than dominated by genes influencing infanticide, thus possibly making the species more survivable in the face of changing environmental conditions.

And by giving adults the means to prevent reproduction, the genetic competition is played out in terms of strategy, instead of violence and force. Those who are best at determining when to reproduce, and how many times, prevail in the genetic lotteries. To the extent that genes determine good decision making, this is a recipe for evolving a smarter society.

So much for the beneficial insights of evolutionary theory. Let’s leave aside the peaceful morality that proceeds from evolution, and explore what intelligent design has to say on the issue.

I started with a Google search, and I was disappointed to find that Walker is correct when he says that intelligent design creationism is silent on the issue. I found nothing from an intelligent design creationist on the web⁵ that said anything about intelligent design creationism’s views on infanticide.

That leaves us to explore the issues for ourselves. As Walker notes:

What characteristics of the unknown designer might we infer from infanticide? … [T]he issue here is that ID as a theory is doomed unless something is known about the designer and that information can be used to generate hypotheses about the real world.

That’s a real problem, because intelligent design creationists frequently refuse to say who or what the creator/designer is. But we can obviously go the other direction here. Infanticide is widespread, not only among people, but also in nature. This is observed fact. Given this, what does it say about the designer/creator?

What it necessarily must say is that the designer/creator found nothing wrong with killing children and helpless young animals. Otherwise, this capability would not have been built into creation. Even if we accept the rather ad-hoc and evidence-lacking assertion that “the fall” corrupted creation and infanticide did not exist prior to then, organisms could not be physically capable of infanticide if the tools for it had not been built into life in the first place.

Intelligent design creationists say that biological structures are intelligently designed to fulfill their functions. If so, that means that the biological structures that animals use to kill babies were intelligently designed for the purpose of killing babies.

Furthermore, infanticide is practiced by organisms that are incredibly diverse. Even plants do it. Bacteria do it. Lobsters do it. The list is incredibly long, and as far as I can tell every class of organism does it. That suggests that not only does the designer/creator condone infanticide, but that he’s positively enthusiastic about it.

This picture of the creator/designer is not, I would suggest, the kind of supernatural power or little green alien that my readers would enjoy hanging out with.

Of course, science is all about finding out what is true, and not about gathering support for what you want to be true. So all we need to do is look at the evidence. Evolutionary theory makes several predictions and provides powerful explanations for what we observe in the biological world - including infanticide. It is so successful at this that it it responsible for originating or explaining - or both - all of our knowledge of biology. Every day, more scientific studies about evolution are conducted, and every day, all of them show that evolution is sound.

Meanwhile, intelligent design creationism? It explains nothing. Even infanticide, which it explains, presumably, by hypothesizing a bloodthirsty infanticide-loving designer/creator, is better explained by evolutionary theory. But it goes beyond this. An intelligent design creationism that explains infanticide with a designer/creator that approves of violence against children cannot cope with the simultaneous presence of altruism in organisms - while evolutionary theory does.

Not only does science better explain what we know about infanticide, in a modern civilization evolutionary theory shows us how the problem it represents can be solved. Meanwhile the primary accomplishment of intelligent design creationism has been to demand that the government subsidize the teaching of its nonsense by raising taxes on the populace so stickers can be placed in texbooks and teachers can be forced to offer religious indoctrination in science class.

1. If we believe the account in the bible, in Joshua chapter 8. [↩]
2. Which is how the bible describes the ancient Israelites. [↩]
3. Babies aren’t really known for defending themselves successfully against the assaults of adults. [↩]
4. In Joshua 8, god is said to not only have approved of, but to have planned, the killing of the children of Ai. In 1 Samuel 15:3, god commands the slaughter of infants. Psalms 135:8 & 136:10, god is praised for killing babies. Psalms 137:9, god commands babies be dashed against the rocks. Exodus 12:29, god plans and carries out the killing of the oldest child of every family in an entire country. Etc. [↩]
5. After looking at a few pages of search results. [↩]

In an example of breathtaking cowardice an ISP called Netcetera has unilaterally cancelled the Quackometer blog, because some guy who promotes nutritional supplements threatened to sue them. Quackometer was devoted to telling the truth about non-evidence-based and potentially dangerous health practices.

Netcetera has written to the owner of Quackometer with the explanation:

We do not wish to be in a position where we could be taken to court, and incur the loss of time and expense that would involve. Consequently Netcetera have decided to suspend the Quackometer website, with reference to our Acceptable Usage Policy, the first part of which is quoted below.

….

1.1) Netcetera reserves the right to suspend or cancel a customer’s access to any or all services provided by Netcetera, where Netcetera decides that the account has been inappropriately used.

Apparently Netcetera believes that calling out scam artists and promoters of dangerous practices masquerading as “medicine” is improper. I can only presume that the Netcetera offices are awash in homeopathic remedies, Noni juice, and and special high-powered antioxidant supplements.

Despite having all this amazing snake oil to hand, the people at Netcetera nevertheless don’t have the magic elixir that would grow them a spine.

I just learned from Denialism Blog that terrorists have set fire to a UCLA professor’s house. An LA Times story (registration required) reports that some sort of incendiary device set the house aflame:

The device was placed Monday morning (February 4) on the front porch of a Westside house owned by Edythe London, FBI officials in Los Angeles said.

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller confirmed that officials with the Joint Terrorism Task Force were investigating the incident.

“It was ignited and caused damage to the property,” Eimiller said. “No one was home at the time and nobody was hurt.”

Eimiller said no one had claimed responsibility. But the agency is investigating the allegation that the Animal Liberation Front used a garden hose to flood London’s house Oct. 20 in an attempt to stop her animal experiments.

The victim, Edythe London, is a researcher at UCLA who studies addiction to nicotine, methamphetamine, and alcohol. Her research has resulted in a better understanding of addiction, and better treatments to help people addicted to drugs to recover, and subsequently live better, more productive lives. Although this has helped drug abusers - and their primary victims, their families and communities - the research has helped millions more. London has developed new ways to study brain function, and almost anyone with a head injury, neurological disease, or learning disability has befitted in one way or another from London’s twenty or so years of research.

“Animal-rights” terrorists want to kill her because some of her work involves the use of lab monkeys. They’ve already successfully attacked her house once, doing $20,000 to $30,000 worth of damage by flooding it. The terrorists who claimed credit for doing that, calling themselves the Animal Liberation Front, said at the time they they were torn between flooding the house and burning it down.

Now they have come back, and since vandalism didn’t work, they’re trying to kill her.

She looks like a huge threat, doesn’t she? Why, just by looking at her, you can tell that she’s evil, fire-breathing spawn of demons.¹ And obviously any attractive middle-aged women named Edyth must be at the root of the collapse of civilization.

London has written about why she uses animals in some of her research. It is a thoughtful explanation of her opinions. This gentle, peaceful explanation of the subject is answered with violence. Her opponents can’t be bothered to put forth a vigorous argument in response - they have to try to kill those who disagree with them.

The people who want her dead have put her home address on a public website, disguising their intent by claiming they just want to distribute flyers in her neighborhood. If this is all they wanted to do, they could just disclose which city block she lives on. Instead, they publish the house number. The intent is clear enough - they want to target her specifically. They want to intimidate her by letting her know that any crackpot who wants to believe they are doing God’s work by killing someone can find her easily.

They have also taken quotations from her research papers out of context and reproduced them in a misleading way. No doubt this serves to fire up their fellow-travellers, and makes it seem as though their violent and deadly actions are somehow justified.

That, incidentally, is the typical tactic of all antiscience malcontents. I’m not sure it is actually possible to oppose science by telling the truth. So the socially maladjusted just make stuff up and pretend that what they say has something to do with reality. In this particular case, if they get what they want they will halt all progress in understanding biology and medicine. And not just by killing all the the researchers, although I’m sure they’d find that good sport - but by banning all research.

I recently commented on the skepchick blog about how to recognize an extremist:

The way that you know that you are dealing with a minority extremist sect of a larger movement is that the larger movement works to morally condemn and limit the influence of the minority sect.

I’m concerned that the violent are the mainstream in the so-called “animal rights” movement. A simple google search turns up not a single example of an animal rights activist condemning this attempted killing of a woman, their family, and depending on how well their IEDs work, her neighbors.

1. If you don’t get this, please look up the definition of sarcasm. [↩]