The persistence of nonsense

Last week, I heard about two boring revelations.

The first is that the Shroud of Turin has finally been proven to be fake. Finally? Again. After all the dating evidence and the historical record show that it was ginned up in the 14th century, long after this story has been put to bed, people still thrash about with this crap. The ‘new’ evidence isn’t even that good — they did a blood spatter analysis. Big whoop.

Next week, news agencies will be shocked to learn that chupacabra is a coyote with mange, because they had a vet look at an old photo.

The second oh-god-my-eyes-have-rolled-back-so-far-they-turned-inside-out story comes from a usually reputable source, the Guardian. They ran a garbage article about cell phones causing cancer, full of distortions of the scientific evidence and conspiracy theories. My god, people, there is no brain cancer epidemic. Practically everyone in the country has a mobile phone now, they’re using them constantly to the point where it’s a standard comedic trope about teenagers and housewives and pedestrians and commuters going through their day with phones clamped to their faces, a gigantic shift in human behavior and reliance on these devices that occurred in only about a decade, and you’d think that if they were causally linked to any kind of cancer there’d be a corresponding surge readily detectable in the epidemiological data. There isn’t. This is a causal agent with people casting about absurdly looking for a problem it might be causing, and not finding one. So they invent an epidemic.

Fortunately, David Robert Grimes comes through with a rebuttal to the Guardian bullshit (he’s very polite. He doesn’t use the word “bullshit” or even anything poetically analogous.) He goes through all the basic, obvious evidence — cell phone radiation is low energy, non-ionizing, and multiple papers have shown a lack of correlation between cell phone use and glioma — and shows how the authors distorted in a dishonest way (he doesn’t even call them liars!) the conclusions of major research studies.

There are signs he’s losing patience with them, though.

The authors conclude by stating a “lack of definitive proof that a technology is harmful does not mean the technology is safe, yet the wireless industry has succeeded in selling this logical fallacy to the world”. Such a statement raises questions regarding their grasp of the term “logical fallacy”. The onus here is on the authors to prove their assertion – it is sheer logical contortion to present a lack of evidence as a superficial supporting argument. That the authors attribute this lack of evidence for their claims to the machinations of a nebulous big telecoms is indicative of a mindset more conspiratorial than sceptical.

This is a problem with what I call sinecure skepticism. There is a self-perpetuating market for glib, contrarian nonsense like cell phones causing cancer, or fluoridation as a communist plot, or ghosts, or the Loch Ness monster, or evolutionary psychology, and the skeptical movement has bred a group of shallow thinkers who lurch at the bait and sell cheap articles that ‘debunk’ the most superficial phenomenology (or in the worst case, write in support of garbage, like EP). In fact, the mission of many skeptics is to focus entirely on the easy crap and to neglect the big issues, because they’re too complex. I’m sure Hertsgaard and Dowie, the authors of the original article, consider themselves to be good skeptics, because skepticism has become nothing but criticism of the obvious using very little knowledge or deep expertise.

Hertsgaard and Dowie are well-regarded journalists, writing in the field of environmental journalism. They are not experts on cell biology, or cancer, or epidemiology, or medicine, or any of the fields that would be relevant to their analysis, so it was an easy leap for them to find fault with a ubiquitous technology, and to uncritically promote another round of this nonsense. David Robert Grimes is a physicist and cancer researcher who actually knows his stuff and can see right through the gross errors.

I like skeptics who actually know something — see also David Gorski or Jen Gunter or Jennifer Raff for examples — and who have actually done the hard work of acquiring deep expertise. Otherwise we get endless cycles of lightweight puffery over trivial inanity, which is exactly what the purveyors of trivial inanity want.

Ask yourself, do we really need more analyses of the Shroud of Turin?

Even harmless quackery kills

A recent study with almost 2 million subjects evaluated the effectiveness of Complementary Medicine in fighting cancer. CM is that supposedly harmless stuff like yoga and essential oils and homeopathy taken in addition to standard, tested, genuine medicine — stuff that you’d think wouldn’t hurt (although it wouldn’t actually help, either, except maybe in your emotional well-being), except, ooops, it did.

Findings In this cohort study of 1 901 815 patients, use of complementary medicine varied by several factors and was associated with refusal of conventional cancer treatment, and with a 2-fold greater risk of death compared with patients who had no complementary medicine use.

Meaning Patients who received complementary medicine were more likely to refuse other conventional cancer treatment, and had a higher risk of death than no complementary medicine; however, this survival difference could be mediated by adherence to all recommended conventional cancer therapies.

That last paragraph is important: sure, aromatherapy isn’t going to harm you unless you use it as an excuse to avoid conventional treatments. And, unfortunately, from the statistics it seems that a lot of people were doing that, giving the overall group a 2-fold greater risk of dying. I think it’s important to note that this is a statistical assessment — supplementing your chemo with traditional Chinese medicine won’t kill you directly, it just puts you in a group that contains many members who will defy medical advice, and end up dead earlier.

I tried to poke a few holes in their conclusions, which is fairly easy to do in this kind of study, but the authors kept foiling me. One concern I had was that maybe their results were biased by the fact that people whose conventional treatments were failing were more likely to turn to desperate, unlikely treatments — so the results weren’t so much “CM causes people to neglect good treatments” as “failing treatments cause people to try CM”. They had an answer.

As patients receiving CM were more likely to be female, younger, more affluent, well educated, privately insured, and healthier, we hypothesize that our sample was biased in favor of greater survival for patients who used CM (vs no CM).

I guess it makes sense. If you’re intentionally taking a placebo, you probably think it is actually going to help you, and it’s that delusion that’s going to make you more willing to turn down effective, advantageous therapies, especially if they’re going to cause you more discomfort. One thing about CM is that it’s always mostly pleasant and doesn’t challenge the patient in any way. It may be doing harm by increasing complacency about a deadly disease.

The most evil and powerful atheist in the world

You might be wondering who that would be, but the answer is right in your face. It’s ME. Yes! According to YouTube comments, which are clearly an unimpeachable, credible source, I am responsible for destroying the atheist movement. Me! And you regular readers of Pharyngula get a mention, too. It’s all our fault.

(Warning: YouTube comments below.)

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Even tiny brains are complicated

This is impressive: scientists have scanned and imaged every neuron and every connection in a fly brain

. The data has been made freely available, and you can download the whole dataset, if you have 12TB of storage available.

Human brains have about a million times more neurons than a fly brain, and note also that this is morphological, rather than biochemical data, which is going to be even more complex. Adjust your expectations for mind uploading accordingly.

It wasn’t Cthulhu after all

There was this mysterious large black sarcophagus found in Egypt, and for a while, there were wild rumors of evil curses and imprisoned demons and HORRIBLE FATES AWAIT ALL WHO OPEN IT. Sadly, the only things in it were three skeletons and lots of reeking sewage that had seeped in.

Addressing media fears that disturbing the tomb could trigger an implacable Pharaoh’s curse, Mr Waziri declared: “We’ve opened it and, thank God, the world has not fallen into darkness.

“I was the first to put my whole head inside the sarcophagus… and here I stand before you … I am fine.”

Dang. I’d almost been hoping for an apocalypse that would put us out of our misery.

Despite that, the site has now been cleared of people amid fears the sarcophagus could release lethal toxic fumes, Egypt’s state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram says.

So, you’re saying, there’s still hope?

I think this is satire, probably

At least, I wish it were satire. Alexandra Petri describes the role of senators.

A senator, as you know, is someone empowered by the Constitution to go on cable news and state opinions. A senator can do nothing to restrain the executive branch. In the system of checks and balances designed by the Founding Fathers, the Senate is neither.

The Senate is an appendix, a vestigial organ whose function no one can determine, so it just sits there and sometimes rumbles ominously after meals. Aside from its traditional role of acting as a rubber-stamp for judicial appointees, it is a kind of cheery bobblehead designed by the Constitution to stare at what the Executive is doing and offer tacit approval. It is decorative, not functional — like a pocket square, or a succulent in a dentist’s waiting room, or the “Share On Facebook” button at the bottom of an article.

It might be a little too accurate, since it perfectly describes the behavior of all those Republican senators who go on TV to deplore the president and mewl a little bit and then do nothing to stop him. Jeff Flake? John McCain? Susan Collins? All those pseudo-mavericks of the right?

Jewdy-ized and homosexual-ized?

What does one wear to a decapitation party? Rick Wiles says we’re going to have one by this weekend.

“America, you’ve been homosexualized. You’ve been Jewdy-ized. I’m just telling it how it is,” Wiles told viewers. “She was spewing out, last night, calls for revolution. She was telling the left, ‘Take a deep breath, we’re at the moment, it’s coming, we’re almost there, we’re going to remove him from the White House.’ We’re about 72 hours — possibly 72 hours — from a coup.

“Be prepared that you’re going to turn on the television and see helicopters hovering over the roof of the White House with men clad in black rappelling down ropes, entering into the White House. Be prepared for a shoot out in the White House as Secret Service agents shoot commandos coming in to arrest President Trump.”

But Wiles wasn’t finished with his hysterical anti-semitism and homophobia.

“That is how close we are to a revolution. Be prepared for a mob — a leftist mob — to tear down the gates, the fence at the White House and to go into the White House and to drag him out with his family and decapitate them on the lawn of the White House,” he said.

In case you’re wondering who “she” is, the leader of the revolution, the one who is going to chop off the president’s head, it’s Rachel Maddow. I knew I liked her.

However, once again, the Left has shown its inability to get their act together. I didn’t get any notice of this glorious uprising. Was it in the same envelope with my check from George Soros? ’cause that’s also late.

Cats did not evolve 80 million years ago

I mined the rich vein of ignorance and inanity that is Harun Yahya’s Atlas of Creation, and only got as far as one page before I was stunned into silence. He made a claim about cat evolution that even my evil cat found repugnant.

You know the Felidae are a fairly recent clade, appearing in the late Miocene, right?

Script below the field if you’d rather not watch video.

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