Old style conservatives going into the wilderness

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield for $34.95, from Amazon for $25.16, from Barnes and Noble for $26.21 ($23.58 for members), and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

As the previous two posts have discussed, the nutters seem to be taking over the Republican Party. The old style conservatives, taken aback by the enthusiasm with which the party rank-and-file unhesitatingly clasped true nutter Sarah Palin to their collective bosom in 2008, are now feeling even more marginalized, alarming them so much that they see no future for themselves in the party.
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Republican presidential hopefuls and the nutters

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield for $34.95, from Amazon for $31.65, from Barnes and Noble for $26.21 ($23.58 for members), and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Telling indicators of the strength of the nutter movement (consisting of birthers, deathers, and tenthers) within the party has been the fortunes of the prospective Republican candidates for the presidency. Sarah Palin is, of course, a true nutter and has always been much beloved by this group so her presence does not tell us anything new. But a good sign of the increasing nutter influence is that Palin’s fellow nutter, congresswoman Michelle Bachman (R-Minn), seems to be hoping that god will speak to her and tell her to run for the presidency, and former senator Rick Santorum is also toying with the idea although he was drubbed in his last campaign for re-election as US senator from Pennsylvania. Any party with a reasonable grip on reality would be embarrassed to have these people as prominent members, let alone have them as potential standard bearers.
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Update on the future of the Republican Party

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield for $34.95, from Amazon for $31.65, from Barnes and Noble for $26.21 ($23.58 for members), and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

When I last wrote on this topic in July, I compared the various factions within the Republican Party to see which segment was likely to take leadership. The four major groupings I identified were the old style conservatives, the rank-and-file social values base, the Christianists, and the neoconservatives.
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The Adventures of Banana Man and Crocoduck

(My new book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield for $34.95, from Amazon for $31.65, from Barnes and Noble for $26.21 ($23.58 for members), and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Those two mighty warriors for Jesus, evangelist Ray Comfort and his trusty sidekick the aging Boy Wonder Kirk Cameron, have come up with a new scheme for fighting the evil theory of evolution which they, along with many religious people, think is threatening to bring about the end of civilization as we know it. Two days before the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species on November 21, they plan to distribute 50,000 free copies of the book at 50 prominent universities. The catch? They have added a 50-page introduction where Comfort will point out all the flaws in the theory. They can do this because the copyright has expired on Darwin’s book.
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God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom

My new book is now available! I received my copy in the mail yesterday.

My publishers say that the book can be obtained through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and also through your local bookstores.

I have a request to make of readers of this blog. If you have the time, I would really appreciate it if you could write reviews of the book on sites like Amazon and elsewhere, and make the book known to people and groups whom you think might be interested in it or might like me to come and give talks on it.

The book deals with the thorny question of the role of religion and the Bible in US schools. While school prayer has been one important facet of these attempts and has perhaps received the most publicity, the teaching of evolution has also been, at least in the US, the focus of many court cases involving various subtle shades of meaning and interpretation of the U.S. constitution, testing in particular the limits of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US constitution, which states simply that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

My book interweaves this general history of religion in schools with the specific history of the opposition to the teaching of evolution in US classrooms, starting with the Scopes trial in 1925 and ending with the intelligent design Dover trial in 2005, focusing on how the nature of this opposition has itself evolved as a result of repeated setbacks in the courts.

The book’s dust jacket gives a good synopsis of the book.

In God vs. Darwin, Mano Singham dissects the legal battle between evolution and creationism in the classroom beginning with the Scopes Monkey trial in 1925 and ending with an intelligent design trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005. A publicity stunt, the Scopes Monkey trial had less to do with legal precedence than with generating tourism dollars for a rural Tennessee town. But the trial did successfully spark a debate that has lasted more than 80 years and simply will not be quelled despite a succession of seemingly definitive court decisions. In the greatest demonstration of survival, opposition to the teaching of evolution has itself evolved. Attempts to completely eliminate the teaching of evolution from public schools have given way to the recognition that evolution is here to stay, that explicitly religious ideas will never be allowed in public schools, and that the best that can be hoped for is to chip away at the credibility of the theory of evolution.

Dr. Singham deftly answers complex questions: Why is there such intense antagonism to the teaching of evolution in the United States? What have the courts said about the various attempts to oppose it? Sprinkled with interesting tidbits about Charles Darwin and the major players of the evolution vs. creationism debate, readers will find that God vs. Darwin is charming in its embrace of the strong passions aroused from the topic of teaching evolution in schools.

Jim Paces, executive director of curriculum of the Shaker Heights City Schools in Ohio and one of the early reviewers of the book, said the following:

[This] captivating new book draws on his knowledge of both history and science to provide an expert analysis of the ongoing opposition to the teaching of evolution in America’s public schools. He offers a clearly written, concise explanation of the evolution-religion controversy which has continued to play out in local school districts across the country. This is an absolute “must read” for school officials and community members alike . . . indeed for anyone interested in a fascinating illustration of who decides what should be taught in our nation’s schools.

Barbara Forrest, professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University and co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, said:

In recounting the history of creationism through major legal cases, Professor Singham correctly exposes the fear that drives creationists to keep searching for ways to undermine the teaching of evolution despite consistent defeats in the federal courts. He shows convincingly that, while religious objections to evolution persist, such objections are ultimately powerless to stop the advancement of science. This book expands the growing list of excellent books available for anyone who wants to understand the phenomenon of American creationism.

Charles Russo, Professor of Education and Law at the University of Dayton, wrote in the Foreword that the book:

presents a highly readable and comprehensive analysis of this fascinating area. With the perspective of a physicist rather than a lawyer, educator, or social scientist, Mano Singham applies his dispassionate scientific eye in such a way that he presents fresh insights into the ongoing controversy over who should control the content of curricula, scientific or otherwise, in public schools.

At its heart, God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom offers a valuable learning experience for all of those interested in education, religion, science, and the law.

In a way, the readers of this blog shared in this book’s creation because its nucleus consisted of a series of posts that I wrote a few years ago.

I hope that those of you who read it find it as least as enjoyable as I did writing it. And, again, please write a review if you can.

Using placebos as part of treatments

Nowadays, the testing of new drugs often involves comparisons not only with placebos but also with older established drugs in three-way double-blind tests. What is emerging from these trials is that the placebo effect seems to be getting stronger, which means that new drugs in clinical trials are having a harder time showing that they are better than the placebo. Another consequence of stronger placebo responses is that some well-known drugs used is the trials as the older standard (and that had beaten the placebo in earlier tests) seem not to be able to do so now.
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The placebo effect

In the previous post, I described the practice of homeopathy and explained why it should no longer be taken seriously. Now that we know that its originator Samuel Hahnemann was basically treating his patients with water, what made him think his treatment was effective? There is no evidence that he was a fraud or charlatan, foisting on his patients something he knew was bogus in order to take their money. He was probably genuine in his belief in the efficacy of his treatment.

It is likely that he was misled by the placebo effect, where patients recover from an illness due to any number of factors that have nothing to do with treatment provided by the doctor. People who want to believe seize on these random events and see patterns that don’t exist. For example, since colds get better after a few days, it is possible to get gullible people to believe that practically anything is a cure for cold since if you take it soon after the onset of symptoms, presto, the cold disappears in a couple of days.

Steve Silberman in Wired Magazine describes how the placebo effect was discovered.

The roots of the placebo problem can be traced to a lie told by an Army nurse during World War II as Allied forces stormed the beaches of southern Italy. The nurse was assisting an anesthetist named Henry Beecher, who was tending to US troops under heavy German bombardment. When the morphine supply ran low, the nurse assured a wounded soldier that he was getting a shot of potent painkiller, though her syringe contained only salt water. Amazingly, the bogus injection relieved the soldier’s agony and prevented the onset of shock.

Returning to his post at Harvard after the war, Beecher became one of the nation’s leading medical reformers. Inspired by the nurse’s healing act of deception, he launched a crusade to promote a method of testing new medicines to find out whether they were truly effective.

In a 1955 paper titled “The Powerful Placebo,” published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Beecher described how the placebo effect had undermined the results of more than a dozen trials by causing improvement that was mistakenly attributed to the drugs being tested. He demonstrated that trial volunteers who got real medication were also subject to placebo effects; the act of taking a pill was itself somehow therapeutic, boosting the curative power of the medicine. Only by subtracting the improvement in a placebo control group could the actual value of the drug be calculated.

The placebo explains why so many medical procedures that are now viewed with horror were standard treatments in the past. Bloodletting, bleeding with leeches, attaching maggots, dousing with cold water, were among the treatments once recommended. Charles Darwin suffered from all manner of undiagnosed ailments that included frequent vomiting and he subjected himself to various uncomfortable water treatments in the belief that they helped him. His beloved daughter Annie died of an unknown illness after receiving similar water treatments.

In my own building on the third floor is a small museum of medical history that contains all manner of gruesome-looking medical devices that no one thinks of using today but once were believed to be effective, even state-of-the-art. As long as the physician and patient had confidence in the treatment, it must have seemed to work.

Because of the repeated discrediting of medical treatments that were once considered effective, it has been suggested that the history of medicine is actually the history of the placebo effect, with new placebos replacing the old, leading to the uncomfortable suggestion that our current treatments, however sophisticated they may seem, are merely the latest placebos.

But there is reason to think that we now have a much better idea of what really works and what is a placebo because Beecher’s work led to the invention of the practice of double-blind experimental testing, where neither the patient nor the researcher collecting the data and doing the analyses knows who is receiving the experimental treatment and who is receiving the placebo.

By 1962, the government had started requiring drug companies to perform clinical tests with placebos in order to get approval and this has led to the elimination of outright quackery in medicine. Without such precautions, people can, even with the best of intentions, subtly distort the results to get the result they want or expect.

As a result of the widespread adoption of double-blind testing, there is good reason to think that our current practices are significantly better than those of the past, and that we are no longer so easily fooled by placebos.

Next: Using placebos as part of treatment.

POST SCRIPT: How double blind tests work

Double-blind tests are useful not only in medicine. Richard Dawkins shows what happens when it is used to test the claims of people who think they can detect the presence of water by dowsing.

It is interesting that when the tests show the dowsers that the “powers” they thought they had is non-existent, they make up stuff to enable them to continue believing. Does that remind you of anything?

Homeopathy and religion

Homeopathic treatment is based on the belief that if something making you ill, then a highly diluted solution of that same thing will act as a cure. It was introduced in 1796 by a German physician named Samuel Hahnemann who claimed it illustrated the workings of the ‘principle of similars’ or ‘like cures like’. This counterintuitive notion may have sounded plausible in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and even now may sound plausible to those who know that vaccines consist of building antibodies to a disease by introducing into the body small quantities of the same or related organisms,

The levels of dilution used were quantified by Hahnemann by something called the “C scale” which meant diluting by a factor of 100. So 1C dilution meant diluting by 100, 2C meant diluting by 100×100=104=10,000, 3C meant diluting by 100x100x100=106=1,000,000, and so on. The substances are diluted in a stepwise fashion and shaken vigorously between each dilution.

A key feature of homeopathic belief is the “principle of dilutions” or the “law of minimum dose” which states that “the lower the dose of the medication, the greater its effectiveness.” So a 7C solution is supposedly more effective (i.e., “stronger”) than a 6C solution, even though it is 100 times more dilute.

The development of the atomic theory of matter in the 19th century pretty much destroyed the scientific credibility of homeopathy. According to modern science, one mole of any substance contains 6.022×1023 molecules or atoms of that substance. This number is called Avogadro’s number. So for example, the element sodium has an atomic weight of 23, which means that 23 grams of sodium contains 6.022×1023 atoms. So if you took one mole of sodium (=23 gram) and diluted it to 12C (i.e., by a factor of 1024), you would have just about a single atom of sodium in it. If you go to even higher dilutions then the chance of having even a single atom of the original substance becomes vanishingly small. Since Hahnemann advocated dilutions of 30C, what he was giving his patients was water. Of course, the idea of the atomic theory of matter and Avogadro’s number was only coming to the fore in the early 19th century so Hahnemann could not know this.

But homeopathic treatments and practitioners are still around. How can people still believe in homeopathy now since we know that there is no active ingredient remaining and people are merely taking in water? This is where the parallel to religion comes into play. Both began in times when science was more primitive and the explanations offered by homeopathy/religion seemed plausible, or at least no worse than the competing explanations. But as science advanced and showed that the original explanations were untenable and better ones existed, people became split. Some accepted science and rejected homeopathy/religion. Others wanted to continue believing and so made up ad hoc theories to enable them to continue belief.

What homeopathy devotees did was find new reasons for believing, arguing that the shaking that occurred during the process of dilution (which they refer to as “potentization”) transmits “some form of information or energy from the original substance to the final diluted remedy. Most homeopathic remedies are so dilute that no molecules of the healing substance remain; however, in homeopathy, it is believed that the substance has left its imprint or “essence,” which stimulates the body to heal itself (this theory is called the “memory of water”).” But there is no evidence that water, a very much studied and well-understood substance, can carry with it any such memory.

Similarly, as science increasingly exposes the inadequacy of religious explanations for phenomena, religions invented theology with its own convoluted reasoning, trying to find ways to retain belief in god. It has ended up being forced to postulate a Slacker God.

Modern theological language is similar to that of modern homeopathy, making stuff up as they go along, introducing vocabulary and modes of operation that are so vague, elusive, and tenuous that they defy any systematic investigation, all in order to continue believing in something that has ceased to have any credibility.

POST SCRIPT: Woo

The term ‘woo’ or ‘woo-woo’ refers to “ideas considered irrational or based on extremely flimsy evidence or that appeal to mysterious occult forces or powers.”

That Mitchell and Webb Look pokes fun at homeopathy and other forms of woo.

The lack of foresight in the Bible

Religious people like to dwell on the virtues of their holy books. They also like to claim that those books were either directly dictated by god or at least divinely inspired. But what is remarkable is that there is not a single thing in any of those books that shows any insight that could not have been held by an ordinary person living two thousand years ago or so with the knowledge that was at hand at that time. The lack of any hint of divine foresight in the Bible is striking.

For one thing, modern science has revealed that the universe is, by any measure, absolutely huge. Even the craziest of the religious crazies do not claim that the Earth is the center of a small universe and that the sky we see is just a bowl with holes in it. But as Carl Sagan pointed out, “[T]his vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially no Western religions.”
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The big tent of the atheists

Regular readers of this blog know that I frequently fall prey to the temptation to classify things in groups. I would have been in my element as a 19th century biologist implementing the Linnaean classification scheme of all living things. Recently I have been thinking that the term ‘atheist’ is associated with too narrow a meaning. In fact, I think that there are six different types of atheist.

The most common type of atheist is the explicit atheist. These are the people who say openly that they do not believe that god exists, and this is the group to whom the label is commonly believed to apply.

Then we have the covert atheists. These are people who no longer believe that god exists but do not feel that they can openly say so. The climate for atheists can be quite hostile in some parts of the world, enough to be socially ostracized or even lose one’s job, requiring such people to keep mum about their lack of belief. Others may keep quiet because they belong to religious families and may not want to upset loved ones by speaking about their lack of belief. I suspect that the ranks of elected officials in the US or those seeking such office have a large number of covert atheists.
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