Some Hallowe’en crapitalism

So I realize it’s not actually Hallowe’en, but I don’t care.

I’ve explained before why it’s important to fight against belief in superstition – in order to co-operate with each other we need to use transparent and reality-based mechanisms. If we instead rely on dewy-eyed “respect” for each other’s ridiculous beliefs, we can end up doing damage to each other and ourselves. When the stakes are low, it’s entirely practical to ignore the more weird things that those around us think are true. Case in point: a close friend of mine believes in ghosts – while I think it’s weird to think that dead people have “spirits” that stick around and appear to random people, but cannot be detected except by the flawed human eye/brain, it’s really not worth it to try and change his mind. After all our friendship is not based on ghosts, and it’s only come up once in the hundreds of conversations we’ve had.

However, sometimes people believe in ridiculous shit and it absolutely does matter:

Eighty mainly elderly people recently jailed in Malawi for up to six years for practising witchcraft should be freed, campaigners say. George Thindwa from the Association of Secular Humanism told the BBC the convictions were illegal as there was no law against witchcraft. He said the problem was that many officials were “witchcraft believers”. The justice minister disputed the allegations, saying the justice system was “reputable”.

Regular long-time readers will remember Malawi from previous posts about religious vs. secular values, the stupidity of sodomy laws, and of course their ass-backwards stance on women’s rights and polygamy. Basically, I’m not a fan. Well now they’ve been caught putting people in jail for being witches.

And then of course, there’s the absolutely ridiculous claim from the justice minister that the system is “reputable”. Yes, it has a consistent reputation for being full of shit. That’s not the same as being reputable.

Justice Minister George Chaponda told the BBC that a person could only be found guilty of practising witchcraft if they confessed to being a witch. But our reporter says the records showed all the suspects had pleaded not guilty. “We are intervening in this matter because we are concerned we still have prisons in Malawi [with] people being accused of being witches,” Mr Thindwa told the BBC’s Network Africa programme. “The courts were wrong 100%, [and] the police, to actually accommodate cases.” Most of those recently sentenced were women usually accused by children of teaching them witchcraft.

I don’t think the people of Malawi are inherently evil, or inherently stupid. They are however held captive to inherently stupid and evil ideologies, by which measles vaccinations are tools of the devil, polygamy is the right of every woman to be protected by a man, and the accusation of a child carries the same weight (in fact more weight) as any sort of evidence. This is why I am completely unashamed to call out bullshit in as loud a voice as possible – to do otherwise would be to grant assent and respectability to all kinds of crazy half-cocked hypotheses, like the existence of witchcraft.

But luckily we live in the enlightened West, where we’ve outgrown such idiocy, right?

A self-described witch in Moose Jaw, Sask., says she’s outraged that religious groups have pressured a local museum to cancel a Halloween seance. The Western Development Museum had been planning to hold a fundraiser on Oct. 29 called Ghosts of the Past, at which, for a $30 entry fee, adult participants could learn about ouija boards and “attempt to make contact with the spirits.” The event was cancelled, however, following complaints from religious leaders and residents, some of whom expressed fears the seance would conjure up evil spirits.

Good grief. If you want to see some medieval stupidity writ large in public, look no further than your religious communities. Of course, these are the good, moderate Christians who are all about tolerance and acceptance. Not those crazy fundamentalists who believe in weirdo nonsense. It’s a good thing there aren’t any of those types of crazies around.

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The real Doctor Evil

Stuff like this chills me to the bone:

A doctor struck off by the General Medical Council for exploiting people with multiple sclerosis could be facing legal action by patients. A firm of solicitors said hundreds of “vulnerable people” who travelled to the Netherlands for treatment may seek compensation. Dr Robert Trossel treated them at his clinic in Rotterdam, following initial assessments in the UK. He charged thousands of pounds for unproven stem cell treatments.

I take heat from friends, from colleagues, and especially from my nemesis for my stance that sometimes the patient is the person who is the least equipped to make the decision about his/her health care. The reply inevitably comes that “people have a right to make their own health care decisions,” or that “scientific orthodoxy” is dangerous so we shouldn’t trust the evidence. I even field regular criticism from friends that think that we should be allowed to pursue unproven medical techniques (or even those that have been shown not to work) because it might benefit some people (either through placebo or through some kind of individualized magic powers that therapies supposedly have that isn’t detectable through clinical trials).

I offer this case study as an example of why I hold the position that I do, and am happy to defend it without shame. This doctor abused and perverted the trust that his patients placed in him as a caregiver, and used it to perform illegal experiments on them. The reason he was able to do it is because he led them to believe that his ‘treatment’ was going to help them recover from multiple sclerosis – a disease that can paralyze you and take away your autonomy. It is no small wonder to me that people would be willing to do just about anything to obtain relief from a disease like this, even if it’s something that is simultaneously expensive and risky.

As before, I am dismayed that I didn’t pay more attention in English class, or that I’ve largely ignored the vast bodies of literature in the English language, because I find myself at a loss to adequately put my disgust for this kind of predatory and exploitative fraud into words. The kind of callous disregard for the obligation that a health care provider has toward their patients, and for human decency in general, that this doctor has exhibited shocks me to my very core. He drew thousands of dollars from people based on a combination of their trust and desperation for a cure. These are dollars that these people could have used to get home care, or travel, or invest in real research, that have instead been wasted because Mr. Trossel (a doctor no longer) thought that he was above petty concerns like clinical equipoise or biomedical ethics.

It’s for this same reason that I am opposed to expediting the research process for this so-called “liberation therapy” proposed earlier this year. While I am hopeful that the procedure works, my optimism is tempered with a healthy amount of skepticism, precisely because the support for it is emotional rather than rational. This is why we have channels through which research must go – to avoid tragedies of the type perpetrated by this vulture.

After a fleeting improvement, Mr Pear’s [a patient who received the experimental procedure] condition has now deteriorated significantly. Mrs Pear said: “When you are sitting in front of a neurologist who is saying ‘look, there is nothing you can do’, you clutch at straws. I am not saying we are the most intelligent people on God’s Earth, but we certainly are not completely stupid.”

It’s almost a shame that there is no god or supernatural force to hold accountable those who would prey on the vulnerable like this. Luckily, we live in a world that has systems in place to provide a measure of justice, and I hope that someday Mr. Trossel comes to realize how evil and heartless his actions were.

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Free speech vs… The Canadian Government

As I said yesterday, the best way to cement your tyranny under the guise of legitimate government is to silence the opposition. Without an effective opposition, you won’t have to worry about people hearing any positions other than those that you agree with. Without the ability to hear/voice dissenting opinions, people will be largely ignorant of anything other that your sanitized version of “the Truth”.

So what do you do when your opposition is reality itself?

Easy, you pervert the scientific process:

The federal government engages in “unacceptable political interference” in the communication of government science, says the head of a group that represents both government press officers and science journalists. “Openness is being held ransom to media messages that serve the government’s political agenda,” wrote Kathryn O’Hara, president of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association, in an opinion published online Wednesday in the international scientific journal Nature.

It’s a deviously effective stratagem to ensure that conservative governments will be elected in perpetuity – make sure that nobody can access unbiased information. Pretty soon, scientists will be government appointees. After all, the current federal minister of science is a chiropractor who thinks that evolution is a “religious question”; it’s fairly obvious that if Stephen Harper even understands science he doesn’t particularly like it.

Now far be it from me to suggest that politicians outside the Conservative party aren’t just as corrupt and willing to clamp down on science they don’t agree with, but according to the complaint previous governments have not done this. As with the gun registry and the census, the current government seems particularly eager to ignore whatever evidence doesn’t support its agenda. The danger with picking and choosing which evidence to follow – aside from the fact that it will result in bad policy – is that people become inherently less trusting of scientific results. We then get anti-vaccine lunatics, creationists, 9/11 “Truthers” and their ilk looking more and more plausible, as we begin to trust the evidence less and less.

The other danger is that, and I cannot stress this enough, politicians are not scientists (particularly, paradoxically, the minister of science). As I’ve said countless times before, science requires specific training in the meth0dology. Understanding science is not simply a question of being smart, any more than fixing the engine of a car or performing heart surgery is. All of these things require dedicated study, an underlying knowledge of the theory, and a great deal of experience. Politicians do not have this at their disposal. To suggest that science reporting should be filtered by the inexperienced brains of politicians is as ridiculous as saying that you need a doctor’s note for an oil change.

This is particularly true when the politicians in question are not simply ignorant of science, but opposed to it. There was a huge public outcry back in November when a former Pfizer executive was appointed to a position on the board of the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR). The fear was that the presence of someone with such close ties to the pharmaceutical industry on the board of a federal health board would be biased against preventive and non-medical intervention, in favour of the industry of his origin. Whatever your feelings on this – Leona Aglukkaq addressed my concerns to my satisfaction in her reply to my indignant e-mail – the concern is just as legitimate in this case. We have a group who has revealed itself to be opposed to the use of science in policy becoming the sole arbiter of what science is worth reporting. Like putting Big Pharma in charge of health care research or letting the oil companies decide energy policy, letting this anti-science government strangle the lines of communication between scientists and the public is a horrendously stupid idea.

Here’s a picture of an otter:

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Movie Friday: Neil DeGrasse Tyson on UFOs

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is probably my favourite public figure in the sciences. No disrespect to Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Bill Nye, Lawrence Krauss, or any of the other multitude of famous scientists out there fighting the good fight for public education in science and skepticism, but I will always carry a torch for Neil. He’s a charismatic, animated, and engaging speaker who is happy to be in the limelight, without being so academic as to turn non-scientists away from the information.

Since I talked about the argument from ignorance earlier this week, I thought I’d share with you Dr. Tyson’s thoughts:

Whoops, wrong video… here it is:

This guy should be teaching science in every classroom in the world. He tears down the mystique about the scientific method and why it works better than the other ways we try to discern truth (divine revelation, hunches, common sense…).

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Another proud moment for Christians

Imagine that human civilization is the Little Engine That Could, chugging along up the hill chanting “I think I can, I think I can” as it struggles to reach the zenith of a fair and just society that minimizes human suffering and maximizes human happiness.

Now imagine someone drops a giant boulder in the middle of the track and says “No you fucking can’t!”

Boulder, thy name be religion:

U.S. regulations expanding stem cell research have temporarily been blocked by a U.S. judge. A non-profit group, Nightlight Christian Adoptions, contends that new guidelines on stem cells drafted by U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration will reduce how many human embryos are available for adoption.

I’ll wait for you to extricate your face from your palms before I start in on this. Do it slowly, you might have fractured something.

Okay, ready? Good.

First off, nobody adopts an embryo. It is possible to bring an embryo to term and act as a surrogate birth mother, then claim the child as your own. Unless something dramatic has happened to the number of women who are willing to pursue this option, or unless in-vitro fertilization has stopped, there will always be far more unwanted embryos than willing wombs.

Second, there are lots of live babies and children waiting for adoption. Stem cell research will do absolutely nothing to diminish this supply, and stopping stem cell research in the name of ensuring a sufficient number of adoptees doesn’t diminish it either; on the contrary, it may actually increase the size of this population by reducing the number of potential adoptive parents.

Finally, embryonic stem cell research requires the consent of the genetic parents. There are lots of people who pursue IVF who aren’t comfortable destroying their genetic material, ensuring that there will always be a renewable supply of embryos for those women hell-bent on getting pregnant with someone else’s child.

There is literally zero merit to their argument, but a federal judge decided to grant it anyway because it’s not as though delaying the progress of science is going to cause any suffering. Well, except those people with Parkinson’s, Cystic Fibrosis, Muscular Dystrophy, ALS… the list goes on.

This is why secular humanism is a better model for stable and progressive government than theocracy – it is less sympathetic to the capricious whims of a shrieking horde that enters a battle with no evidence and spurious argument. I anticipate that this ban will be overturned by a higher court, but it’s a solid reminder that in the battle between happiness and suffering, American Christianity is on the side of suffering.

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Update: Harper government actually stands up for science… wha?

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of our current Federal government. They are decidedly opposed to any use of science in decision-making, preferring instead to appeal to ideologies rather than reality. The study of science and logical positivism make you, on average, more liberal than conservative – preferring to side with what works rather than stapling yourself to what you agree with. As Stephen Colbert so succinctly put it, “Reality, as you know, has a strong liberal bias.”

That’s why I was shocked to read this news story:

The Canadian government will not fund a clinical trial of the so-called liberation therapy for multiple sclerosis at this time, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq says. Aglukkaq spoke to reporters in Ottawa on Wednesday, a day after a panel of North American experts announced they unanimously recommended against supporting a clinical trial of the treatment in Canada as yet. Aglukkaq commissioned the expert panel’s report from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which funds medical research, and the MS Society of Canada. “I feel the most prudent course of action at this time is to accept the recommendation of the country’s leading researchers,” Aglukkaq told a news conference (emphasis mine).

Did I say shocked? I should have said ‘floored and rended into a state of utter disbelief’. The Harper government (so called because he calls the shots, and everyone else runs his plays) actually relying on the expertise of people who know what they’re talking about? Surely I must be hallucinating. Particularly from a party that talks a big game about letting people make their own decisions, regardless of how unwise those decisions may be (a view apparently shared by my “nemesis”).

I’ve been skeptical of this ‘liberation therapy’ since it was first announced. My skepticism isn’t merely because it’s a stark departure from accepted practice, but because as a person who works in and is trained in health research, I recognize that many times these ‘radical’ approaches fail to stand up to rigorous scrutiny. A panel of experts recommended against CIHR fast-tracking large-scale clinical trials until smaller, well-controlled trials showed a benefit to the treatment. This is simple pragmatism to anyone in the health research community – it’s not a good idea to experiment on a large group of people unless you are reasonably sure they will actually benefit from it. Ethics boards actually demand this exact type of rigour before allowing research to go through. I am hopeful and optimistic that this treatment could potentially make a positive impact in the lives of people suffering from a horrible disease, but I temper my optimism with skepticism to say that I won’t advocate its use until we know for sure if it works or not.

So the Harper government thinks we should listen to the experts, and make our decisions based on that. Could this be a sign that they’re not as anti-science and ideological as I thought?

No, it’s not:

An RCMP report that evaluates the long-gun registry as cost-effective, efficient and an important tool for public safety hasn’t changed the mind of the Conservative MP behind a bill to scrap the registry. In an interview Tuesday on CBC TV’s Power and Politics with Evan Solomon, Candice Hoeppner says the report told her nothing new. “My position remains steadfast as does our party’s position,” she said. “We believe the long-gun registry needs to end. As legislators, that’s our job, to look at policy, to decide what’s in the best interests of Canadians and make those decisions. So, nothing has changed.”

So instead of experts using their training and experience to help decide what’s the best use of public funds to protect the lives and property of Canadians, Ms. Hoeppner thinks that political appointees are better suited to do it. Political appointees, I’ll add, that have no experience or training in anything other than politics. Even conservatives will have to agree that if someone’s going to be making our decisions for us, it would be better if they actually knew what they were talking about.

Then again, maybe they don’t have to agree at all:

An article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal slams the federal government for its efforts to shut down Insite in downtown Vancouver, Canada’s only safe injection site for drug addicts… The paper points out that soon after it was elected, the Conservative government removed harm reduction as one of the four pillars of its National Anti-Drug Strategy. The four-pillar strategy, endorsed by the World Health Organization also includes treatment, enforcement and prevention.

I mean, just because a bunch of eggheads who have spent years of their lives studying the problem and potential solutions doesn’t mean that they know what they’re talking about, or that you should listen to them. It definitely doesn’t mean you should accept the evidence that’s right in front of your face.

No wait, that’s exactly what it means.

What it means to ‘replace’ science

Not too long ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine about the dichotomy between science and religion. His position was that we can’t rely on certainty in anything, since our understanding of the universe is constantly changing. Because of this, he reasoned, faith in the supernatural is just as valid as the use of scientific evidence. I had a similar conversation with another friend a few months later, who was trying to convince me that medical woo-woo might be validated someday because the nature of science was “constantly changing”.

This position is, at best, only trivially true if you consider all forms of change to be exactly the same. Even though I walk 5 km towards work every morning, I will never end up 10 km away from work. Even though my position is “constantly changing”, I’m not jumping all over the place at random, hoping eventually to land at my office. Our understanding of the universe and the processes that hold it together similarly does not fluctuate at random – it is modified by progressively better evidence. So while the statement “science is constantly changing” is true, it is true only in one specific way.

My first friend brought up our understanding of physics as an example of how things might be completely different in 25 years (this was after many drinks, so I’m going to go easy on him). His position was that while we “know” that F=ma today, we might have an entirely different understanding of the relationship between force, mass, and acceleration. He cited the re-orientation of the world once quantum physics was better understood as an example of how science can be replaced with newer understandings.

“Bullshit,” I replied. “Einstein didn’t ‘replace’ Newton; he showed where the limitation of Newton’s mathematics were, and provided a guide for how to overcome them.” In order for Einstein to ‘replace’ Newton, he would have to provide sufficient evidence of events or occurrences where F did not equal ma – in other words, there would have to be overwhelming evidence to show that F only coincidentally equals ma. What Einstein did was show that Newton is true within a specific range of phenomena. The fact is that Einstein’s equations had to continue to describe the phenomena that Newton’s did; the fact that they agree perfectly is a testament to Einstein’s genius.

Perhaps a better illustration of this is the competing theories of evolution in vogue 160 years ago – those of Darwin and Lamarck. Darwin’s theory is familiar to us all – environmental changes favour the survival of certain individuals in a population to survive and breed. Lamarck’s theory was that environments imprinted changes on individuals, who passed traits on to their offspring – for instance, giraffes have long necks due to stretching to reach tall leaves. While it sounds ridiculous now, it certainly fit the available evidence (DNA or modern genetics were not understood, and heritability of traits was well-documented). Presented with two competing theories, biologists of the day looked to see which one matched the evidence best (Darwin, of course, had the advantage of basing his theory on years of carefully-collected evidence).

Since then, many developments have been made in biology. The discovery of the structure of DNA, for example, led to a greater understanding of where variation in species came from, and how mutations occur. Advances in technology have enabled us to measure climate changes and global events that happened millions of years in the past. The tree of life has been re-drawn (one of the few examples of a time when science has been completely re-understood, but the old tree of life wasn’t based on rigorous science, simply some guy looking at things and giving them names) to reflect new understandings in the common ancestry of all life. Changes have been made to Darwin’s original theory in light of evidence that wasn’t available to him at the time. None of this means that evolution has been replaced, any more than the 26 year-old version of me is going to “replace” the 25 year-old version of me on my birthday (which is coming up soon – please give me many presents). It is a development that refines and build upon the understandings of the past.

Hence my objection to the idea that science is “constantly changing”, and therefore is only selectively valid. This attitude comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what “science” is – one that I have talked about before. Science is not merely a list of facts in a dusty book on a shelf – it is a process that involves taking a bird’s eye view at a group of facts and organizing them into a central concept that can be tested for validity. Any change in scientific understanding must, at the very least, continue to explain those things which have already been observed to be true. It has to be able to explain all of those things that have observed to be true, not simply cherry-picking those facts that agree and neglecting all of the contradictory evidence.

This is why I am confident making statements like “God isn’t real” or “homeopathy doesn’t work” or “vaccines don’t cause autism.” Woo-woo supporters are quick to pipe up “you can’t know that for sure”, demanding the impossible proof of the negative. Claims about an intervening supernatural being, or the (selective) memory of water, or the supposed link between vaccination and developmental disability would require a completely new understanding of physics, physiology, biology, and a handful of other ‘-ologies’ that are based on a wealth of evidence. “Science is changing all the time,” they whine “so we just may not know how it works yet.” Once again, I say unto them “bullshit.” Not only is there insufficient evidence that reiki, or intercessory prayer, or cell phones causing brain cancer, are in any way factual, in order for them to be even plausible, we’d have to invalidate everything we have learned about reality so far.

So while developments can, have been, and will continue to be made in scientific fields, they work in a linear fashion as long as we continue to follow the evidence. It is because of this that I am satisfied to put my trust in this method, rather than one based on faith or magic.

TL/DR: New discoveries don’t “replace” older ones, they add to an always-growing body of evidence that help us to understand the world. Woo-woo theories require us to throw out the evidence, or at least pretend it isn’t there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11100528

UBC brings in biomass generator

No point to be made here, I just think this is a really cool thing:

The technology converts wood waste into a combustible gas called syngas, which is typically a mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and ash. That will be used to drive a gas engine made by General Electric to produce two megawatts of electricity. The waste heat will be used to produce steam that is expected to offset about 15 per cent of the natural gas currently used for heating at UBC.

I’m a sucker for technology. To me it embodies the idea that human diligence, careful consideration, and ingenuity can solve major problems. It’s what keeps me from looking at the state of the world and thinking “it’s all going to shit.” When we put our minds to work, we can do amazing things.

Huh… maybe there IS a point to be made here 😛

Here’s a picture of an otter:

Phillipine sexy-time for Catholic Church

There is a fundamental issue I have discovered (in my many many years of life :P) when it comes to resolving an argument. There are often ideological positions on both sides. Some of them are logically flawed from the start, and such flaws can be pointed out easily. Other times they boil down to differences in value judgments – for example, I place a higher value on the utility and efficiency of social programs than I do on the slight amount that my privacy is compromised by the census. Others clearly do not. These kinds of arguments are intractable, since they boil down to what a person thinks is important, and the best you can hope for is to find some common ground.

However, more often than not, disagreements boil down to conflicts that can be resolved by simply looking at data. Will raising taxes on cigarettes reduce use? Does capital punishment work as a crime deterrent? Do people become happier with more money in their pocket? Those are questions that are about observable, measurable phenomena, and we can (and have) evaluate them.

Same goes for “does sex education lead to promiscuity?” The evidence is very clear: again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again the literature is explicit that sex education programs are effective at imparting useful and valuable knowledge about sex and reproduction, without turning kids into bang-happy sluts (any more than they were when they started, at least). Comprehensive programs on safe sex actually seem to, paradoxically, reduce the rate at which kids have sex – at the very worst they are no more likely to have sex when armed with information.

(Click for full-sized image)

It seems painfully obvious in this case that a simple, cursory glance at the mountains of evidence would be enough to settle the debate. We may not like our kids having sex, but teaching them about it doesn’t make them more likely to do it, it just means they’re more likely to do it safely if and when they do.

But of course, if you want to strip reason, logic and evidence right out the argument, all you have to do is talk to the Catholic Church:

In the Philippines, a conservative, predominantly Catholic country, even older students learn little about how to make babies, or – of more urgency according to many officials and health workers – how to prevent making babies. But despite stiff opposition from the Catholic Church, this could be about to change.

In yet another example of religion’s pre-occupation with sex; ironic, since all of these bishops and priests are celibate, the Church has taken up the cause against teaching kids things. Knowing things leads, as everyone knows, to doing things. The first thing I did when I learned about particle physics, after all, was go out and build a nuclear bomb (I named it ‘Shroom’). It’s no surprise to me, having been raised Catholic, to see the Church be wrong, yet again, both in terms of public policy and science. What does surprise me, however, is the secular response. Similar to what took place in Argentina and Venezuela, the secular authority is telling the Church to go anoint itself:

Recently, the education department decided to launch a pilot scheme introducing sex education into the school curriculum from the ages of 11 onwards. The former education secretary, Mona Valisno, who has just left office because of a change of government, spearheaded the campaign, saying it would empower schoolchildren to “make informed choices and decisions”.

Sadly, the Whore of Babylon still has some power to exert over lawmakers:

According to Mrs Valisno, there will be no mention of abortion, or even contraception, during any of the new lessons. She said the scheme was not designed to emphasise the actual sex act, but to promote personal hygiene and interpersonal relationships.

This is doing no favours at all for the poor in the Phillipines, who are the most in need of real instruction. I have no doubt that when the program, with all of the useful information taken out of it, fails to reduce unwanted pregnancies and STIs, the Church will crow about how education doesn’t work.

“Children are fragile creatures. The [education] department should be very, very careful not to teach children about matters they will imitate the following day,” said Monsignor Pedro Quitorio, a spokesman for the highly influential Catholic Bishops Conference.

The shocking hypocrisy and complete lack of human decency inherent in a Catholic spokesperson arguing to protect the fragility of childhood leaves me cold. The stupidity of not wanting children to imitate the positive things they learn in school about protecting themselves from disease and unwanted pregnancy leaves me wondering why anyone with any kind of moral instinct would listen to a single word this organization has to say about values.

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CFI Vancouver presents Dr. Christopher DiCarlo: We Are All African

It was another big weekend for Vancouver skeptics. We hosted Dr. Christopher DiCarlo for a discussion of human origins in Africa, and we once again handed out flyers at a reading by self-proclaimed ‘psychic medium’ John Edward.

On Friday, August 13th 2010, Centre for Inquiry Vancouver hosted a talk by Dr. Christopher DiCarlo entitled “We Are All African”. In the presentation, Dr. DiCarlo discussed the anthropological evidence for speciation of homo sapiens in Africa, and some of the potential implications this knowledge might have.

Of course I was thrilled to attend this talk – African origin of humanity has long been a given to me, but I’d never really examined the evidence. Being both recently descended from Africa and interested in racial issues, this presentation was right up my alley. I will not do a full writeup of the talk, since this is not a science blog, but I thought I would share a small portion of the presentation that particularly resonated with me. As before with Dr. PZ Myers, I am declining to post the entire lecture, but I will put up this one slice. CFI will post the videos soon (having decentralized the process, so now we can work on them here and post to the CFI YouTube channel), and when they are up, I will link you.

Dr. DiCarlo hits my absolute favourite point at the :50 mark – the idea of in-group and out-group biases (the heckler is his wife, incidentally apparently a random drunk roaming through UBC campus – my bad :P). Regular readers will remember that I talked about this type of bias as the defining feature of racism, and that when we re-draw our tribal maps, we eliminate the “us vs. them” kind of mentality. Dr. DiCarlo suggests that perhaps the fact of common African ancestry could become a way of ultimately doing away with the arbitrary borders we draw around our groups.

We went out for beers after the talk, and I got a chance to chat briefly with our speaker. He had told us a story about how he lost was denied a tenured position at Wilfred Laurier University, seemingly due to complaints from students that his teachings were religiously insensitive. After inviting an Aboriginal student (in his critical thinking class) who had expressed her incredulity at the accuracy of the science to present her own evidence, so as to spark class discussion:

The tone was not sarcastic but, rather, a sincere attempt to perform the function for which the University employs him — to teach students about critical thinking. The woman never returned to his classroom. Instead, she complained to the University, along with two other students who were opposed to his “religiously insensitive” position on evolution. The objections apparently focused on Dr diCarlo’s comments on religion and evolution, but also indicated concern about fair grading and “talking about sex in class.”

While this is an incredibly unfortunate incident, it reveals that some people are not willing to accept those facts that conflict with their world view. A group particularly ill-suited to receive the implications of this kind of information is evangelical/fundamentalist Christian groups (though conservative Muslim or Jewish groups would be similarly resistant). I suggested to Dr. DiCarlo that it might be an interesting experiment to present these findings to black evangelical Christian churches, of which there are a number in the Toronto area. My thinking was that for a group of people who already buy in to the idea of African origin, these people would have a unique perspective, and it may be a way of introducing the idea of evolution as a positive thing, rather than a subject to be resisted at all costs.

All in all I enjoyed both the talk and the reception immensely. Once the video is up, you’ll have the chance to check it out, and I highly recommend that you do.

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