Alert Edward Tufte!

How strange: The Economist is running this graph, of people’s acceptance of evolutionary theory by country.

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Look familiar? It should. It seems to be some of the same data used in this well known figure (not from New Scientist, by the way, but Science):

Miller JD, Scott EC, Okamoto S (2006) Public acceptance of evolution. Science 313:765-766.

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So, The Economist has taken a chart, stripped out half the data, put it into new colors that make my eyes hurt, and put it on a background with chimpanzees having a snack — said chimpanzees occupying almost half the space allotted.

Shock horror! I am offended! The monkey is unhappy! My sensibilities, in particular, recoil. Someone send the illustrators at The Economist some copies of Tufte’s books. I think I’ll stick with Miller et al.’s version.

Here we go again — Florida’s turn!

How do these yahoos get elected? We’ve got another dumb-ass bill about to emerge from the state of Florida:

State Sen. Stephen Wise of Jacksonville announced through an article in the Florida Times Union that he plans to file a bill this legislative session to require evolution to be balanced with a discussion of intelligent design. Yes, require. Not just allow, but to require.

Are there no senior, wiser heads in these legislatures who are willing to take these clowns by the collar and explain to them that they are an embarrassment to the state and the nation? Or are legislatures all brain-dead from top to bottom?

She is “in the condition to have babies”

Italy is experiencing its own version of the Terry Schiavo case. A woman, Eluana Englaro, was in a car crash 17 years ago that caused catastrophic brain damage — she’s been in a vegetative state ever since, and the family has been engaged in a legal fight for many years to pull the plug and allow her to die with a little dignity. They finally won that battle recently, and are easing her off life support and a feeding tube.

Cue the right wing. Silvio Berlusconi, Bush-like Prime Minister of Italy, has rushed to impose an emergency decree blocking the suspension of life support, a decision made after consulting with the Vatican. Here’s a good rule: never consult the priesthood of a death cult before making a life-and-death decision. They always give stupid and evil advice.

Berlusconi’s rationalization is appalling and repugnant. He claims to be “rescuing” Englaro — not true, since she was effectively dead 17 years ago — and in what has to be the most tasteless and disgusting excuse made yet for the actions of these villains of the right, has further justified it by saying that physically she is “in the condition to have babies”. So, what is Berlusconi going to do next in his bizarro Prince Charming act? Fertilize her eggs?

It’s nice to know that the Catholic Church’s criteria for the value of a woman’s life focus on the functionality of her ovaries rather than the existence of her mind.

Anti-vax study a case of scientific fraud?

If you want to know where the current ridiculous anti-vaccination scare came from, there’s one well known source: Andrew Wakefield. He published a paper in 1998 that claimed there was a link between vaccination and autism that was a popular sensation, and had a dramatic effect.

Despite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated.

Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.

Now for some shocking news — it looks like the data may have been faked.

The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions.

However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.

Will this revelation matter? Not one bit. The anti-vaxers have ignored all the evidence that they are wrong so far, so one more demonstration that one of the primary promulgators of this nonsense was an outright fraud won’t change a thing, I’m afraid. This is still a clear-cut case where delusions can kill.

(via Phil)

Plea to the godless community

I got a request to mention this, and how can I not? A young boy is battling leukemia, and his family is struggling with the costs. They’ve had to put up an online donation box in the hope of some relief.

If you’ve got a little to spare (I know, this is not a good time in the history of our economy to expect that), think about giving a little to a family in need…or at the very least, donate to the Children’s Cancer Research Fund. And also think about this if our representatives ever get moving on health care reform.

Shhhh. Don’t tell the students.

Professor Denis Rancourt of the University of Ottawa has taken a radical step in his teaching practices: he tells all the students in his classes that they automatically get an A+. For this, among other infractions of convention, he has been suspended with pay from his teaching position pending institutional review.

Prof. Rancourt’s suspension is the most serious step in a long series of grievances and conflicts with the university dating back to 2005, when, after researching new teaching methods, he first experimented with eliminating letter grades. He also altered course curriculum with student input – although not the approval of the university – an approach he calls “academic squatting.”

A well-published and politically outspoken scientist who revels in hashing out theories on napkins at conferences, Prof. Rancourt’s unconventional teaching style has generated both an ardent following among a core group of students, and the rancour of many of his fellow faculty members, one-third of whom signed a petition of complaint against him in the fall of 2007. In the letter, which he provided, the complaints stem largely from a series of critical e-mails he distributed about their “paternalistic” teaching methods – a criticism he still expresses, with little restraint, today.

Well, I have to say that what he proposes actually sounds cool and interesting, and that I’d have to see a lot more information before I could say whether the suspension was warranted or not. Grades are a pain and sometimes an obstacle to real learning, and sometimes they are a crutch — a whip we use to motivate when we can’t get the students excited about a subject. I think that one of the things tenured professors ought to be able to do is experiment and innovate in their teaching.

However, there are two potential problems. One is that sometimes innovation doesn’t work — if you’re going to experiment, sometimes experiments fail. The article doesn’t say whether there was some objective assessment of the outcomes of his classes. Do his students actually come out the other side of the term with him with more knowledge and understanding? If they do, bugger the objections, let him keep at it. If they don’t, and the university is actually complaining that he is ignoring the assessment of his experiments to keep doing stuff that doesn’t work, then goodbye Professor Rancourt.

The other problem is that a university education is not the product of a single instructor, and we must respect the whole of the curriculum and work together with our colleagues. I rely on other faculty to teach our students cell biology and molecular biology, for instance; if students showed up in my upper level elective courses with the expectation that they’d learn some developmental biology, and I discovered that they knew nothing about those foundational subjects because their instructors had decided that they’d teach philosophy and political science instead (something I know they wouldn’t do), I would be screwed, and more than a little upset. I’d like to know how far he deviated from the course curricula…a little flexibility is good, but if he was ignoring the needs of the whole discipline’s program, then that’s also reason to say bye-bye to Rancourt.

Whatever happened with the proteomics paper by Warda & Han?

Not much, I’m afraid. The weirdly awful paper has been retracted, but we still don’t know how it got published in the first place. NCSE Reports has an excellent summary of the affair, but the conclusion is still highly unsatisfactory (the conclusion of the event, that is, not the summary, which is spot on).

THE EDITOR’S RESPONSE
I contacted the editor-in-chief of Proteomics, Michael Dunn, to find out more about what happened. Many scientists have speculated publicly that the peer review process went seriously wrong for this paper. Dunn assured me that the paper was reviewed by two “well-respected and highly competent reviewers” both of whom recommended minor revisions. For some reason, though, “neither picked up the references to creationism, nor did they recognize that sections of the text were plagiarized,” according to Dunn. It is not too surprising that the reviewers missed the plagiarism, but the title and abstract should have raised huge red flags warning the reviewers that this article had questionable science. I have to conclude that the reviewers were very sloppy, incompetent, or both; at the very least they were inattentive in this case, despite the editor’s claims to the contrary. And Dunn himself is not without responsibility in this case: he must have seen the reference to “the soul” in the article’s title, and he should have been more pro-active. His failure to make any public statement about the creationist claims in the article also raises questions about the leadership at the journal.

CONCLUSION
This entire episode points out a weakness in scientific peer review that creationists and other pseudoscience proponents may try to exploit again. We only caught this attempted fraud thanks to the diligence of bloggers: the journal itself had already missed it. What is perhaps more troubling is the fact that the journal relied solely on the plagiarism to force the retraction: if not for that, the article might have been published despite its unsubstantiated creationist claims. I asked Dunn specifically about this issue, but he declined to comment. The Warda and Han paper demonstrates a new strategy that proponents of creationism might attempt again, and perhaps next time they will not be so foolish as to plagiarize their text. We can only hope that the publicity surrounding this incident will alert both reviewers and editors of scientific journals to be on the lookout for “stealth” creationist claims in the future.

The title of the paper was “Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence.” I’m still baffled by the fact that “well-respected and highly competent reviewers” could completely overlook the title and an abstract that makes extravagant claims for a complete and rather revolutionary revision of the most widely accepted explanation for the origins of mitochondria.

Rename it to “Quackery Without Scruples”

I’ve always considered Doctors Without Borders to be a commendable, even noble, organization. So I’m a little bit shocked to see this new group capitalizing on their good name: Homeopaths Without Borders. They’ve got to be joking.

It is our main aim to transfer homeopathy to those countries, where public health care and medical supply of the people is sub-standard, for whatever reasons. Homeopathy also proves very effective in healing physical and mental injury in situations of war or political crisis.

If their health care is substandard, isn’t it rather cruel to charge in and make it worse?