And wouldn’t you know it, right there in the title it announces that I’m mild-mannered. Next time, I swear, I’m gonna…I’m gonna…I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Maybe I’ll take off my glasses. Maybe I’ll cuss, darn it.
I’ve got to do something to shed this teddy bear reputation. A tattoo, you think? Get my teeth filed all pointy-like? Stop taking showers?
Yet more skeptics have spoken out: Randi, Orac, and Novella, on the case of the Belgian man who is claimed to have awakened from a persistent vegetative state, and is even, supposedly, writing a book about his 23 years trapped in an unresponsive body.
It’s possible that he has recovered to some degree, but the evidence hasn’t been shown. Supposedly, he was diagnosed to have some functionality with a poorly described brain mapping technique (one summary I read in Nature suggests that it was looking for areas of the brain that lit up in response to external stimuli, but there’s more to consciousness than that), and then the media is going ga-ga over Houben’s reported words…but he isn’t saying anything! It’s all done with this bogus “facilitated communication” nonsense, which is thoroughly unconvincing. There are videos of him tapping out answers with his eyes closed, guided by an assistant staring intently at the keyboard.
Here’s a simple test. He’s being asked questions in English and answering in Flemish. Find a facilitated communicator who doesn’t speak Flemish and have him or her do the same routine. I know what the result will be: either Houben will suddenly start answering in English, or the font of words will dry up.
There is a Seventh Day Adventist college, La Sierra University, which has horrified church leaders because their biology department is infested with evolutionists. It just goes to show: educate an intelligent person in biology, and they can’t help but accept evolutionary theory as the idea best supported by the evidence.
This has caused much anguish among the SDAs, and a website that moans about the problem is running a poll. As we all know, an internet poll is obviously the very best way to resolve scientific issues…so how about if you go help them out? They seem to be riven with dissent right now.
Yes 49%
No 51%
Don’t miss it next year: Rebecca Watson reviews Skepticon II, both the talks and the social scene.
And if that’s not enough, Carl Sagan’s Dance Party recorded a podcast with several of us while we were there.
People are asking if the talks at Skepticon were recorded. Yes!
The whole two days are being edited and uploaded to youtube right now. Have patience, it will take a little while.
We’ve had an infestation of insane trolls today who have babbled incoherently about who knows what…I think Keith Knight has captured them perfectly.
The media can’t let today pass by without doing something stupid, so here are a few unfortunate faux pas from our news outlets.
Newsweek has published a dozen reasons to celebrate Darwin. The first? Darwin wasn’t an atheist! Huzzah! He also wasn’t a Jew, let’s celebrate that!
The second isn’t much better. Darwin mentioned “the Creator” once in the second and subsequent editions, therefore you can find God in the story of evolution! Snap your fingers in the face of an atheist for that, believers! You can read the rest, but they’re all rather pathetic.
CNN has also published a long piece of tripe from Stephen Meyer. Yeesh, it’s the same old nonsense: Darwin is controversial (nope, he’s only controversial among ignoramuses), the fossil record and the Cambrian explosion refute evolution (nope, they confirm a pattern of change over geological history), “many biologists now doubt…” (nope, few biologists do, and they all seem to be kooks), DNA is a digital code and a software program (nope, that’s a metaphor, and a pretty bad one, actually), there is evidence of design in cells (nope, if there were, I’d expect some IDiot to show it to me—they never do). It’s an awful, boring, tired old piece trumpeting the same assertions the Discovery Institute has been making for 15 years. When will the media learn that nothing those bozos say is ever news?
Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and a few sites have taken notice.
A new science blog, The Whirlpool of Life, opens today.
CNN has published a brief retrospective from Richard Dawkins. It focuses entirely on “militant atheism”, which is odd since the book itself did not promote unbelief, but also indirectly appropriate, since the concept did end up undermining the argument from design, and contributed significantly to making god irrelevant.
And…that’s about it. No fireworks, no triumphant announcements, no scientists standing outside in candlelight vigils singing hosannas to Chuck. That’s about right, I think — it’s a great book, it made a difference in the intellectual world, but it ain’t religion, thank dog.
So Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort showed up at UCLA to hand out their vandalized editions of the Origin, and Kirk got caught on video (with horrible sound and video quality, unfortunately) getting rhetorically bitch-slapped in an argument with a UCLA student. Be proud, California universities, you’re doing a fine job.
This particular story has a poll attached to it. Here’s the entirety of the poll and its results.
Kirk Cameron — Master Debator?
Yes 100%
Good work.
You may have heard the recent news about a Belgian man who was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after an accident, but who now has been miraculously discovered to have actually been conscious for the last 23 years, trapped in a partially paralyzed body. How horrific, and how frightening that the doctors could have made such a ghastly error.
Until you watch this video. How did they figure out that the poor man was actually alert and mentally competent beneath his deeply damaged exterior? They’re using facilitated communication: somebody holds his hand and moves it around to tap out messages on a computer. Look at the fellow, sitting there slack and grimacing and drooling, and the staffer deftly and quickly using his finger to peck out lucid and grammatical sentences. How does anyone fall for this?
I’d like to see how well Mr Houben communicates when his ‘facilitator’ is blindfolded, or when he is asked questions about objects in his line of sight but hidden from hers.
This excellent article in the Chicago Tribune documents the abuses of science by quacks. Legitimate researchers identify certain properties of autism — markers for inflammation in the brain, for instance, or correlations with testosterone — and write up papers that even go out of their way to explain how their observations are interesting, but do not necessarily lead to therapies, and what do you think the medical frauds do? They use them to justify useless or dangerous treatments like injections of testosterone inhibitors or anti-inflammatory agents or loading up patients with intravenous immunoglobulin…treatments that have not been tested in any way, have not gone through clinical trials, and which are justified by tenuous connections to legitimate research, which sometimes contraindicates what the quacks are doing.
So when Pardo and his colleagues published their paper in the Annals of Neurology in 2005, they added an online primer that clearly explained their findings in layman’s terms and sternly warned doctors not to use them to develop treatments.
“We were concerned that the study would raise a lot of controversy and be misused,” Pardo said. “We were right.”
Over and over, doctors in the autism recovery movement have used the paper to justify experimental treatments aimed at reducing neuroinflammation.
It just goes on and on. Legitimate scientists find a weak connection to something, describe it with solid caveats, and these evil exploiters of the pain of others jump on it to advocate radical and dangerous treatments that ignore all the problems.
Pardo’s study is just one example. In May, the Tribune reported on another questionable use of research. A geneticist and his son who promoted treating children who have autism with a testosterone inhibitor had based their protocol, in part, on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychopathologist at England’s University of Cambridge who has explored the role of the hormone in autism.
Yet Baron-Cohen told the Tribune that the idea of using the drug this way “fills me with horror.”
Pardo said that since his paper came out he has received many questions about unproven autism treatments. He is particularly haunted by inquiries regarding powerful immunosuppressant drugs usually used on organ transplant patients, calling the idea “completely wrong.”
Said the researcher: “People are abusing science for the treatment of autism.”
The article also names names: Dan Rossignol, Jeff Bradstreet, James Neubrander, and Patricia Kane are people who abuse the scientific literature to promote expensive and dangerous snake oil (I was also amused to see that Kane has her degree from Columbia Pacific University, the same sloppy institution that gave Jerry Bergman a Ph.D.—and the article is not kind in its characterization of CPU).
It’s good to see some strong skeptical coverage of medical science in a newspaper. This is exactly what good journalism ought to be doing — digging in and exposing the lies.
