CAM and credulity

I was asked by a friend to take a look at this paper which he was surprised to see in a science journal. It’s a weird and unconvincing paper, a Case report of instantaneous resolution of juvenile macular degeneration blindness after proximal intercessory prayer. It’s actually a case of rummaging around in old medical files in order to report a “miracle” in 1972.

Here’s the story: an 18 year old girl lost her vision in 1959 over the course of a few months, with no identified cause. She was diagnosed with 7/200 vision, attended a school for the blind, and lived as a blind person for 12 years. Then, even more suddenly, her vision recovered fully after her husband prayed for her.

When the couple went to bed later than normal (after midnight), her husband performed a hurried spiritual devotional practice (reading two Bible verses) and got on his knees to pray. She describes that they both began to cry as he began to pray, with a hand on her shoulder while she laid on the bed, and with great feeling and boldness he prayed: “Oh, God! You can restore […] eyesight tonight, Lord. I know You can do it! And I pray You will do it tonight.” At the close of the prayer, his wife opened her eyes and saw her husband kneeling in front of her, which was her first clear visual perception after almost 13 years of blindness.

An examination in 2001 revealed that she had 20/40 vision, and that her retinas looked normal.

I can’t debunk this account, if that’s what you’re looking for. I could speculate about possible ways the story is misleading us, but we know nothing about the causes of the blindness or its cure, we don’t even know that there was a physical basis for the blindness, and I’m not going to diagnose an old medical condition — that’s what the authors of the paper are doing. All we’ve got are old records, and modern evidence that she can see, and no way to trace the actual history of her vision. It’s an anecdote. Maybe she was actually cured by a miracle! Unfortunately, there’s no way to analyze what actually happened.

I’m skeptical that prayer is actually effective, though. This woman was devout, came from a very religious family and community, and you’re telling me that the onset of blindness did not trigger a flurry of intense prayers from the woman, her family, and her church? Was that the first time her husband begged his god to restore her sight? It’s awfully hard to believe that something that was certainly done to no effect for years can be assigned a causal role in her abrupt recovery. But OK, I just have to shrug and say that’s some story.

How did it get published in a science journal? Well, it’s not a science journal, for one thing. It got published in Explore.

EXPLORE: The Journal of Science & Healing addresses the scientific principles behind, and applications of, evidence-based healing practices from a wide variety of sources, including conventional, alternative, and cross-cultural medicine. It is an interdisciplinary journal that explores the healing arts, consciousness, spirituality, eco-environmental issues, and basic science as all these fields relate to health.

It’s one of those alternative journals with standards so wide open the editors’ brains have fallen out. I’ll also note that the paper concludes with an empty statement.

The PIP [proximal intercessory prayer] may have been associated with a response in the ANS [autonomic nervous system] of the patient. However, research on the potential for PIP to affect the ANS and/or reverse vision loss associated with JMD is limited. Findings from this report and others like it warrant investment in future research to ascertain whether and how PIP experiences may play a role in apparent spontaneous resolution of lifelong conditions having otherwise no prognosis of recovery.

“warrant investment in future research”…how? You’ve got one poorly understood, anecdotal observation, so how do you propose to do “research”? By gathering more anecdotal self-reports from believers in this phenomenon, and looking at more half-century old medical records? I’m also concerned that the authors now want to find people with “lifelong conditions having otherwise no prognosis of recovery” and tell them to pray for a cure. Most of those people will say they’ve already been praying for years, so…pray harder? Pray to the right god? Pray with the right magic words? It’s not as if they’ve identified a repeatable treatment or specific mechanism that they can test and refine.

I do note one admission that they authors make.

Prayer is one of the most common complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies.

That’s a confession that most of CAM is useless.

A tiny scrap of good news

West Virginia had a bill in the works to explicitly allow the teaching of intelligent design creationism.

Teachers in public schools, including public charter schools, that include any one or more of grades kindergarten through 12, may teach intelligent design as a theory of how the universe and/or humanity came to exist.

Never fear, Americans United is on the case. It didn’t pass, not yet at least.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State President and CEO Rachel Laser issued the following statement in response to the West Virginia Legislature adjourning without passing Senate Bill 619, a bill that would have authorized public school teachers to teach intelligent design creationism:

“We at Americans United are thankful that West Virginia public school students won’t be forced to sit through lessons on intelligent design creationism – an inherently religious doctrine that has no place in public schools. Public schools are not Sunday schools; their purpose is to teach students sound science, not preach religious beliefs.

“While the intelligent design bill failed this session, it’s alarming that the bill got as much traction as it did. The bill’s supporters blatantly ignored the Constitution’s promise to separate church and state – the protector of religious freedom – and would have flouted decades of court precedent that bars the teaching of religious doctrine in public schools, including an Americans United case that successfully proved intelligent design was simply creationism rebranded.

“If legislators insist on resurrecting this bill, Americans United is ready to defend the Constitution and protect public education and the religious freedom of West Virginia families. Using our public schools to impose religious doctrines like intelligent design on a captive audience of schoolchildren is part of the Christian Nationalist agenda to force all of us to live by their narrow beliefs. We need a national recommitment to the separation of church and state. Our public schools and our democracy depend on it.”

The creationists are persistent little buggers, that’s for sure.

Who would want this?

Also, where is Ray Comfort getting the money?

That’s a box full of crap you can get for free from LivingWaters/london. Just fill out the form at that link, giving Ray Comfort your address, and he will ship up to ten boxes of his book and Bible tracts about the coronation.

You could have a thousand copies of Ray’s book and six thousand cheesy tracts delivered to your doorstep, totally free. Unless you’re in the UK, EU, Australia, or New Zealand, in which case you don’t get the books, just 10,000 cheesy tracts. Or if you’re outside those countries, you get nothing, and will have to pick up your free tracts in person in London.

From this I have determined that Canada is truly blessed.

I thought about ordering a box, just to bleed a few drops from the bloated vampiric corpse of Ray Comfort’s unaccountably rich organization, but decided not to. My reasons: a) it’s not enough to exsanguinate the parasite, b) it would just encourage him, c) it’s incredibly wasteful and would just have to be recycled, and d) I don’t want to read his stupid book (I’ve read enough Comfort to know it will be awful), I don’t want his tracts, and I don’t need a box of waste paper in my house. The man is giving away free garbage, and that does not appeal.

I still have to wonder, though: does ol’ Ray have some multi-millionaire sugar daddy? Or does he get so much in donations from a horde of deluded Christians that he can afford these ridiculous give-aways? Does he pay taxes on all of his revenues that he then spends on evangelical nonsense?

By the way, Ray Comfort is very, very excited about the coronation…but he’s not going to bother to go himself. He wants his minions to do the humiliating work of distributing his crap to all the people who don’t want it in London.

Always tell Steve Kirsch “NO”

What an interesting dilemma: if I were seated next to this smug asshole, would I take the money? How about you?

On the one hand, that would be a nice sum for my retirement, and the odds of getting COVID from one exposure are low…and the odds of dying from the disease are even lower. On the other hand, gambling my health and life against what this guy considers chump change is a fool’s game.

The deciding factor for me is that Mr Kirsch is an obnoxious jerk who’d use my acceptance as propaganda to do greater harm to other people. His seatmate turned him down, as did several other people he offered $10,000 to. So yeah, I’d tell him no, and probably tell him to fuck off.

As it turns out, Steve Kirsch is a notable liar and quack with a lot of money.

Kirsch is a serial entrepreneur who has spent decades pitching the next big thing, whether optical mice (Mouse Systems), document processing (FrameMaker), search engines (Infoseek), digital security (OneID), or e-commerce (Propel Software). His latest startup, M10, is a spin-off of a spin-off that sells a blockchain for banks. He has made millions from these projects, even if they have not turned him into a household name.

“You see this with people who have a lot of money, who think that reflects their intelligence,” Richman told me. “He considers himself an expert in something that he doesn’t have training or experience in, and he’s not following scientific methods to assess data.”

Man, we sure have a lot of examples of that phenomenon.

His current obsession is with promoting crank COVID cures like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. He’s funding clinical trials, which is good, but then he tends to ignore or even contradict the results when they don’t go in the direction he wants, which is antithetical to doing good science.

His peers and the beneficiaries of his wealth are beginning to realize that.

Peter Meinke, another former board member, spent nearly three decades in drug discovery at Merck.

“It’s really, really common for a small effect, something that looks exciting, to be a statistical fluke when you look at a larger population. It’s sad, but it’s true,” he told me. “With covid, 80% of your patient population does just peachy with no treatment at all, just a little bed rest and fluid. It’s actually much harder to parse out a signal than if you’re treating diabetes or cancer.”

In addition to the issues with fluvoxamine, advisors grew increasingly uncomfortable with Kirsch’s posts about ivermectin, which he has repeatedly claimed in blog posts and appearances in alternative media can be used together with fluvoxamine to prevent 100% of covid-19 deaths. (“The ivermectin data are trash,” Feinberg told me. “There’s nothing there.”)

Things took a final and dramatic turn once Kirsch started claiming the government was covering up vaccine deaths.

An obnoxious crank with money. That’s all he is.

What do others think of Evolutionary Psychology?

Over there on Reddit, there is a subreddit called r/evolution for the discussion of evolutionary questions and issues. There is now consideration of a rule to clarify their stance on evolutionary psychology. It’s a good one.

As you know, the moderator team has been considering the possibility of new rules to help improve things around here. And of course, we wanted to get the community’s feedback on the matter before we pulled the trigger. Please, just remember to voice your disagreements peacefully.

  • Rule #X: Evolutionary Psychology. The moderation team takes the stance that evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience. Like any pseudoscience, it starts with a conclusion rather than drawing that conclusion from data; it also tends to ignore or even demonize other fields of science that already provide information about the topics it addresses; and tends to boil personal behaviors and preferences (as well as complicated sociocultural and developmental phenomena) down to a handful of terms it uses as buzzwords to craft adaptationist/bioessentialist just-so stories that are often untested, untestable, or even wildly incorrect. It’s also frequently used to justify everything from preexisting biases all the way to dehumanizing rhetoric. These posts also tend to attract a lot of baseless speculation and experts on these topics are often drowned out by negativity and downvotes, all of which is antithetical to the climate we’re trying to cultivate.
  • Please note that while we discourage evolutionary psychology and pseudoscience in general, simply asking questions about the evolutionary basis for certain human behaviors or cognitive traits isn’t necessarily an issue: there are legitimate scientists in various fields (eg, anthropology, especially evolutionary anthropology, ethnography, behavioral genetics, etc), who study these topics with proper, physical data, and so there is information out there. However, if we feel that a question is better suited for other academics (eg, regular psychologists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, etc), if things start getting pseudoscientific, or if certain lines are crossed, we may choose to intervene.

More pithily, they say the “problem is that evolutionary psychology is science in the same way that Taco Bell is authentic Mexican food.” There is some polite agreement with the statement (I’m not saying anything, because I’d only provide loud impolite agreement) and some polite disagreement. The disagreeable all seem to be quoting Tooby & Cosmides, which to me is just another sign that it’s a cult. EP has existed for decades, and all you’ve got to show for it is a pair of aging, founding authorities and a swarm of lunatics and bad publications? Cut your losses. Treat EP as crackpottery.

As far as I’m concerned, the statement is fair and judicious.

Come to Minnesota, one of the few sane states in the country

Minnesota is doing the right thing.

Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz signed an executive order Wednesday directing state agencies to take action to protect and support access to gender-affirming health care across the state.

“All state agencies must, to the fullest extent of their lawful authority, pursue opportunities and coordinate with each other to protect people or entities providing, assisting, seeking or obtaining gender affirming health care services in Minnesota,” the order says.

Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender – the one the person was designated at birth – to their affirmed gender – the gender by which one wants to be known.

Walz’s order comes as Republican-led states around the country push restrictions on such care, with at least four states this year having passed measures to outlaw gender-affirming care for minors. As part of the order, the governor is prohibiting the state from cooperating with investigations by states that aim to penalize such care, saying their actions “pose a grave threat to the health” of members of the LGBTQ community.

Yeah. Basically, Republican-led states have turned evil and want to actively harm their own citizens, but Minnesota will stand strong as a refuge. Join us!

Glinner evokes the mob!

Oh no! Graham Linehan mentions me again!

He gets everything wrong again. I’m not practicing “mob-friendly pseudoscience” — the kind of stuff I do doesn’t find favor with pseudoscientists or mobs. Rather, Glinner leads a hate-mob himself, and if anyone is going to get mobbed today, it’s me, descended upon by the anti-trans loons endemic to the UK. So far, it hasn’t happened — maybe Linehan is losing his social potency? Or maybe the fact that the article is not great, and is published in a magazine for conservative twits?

He’s highlighting an exercise in pedantry published in some magazine called “The Critic”. I never heard of it before, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.

The Critic is a monthly British political and cultural magazine. Contributors include David Starkey, Joshua Rozenberg, Peter Hitchens and Toby Young.

The magazine was founded in November 2019, with Michael Mosbacher, former editor of Standpoint, and Christopher Montgomery, a strategist with the European Research Group of Eurosceptic Tory MPs, as co-editors. It was funded by Jeremy Hosking, a Conservative party donor who had previously donated to Standpoint.

I’m not familiar with many UK political figures, but I’ve heard of Peter Hitchens (vapid gasbag) and Toby Young (eugenics cheerleader and generally awful human being), so I’ve already got a sense of the flavor of the magazine. I think I don’t need to read further.

I did check out the recommended “great piece” though. It’s familiar stuff; it’s the same Twitter nonsense I criticized before. He has two points that he babbles about. One is that I’m breeding spiders, therefore I know deep-down that sex is real.

Recently, Myers has started breeding spiders, a project which he is documenting in great detail on twitter. What I found intriguing is that in his spider updates, any uncertainty about the reality of sex or how many sexes there are, seems to be forgotten. When he charted the growth of his arachnoid pets, he used two colours: yellow for spider-girls and blue for spider-boys with no need for intermediate hues. His blog is full of references to his female spiders producing eggs — never the males, whose function is to provide the sperm ideally without getting eaten by their mates. Quite how his spiders know about sex, given that it is (according to Myers) a social construct, is never explained.

This is gender-critical bullshit. Recognizing that sex and gender are concepts that are interpreted and shaped by culture does not mean that I deny the reality of gametes, and reproduction, and egg-laying, and different roles by individuals in sex. You’d think they’d figure out that all my posts about breeding spiders must mean that I don’t deny that sex exists, but no, they think it’s some kind of big gotcha. Tell me that you don’t understand the role of culture in sexual behavior without telling me in so many words that you don’t understand the role of culture in sexual behavior.

Also, curious fact about my yellow and blue chart lines: those are assigned after the fact. We’re charting growth from the day of eclosion, when sex is indetectable, and we get our first hint about a month later when the later-identified females have a surge in growth (but it’s not a rigid distinction — there’s a lot of overlap), and about two weeks later they go through a molt and we see a distinct difference in palp size. Then I go into the spreadsheet and add the label for sex.

His second criticism, and the one he dedicates most of his article to, is the complaint that sex can’t be bimodal because we can’t quantify maleness and femaleness, that we can’t define the degree to which someone is male or female.

EXACTLY. That’s what I say.

To him, though, that means sex has to be a strict binary, unaffected by any cultural construction of the phenomenon, which is totally bonkers.

Sex isn’t bimodal, because it’s a category, not a value. Specific measurements can have all sorts of distributions (including bimodal) — and if those traits are bimodal, they likely have that shape precisely because we have two, and only two, sexes.

Oh. Sex is a category, and we have defined two, and only two categories, and therefore because we have constructed these categories, sex is binary and not at all constructed. Categories are absolute and magical, defined entirely outside the influence of human interpretation, and delineated by strict boundaries, defined by our cultural traditions in addition to variable biological properties.

OK, so if I add the categories “trans woman” and “trans man,” I have immanentized a new sexual reality, and can declare that sex is quaternary. Go ahead, add your own category, we can expand this indefinitely. All you have to do is come up with a definition that bounds your category. The boxes you find yourself in are entirely real.

By the way, I’ve operationally defined sex in spiders as trinary without even trying. I have these stacks of containers for spiders, and there are three distinct sets: males, females that produce fertilized eggs (they have specific labels), and morphological females that have been exposed to a male but refuse to mate and therefore don’t lay eggs (and lack labels). Those are the categories set up in my lab, therefore they must be real. It can’t possibly be that the non-reproductive females have criteria for mating that go deeper than whether the male has palps or not.

“woke”

The most useful thing about the word “woke” is that it allows me to instantly recognize the lying idiots. All these conservatives complaining about “wokeism”…it’s like they’ve tattooed “LOSER” on their foreheads, and they’re proud of it.

Ron Desantis, of all people, gave the game away when his lawyers had to explicitly define “woke”, and this is what they came up with.

Asked what “woke” means more generally, [Desantis’ General Counsel Ryan] Newman said “it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

Newman added that DeSantis doesn’t believe there are systemic injustices in the U.S.

That’s a fine definition, and that Desantis “doesn’t believe there are systemic injustices in the U.S.” confirms my opinion that those who use the word disparagingly are all lying idiots.

I am surprised and reassured to learn that I’m not some weird outlier in this, as well: in one poll, a majority agree that “woke” is not an insult.

Republican presidential hopefuls are vowing to wage a war on “woke,” but a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds a majority of Americans are inclined to see the word as a positive attribute, not a negative one.

Fifty-six percent of those surveyed say the term means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” That includes not only three-fourths of Democrats but also more than a third of Republicans.

Overall, 39% say instead that the word reflects what has become the GOP political definition, “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words.” That’s the view of 56% of Republicans.

I disagree that it’s a mistake for Republicans to abuse the term, since a majority of them think it’s a synonym for “politically correct.” It’s a rallying cry used to gather all the lying idiots under the banner of whatever yahoo is running for office, and in that sense it’s effective, as long as you don’t mind using language dishonestly and misrepresenting what people actually think.

I find it a handy flag to recognize that someone doesn’t believe systemic injustices exist, and that they sure don’t feel any need to oppose injustice, because they think everything is hunky dory, and we should just maintain the status quo. It certainly has made it fast and easy to spot bad people to block on social media.

But here, I’ve got a video from Cody Johnston that explains the whole absurd, horrible situation at length, almost an hour of length. It’s an entertaining and theatrical and detailed hour, though, so you might enjoy it more than my cursory dismissal of anyone who thinks “woke” is a bad thing.