That venerable institution among internet atheists, Reggie Finley, will be interviewing me tonight for Infidel Guy radio. We’re going to talk about this strange propaganda film, Expelled, that’s supposed to come out next month, and I suppose we’ll also discuss creationism in a more generic context as well, and maybe we’ll even talk about real science. Tune in at 8ET.
Let me answer my own question: because he is an appallingly freakish idiot, and always a reliable source for the most amazingly inane claims. Don’t worry, that link takes you to Mark Chu-Carroll’s evisceration of his latest insane rant, that women are intellectual inferiors who can’t teach biology or calculus and are incapable of practicing computer science or art. Vox Day. Can he do any of those things? I think not.
By the way, my wife is director of institutional research at a local college, and my daughter is a computer science major. Women outnumber men in our computer science program and have parity in our biology discipline. It’s amazing how they do those things and know more than I do in their fields with such inferior brains.
Usually, when I read one of these common stories about people denying themselves reasonable medical care for religious reasons (such as the Jehovah Witness’s proscription against blood transfusions, or the Christian Scientist’s insane denial of illness altogether), I find myself siding with the doctor trying to overcome their foolishness, rather than the deluded theists. This one is an exception.
To make it short, a Jehovah’s Witness couple are expecting twins; one of the twins has a circulation defect that prevents pulmonary circulation, meaning it would suffocate to death as soon as it was born and needed to breathe air; they refuse any surgery to correct the problem; doctor gets a court order, operates at birth against the parent’s wishes, and saves the infant.
I think the doctor was way out of line. This is a case in which the parents were fully aware of the situation and knew that the fetus would die at birth, and elected (for screwy reasons, admittedly) to not pursue extraordinary measures to save its life. They had not deluded themselves into believing medical intervention was unnecessary and that magic would heal the child, they had resigned themselves to its death. And until the child has enough self-awareness to actually want to live, I think that is a decision parents have to be allowed to make. If they want that particular baby, they should be allowed to elect to have major surgery, but if they don’t, they should be permitted to allow its condition to run its course, unless the outcome is likely to be survival with serious damage.
The cost of these medical interventions can be prohibitive, and it can be entirely reasonable to decide not to invest money and time into a fetus who has neither autonomy nor unique qualities, nor an individual personality to which the parents have attached their affection. Let them die. Let the parents decide, not a doctor.
The article cites a particularly horrendous case.
In 1990, for example, a woman named Karla Miller went into premature labor at 23 weeks of gestation in Houston. Because a child born that early has a 75 percent chance of death or severe disability, the husband chose not to sign a consent form that would allow resuscitation. But the neonatologist resuscitated the girl, who grew up severely retarded, legally blind, and quadriplegic. The parents sued the hospital for ignoring their wishes, but in 2000 the Texas Supreme Court ruled for the hospital. George Annas, a medical ethicist at Boston University, later attacked the decision in the New England Journal of Medicine, since “the court implies that life is always preferable to death for a newborn . . . no matter how unlikely their survival is without severe disabilities.”
I wonder if that neonatologist has since taken responsibility for the round-the-clock care and various expenses and stresses of that kind of affliction?
I have just walked outside in Morris, Minnesota, and you may not believe this, but there is liquid water falling from the sky. I even spotted an absence of coats, and someone rollerblading. Have I been magically transported to some tropical paradise, like Portland, Oregon?
People in India were told that there was a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary floating in the sky, so about 50 of them suffered burned retinas by staring at the sun. I think we can see that religion definitely attracts stupid people to its ranks.
I sure hope no one tells them that if you hit yourself on the head with a hammer real hard, you’ll see swarms of angels dancing everywhere around you. Or, more likely, that if you mail all your money to a preacher, you’ll get rich. But no one would be that sadistic, would they?
There are all these PharynguFests going on, but they all make me entirely superfluous…I may have to pout. Why isn’t anyone inviting me to London or Anchorage? I know, it’s because you don’t need me, and you’re cheap and don’t want to spend the money on some distant nerd, since you’ve got plenty of local nerds right at hand. And that’s OK. I do have some traveling in my near future, in case anyone wants to take advantage of it.
I’ll be in Washington DC for the AFT/NEA conference the weekend of 28-30 March, so I might be available that Friday or Saturday evening.
I’ll be in Eugene, Oregon the weekend of 4-6 April for an Evo-Devo conference. Of course, there’ll be some major biology celebrities on hand, and I also have some old friends out there, so that might be trickier to schedule.
Then there’s a midweek event in Berkeley on 28-30 May, another evo-devo-genomics meeting, and I’ll be juggling TAM6 (Las Vegas) and the Evolution 2008 meetings (Minneapolis) on 19-24 June, and a MENSA conference 2-6 July in Denver, GECCO in Atlanta on 12-16 July, and Netroots Nation on 17-20 July. And then the Atheist Alliance convention somewhere in California on 25-28 September. Other events may gradually fill in my calendar, too.
See? There might be some chances to invite me to one of these events someday.
In early February, a number of bloggers brought to your attention a peculiar paper on mitochondrial proteomics, a paper which was obviously odd on even casual inspection, containing grandiose claims of a theoretical revolution that were entirely unsupported and ludicrous assertions of evidence for God in the genome. Deeper examination revealed that much of the paper had also been plagiarized from various sources. To the credit of the journal, the paper was quickly retracted one month ago today; however, the retraction was entirely based on the plagiarism, and none of the other failings of the paper were addressed, nor were any of the patent errors in the review process at the journal Proteomics discussed. This is strange, especially in light of the fact that the Warda/Han paper was the most accessed article in the journal. This is not an issue that should be swept under the rug!
Today, several of us — Steven Salzberg, Lars Juhl Jensen, and Attila Csordas — are repeating our call for an explanation of the events that led to the leakage of such an egregiously ridiculous paper into print. Bad papers are a dime-a-dozen, and we aren’t so much concerned with the detailed discussion of the flaws in this one paper as we are with seeing the integrity of the peer-review process maintained, or better, improved. The Warda/Han paper had obvious red flags that marked it as potentially problematic in the title, the abstract, and scattered throughout the body, and it’s hard to imagine how any reviewer or editor could have let them simply slip by without comment, yet that is exactly what seems to have happened.
We want to know how this paper slipped through the cracks, because we want to know how large the cracks in the peer review process at Proteomics are. It’s a journal with a good reputation, and we are not presuming that there was any wrong-doing or systematic failure of peer review there, but we do think that a lack of transparency is of concern: there is no assumption of a crime, but the ongoing cover-up is grounds for suspicion. Let’s see some self-criticism from the journal editor, and an open discussion of steps being taken to prevent such errors from occurring again.
Alternatively, if the journal wants to outsource its quality control to a mob of bloggers, that works, too … but we tend to be less formal and much more brutally and publicly critical than an in-house process might be, and we’re also going to be less well-informed than the actual principals in the review process. Better explanations are in order. Let’s see representatives of the journal provide them.
People, I know it’s really hard sometimes to tell the parodies from the sincerely held beliefs of the faith-heads. That last post was humor; sure, there are people out there who think they can spot atheists by their degenerate, evil ways, but that was clearly a spoof of such attitudes. This, on the other hand, is the real thing, a loving work of ignorant inanity by a couple of liars for Jesus:
See the difference? That little video makes assertions of fact that are entirely false, but really aren’t at all funny. When someone accuses atheists of wearing comfortable footwear because it “encourages moral decadence,” that’s silly and makes us laugh. This, on the other hand, doesn’t sound like the punchline to a joke:
Carbon dating and all other forms of radiometric dating are so flawed that scientists don’t even want to use them any more to determine the age of fossils.
There isn’t even a grain of truth to that sentence; it doesn’t make me want to laugh (except, maybe, in a mean-spirited way at the peckerwood making the claim); it reflects a deep-seated ignorance about the scientific tools used for dating; and it is nothing but a rallying cry for like-minded pissants to nod their head in agreement that someone has confirmed their biases.
(Seriously, that claim is so damned stupid it’s more likely to make me angry than amused. I am surrounded by geologists here at UMM, and one of them gave a presentation on radiometric dating just last month. They’d love to date everything, and the reason that they don’t is that it takes a fair amount of work to prepare samples, and it isn’t cheap to ship them off and get isotopes assayed. I want these creationist frauds to read Turney’s Bones, Rocks, and Stars so their delusions aren’t quite so idiotic.)
It helps to be familiar with actual creationist arguments. When you see something that parrots the claims they do make, unleavened with a hint of satire or a pointer to a refutation, then you’ve got the real thing.
That video does cut it close in one place, when it tries to propose it’s positive support for Christianity over other religions, and it claims that their distinguishing feature that makes their religion the one true belief is that it values faith over works. That sounds like such a breathtakingly ridiculous claim that it approaches self-satire, but if you know that Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron in their “Way of the Master” series actually make that argument with straight faces, it stops being funny.
While I’m at it, let me mention to everyone who hasn’t figured it out yet that the Objective Ministries Creation Science Fair page is a parody, just not a very good one, or perhaps too good. I still get email about it every once in a while from people who think it’s true. Its problem is that it treads the line too finely; it uses arguments that are just too darned close to actual creationist arguments, which makes it more of a pain in the ass than something to amuse.
Who needs church if you can get together and reason together? First it was Boston; now other cities are joining in with gatherings of fans of skepticism and science. Here are your opportunities:
London, England: Saturday, 15 March, 7:00pm, at the Doric Ach near Euston station.
Anchorage, Alaska: Thursday, 20 March, 7:00pm, at the cafe in the Barnes and Noble on Northern Lights Blvd.
We shall take over!
