I’m used to hearing complaints that those damned immigrants, especially the Muslim ones, are bringing White America down. How about when the shoe is on the other foot, though? Minnesota has a lot of Somali immigrants who are predominantly Muslim, and recently it’s in the news that there is a small epidemic of measles sweeping through that community, because they’re not getting properly vaccinated. Must be some religious thing, right?

Wrong. It’s homegrown Western ignorance. It seems the Koran doesn’t have much to say about autism or vaccinations, but once you move to America, the parasites descend upon you and fill your head with lies about how your kids will be all horribly autistic if you protect them against contagious disease.

So worried Somali-Americans got lectured at by Mark Blaxill. Who is he, you might ask?

Blaxill is not a scientist. Nor is he a doctor, though he plays one at SafeMinds. Blaxill is a former businessman turned spokesperson for the anti-vaccinationist movement (Vice President of SafeMinds). Fancies himself a self-made expert epidemiologist. In the grips of extreme confirmation bias (science doesn’t support his views, hence scientists are probably mislead by their own personal interests — having no clue as to how a controlled experiment is carried out).

Liar, crank and conspiracy theorist (Big Pharma is out to get us — Blaxill actually terms it the “autism holocaust”), as discussed here; also a professional shifter of goalposts (without necessarily being aware of it himself).

Among his most prominent techniques are faking statistics to show an explosion in autism the last thirty years, and looking at new studies to determine whether they are scientifically “solid” or not (meaning he determines whether they can be interpreted as agreeing with his lunacy or not).

Oddly, he doesn’t look Somali or Muslim. He is going to kill people with misinformation, though.

The Free Speech Absolutists are in a tizzy again, because Ann Coulter isn’t going to speak at Berkeley. The usual cliches are being deployed.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Very noble.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” How can anyone oppose liberty?

“One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.” Definitely the case here.

OK, let’s do it! Absolute, total, complete Free Speech on college campuses! Anyone and everyone can say whatever they want, any time they want, you can have an auditorium of your choice, you can book it for as long as you want!

One catch. You want infinite free speech on campus, you have to give us infinite money, infinite time, infinite resources. Fair enough?

Somehow, I don’t think it’s coming. Especially since the same people who want to see Ann Coulter given a privileged spot on the non-infinite roster of available speaking engagements are the people who under other circumstances complain bitterly about diversity. The rage always seems to rise on behalf of far-right asshats and Nazis, like Coulter or Yiannopoulos, have you noticed?

But even if we could accommodate everyone and every single point of view, the result has a name: it’s called cacophony. I don’t see how that is useful or constructive. Universities have a mission of promoting education; should we, in the name of Free Speech, insist that we also promote ignorance? That would be incoherent.

Universities are not neutral on all issues, nor should they be. We try to encourage open-mindedness; you can’t do that by also opening the door to those who encourage the closing of minds. We try to serve a diverse community; that doesn’t work if you take a disinterested position on purveyors of hate and bigotry. We aim to be selective and teach the best ideas that have the support of an educated, informed group…the antithesis of indiscriminate acceptance of bad, unsupported, rejected falsehoods. Coulter has nothing to contribute.

I know what’s next: Marketplace of ideas! Exposing students to novel points of view! The university should take students out of their comfort zone!

This is true. We do that all the time. I introduced my students to epistasis last week — discomfort and confusion were sown everywhere. It was good. But none of these arguments apply to Ann Coulter.

We, and the students, all know exactly what kind of provocative bullshit she’s going to say. She’s got a syndicated opinion column, she’s written 12 books, she regularly appears on television. I’ve got one of her books, a signed copy, on a shelf in my office because a student brought it back for me. She is a known quantity. That’s why people protest her appearances! They aren’t saying, “please keep me ignorant and unaware of this person and what she has to say”, they are saying “I am already fully aware of Ann Coulter’s perspective, and why are you giving her more money to stand in front of us and babble her hateful drivel?” It’s not as if Ann Coulter has lacked the ability to make her views known.

I mean, if you’re saying we can learn something new and interesting from an Ann Coulter talk, I have to point out that a) she is not a scholar with an insightful, well-researched position, b) we’re already well-steeped in her kind of godawful discourse, and c) I have to question your competence in critically evaluating the world of ideas if you think she has anything worthwhile to contribute.

Further, if you think being a place for education and intelligence and learning means you’re supposed to be wide open and completely neutral on everything, letting every voice through unfiltered, you don’t understand the university. I’ll give you two words: critical analysis. The university will examine your ideas, all right, and it will judge them. Nazis don’t get to come back and demand a do-over and a new grade.

Those protests? Those are students exercising their intelligence, and then going into the public square to exercise their free speech. Why? Did you think free speech meant freedom from criticism?

Somehow, I found myself looking at iridology diagrams. Iridologists claim that the surface of the iris is connected to every organ in the body, so the detailed pattern of flecks and lines and spots in the colored portion of your eye is a map to your health, as good as an X-ray or MRI. They actually do get quite specific.

From there I stumbled onto sclerology — these sclerologists claim the map is in the whites of your eyes, and that the network of blood vessels, for instance, tells you all you need to know about the state of your body.

Why, just this morning, I got up, looked in the mirror at my rheumy bloodshot eyes, and learned instantly that I was a walking tumorous mass that apparently was simultaneously exploded and crushed in a tragic farm machinery accident yesterday. It was terrible.

But this is just patent bullshit, every bit of it.

For one, we’ve taken eyes apart and looked. There is no connection between eyes and every other organ; the iris is innervated via the ciliary ganglion (the parasympathetic pathway) and the superior cervical ganglion (sympathetic). There are patterns to the capillaries of the eye, but they are more for efficient circulation of the blood than reflecting a mystical connection to your pancreas.

These maps owe more than a little to the model of the cerebral homunculus, which shows the targets of innervation by the sensorimotor cortex. That makes sense. There are necessary connections that the brain makes to control or receive input from the periphery. There are no such necessary associations with the eye. Also, those maps were made with thorough experimental and observational analyses of thousands and thousands of people — functional deficits were mapped to stroke lesions, and focal stimulation of brain regions were found to lead to specific sensory and motor responses. We’ve got data to back up the idea of how brains are connected to body parts.

And then there’s the plagiarism: why are the sclera and iris maps so similar, with bowels below and brain above, and heart central lateral and lungs central medial? It looks like someone invented a pattern for one part of the eye, and then a copy cat con artist stole it and redrew it for another part of the eye. And look at the pretense of precision! Do you believe the pituitary is associated with some specific point at about 11:30, while the ego is found at 11:10?

I confess, my ego compelled me to go look in a mirror for my ego. Couldn’t find it. My ego is just shattered now.

It’s still impressive in a pseudoscientific way. None of these maps are constructed by scientific methods — carefully replication of meticulous empiricism — and are totally lacking in any kind of observational foundation. You can just sit down and make stuff up, and if it’s flashy enough and apes the lingo of real scientists, someone will believe it enough that they’ll pay real money to a quack.

What is it about the shroud of Turin that short-circuits people’s critical thinking? A recently published paper by Catholic weirdos claims to have carefully scrutinized the piece of cloth, and that they can interpret some of the patterns there as an image of Jesus’ scrotum.

Yes. You read that correctly. There are peepers trying to get a look at Jesus’ twig & berries.

I can’t get at the paper itself, nor am I particularly interested — except, maybe, as another example of pareidolia. You might as well stare at medieval paintings of a naked Jesus and then claim that you’ve acquired deep insights into the biology of a person dead 2000 years ago. Oh, wait, gosh, that’s exactly what some people are doing. Some artwork shows Jesus in feminine poses, or with ambiguous sexuality, so it’s open season on speculation.

A late fifth/early sixth-century mosaic in what is known as the Arian baptistery in Ravenna, Italy shows Jesus, naked in the river Jordan, with genitals clearly visible to the viewer. The rest of Jesus’ body is ambiguously gendered. He is depicted as clean-shaven, youthful, and even slightly wide-hipped. Some have argued that he is androgynous. Regardless of how we assess Jesus’ gender in this scene, the mosaic is pointing us to the idea that Jesus really was a human being, not merely appearing as one.

There are no contemporary accounts or images of Jesus. The portrayals you seen now, or in the fifth century, or in the Medieval period, or during the Renaissance, were all artistic renditions that more reflected the culture and concerns of the artist than anything about the dead guy on a stick. It’s fine to talk about the values of 5th century Ravennans in the context of the art they made, but it is utterly bonkers to use that to discuss the biology of someone who died 500 years before, in another part of the world.

In 2014, Dr. Susannah Cornwall, who teaches at the University of Exeter, caused a stir when she published an academic article arguing that the sex of Jesus was simply a best guess. She wrote, “It is not possible to assert with any degree of certainty that Jesus was male as we now define maleness.” Correctly observing that it is difficult to speak definitively about the genitalia of an unmarried person with no children, she added, “There is no way of knowing for sure that Jesus did not have one of the intersex conditions which would give him a body which appeared externally to be unremarkably male, but which might nonetheless have had some ‘hidden’ female physical features.”

There is no way of knowing is the operative phrase there. I’m fine with the idea that Jesus’ masculinity was a rather irrelevant part of the myth, but annoyed with the baseless dissection of genitalia that aren’t there. But then, it’s also the case that we don’t know that Jesus had a beard, or long hair, or a fine Aryan complexion, so all we’ve got is cultural bias on those trivial details.

But now some unhinged people are excited that they might have a “photo” of Jesus’ crotch.

Newly published scientific investigations into the Turin Shroud have identified the outline of the scrotum and right hand thumb of the man outlined on the cloth. If the Shroud is authentic, this would seem to supply clear evidence that Jesus was, in fact, male.

If the Shroud is authentic, but, as the article points out, it isn’t. And if this picture were accurate, then Jesus rode a dinosaur.

The “ifs” are strong in this article.

An authentic foreskin relic would do a lot more than establish the sex of Jesus. If, in our twenty-first century, we had a piece of Jesus’ body, the problem would no longer be heretical claims about his gender or non-divinity, but rather the potential for sacrilege. If we had the DNA of God it would only be a matter of time before somebody wanted to clone him.

If we had a tiny scrap of human tissue from the first century, I’d think the first question to ask would be how you know it came from a specific individual (let alone one with magic powers), so I don’t see how any of this creative speculation allows you to say anything about the prophet who supposedly founded the Christian faith.

But then, this is a subject that does seem to scramble even relatively intelligent minds.