If I had some ham, I could make a ham sandwich, if I had some bread

What is it with these loons? They’ve got nothing, but they’re continually telling us what they could accomplish, if only they…what? I don’t know.

The latest trend in kook blogs is to tell us all the things that would happen if we only accepted their weird premises. Here, for example, is Terry Hurlbut, explaining what America would be like if creationists controlled science.

This hypothetical creation-oriented society would take scientific education, research, and investigation in a new direction. Astronomers would stop looking for “dark matter” and “dark energy,” and instead develop a uniform cosmology with insights from the Annals of Creation. It would find this model much simpler than the Big Bang model has now become.

That’s right, astronomers, forget about math and radio telescopes and Hubble and all your new-fangled physics. Throw out the textbooks and roll the curriculum back to 1625 — the only source you need is the theology of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland!

Geology would return to its pre-Lyell understanding. The result might, perhaps, lead to improved fossil-fuel exploration, and would be more likely to lead to improvements in prospecting for uranium, thorium, and other radioactive minerals. The realization that radioactive elements on earth had their origins in a spate of ultra-high-magnitude earthquakes might lead to an investigation of whether more radioactive materials might suddenly become “discoverable” near the epicenters of any future magnitude-eight or stronger earthquakes. Indeed, the careful study of veins of uranium, thorium, and similar ores, and of the magnetic ores, might lead to better mapping of earthquake zones.

Your turn, geologists. Uniformitarianism is out. You only have to roll your discipline back to about 1830, though, throwing out everything in Lyell’s Principles of Geology and anything since. Wait…you might also have to get rid of Hutton, which pushes the date back a bit further. Don’t worry, though, you’ll have an easier job finding fossil fuels if you forget the “fossil” part and pretend they were all generated within the last 4000 years.

Medicine would abandon its hubristic seeking after “designer drugs,” its careless disregard of the possible functions of various organs (like the vermiform appendix), and its almost willful ignorance of the role of diet in human health (and animal husbandry). Creationism would reinforce the notion that mankind, and for that matter every animal, is specifically designed to use certain foodstuffs that are, in turn, specifically designed to serve as good, healthful food. Such a society would necessarily abandon the modern Western diet and rediscover the health-maintaining practices that the Bible mentions (and that are still current, in only slightly modified form, in the Middle East, and especially in Israel).

Oh, right. Let’s get back to the standards of health care of Palestine in the 1st century AD.

Zoology would become a much more exciting discipline than it is today. Zoologists would look on the woolly mammoth with new understanding. Expeditions to find live dinosaurs would be more than the stuff of science fiction (cf. The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and would receive serious attention and funding. And this Examiner does not doubt that at least some would be successful.

Of course, creationists can seek dinosaurs in the vasty tropics. Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they find them when they do search for them?

Hurlbut clearly lives in a fantasy world that has no connection to reality. But I have found someone even crazier: John Benneth. Benneth has written one long-ass post in which he lists every deplorable statistic he can find, and then announces that “homeopathy would have helped”. Oh, really?

In one year 85,000 Americans were wounded by firearms, of which 38,000 die, 2,600 children. Homeopathy could have helped with ledum pelustre , aconitum napellum, arnica Montana and individualized constitutional treatments.

I think homeopathic firearms certainly would have helped, but otherwise, no, throwing water at wounds isn’t going to cure them.

150,000 American children are reported missing every year. 50,000 of these simply vanish. Their ages range from one year to mid-teens. According to the New York Times, “Some of these are dead, perhaps half of the John and Jane Does annually buried in this country are unidentified kids.” Homeopathy could have helped with individualized treatments. Homeopathy could have helped with remedies like Absin. Cimic. OP. Phos. Plb. Rhus-t. Staph. Stram., Falco-p, and Magnesium muriaticum

Homeopathic body-burials? I don’t get it.

In one year 1,000,000 American children ran away from home, mostly because of abusive treatment, including sexual abuse from parents and other adults. Of the many sexually abused children among runaways, 83 percent came from white families. Homeopathy could have helped with remedies like Lyc., Falco-p. Herin.

If only those white families had been treated with John Benneth’s Patented Skin Darkener, those kids wouldn’t have run away!

2,000,000 to 4,000,00 American women were battered. Domestic violence was the single largest cause of injury and second largest cause of death to American women. Homeopathy could have helped the victim with recovery from the trauma with a remedies such as Arn. and Staph and helped the assailant with his anger with remedies such as Croc. Mez. and Sulph.

Ladies, next time the husband staggers home drunk and starts walloping you around, just ask him to drink a nice glass of water. Everything will be all better then.

With so much violence, should it be surprising that 135,000 American children took guns to school? Homeopathy could have helped.

More homeopathic firearms?

In one year African Americans constituted 13 percent of drug users but 35 percent of drug arrests, 55 percent of drug convictions and 74 percent of prison sentences. For non-drug offenses, African Americans got prison terms that averaged about 10 percent longer than Caucasians for similar crimes.
Homeopathy could have helped.

One moment it’s all those white kids running away from home, now it’s all the black people in prison, and homeopathy somehow fixes it all. Maybe it turns everyone gray?

Anyway, these guys are completely nuts, but anyone can play the “If X, then Y” game. If only magic really worked, then I could fix that drippy showerhead. If the sky were purple, I’d be able to knit. If squid wore hats, then monkeys would dance on Mars.

Doesn’t it matter that the centuries-old magic tricks both Hurlbut and Benneth think are panaceas were tried once, failed, and better solutions were discovered?

Science is not dead

People keep sending me this link to an article by Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker: The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method, which has the subheadings of “The Truth Wears Off” and “Is there something wrong with the scientific method?” Some of my correspondents sound rather distraught, like they’re concerned that science is breaking down and collapsing; a few, creationists mainly, are crowing over it and telling me they knew we couldn’t know anything all along (but then, how did they know…no, let’s not dive down that rabbit hole).

I read it. I was unimpressed with the overselling of the flaws in the science, but actually quite impressed with the article as an example of psychological manipulation.

The problem described is straightforward: many statistical results from scientific studies that showed great significance early in the analysis are less and less robust in later studies. For instance, a pharmaceutical company may release a new drug with great fanfare that showed extremely promising results in clinical trials, and then later, when numbers from its use in the general public trickle back, shows much smaller effects. Or a scientific observation of mate choice in swallows may first show a clear preference for symmetry, but as time passes and more species are examined or the same species is re-examined, the effect seems to fade.

This isn’t surprising at all. It’s what we expect, and there are many very good reasons for the shift.

  • Regression to the mean: As the number of data points increases, we expect the average values to regress to the true mean…and since often the initial work is done on the basis of promising early results, we expect more data to even out a fortuitously significant early outcome.

  • The file drawer effect: Results that are not significant are hard to publish, and end up stashed away in a cabinet. However, as a result becomes established, contrary results become more interesting and publishable.

  • Investigator bias: It’s difficult to maintain scientific dispassion. We’d all love to see our hypotheses validated, so we tend to consciously or unconsciously select reseults that favor our views.

  • Commercial bias: Drug companies want to make money. They can make money off a placebo if there is some statistical support for it; there is certainly a bias towards exploiting statistical outliers for profit.

  • Population variance: Success in a well-defined subset of the population may lead to a bit of creep: if the drug helps this group with well-defined symptoms, maybe we should try it on this other group with marginal symptoms. And it doesn’t…but those numbers will still be used in estimating its overall efficacy.

  • Simple chance: This is a hard one to get across to people, I’ve found. But if something is significant at the p=0.05 level, that still means that 1 in 20 experiments with a completely useless drug will still exhibit a significant effect.

  • Statistical fishing: I hate this one, and I see it all the time. The planned experiment revealed no significant results, so the data is pored over and any significant correlation is seized upon and published as if it was intended. See previous explanation. If the data set is complex enough, you’ll always find a correlation somewhere, purely by chance.

Here’s the thing about Lehrer’s article: he’s a smart guy, he knows this stuff. He touches on every single one of these explanations, and then some. In fact, the structure of the article is that it is a whole series of explanations of those sorts. Here’s phenomenon 1, and here’s explanation 1 for that result. But here’s phenomenon 2, and explanation 1 doesn’t work…but here’s explanation 2. But now look at phenomenon 3! Explanation 2 doesn’t fit! Oh, but here’s explanation 3. And on and on. It’s all right there, and Lehrer has explained it.

But that’s where the psychological dimension comes into play. Look at the loaded language in the article: scientists are “disturbed,” “depressed,” and “troubled.” The issues are presented as a crisis for all of science; the titles (which I hope were picked by an editor, not Lehrer) emphasize that science isn’t working, when nothing in the article backs that up. The conclusion goes from a reasonable suggestion to complete bullshit.

Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

I’ve highlighted the part that is true. Yes, science is hard. Especially when you are dealing with extremely complex phenomena with multiple variables, it can be extremely difficult to demonstrate the validity of a hypothesis (I detest the word “prove” in science, which we don’t do, and we know it; Lehrer should, too). What the decline effect demonstrates, when it occurs, is that just maybe the original hypothesis was wrong. This shouldn’t be disturbing, depressing, or troubling at all, except, as we see in his article, when we have scientists who have an emotional or profit-making attachment to an idea.

That’s all this fuss is really saying. Sometimes hypotheses are shown to be wrong, and sometimes if the support for the hypothesis is built on weak evidence or a highly derived interpretation of a complex data set, it may take a long time for the correct answer to emerge. So? This is not a failure of science, unless you’re somehow expecting instant gratification on everything, or confirmation of every cherished idea.

But those last few sentences, where Lehrer dribbles off into a delusion of subjectivity and essentially throws up his hands and surrenders himself to ignorance, is unjustifiable. Early in any scientific career, one should learn a couple of general rules: science is never about absolute certainty, and the absence of black & white binary results is not evidence against it; you don’t get to choose what you want to believe, but instead only accept provisionally a result; and when you’ve got a positive result, the proper response is not to claim that you’ve proved something, but instead to focus more tightly, scrutinize more strictly, and test, test, test ever more deeply. It’s unfortunate that Lehrer has tainted his story with all that unwarranted breast-beating, because as a summary of why science can be hard to do, and of the institutional flaws in doing science, it’s quite good.

But science works. That’s all that counts. One could whine that we still haven’t “proven” cell theory, but who cares? Cell and molecular biologists have found it a sufficiently robust platform to dive ever deeper into how life works, constantly pushing the boundaries of uncertainty.

Have you still got your Christmas tree up?

Then it’s not too late to get this fabulous ornament for it:

i-0c1b31f18811f524b170ea8ef073fc9b-season_of_reason.jpeg

Even if you don’t have a Christmas tree ever or any more, you can still help out with the James Randi Educational Foundation’s fundraising campaign. The JREF has been awarding grants to teachers and students to promote critical thinking, provides lesson plans and curricula, and makes all kinds of tools available to educators, all to help improve the minds of people all around the world. It’s a great cause, and they’re struggling right now like all charities in a bad economy.

I’ve got one of those ornaments on my otherwise entirely squid-based theme of holiday decorations, and it looks great there. The JREF goes well with everything!

How astrology works

You’ve been wondering about that, too, haven’t you? Prepare to be disappointed again, because the source of this bit of egregious misinformation is none other than that raving nutcase, Mike Adams of NaturalNews. He claims that astrology has a scientific basis:

Skeptics must be further bewildered by the new research published in Nature Neuroscience and conducted at Vanderbilt University which unintentionally provides scientific support for the fundamental principle of astrology — namely, that the position of the planets at your time of birth influences your personality.

Hey, Vanderbilt is a good and respectable university. I wonder how they studied the effects of planets on personality. Short answer: they didn’t. And Mike Adams explains it himself.

This study, conducted on mice, showed that mice born in the winter showed a “consistent slowing” of their daytime activity. They were also more susceptible to symptoms that we might call “Seasonal Affective Disorder.”

That’s old news. We’ve known about seasonal rhythms in physiology for a long, long time, and it’s completely unsurprising. It’s also unsurprising that Mike Adams somehow thinks seasons are correlated with the positions of any of the planets other than Earth itself. Because he’s a moron.

Hey, Mike. Think. This is a study from Vanderbilt that shows that known seasonal phenomena, day length, dietary changes (oh, that should get him excited), even temperature can affect one’s metabolism, and that maternal metabolism during pregnancy can have enduring effects on children. This is not the same as saying that the position of Jupiter in the sky or where Pisces is on the horizon can have any effect on your personality.

Oh, but this is Mike Adams, the kook who starts off talking about astrology and then goes into a rant about how cold fusion really works. Thinking isn’t what he does.

How homeopathy works

You’ve been wondering, haven’t you. Good theories involve both substantiating evidence for a phenomenon and an explanation of the mechanism, and homeopathy has had neither: no evidence that it works (and plenty that it doesn’t), and no rational explanation for how it works, unless you count gibberish like “memory of water”. Now that has all changed. The way homeopathy works is nanotechnology.

Homeopathic pills containing naturally occurring metals such as gold, copper and iron retain their potency even when diluted to a nanometre or one-billionth of a metre, states the IIT-Bombay research published in the latest issue of ‘Homeopathy’, a peer-reviewed journal from reputed medical publishing firm Elsevier.

IIT-B’s chemical engineering department bought homeopathic pills from neighbourhood shops, prepared highly diluted solutions and checked these under powerful electron microscopes to find nanoparticles of the original metal.

”Certain highly diluted homeopathic remedies made from metals still contain measurable amounts of the starting material, even at extreme dilutions of 1 part in 10 raised to 400 parts (200C),” said Dr Jayesh Bellare from the scientific team.

Ah, the “reputed” publisher, Elsevier. They don’t say what their reputation is, but I will: they are a reputably venal organization that gouges libraries and buys up journals without concern for quality. If you want one symbol for all that is wrong with science publishing today, you can’t go wrong picking Elsevier.

Anyway, the explanation isn’t an explanation. It simply says that no matter how much you dilute a substance in principle, it’s still going to contain trace contaminants. I’d like to know if they examined the water they used to dilute their “remedy”; odds are good that it contains low concentrations of miscellaneous stuff. Also, doesn’t this mean it wasn’t actually homeopathic, but simply contained a dilute quantity of an active agent? This doesn’t explain how potency would be increased by dilution at all.

Finally, “quantum” is not the only potent word that fails to magically make a quack explanation scientific. Add “nanotechnology” to the list.

Oh, wait, not before I bring my new snake oil to market, the one that contains “quantum nanotechnology”! I’m going to make a fortune!

Sokaling integrative medicine

Funny business, this. Professor John McLachlan corresponded with the organizers of an international conference on integrative medicine, proposing some very peculiar ideas that he wanted to present. They were…intrigued. They asked him to flesh out his concepts in a formal abstract so that they could evaluate whether they were worthy of inclusion in their prestigious meeting, so he did, and here it is.

Abstract

Intensive study of the development of early human embryos indicates that there is a reflexology style homunculus represented in the human body, over the area of the buttocks. This homunculus corresponds to areas of clonal expansion (“Blaschko lines*”), in which compartments of the body have clear ontological relationships with corresponding areas of the posterior flanks. The homunculus is inverted, such that the head is represented in the inferior position, the left buttock corresponds to the right hand side of the body, and the lateral aspect is represented medially. The Blaschko lines mediate energy flows to parent areas, and lead to significant responses to appropriate stimuli. As with reflexology, the “map” responds to needling, as in acupuncture, and to gentle suction, such as cupping. Responses are stronger and of more therapeutic value than those of auricular or conventional reflexology. In some cases, the map can be used for diagnostic purposes. In both therapeutic and diagnostic interventions, a full case history must be taken, in order to define the best methods of treatment. In the presentation, anonymised case histories, “testimonies” and positive outcomes will be presented. The methodology does not lend itself to randomised double blind controlled trials, for obvious reasons.

Obviously, the involvement of a sensitive area of the body poses special challenges. Ethical practice is of significant concern. Informed consent must be obtained from all patients in writing, before either therapeutic or diagnostic procedures are commenced. Although exposure of the gluteal region is recommended, procedures can be carried out using draping if this is required in order to gain patient cooperation. Chaperones or same sex practitioners are recommended in the case of female patients.

Unfortunately, this novel paradigm may meet with closed minds and automatic rejection. Patience and understanding of “closed” mindsets is essential in order to advance this new discovery in a way commensurate with its importance.

*See for example http://dermnetnz.org/pathology/blaschko-lines.html.

I’m deeply disappointed that he didn’t cite my article on Blaschko’s lines, but despite the absence of a boost from my notoriety (OK, maybe it helped that he didn’t mention me), the committee pondered and pondered the obvious rubbish scribbled above, and accepted the presentation. Unfortunately, McLachlan has chickened out and decided not to travel to Jerusalem to stand in front of a bunch of quacks and babble out more nonsense in the same vein. It’s a shame! It would have been so easy — it’s not as if he’d have to actually collect any data.

Besides, I’d really like to see therapeutic ass-cupping become a common alternative medicine practice.

Standards of proof are pretty low at Fox News

Gah, this is an awful and credulously reported story: Child’s Nightmares and Memories Prove Reincarnation. There is no proof there. The story is simple: ordinary child plays video games, draws lots of pictures of airplanes in dogfights and dropping bombs, and has a few night terrors, so the parents leap to the conclusion that he’s a reincarnated WWII pilot. When they contact a carrier crewman from the era, he conveniently provides more details to fill in the story, and soon enough, they’ve got a full blown delusion.

My favorite part? The kid is always signing his drawings as “James”, and they identify a pilot who died in a crash over Japan…whose name was James! Astonishing confirmation! He was signing his crude cartoons of airplanes with the name of a long-dead pilot!

By the way, the name the kid was born with is “James”.

This’ll settle the current atheist/skeptic argument: a poll!

The current silly Skepticon controversy is easily resolved: just vote on it.

How much of a so-called skeptic convention can be about religion?

None 0% (0 votes)

No more than 25% 0% (0 votes)

No more than 50% 0% (0 votes)

Just so long as it isn’t all of it 25% (3 votes)

All of it, why not? 75% (9 votes)

Nicely done. There’s only one choice that isn’t arbitrary and incoherent and unjustifiable; I’d like to see the complainers confront the specific details of their position.

Oh, and by the way, I haven’t escaped Missouri yet — I’m stuck in an airport, waiting to fly out, and facing the prospect of some fierce, nasty, icy weather in Minnesota. I might be holing up in a hotel waiting for the snow and ice to clear tonight.

I had no idea I was stepping into a controversy

It’s such a petty and trivial one, though, I can’t be too concerned. I’m at Skepticon 3, and I just learned tonight that the convention has been a source of dissent…and when I read the argument, I was stunned at how stupid it was. Apparently, Skepticon has too many atheists in it, and is — wait for it — “harming the cause”.

I’m not joking. Jeff Wagg, formerly of the JREF, has a long lament deploring that 3 of the 15 talks are explicitly atheistic, and that JT Eberhard, the organizer, emphasizes the problem of religion too much for it to be True Skeptic™ conference. It’s utterly batty. Some people have this grandiose notion that they have the only acceptable definition of skepticism, and somehow, in some way, religion is excluded from skeptical criticism.

As Reed points out in his IndieSkeptics article, atheists (and free thinkers and secularists and scientific naturalists, etc.) are fighting a cultural war in this country. It’s a very important war, and I’m a combatant as well. Atheists have been bashed and had religion forced on them forever, and it’s shameful to allow it to continue in a country purporting to be “free.” But to conflate atheism with skepticism dilutes atheism and destroys skepticism.

And I fear the damage has already been done. I see a lot of good people leaving the skeptical community because they’re uncomfortable with the tone and disappointed with, frankly, the lack of skepticism presented by many people.

And I say good riddance to those people. If these so-called good skeptics are going to abandon the movement because they’re uncomfortable with people who openly question their superstitious beliefs, then they don’t seem very committed and their departure will be no loss. I also think that the only hypothetical destruction of skepticism going on here is this bizarre insistence that we privilege certain weird notions as being outside the scope of skepticism. Wagg also throws up a strawman or two.

I’m convinced that a litmus test over who’s a skeptic and who isn’t based on religious belief is harmful to both movements.

Absolutely no one has proposed such a litmus test. Even I, loud and obnoxious hard core atheist, have specifically stated there should be no such restriction. Does Wagg really think Randi or DJ Grothe are going to be more snide about religion than I am?

Skepticon does have a strong anti-religion emphasis. So? This is a subject open to criticism, and it’s perfectly fair to apply skepticism to religion as much as we would to dowsing or Bigfoot. If someone had organized a skeptics’ conference with an emphasis on, for instance, quack medicine, I doubt that anyone would have squawked that “it’s harming the cause!”, “it’ll make skeptics who believe in homeopathy uncomfortable”, or “it’s diluting medicine and destroying skepticism”. And if Wagg really feels strongly about reinforcing his narrow vision of what skepticism should be, he’s welcome to organize his own conference. Complaining that someone else has put in the hard work of creating a successful conference because it isn’t the conference Wagg would assemble smacks of pettiness and sour grapes.

The closest thing to a reasonable attempt to describe a boundary putting atheism outside skepticism is this:

I believe that if you equate skepticism with anything other than science, you’ve missed the point. As for Christianity, skepticism has nothing to say except about testable claims associated therein. Bleeding statues? Yes, skepticism comes into play. Jesus rose and is in heaven? Seems unlikely, but there’s not a lot more to say.

This is a common and entirely unbelievable rationalization that I most often hear from theists, and I don’t buy it for a moment. A claim that a magic man rose from the dead and flew up into the sky is certainly something we should be skeptical about! And further, the argument that because it is untestable, it is a statement that skeptics must be neutral about is thoroughly bogus, and opens the door to exempting the most ludicrous, poorly justified, crazy claims from skeptical scrutiny. It’s also dishonest about Christianity; it certainly does make specific historical claims that are subject to assessment (and several of the talks today did just that), it proposes phenomena that violate our knowledge of how the world works, and it lacks credible evidential justification for its central ideas.

It also takes an awesome amount of arrogance to declare certain subjects off-limits to inquiry, and that even considering them damages the skeptical movement. That also requires a truly astonishing lack of self-awareness.

JT has also responded to this nonsense. I think we can tell where the future of skepticism lies.

Ever want your own Zener cards?

I didn’t think so. I never did, either. But now at least you can get them for free: the JREF has a teaching module on ESP that you can download.

It’s pretty good. The module strongly emphasizes good record keeping and rigor, which are important skills for young investigators. I was a little disappointed in the bit about statistics—it basically tells the students to use a table to look up values, don’t worry about the math behind it, and trust us, getting 8 hits in 25 trials does not mean you have ESP. I would think the very best first module to throw at students would be an introduction to statistics; have the kids throw dice or flip coins and tally results, and learn what randomness really looks like and how we test for it.

Particularly if you’re going to critically examine parapsychology, an understanding of how subtle biases can lead to statistically significant results is a good idea, because I suspect that the casual fudging of a few numbers is the foundation of the whole field. Just look at Daryl Bem’s work to see what I mean.