The heroic Andy Wakefield

The New York Times has a long profile of Andrew Wakefield. It’s not at all laudatory (read the last paragraph in particular), but it does include quotes from people who regard Wakefield as a hero…and even something more.

“To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one,” says J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a group that disputes vaccine safety. “He’s a symbol of how all of us feel.”

Handley, of course, is a certifiable kook and an awful excuse for a human being. I am amused that he sees Wakefield as a Jesus, though; there doesn’t seem to be much self-sacrifice in Wakefield’s past or any prospect of martyrdom in his future. Jesus did say “suffer the little children,” though, which we can quotemine to apply appropriately to these promoters of childhood mortality.

After reading about callous fraud Wakefield, though, you need some context. How about this?

Europe, especially France, has been hit by a major outbreak of measles, which the U.N. health agency is blaming on the failure to vaccinate all children.

The World Health Organization said Thursday that France had 4,937 reported cases of measles between January and March — compared with 5,090 cases during all of 2010. In all, more than 6,500 cases have been reported in 33 European nations.

“This is a lot of cases, to put it mildly. In past years we’ve had very few cases,” said Rebecca Martin, head of WHO’s office in Copenhagen for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization.

“There’s been a buildup of children who have not been immunized over the years,” she said. “It’s almost like a threshold. When you have enough people who have not been immunized, then outbreaks can occur.”

Wakefield’s body count is much higher than Jesus’s or Mandela’s.

Stop drinking that fake water!

The world is full of people selling products that are nothing but advertising, like those silly “power balance” bracelets that do not give you either power or balance. Add another one to the list: Real Water. Did you know that going through a pipe strips water of its electrons? That lots of the foods we eat are lacking electrons? Well, Real Water is good for you because it adds extra electrons! The Guardian has an excellent take-down of their claims.

Now the real question is whether an expose by some science nerd will outweigh celebrity endorsements by Paul Oakenfold, Melanie Brown, and Chad Kagy. Anyone want to take any bets on whether Real Water will collapse into bankruptcy now that their fraud is revealed? Nah, not me either.

By the way, Real Water hates ORAC. No, not that one — the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Test, because they say it doesn’t do a good job of measuring how powerful Real Water with Electrons is at clearing free radicals.

Support Planned Parenthood on Good Friday

We have a weekend of reason and lunacy coming up. On the reason side, atheists will be gathering in Iowa to discuss science and a sensible interpretation of the universe, taking advantage of a holiday none of us find particularly interesting. On the other side, that holiday celebrating the magical ‘death’ and imaginary resurrection of a weird Jewish mystic is regarded as also a good time to come out and oppress people. As is traditional, mobs of fanatics will turn out on Good Friday to surround local women’s clinics and harass and threaten the patients. Good Friday is not a good day to get a pap smear.

Planned Parenthood is well aware of this nasty tradition, and they are asking people of good will to come out and stand in solidarity with women looking for health care and reproductive freedom. There will be a rally at the Highland Park Clinic in St Paul tomorrow — they are asking people to register for two hour shifts. They are unfortunately marred by a couple of multifaith services, but stand with them anyway.

The new palmistry

I am a gorgeous hunk of virile manhood. How do I know? I looked at my fingers.

Research has shown that men whose ring finger on their right hand is longer than their index finger are regarded as better looking by women, possibly because their faces are more symmetrical.

There is no link, however, between this finger length and how alluring women find a man’s voice or his body odour, the study found.

Guys, you may be looking at my picture on the sidebar and thinking there must be something wrong here…but no, I assure you, my right ring finger is distinctly longer than my right index finger, and I will waggle that in your face and tell you to ignore the schlubby, hairy, homely middle-aged guy attached to that hand — the fingers don’t lie.

Right now I know a lot of you fellows are staring at your hand, and some of you are noticing that you have a long index finger, a sure sign that you are a hideous beast, unlike me. And others have nice long ring fingers, and you get to join me in my club of attractive manly men, no matter what the rest of your body looks like. We’ll get together and make the ladies swoon.

Except, well…I’ve been looking at some of the data, and I’m distinctly unimpressed.

It’s not the idea that digit ratios vary, though: that looks to be well established, with observations first made in the 19th century that men have relatively longer ring fingers, while women have relatively longer index fingers. There does seem to be an entirely plausible (but small) side-effect of testosterone/estrogen on digit development. There is even some rather noisy looking data that suggests that we can use digit length ratios as a proxy for embryonic testosterone/estrogen exposure.

The problem, unfortunately, is that there seems to be a little industry of scientific palmists who are busily cross-correlating these digit ratios with just about anything, and I think they are drifting off into measuring random noise. It’s amazing what can get published in respectable journals, and subsequently get loads of attention from the press. Look at the methods for this study of attractiveness, for instance.

The team studied 49 Caucasian men aged between 18 and 33 years of age. They measured their finger ratio, got them to recite into a voice recorder, took a photograph of them with a neutral expression and got the non-smokers to wear cotton pads under their armpits for a day. The men were then evaluated for attractiveness, facial symmetry and masculinity by 84 women, and the results are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Wow. Tiny little sample size, probably drawn from the usual limited population of college students, one straightforward objective measure (the digit ratio), and a subjective evaluation…and from this the authors try to infer a general rule. And sometimes they get a positive correlation with one thing, and no correlations with other things.

This is not only rather uninteresting, it’s also not very reliable. But it’s easy to do!

But wait, you might say, statistics is a powerful tool, and maybe those correlations are awesomely solid. This could be, so I went looking for papers that showed some of the data, so I could get a feel for how robust these effects were. Here, for example is a chart comparing number of the number of children to the ratio of index finger length to ring finger length (2D:4D ratio) for English men, where we’d expect low ratios to be a consequence of higher testosterone and therefore more virility, and for English women, where we’d expect a reversal, because fertile womanly women would of course have more estrogen. And it works!

i-8503b112c3131577f253e4a4c1fc90d7-digitratio1.jpeg

Look at the slopes of those lines, and they actually fit the prediction. But then…look at the actual data points, and I think you can see that knowing the length of the fingers of any individual tells you absolutely nothing about how many children they have. You can guess why: it’s because there are a great many factors that influence how fecund you are, and small variations in hormones are only going to be a tiny component of such decisions.

You may also notice the outliers. Look at that man with most womanly hands of the entire group, having a 2D:4D ratio of 1.1 — he also has the second largest brood of the whole sample, with 5 kids. And the woman with man-hands with ratio somewhere around 0.87? Four kids.

It’s also a good thing that these data are collected in two separate graphs, because if you put the men and the women on the same chart, they’d overlap so much that you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. While the sex difference may have been documented since the 19th century, it’s clearly not a big and obvious difference, and the overlap between the sexes is huge.

Or how about these data?

i-6306184888fb70c3bc4cf6c2e90a9252-digitratio2.jpeg

That’s the splat you get when you compare 2D:4D ratio in women against another classic magic number associated with attractiveness, the waist-hip ratio. A correlation emerges out of that mess, too, and it turns out that more estrogen exposure (as indirectly measured by looking at digit lengths) is correlated with relatively thicker waists. Sort of. I guess. Yeah, it’s statistics all right.

How these sorts of data are interpreted is to see them as suggesting the presence of sexually anatagonistic genes, that is, genes that respond to high testosterone with expression patterns that are beneficial to males, and genes that respond to high estrogen with expression that favorably biases morphology towards typically female variants. I can believe that such phenomena exist, and that doesn’t bother me in the slightest; what does, though, is this I’ve-got-a-hammer-so-everything-looks-like-a-nail approach, using an easily measured metric that is indirect and variable, and the neglect of the particular for the useless general. This is clearly a situation where testosterone/estrogen levels are only one relatively minor variable, and the more interesting factors would be allelic variations, genetic background, and social/cultural effects. But hey, we can measure fingers with calipers, easy, and then we can through questionnaires or easy, fast, noninvasive tests at a handy population, and look! Numbers! Must be science, then.

Except that we don’t really learn very much from it, other than that I’m really beautiful, despite what I actually look like.

Ferdenzi C,
Lemaître J-F,
Leongómez JD,
Craig Roberts SC (2011)
Digit ratio (2D:4D) predicts facial, but not voice or body odour, attractiveness in men.
Published online before print April 20, 2011, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2011.0544 Proc. R. Soc. B

Manning JT, Barley L, Walton J, Lewis-Jones DI, Trivers RL, Singh D, Thornhill R, Rohde P, Bereczkei T, Henzi P, Soler M, Szwed A. (2000) The 2nd:4th digit ratio, sexual dimorphism, population differences, and reproductive success. evidence for sexually antagonistic genes? Evol Hum Behav. 21(3):163-183.

Andrew Sullivan at his most vacuous

Chris Matthews gathered a small flock of believers to talk about whether Hell exists or not. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be bothered to find someone who wasn’t delusional to sit on his panel, so we’ve just got a gassy series of empty statements like rarefied flatulence that say nothing at all except that they’re pretty darned sure they’re all experts on the afterlife. Couldn’t they have invited even on atheist so that I’d be unable to dismiss the whole pointless exercise as the wanking of idiots?

If you can’t bear the thought of listening to this nonsense, Amanda Marcotte has done a fine job of extracting the subtext.

Chiropractic will fix your junk DNA!

I’m really interested in DNA and genes and genetics, so I was of course attracted to this website that explains a lot of secret information about DNA. Did you know that all the problems in your life are caused by a misaligned DNA code? The author of this site, Tom OM, is a German chiropractor, and I guess it’s a short jump from cracking spines to aligning DNA, because he promises to fix everything in your life just by activating your DNA, whatever that means.

That site is just a teaser, though. You have to give them your name and email address, and then you get to read his seven part introduction to the science. How could I resist? I did it, so now you don’t have to, and I will spill the secrets right here.

What I discovered is that once I attune myself and awaken my DNA, the hidden secret functions of my junk DNA will be activated, and you will be able to “manifest anything you desired in your life, live a life without drama, create your ideal physical body, become immune to all dis-ease, and REVERSE the aging process.” Awesome.

And there’s more! We mundane people only use 2 strands of DNA, but we all have 12 strand DNA. Awesomer.

The six pairs of strands are called the 12-strand Spiritual DNA. In the 12-strand system, the first pair is physical and the other five pairs of strands are non-physical energy imprints in the human energy field.

1st Pair: governs the creation of all aspects of our physical body. It controls our genetic patterning, our physical body, our predisposition to certain health conditions, our aging process, our metabolism and much more.

2nd Pair: governs our emotional body. It creates and controls our genetic emotional profile as well as our predisposition to certain emotional conditions. For example, it governs our EQ (our emotional intelligence), determines whether we will be a type A or a type B personality and determines whether we will be introverted or extroverted.

3rd Pair: governs our mental body. It controls our genetic mental profile and determines whether our mental energy be directed toward logical, linear, rational thinking (as in a scientist or an engineer) or toward the intuitive, artistic expression. Furthermore, it controls whether we will be primarily optimistic or primarily pessimistic.

4th Pair: governs our soul. It controls our karmic patterning and our genetic soul profile. Karmic patterning refers to the karmic pre-conditioning that we have brought into this lifetime to work with and master. Specifically, it includes karmic wounds, issues or lessons that were not resolved or completed in past lifetime experiences and which will re-manifest in this lifetime to give us with an opportunity to resolve them.

Genetic soul profile governs our soul’s mission. It determines what soul level archetypal pattern we will have. For example will we be destined to be a leader, healer, builder, teacher, student, warrior, monastic, parent, etc? Furthermore, it contains a profile of the experiences we are to have, the wisdom we are to develop, the spiritual strengths we are to master, the service we are to provide to others and the path we are to take to find pure joy.

5th Pair: governs our soul cluster and controls the movement and timing of specific souls within a soul cluster to seek and find each other to the mutual fulfillment of their souls purpose.

6th Pair: governs all of creation and aligns your 12-strand DNA with the divine will.

Before you get too excited, though, realize that 10 of those strands have been de-activated. You have to turn them on. How, you ask? Wait, I say.

First you have to grasp our history.

As far as you know, we are on our way back to the creator. We were originally angelic beings, which out of some reasons and free will choices left our paradise to experience in the dense material world. In this evolutionary process of going back to God/Creator through cycles the human race was at several times in a high developed state of multidimensional consciousness – like Atlanteans – but was unplugged from their power through dark alien forces called Annunaki (Gods of the Sumerians) which intended to gain and maintain their power. So they first decided to do a genetic manipulation, which created the split brain. This separated the analytical part of a person’s reasoning from their intuitive, emotional part and the problems associated from this can still be seen today. They then unplugged 10 of the 12 strands of DNA but left them there. Some of this is the chemical DNA that science calls “junk” DNA, the DNA that is just sitting there inside your cells, the other is the etheric DNA that exists in higher harmonics of frequency that you can’t see with the naked eye. Once the 10 etheric strands of DNA were unplugged, humans that would come after this would have a terrible time deciphering thought. So these beings that called themselves gods then introduced language. Language separated tribes and peoples. Think of how much easier life would be if there was only one universal language! And so, humans started having to have verbal commands to understand and perform certain tasks and this is still very apparent to this day. Look at how the militaries of the world accomplish this with “orders”. The next decision was to change the humans’ DNA structure to suppress psychic abilities and make the unconscious mind almost unavailable. So the 10 DNA strands were unraveled and implants were placed in the etheric bodies to keep the strands from re-fusing. The strands were also disconnected from the endocrine system in the physical body which stopped the creation of a chemical which activates the pituitary, pineal, and hypothalamus glands. Thus, these glands have since shrunken from non-use, and scientists can’t figure out what they are used for. This is why most people currently only use less than 10% of their brain. Only a few individuals retained the use of these glands in future generations – these individuals carried the special gene that makes them natural psychics, mystics, or shamans. The general population of mankind was left with the ability to activate the glands and 10 DNA strands, but only if they were dedicated and aware of how to do it. And this is what DNA Activation Power does – re-activates these DNA strands so a person can realize their true genetic potential and original blueprint. And activating your DNA will also enable you to finally have 100% brain utilization. It’s a very interesting history – that of humankind, and I encourage you to experience the knowledge through your own diligent research. Our race was not only affected by genetic tampering and experimentation but was also almost totally decimated by distortions in the planetary grids. You see, the Earth is a living organism as well and brings in energy from Source just like any living organism or planetary structure. We as humans living on the Earth, can only bring into our bodies the frequencies that Earth can bring in from Source. If the Earth’s grids are damaged, then every life form living on Earth will have a damaged DNA template. Planetary grid distortions of the 3470 BC “Babble-on” Massacre caused mutation in the human DNA template that shortened human life span, blocked higher sensory perception, caused loss of race memory, and scrambled our original language patterns, which are built upon DNA fire letter sequencing. Our race has been amnesiac, dying young, and “babbling on” in rhetorical conflict ever since. This historical event was recorded as the biblical “Tower of Babel” story.

We stupid scientists have no idea what the pineal, pituitary, ahd hypothalamus do, you know, and we use less than 10% of our brains and only 3% of our DNA. So we need to use all that power, somehow.

How you ask, how? Well, now I would tell you, except I don’t know. I have to buy some CDs first. When you give your name and email address, this is what you get: a list of CDs you can buy to attune your DNA and become a higher being. So the cost of switching on my DNA is, and I’m just listing the CD prices here, $39 + $49 + $69 + $89 + $99 + $111 + $33 + $19, or $508. I have this vague suspicion that if I actually ordered all of those CDs, there would be a few others that would suddenly appear, demanding the attention of my wallet and my activated DNA.

I’m stupid and unenlightened. I just can’t cough up that much cash, even if it does magically turn on my junk DNA.

We’re breaking Hoffmann

He’s melting down fast.

So I wrote this piece criticizing R. Joseph Hoffmann’s weird praise of martyrs, and today I wondered if maybe he had notice, so I checked his blog. I think he noticed. His response is ironic and unreflective, however…and amusing.

I wrote that we ought to reject the whole concepty of martyrdom, and that it isn’t just gods we should reject, but also these peculiar notions of the agonizing death as a virtue that are really born out of an Iron Age morality. Hoffmann’s latest comment is a rant about atheist tantrums, calls the New Atheists “negative,” “abrasive,” “unsophisticated,” and “philistines,” and singles me out as a “super-jerk”.

Hmmm. Speaking of tantrums…somebody give that man a mirror.

By the way, it’s a minor point, but has anyone else noticed that R. Joseph Hoffman never links to anyone else? Besides being something he has in common with creationists, it also suggests that he doesn’t understand the medium he’s using.

Here’s another good sally against New Oxonian foolishness, from Advocatus Atheist.

Botanical Wednesday: Acrobatic trans-species sex!

Let’s turn this into a kinky porn blog with a titillating photo of a gecko servicing a Trochetia flower.

i-419844f7342b4aeb6830c4068c545978-trochetia.jpeg

What do we call this? It can’t be bestiality or zoophilia, since this is actually trans-kingdom.

You know that I’m on a slippery slope here…once you start flashing photos of Animalia getting it on with Plantae, the next step in degeneracy is dirty talk about horizontal gene transfer between whole domains.

Ken Ham put to shame

Oh, sure, Ken Ham wants to build a life-sized Noah’s Ark…but he’s trying to get tens of millions of dollars of tax breaks to build a giant ark that won’t even float. Johan Huibers is building his own version, and even plans to sail it around the world. Sorry, but the video is entirely in Dutch, but at least you can witness his sophisticated building techniques.

Do the Dutch authorities demand some kind of inspection before they allow so-called boats to be launched? Because that thing looks like it will barely make it into the harbor before it capsizes.

Ken Ham needs to meet this challenge: I want to see him out there with a nail gun, tacking sticks and boards together with his own money, and then I want him to set sail into the Atlantic and meet Johan Huibers halfway, where they can argue theology.