Bad science? It’s OK—just put him in charge of women’s health

Clearly, Bush is not going to drift quietly into oblivion. Majikthise and Feministing report that his administration is appointing a certifiable kook to run the federal program that oversees family planning and reproductive health. His qualifications seem to be that he’s fanatical about abstinence, to the point of making stuff up.

At the Annual Abstinence Leadership Conference in Kansas, Keroack defended abstinence (in an aptly titled talk, “If I Only Had a Brain”) by claiming that sex causes people to go through oxytocin withdrawal which in turn prevents people from bonding in relationships. Seriously.

[Keroack] explained that oxytocin is released during positive social interaction, massage, hugs, “trust” encounters, and sexual intercourse. “It promotes bonding by reducing fear and anxiety in social settings, increasing trust and trustworthiness, reducing stress and pain, and decreasing social aggression,” he said.

But apparently if you’ve had sex with too many people you use up all that oxytocin: “People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.” Hear that? Too many sexual partners and you’ll never love again!

I know that oxytocin is thought to have a strong role in bonding, is triggered for secretion in many situations—sex, labor, lactation, etc.—but these claims that you can have permanent depletion of oxytocin levels by too much sex? Never heard of that. I hit the physiology texts in my office; no support. I tried the online databases, and hoo-boy is there a lot of stuff on oxytocin; but nothing I could find to support those claims. Keroack doesn’t seem to have published anything on this subject in the peer-reviewed literature, either—the only source cited for it is something called “A Special Report from the Abstinence Medical Council”. Strangely, the only instances Google turns up of this “Abstinence Medical Council” is as the publisher of this report, and as a part of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, run by Leslee Unruh, unqualified hack (and also organizer of creepy “purity balls”). I think I’m right to suspect the source is ginned-up propaganda for a quack organization.

So there isn’t any evidence for his claims. Is it logical? Oxytocin has complicated and sometimes conflicting effects, so it would be awfully hard to pin down any clear consequences of multiple partners on pair bonding without lots of data, but on the face of it, no, none of what he says makes much sense.

Emotional pain causes our bodies to produce an elevated level of endorphins which in turn lowers the level of oxytocin. Therefore, relationship failure leads to pain which leads to elevated endorphins which leads to lower oxytocin the result of which is a lower ability to bond. Many in this increased state of emotional pain and lower oxytocin seek sex as a substitute for love which inevitably leads to another failed relationship, and so, the cycle continues.

But sex increases oxytocin levels! If he’s postulating that lower oxytocin levels are causal in relationship problems (I’m going with the flow, OK? I don’t buy into the simple chemical explanation of complex relationships myself), then it seems to me that lots of mindless sex would be the corrective prescription.

But then he’s postulating some kind of mysterious depletion or desensitization if you get too much oxytocin. That doesn’t make much sense either, because women are going to get their biggest surges of oxytocin when 1) they go into labor, and 2) they lactate. If ODing on oxytocin diminishes one’s ability to form a permanent bond, then shouldn’t childbirth be a major cause of divorce? There are also oxytocin surges in both men and women during orgasm. Does he also counsel married couples to avoid too much sex? How much is too much? How would he know?

Yeah, he’s waving his hands about interactions between endorphins and oxytocin, but seriously: he’s got no evidence for what he’s claiming, and it doesn’t make sense to claim that brain chemistry on that level senses whether you’ve had sex 10 times with one person or one time each with ten people. He’s making it up as he goes along.

This guy is simply not credible. It looks to me like the Bush administration is trying to throw a sop to the religious right after the defeat of the South Dakota abortion ban by appointing a reliable ideologue with connections to the insane Unruh anti-abortion/abstinence machine to a position where he can interfere with women’s reproductive health. Let’s hope the Democrats will show some spine and squelch this continued nonsense of using fake science to support bad policy.

Welcome to an American institution of higher learning

Rob Helpy-Chalk has a horrific video of a student being repeatedly shocked with a taser…for not exiting a UCLA library quickly enough. If you’d rather not listen to a hand-cuffed young man screaming in pain, you could just read the story. There are a few campus police officers who need to be sacked immediately and publicly; there are no excuses for their abuse of power.

Some like red meat, some like pablum

Zeno sent me this link to an article by Jon Carroll—Carroll is one of those “eh, so what” members of the godless community, who probably rolls his eyes at those uppity atheists who get so obnoxious about the role of religion in our culture, while at the same time recognizing that there are some problems that need to be fought…one of those annoyingly tepid unbelievers, anyway. And that’s OK. I actually agree with a big chunk of what he writes. This point, in particular, is one that’s important:

But there’s one idea that comes up in these discussions that I want to talk about; it’s the notion that “religion is responsible for most of the war and suffering in the world,” or however it’s phrased. You know, the Crusades, the Inquisition, colonialism cloaked in Christianity, bigotry against women cloaked in Islam or Hinduism — the list is pretty long.

I don’t believe that it’s religion’s fault. I believe that human nature is responsible for war and torture and intolerance. I believe that we are beasts, and that every institution we set up reflects our bestial nature. If we drag God into it, it’s because we feel shame for our actions. “Sure, seems bad to kill babies, but God told me to do it, so it must be OK.”

[Read more…]

If I were in his position, I’d ask my students to please shut up

This story about the wingnut history teacher, David Paszkiewicz, just gets more and more amusing and sad. Lippard has comments from students defending the guy, and while I know that a lot of high school students are immature, these are damning. Kearny High School officials ought to be very concerned that their teacher and students put the place in a very bad light.

Nature publishes a crank letter

This week’s issue of Nature contains a bizarre letter from a Polish creationist, forester, and member of the Polish parliament. His credentials notwithstanding, it is a very silly diatribe that makes a series of false claims—claims that are trivial to dismiss, but in that fine tradition of the Gish gallop and Hovind’s rambling free-association eructations, he makes a lot of them. A whole lot of them; all just plain naked assertions with no evidence to back them up, because the evidence, if he’d bothered to discuss it, contradicts him. Even the title reveals his ignorance of how science works.

Rather than trying to dismantle it piece by piece, I’ve just added links to his letter that lead to short, simple refutations of his claims.

Creationism, evolution: nothing has been proved

Maciej Giertych

In your News story “Polish scientists fight creationism” (Nature 443, 890–891; 2006 doi:10.1038/443890c), you incorrectly state that I have called for the “inclusion of creationism in Polish biology curricula”. As well as being a member of the European Parliament, I am a scientist — a population geneticist with a degree from Oxford University and a PhD from the University of Toronto — and I am critical of the theory of evolution as a scientist, with no religious connotation. It is the media that prefer to consider my comments as religiously inspired, rather than to report my stated position accurately.

I believe that, as a result of media bias, there seems to be total ignorance of new scientific evidence against the theory of evolution. Such evidence includes race formation (microevolution), which is not a small step in macroevolution because it is a step towards a reduction of genetic information and not towards its increase. It also includes formation of geological strata sideways rather than vertically, archaeological and palaeontological evidence that dinosaurs coexisted with humans, a major worldwide catastrophe in historical times, and so on.

We know that information exists in biology, and is transferred over generations through the DNA/RNA/protein system. We do not know its origin, but we know it exists, can be spoiled by mutations, but never improves itself spontaneously. No positive mutations have ever been demonstrated — adaptations to antibiotics or herbicides are equivalent to immunological adaptation to diseases, and not a creation of a new function.

We keep on searching for natural explanations of everything in nature. If we have no explanations we should say so, and not claim that an unproven theory is a fact.

I’d love to know how this piece of ignorant dreck managed to get published. Is Nature concerned that they’re always publishing stuff from smart people, so they’ve committed to a policy of affirmative action for idiots, just to give them a chance?

Deepak Chopra and his magic love god

Chopra.

Deepak Chopra is a fraud who probably makes at least ten times my salary, who gets invited onto talk shows and news programs to spout his opinions, whose books are read by millions as if they actually provide any insight…and the guy has the brains of a turnip. It’s just sad. Have you no shame, Ariana Huffington?

His latest attempt to explain himself (an effort which is to reason as cat-strangling is to art) is a poor critique of Dawkins’ The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It promises to be part one. When I was in my twenties, I had a very difficult extraction of my wisdom teeth, and that promise reminded me of what the dentist said, after he he had literally knelt on the armrests of the chair, wielding a hammer and chisel against my tooth…”Well, that’s the first one done.” I’m sure you all know that awful sinking feeling as you complete one ugly chore, only to realize that there’s more to come.

There isn’t much to his argument, fortunately, so I’ll just pluck out one representative piece of it. This is a familiar complaint: I call it the “Well, you can’t see love in your fancy microscope, now can you, Dr Smarty Pants?” argument.

Is science the only route to knowledge? Obviously not. I know that my mother loved me all her life, as I love my own children. I feel genius in great works of art. None of this knowledge is validated by science. I have seen medical cures that science can’t explain, some seemingly triggered by faith. The same is true of millions of other people. I know that I am conscious and have a self, even though Dawkins—along with many arch materialists—doesn’t believe that consciousness is real or that the self is anything but a chemical illusion created in the brain. By Dawkins’ reasoning a mother’s love is no more real than God as neither can be empirically quantified.

Ho hum. You can sort of see the wheels turning in the poor sap’s head: he’s got this idea that Science is men in white lab coats with needles and instruments and computers, and he is surely convinced that they had nothing to do with his momma loving him, and of course they didn’t. But then, his naive view of meddling scientism has nothing to do with what the godless and Dawkins are talking about. We’re just saying that love is a natural property between human beings, no deity required. I would just ask him a few questions.

Is he, Deepak Chopra, a human being? Is he real?

Was his mother a human being? Was she real?

Can human beings feel love for one another here in the real world?

The answers, I would hope, would all be “yes” (although with a wacked-out flake like Chopra, one can never tell; he might answer “Unicorns,” “Vibrations,” and “Quantum” to the questions, but at least then I’ll have cause to ask that he be committed.) Then I would say that all people like Dawkins are saying is that we’re dealing with natural phenomena between natural agents in the natural world, so yes, we can observe it, test it, measure it, and believe it…no problem. Dawkins and I are most definitely not denying the existence of love, nor are we advancing this strange idea that other properties of the mind, like consciousness, do not exist.

It’s a bad argument when you have to mischaracterize your opponents that grossly to make a point.

I would also turn his worries around. Do you think a mother’s love and consciousness and art need to be validated by religion? Religion has nothing to do with those experiences; it offers nothing but unfounded, contradictory assertions that it contributes; it adds nothing to our understanding of mind or love or art. All of his complaints can be reversed right back at the superstitious nonsense of religion with far more accuracy than they can be applied to science.

Not that any of this will make the slightest impression on that turnip. He’ll just go on making stuff up, selling lots of goofy books, and appearing on television. And, of course, he’ll go on to inflict on us another vacuous cavil against a book he doesn’t comprehend.

The Koufaxes are much more respectable

I see that Phil and I are going to be in competition: we’ve both been nominated in the new Best Science Blog category of the Weblog Awards. This is one of those awards I don’t quite get: apparently, the organizers will just choose a subset of the nominated blogs in some way or another, and I seem to recall that voting is weird, too—you get to vote once a day in each category. It’s also run by a very conservative group blog that I’ve only interacted with because there is a loud-mouthed putz of a creationist in the group…I will be very surprised if a certain cranky liberal evolutionist gets his name pulled out of that hat.

The voice of David Paszkiewicz

Remember that fundie history teacher who was caught on tape? One of the recordings is now online. I haven’t listened to the whole thing—the quality is terrible, and it’s a typical high school classroom that is in a noisy uproar—but you do hear him nattering on about Satan and the Bible and sin and so forth; apparently, the “Scriptures aren’t religion, they are the foundation of all of the world’s major religions”, and he claims evolution isn’t science.

I’m not sure what he’s teaching.

Dave, an audio engineer, has provided an amazingly cleaned-up version of the recording. Listen to that one.