Pharyngula

Our illness is their profit

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 09:28:37 -0500

Have you ever walked around an 19th century (or earlier) graveyard? It gives you a depressing snapshot of the old reality: so many young women dead in childbirth, so many children reaped by diseases. We've been fortunate, we residents of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that so many of those lethal conditions are treatable, and we're mostly able to live without fear of our children dying in our arms. But here in the United States, we may have been living in a brief window of time in which treatments are both available and affordable, and are moving into an era where they're available, but only the lucky top few percent are actually available to take advantage them.

I'm one of those lucky ones: I've got a good secure job with adequate health insurance. I had my own little health scare a year and a half ago, and I obediently marched into the hospital for a full battery of the most up-to-date treatments, and I walked back out with almost all of the expenses fully covered by my insurance. I could even urge everyone to get checked out at the slightest twinge. But this isn't true for everyone.

Take, for example, Kevin Zelnio: a smart guy with an advanced degree, working as a writer and scientist-at-large, relatively young and healthy, with a young family — and he's uninsured, like almost 50 million Americans. When they get a cough or a nagging ache, they can't just go to the doctor to get it checked out, to prevent something more severe developing. Even the most basic and most essential of preventive medicine is prohibitively expensive.

When I started my family 6 years ago, I was on a path to a career in research and teaching. We had amazing health insurance through my institution and my wife and children-to-be were generously covered, no-questions-asked by the state of Pennsylvania during, and a year after, the pregnancies. We never saw a bill. After I got "real jobs" upon completing my Masters degree, I entered a grey zone of contract teaching and research employment at universities. With a decent, regular salary we were ineligible for state aid, yet didn't make enough to afford extra costs. Furthermore, the quality of the insurance kept lowering until I wasn't even sure what I was paying for - even as the premium costs were rising.
It reached rock bottom last Spring when we attempted to actually use our insurance that I bought for $1400 every six months while a contract lecturer and beginning PhD student at a North Carolinian university. My boy was starting Kindergarten and needed to be current on his vaccines. Of course, both kids needed to be current, so we took them in one-by-one, got their shots and check-ups, handed over the insurance information, paid our co-pay and went on our way. Never thinking about it, assuming that insurance would do the job we paid them to do.
Exactly 6 months later we received bills, after I no longer had insurance (I had to leave my phd for variety of reasons), and addressed to our kids' names and not mine, the policy holder, for substantial amounts. Apparently, my daughter owed over $400 and my son owed over $1600 to the doctor office, which was the net left over after the insurance contributed about $200 for each visit.

The Zelnios are paying more for simple vaccinations and check-ups than I had to personally cough up for a week of cardiac care and surgery in a hospital. That is a deep injustice. That is wrong. That shouldn't be happening in what we arrogantly call the richest country on earth, but it is. And you don't get to claim that people in these situations "deserve" it.

Most of the uninsured in this country aren't lazy, freeloading hobos who don't wanna work. They span a wide variety of demographics. As a 30 something, white male with advanced college degree who works full time as a self-employed consultant and writer are you surprised that I cannot afford health insurance for my family? In fact, the majority of uninsured are in my age range and are full or part time workers earning incomes above 100% the federal poverty level. The fact of the matter for many of the uninsured is that employment-sponsored coverage has been in decline due to the escalating costs of health care. Employers can't remain competitive and pay double the costs they were paying a decade ago for insuring their workers.

The uninsured are locked out of basic health maintenance: now imagine a crisis, a life-threatening illness striking one of your kids. The Zelnios don't have to imagine, it happened; read the whole thing.

This is madness. All this country has is this paltry compromise called Obamacare, which doesn't even touch the fundamental problems of our rapacious insurance industry and complacent medical system, and the Republicans want to revoke even that. The people who are the heart of this country are driven into bankruptcy while the people who are little more than parasitic tumors, the obscenely wealthy, flourish. That is not a formula for survival.

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Friday Cephalopod: NUMBERLESS HOSTS!

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:47:47 -0500

You will not escape the swarm.

(via NatGeo)

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Dear Jezebel

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:46:17 -0500

There's a reason I promote atheism and skepticism coupled with feminism, and it's not because I'm trying to foist a feminist ideology on skepticism. It's because skepticism drives me to consider discrimination and injustice as wrong, not just in an abstract moral sense, but unjustifiable and invalid. If I am in any sense a feminist, it is because I am a skeptic, not vice versa. And I think the best way to achieve equality for women, and for minorities of all kinds, is to view the world rationally, empirically, and as objectively as possible. It's the people who try to justify everything with their biases and gut feelings and falsified opinions that have gotten us in our current mess.

So it really pains me to see the website Jezebel take a big step backwards and publish a ghastly gullible bit of fluff that endorses nonsense, titled "Worth It: A Homeopathic Pain Reliever That Actually Works".

Sorry, but it doesn't.

The author thinks it does, but mild pain can be a highly subjective phenomenon, and a little delusion goes a long way in persuading someone to ignore a sensation. The stuff she was playing with is called Arnica, and it's based on an herbal remedy that's supposed to have pain-relieving qualities, similar to aspirin. homeopathic arnica has been tested in double-blind, controlled studies, and as you might guess, when the patient doesn't have the preconception that the little pill will cure their pain, it doesn't cure the pain. It's indistinguishable from placebo.

These pills contain 30c arnica, lactose, and sucrose. 30c is the dilution: the arnica is diluted to one part in 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This is the equivalent of 1ml of arnica dispersed into a cube 100 light years on a side. There ain't no arnica in it. It's a sugar pill.

The author also plugs arnica gel, which is not homeopathic, but it is a bit vague about the concentration; it's a 7% solution of I-don't-know-what. This could do something. Arnica contains thymol, which is fungicidal and antibiotic. It's effect on pain has been tested in double-blind, controlled studies, with ambiguous results: one study finds a weak analgesic effect, but recommends it be used together with aspirin (which had a stronger effect). Another study found that arnica actually increased pain. This isn't too surprising, either: "arnica" is a plant, the active agent, whatever it is, hasn't been identified or purified, so what people are getting is a variable assortment of complex molecules in variable concentrations.

Maybe it actually works. I wouldn't be surprised — after all, willow bark extracts were also found to alleviate pain. But science tracked down the active ingredient in that willow bark, acetylsalicylic acid, and have been able to work with the pure agent and also analyze the mechanism of action. Arnica? Who knows. Why people are willing to slather on a mystery mix of miscellaneous plant toxins, but get all squeamish at the idea of pharmaceutical chemicals, is a total mystery to me.

But that doesn't matter. What we've got here is one author credulously and enthusiastically peddling a homeopathic nostrum on the basis of subjective personal anecdotes. An n of 1, no controls, no blind experiments, just one person pushing boxes of sugar pills at $8.29 each. And on top of all that, read the comments: lots of people are pushing back and explaining that homeopathy can't work (excellent!), and others are complaining about "nasty comments" and "rude comments" and getting huffy that skeptics would have the effrontery to expect better analysis.

How do you like this excuse?

Oh for heaven sake. This is not Science, it's Cassie telling us it works for her. I don't care if homeopathy is a quack if it works for people and they are happy about it. It's ain't that easy making placebo these days. She's not telling you to cure cancer with homeopathy (and even id she did - you know better don't do it!) she's telling us that this gel and pills work for her pain. It's just popular advice .

Feminism is best served by embracing reality, by thinking critically, and advancing rational arguments. This sloppy Newage shit-slurry of ingenuous gullibility is pure poison to the cause.

Now that's rudeness. There's nothing even close in the comments there.

(via Templeton Koala's blog)

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There Will Be Blood?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:38:39 -0500

I was on Skeptically Speaking this week, weirdly and uncomfortably talking about the evolution of menstruation. I barrelled ahead anyway, even though I've got a Y chromosome and am not a member of the club. Fortunately, they also had Kate Clancy on to be a little more authoritative.

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Zooming in on the Origin of Life Science Foundation

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 10:13:23 -0500

I'd been wondering about the credibility of David L. Abel, an Intelligent Design creationist who claims to work in the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc. I tried to track down this foundation with the lofty title, the million dollar prize, and the elaborately specific departments, but the best I'd been able to do was find a google satellite image.

Huh. That looks suspiciously like a suburban house.

So then someone from the Evil Atheist Conspiracy's vast network of spies and agents decided to drive by and get a picture.

Why, it is someone's house at that address! It's a nice but unpretentious little place in a residential suburb. There must be some mistake. This doesn't look like a fantastic institute of advanced science — it's got shady trees and a lawn and a basket of flowers by the garage and it looks like a typical two bedroom house.

But wait…what's that by the hanging basket? It's a sign of some sort. Look closer…

Yep, that's the place.

That's every intelligent design creationism institute of scientific thinking: a cheap sign tacked up on a garage, with some guy with delusions of competence twiddling his thumbs inside.

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Friday Cephalopod: Feasibility trial successful

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:22:46 -0500

Next step: lasers mounted on squid mantles.

You puny humans are so screwed.

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Making excuses

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:05:15 -0500

The editor of Life, Shu-Kun Lin, has published a rationalization for his shoddy journal.

Life (ISSN 2075-1729, http://www.mdpi.com/journal/life/) is a new journal that deals with new and sometime difficult interdisciplinary matters. Consequently, the journal will occasionally be presented with submitted articles that are controversial and/or outside conventional scientific views. Some papers recently accepted for publication in Life have attracted significant attention. Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the scientific validity of the contributions. In response I want to first state some basic facts regarding all publications in this journal. All papers are peer-reviewed, although it is often difficult to obtain expert reviewers for some of the interdisciplinary topics covered by this journal. I feel obliged to stress that although we will strive to guarantee the scientific standard of the papers published in this journal, all the responsibility for the ideas contained in the published articles rests entirely on their authors. Discussions on previously published articles are welcome and I hope that, by fostering discussion and by keeping an open-minded attitude towards new ideas, the journal will spur progress in this little explored, difficult and very exciting area of knowledge.

In particular, the paper "Andrulis, E.D. Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life. Life 2012, 2, 1-105" was published recently online and is due to appear in Issue 1, Volume 2, 2012 of Life, at the end of March this year [1]. So that our readership has as much information as I can divulge without violating the confidentiality of the review process, what follows is the background of these events. Professor Bassez had previously guest-edited a successful special issue titled "The Origin of Life" in another MDPI journal [2]. Although Professor Bassez [3] had also planned to be the Guest Editor of the special issue "Origin of Life - Feature Papers" for Life [4], she was, for personal reasons, unable to do so. I therefore volunteered to take this responsibility on her behalf and to guest edit this special issue and supervise the editorial procedure for the papers. I made the decision of acceptance based on the peer review reports we received and their recommendation in support of publication. As stated earlier, finding reviewers able to cross discipline boundaries as is often needed for multidisciplinary "origin of life" topics [5] is particularly difficult. The publishing process that MDPI manuscripts go through by our in-house editorial staff members is that they choose reviewers from sources like Chemical Abstracts, PubMed, Web of Science or more recently, from Google Scholar. Very often we also ask the Editorial Board members to review papers or ask those of them who have relevant knowledge and expertise to supply possible reviewer names. We also use the reviewer names suggested by the authors, but we do this with great care, checking the background of each potential reviewer and their publication record, as well as ensuring they have no collaborations with the authors that may be construed as a conflict of interest. I should stress that although we try to encourage bold, innovative science, we reject many submissions. In the case of the Dr. Andrulis's long paper, the two reviewers were both faculty members of reputable universities different than the author's and both went to considerable trouble presenting lengthy review reports. Dr. Andrulis revised his manuscript as requested, and the paper was subsequently published.

Regardless of opinion on specific papers that have been published to date, I sincerely hope that all of our articles, most of which are outstanding, will continue to be read and discussed. Our editorial procedure is under scrutiny by the Editorial Board, who wishes to be more closely involved in the editorial process, and we are striving to further improve our editorial service. We welcome comments on the Dr. Andrulis's paper or any other papers that have been published in Life.

The "interdisciplinary" excuse is bogus. I am not a specialist in the fields discussed, but I could see immediately that Andrulis's paper, and Abel's paper as well, were "off" — to any critical, skeptical thinker their flaws are obvious. Are there any scientists in any field — general physics, biology, chemistry, psychology, for instance — who would read either of those papers and think maybe there's something to them? You'd have to be a fellow crackpot or somebody completely unqualified to evaluate any science papers to fail to see the problems in them.

Also, you don't need someone with great interdisciplinary knowledge to be able to screen out this kind of nonsense. I'm reminded of the comment I read on the Velikovsky affair: someone (it might have been Sagan) noted that the astronomers could see that Velikovsky's cosmic billiard game was bad physics, but gosh, his biblical scholarship sure was impressive; while the Bible scholars were all saying his mythology was all terrible literary scholarship, but golly, he sure seemed to know a lot of physics. Evaluating interdisciplinary work does not mean you cherry pick the most favorable interpretations from those most ignorant of a specific subfield, nor does it mean you split the difference and average the opinions of the subfields together. If one part of the mix is bullshit, you throw out the whole thing.

The fact that they're having trouble finding qualified reviewers for the work they're publishing is also ominous. Shouldn't the editorial board consist of people who are competent in this interdisciplinary field who can screen out the wackier submissions? And shouldn't it be setting off alarm bells when they accept suggestions of reviewers from authors, and those are the only people they can get reviews from? It's a situation ripe for selection by crackpots of crackpot reviewers; you just know that the Abel paper was reviewed by fellow travelers in the Intelligent Design creationism movement, and got no critical evaluation at all.

Given the spectacularly poor quality of the Andrulis and Abel papers, though, I am most amused by the claim that the editors and reviewers of Life "reject many submissions". I would love to see the papers that they judged worse than Andrulis's and Abel's.

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More bad science in the literature

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:07:25 -0500

That sad article on gyres as an explanation for everything has had more fallout: not only has it been removed from Science Daily's site, not only has Case Western retracted the press release, but one of the editors at the journal Life has resigned his position over it. The editorial board of the journal was completely surprised by the wretched content of the paper, which is not encouraging; apparently they exercise so little oversight at the journal that they were unaware of the crap their reviewers were passing through. One board member thinks it is a hoax, and laughed at off. Think about that; your shiny new journal has just published total garbage, and instead of being brought up short and questioning the quality control of the review process, you think it is amusing that what you consider an obvious hoax slipped in? There's something seriously wrong there.

Add this to the list of failures at Life: the paper immediaely after Andrulis's is this one, "Is Life Unique?", by David Abel. Guess what? It's Intelligent Design creationism crap. Here's the abstract:

Abstract: Is life physicochemically unique? No. Is life unique? Yes. Life manifests innumerable formalisms that cannot be generated or explained by physicodynamics alone. Life pursues thousands of biofunctional goals, not the least of which is staying alive. Neither physicodynamics, nor evolution, pursue goals. Life is largely directed by linear digital programming and by the Prescriptive Information (PI) instantiated particularly into physicodynamically indeterminate nucleotide sequencing. Epigenomic controls only compound the sophistication of these formalisms. Life employs representationalism through the use of symbol systems. Life manifests autonomy, homeostasis far from equilibrium in the harshest of environments, positive and negative feedback mechanisms, prevention and correction of its own errors, and organization of its components into Sustained Functional Systems (SFS). Chance and necessity--heat agitation and the cause-and-effect determinism of nature's orderliness--cannot spawn formalisms such as mathematics, language, symbol systems, coding, decoding, logic, organization (not to be confused with mere self-ordering), integration of circuits, computational success, and the pursuit of functionality. All of these characteristics of life are formal, not physical.

It's drivel. The whole thing is one long windy argument from assertion, as in the penultimate sentence above, which is simply the bald claim that higher order functions of human functions like cognition cannot be derived from chemistry and physics. The paper itself contains no data at all — no experiments, measurements, or observations — but it is full of novel acronyms. Apparently, all you need to do to make it as a big time creationist is to make up new words and phrases and string them together. I checked out some of his other papers — he seems to be some kind of computer science guy, and this is all he does, is write impenetrably glib papers full of pretentious acronyms, posing as an expert on biology while saying nothing credible about biology at all.

But he certainly has an impressive address and affiliation!

Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc., 113-120 Hedgewood Drive, Greenbelt, MD 20770

Whoa. Sounds major. Unfortunately, I've never heard of this foundation, and all I could find out about it is a webpage in which they announce a million dollar prize for "proposing a highly plausible natural-process mechanism for the spontaneous rise of genetic instructions in nature sufficient to give rise to life." This sounds suspiciously like standard creationist dodging — they'll never have to award this prize. So I looked at their judging, and at first glance it seems impressive: they have over 200 judges, including Jack Szostak, Peter Atkins, Paul Davies, and Edward O. Wilson. But then, they mention that judging will be in 5 tiers, and only the ones that pass all other reviews will reach the Nobel prize winners and famous scientists…and the first tier is an "in-house review". I suspect the big names will never be pestered by this prize committee. Actually, I wonder if most of these judges know that their name is on this list. Maybe you should look in case you've been drafted.

I started wondering about this "in-house staff" who would be doing the initial judging, and about the Origin of Life Science Foundation itself. It's awfully hard to track down — its only web presence is the prize page, and its only employee seems to be…David L. Abel. So I looked it up in google maps to see where the foundation's majestic headquarters might be.

It's a house in a residential neighborhood of a Maryland suburb. It made me wonder if maybe the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics was located in the master bathroom, while he Department of ProtoBioSemiotics was in the hall closet, or whether both were consolidated into a sunny corner of the kitchen. At least it seems to be a step above Patriot University, but it's still some guy's house that he's calling a Foundation with multiple implied Departments with fancy titles.

That's not all! Mr Abel seems to be a linchpin of the Intelligent Design movement, who manages to work his rambling, incoherent publications into all kinds of journals. In fact, the Discovery Institute just bragged about all their peer-reviewed scientific publications, and there, in their list of over 70 works published over the last 25 years or so, which includes papers by such famous scientists as William Lane Craig and John A. Davison, and prestigious journals like Rivisti di Biologia and their own in-house pet journal, BIO-Complexity, and also seems to include books that were not peer-reviewed at all, are twelve papers by Mr Fancy-Titled-Suburban-House. 17% of the Intelligent Design creationism movement's 'scientific' output comes out of that dwelling in Maryland.

I'd love to see the gigantic laboratory he must have in there.

For your edification, I've included the official complete list of Intelligent Design creationism's publications below the fold. It's an impressively short list of hackery.

And may I suggest that the journal Life has deeper problems than simply accidentally allowing one bad paper to slip into publication? I think it needs a negative impact factor.

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An open letter to the Indiana legislature

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:28:47 -0500

The Indiana Senate has approved this bill:

The governing body of a school corporation may offer instruction on various theories of the origin of life. The curriculum for the course must include theories from multiple religions, which may include, but is not limited to, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Scientology.

I've heard a few complaints from Hoosiers about this, including teachers. One high school science teacher has asked me to post this open letter on the subject; they've asked that I not include their name, which is sad in itself. Not only is the legislature passing stupid laws, but the environment is so oppressive that the science teachers who are expected to implement it cannot speak out against it, for fear of losing their jobs. Indiana, you suck.

At least I don't have to worry about the politicians of Indiana gunning for my job, so I can post this letter for my correspondent.

Honorable Representatives of the state of Indiana,
I am quite dismayed to learn of the passage of SB 89 which will give Indiana school boards the authority to require the teaching of various origin stories in public schools. There are several reasons I feel this is an inappropriate action for our state to take.
First, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in 1987 in Edwards v. Aguillard that balanced treatment of creationism and evolution violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Then in 2005 the U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania ruled against the inclusion of Intelligent Design in the science curriculum. As Judge Jones wrote, "To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions. The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy." Now it appears that the citizens of Indiana are being poorly served. If this becomes law, our citizens will have to foot the bill for the lawsuits that will certainly ensue.
Second, I appreciate Indiana's need to educate our citizens about the beliefs and cultures of our planet's people. Our students would greatly benefit from learning about the multitude of worldviews that exist, in a philosophy or comparative religion class. Such understanding would make our citizens better prepared for international commerce and political discourse. I do not believe that SB 89 was introduced for this reason, however. The implication is that the introduction of various religious beliefs would take place in the science class room. As a biologist and science teacher, I understand the evidence for evolution is as strong as the evidence for any other theory we teach. I also understand that religious belief is based on faith, which by definition requires no evidence. I do not comprehend how exposing my students to ideas based, not on evidence, but faith could constitute good science education. When I read that this bill will allow school boards to require the teaching of "theories from multiple religions", I interpret this to indicate that a school board may specify which religions may be taught. Two constitutes "multiple", so if a school board so chose, they could require teachers to teach Christian and Jewish creation ideas only, which are essentially the same. This would not serve to enlighten students on the diversity of ideas, but to reinforce ideas that either they already hold or that they will find in conflict with their beliefs. In either case, it could set students at odds with each other, while not teaching any science at all.
If I am misinterpreting the spirit of this bill, please change the language to indicate that this is not to be applied to science classes, and/or specify which religions' views must be taught if the local school board chooses to require this. In my opinion, if this is to be done in any way consistent with spirit of the Establishment Clause, all religious views must be taught. In this case, teachers will not be able to cover the state science standards in 180 days and also teach religion.
Third, the misunderstanding of the word theory in the bill is a sad indication of the ignorance of the authors. In science, the word "theory" does not mean an "idea". A theory is an explanation for how something happens, based on a great deal of research which has been reviewed, published, tested, re-tested, accepted by most scientists in the field, and not yet disproven. No religion has a "theory" of the origins of life that meets the criteria we require to give an idea the full weight of the title "theory" in science. I would be happy to speak with any representative who would like to learn more about what the theory of evolution actually says and what evidence supports it.
Sincerely,
Indiana High School Science Teacher

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One Carnival of Evolution, coming right up

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:30:56 -0500

I've been naughty and neglecting to announce these things, so let's start correcting that: here's the 44th Carnival of Evolution.

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Botanical Wednesday: Walking? No way

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:08:28 -0500

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Your state's report card

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:53:41 -0500

The Fordham Institute has released their annual evaluation of state science standards. They are very tough graders — Minnesota got a "C". Ack! Mom & Dad are going to be pissed, how will we ever get into a good college at this rate?

The Institute does a fairly thorough breakdown, so there are some bright spots: Minnesota is doing a good job in the life sciences, but where we got dinged hard was on the physical sciences, which are "illogically organized" and contain factual errors. Here's the introduction to their evaluation of our life sciences standards:

Important life science content is presented quite minimally, but the flow and logic are such as to convey an understanding of the concepts rather than coming across as a list of topics to check off. The inclusion of examples from Kindergarten through eighth grade helps to further explain what students should know and be able to do.

Minimal is OK, as far as I'm concerned; it think it's more important to get across a solid conceptual understanding. Of course, given that some teachers do a very poor job of getting those concepts across, more specific guidelines might be useful.

What's really awful about our C, though, is that that's the same grade Texas got. Oh, the ignominy!

I think we got robbed, though. The detailed breakdown says that a major problem is inconsistency: some bits of the Texas standards are stellar, others are terrible; different grade levels get variable quality of coverage. Texas gets slammed for life science standards that are "woefully imbalanced, with poorly developed material in the early grades and strong, sometimes excellent, content in the upper levels." The major flaws are entirely predictable.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the middle school standards, however, is their coverage of evolution. For instance, the seventh-grade standards mention the Galapagos finches, giving the impression that the Darwinian paradigm is being presented. Unfortunately, it is not. Instead, the example of the finch Geospiza fortis apparently refers to studies by Peter and Rosemary Grant on beak size in this species, made widely known by Jonathan Weiner's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Beak of the Finch. Creationists often distort these important findings to argue that Darwinian macroevolution does not occur--instead, microevolution does. In addition, the word "evolution" is never used in any of the middle school standards, and the term "natural selection" is never explained.

What's really telling, though, is the reactions. I just told you I'm disappointed with Minnesota's "C"; we can do better, and I hope the next round of standards will improve ours to an "A". In Texas, creationist kook Don McLeroy was happy with his "C".

McLeroy told the Texas Independent he is "very pleased" with the study and believes it only serves to validate the role he and the conservative bloc played in crafting the standards.
"The work of religious conservatives has been vindicated," he said, pointing to the report's positive review of high school evolution standards. When asked about the poor evaluation of middle school standards, McLeroy said blame could fall on the writing teams and review committees and/or the whole board who could have stepped up to improve them. "In the end, what we wrote was legitimate, sound science and the study proves it."

That is so completely backwards. The weaknesses in the standards are the direct result of the meddling corruption of science pushed by the religious conservatives on the board; everything the Fordham Institute said was bad about their standards were the points the creationists pushed. The strengths are the product of the motivated, hard-working scientists and educators who fought against the religious conservatives. McLeroy can take credit for that "C" in the sense that it could have been an "A" if he and his fellow travellers in superstition had been kicked out of the process…and that's nothing to be proud of.

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Big Charity

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:10:35 -0500

It must be tough running a charity. You've got a cause you care deeply about, and you're constantly juggling the game of having to spend money (in administration, advertising, staff) to raise money (for the cause!), and worse, of sometimes having to compromise to achieve your goals — you sometimes have to work with your enemies to get where you're going. And if you're really, really good at it, and raise lots and lots of money, it becomes easy to lose sight of the cause while becoming corporate.

So it goes with Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the $400 million/year giant pink gorilla of cancer charities, fighting for the cause of ending breast cancer. As charities go, they're reasonably efficent (about 20% of their budget is overhead, 20% goes to cancer research, and the rest goes to education and health care), and they're certainly effective — they practically own the color pink, it seems, and their little pink ribbons are ubiquitous. If you've donated money to them in the past, you should have no regrets, and you can pat yourself on the back for having done some good.

But it's time to cut the cord to this Big Charity.

Komen has lost sight of the cause, and has become more of a money-raising machine, for one thing. This is one of those awkward compromises they made to tap into corporate interests: they sold their identity and their label to anyone willing to cough up the cash. One correlation with the incidence of breast cancer is dietary fat — yet Komen went into a commercial promotion with KFC, selling big pink buckets of greasy fried chicken.

It was this national nonprofit education and advocacy organization that coined the term "pinkwashing" to describe the situation where a company purports to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink-ribboned product, but manufactures products that are linked to the disease.
This latest campaign between KFC and Komen is "simply pinkwashing at its worst," Barbara A. Brenner, JD, executive director of BCA, told Medscape Oncology. "This is just so wrong on every level. . . . This is so much more about KFC's bottom line than about curing breast cancer," she said.

This is just one example of losing sight of the goal. I would argue that in addition they've been too successful: their marketing has obscured their purpose. We're drowning in a sea of pink every time breast cancer is brought up, and the symbol of slapping a pink ribbon on something has replaced the substance of the cause. I always say that prayer is the very least you can do, but slapping a ribbon on your car is a very close runner-up.

And now, the last straw. Ultimately, breast cancer research is one part of improving women's health; if that narrow slice of concern begins to cannibalize the wider aspects of women's well-being, it does more harm than good. The Susan G. Komen Foundation has reached that point where the money-making machine is being hijacked to benefit organizations that do harm to women.

Specifically, Komen has yanked its support for breast-cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood. That's astonishing. Education and screening for breast cancer is what Komen is all about — it's what they do. It's as if I were to announce that I reject the teaching of evolution at a particular college campus because I really hate their football team (and if I had millions of dollars worth of clout). It makes no sense from the perspective of an anti-cancer charity.

It does make sense if you're a right-wing corporate entity that has funded its growth on a foundation of a universally appreciated cause, but that actually has closer ties to conservative corporate and religious interests. They aren't so much against breast cancer, as they are for protecting "good" girls, and against those fornicating sluts who get abortions, and can go ahead and die horribly. They listen more to the anti-abortion crusaders (some of whom are on their executive staff!) than to women.

So don't give to them anymore. Redirect your charitable giving to organizations that don't have a Puritanical streak, and are a bit less Republican in outlook. There is no shortage; I recommend the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Breast Cancer Charities of America, CancerCare, and the Cancer Research Institute. So far, they all seem to be dedicated to fighting cancer and helping people, and a lot less concerned about policing people's morality to conform to that of the Religious Right.

But I don't want Susan G. Komen to go away. I think it is an excellent charity for right-wingers and Christian fundamentalists to donate to — their money will go to a cause we can all support, and it's better than filling the coffers of the Mormon or Catholic churches.

P.S. There are some very bad arguments for not donating to the Komen foundation out there, and the very worst are those that selectively cite statistics to argue that cancer research is futile. Some cancers have been refractory and have shown little progress in the last decade; others are showing significantly better statistics. But most importantly, our understanding of cancer has steadily advanced, and even where someone dies of the disease, we glean another piece of the puzzle. And of course, what do you propose to do otherwise? Nothing at all?

(Also on FtB)

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Mary's Monday Metazoan: the only angel I believe in

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:33:38 -0500

Aside from Mary, that is.

(via NatGeo)

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True Science for Boys

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:14:17 -0500

Ah, the 19th century…when mad scientists were really mad, and not only that, they were popular at parties. In 1818, Dr Ure and Professor Jeffray obtained the freshly killed corpse of Matthew Clydesdale, only an hour from the hangman's noose, and proceeded to experiment on it with a battery in the Glasgow University anatomy theater before a crowd of spectators. In my youth, I had to settle for recent roadkill, a 9 volt battery, and a dark basement, all by my lonesome — my jealousy is acute.

Here is a small portion of the account of that day's fun.

The supra-orbital nerve was laid bare in the forehead, as it issues through the supraciliary foramen in the eyebrow: the one conducting rod being applied to it, and the other to the heel, most extraordinary grimaces were exhibited every time that electrical discharges were made, by running the wire in my hand along the edges of the last trough, from the 220th, to the 270th pair of plates: thus fifty shocks, each greater than the preceding one, were given in two seconds. Every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action: rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smile united their hideous expression in the murderer's face; surpassing far the wildest representation of a Fuseli or a Kean. At this period several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted.

The account of galvanic experiments on dead bodies is taken from The Young Man's Book of Amusement, which on the cover promises to teach card tricks and how to make fireworks. You'd think an amusement in which the first step is to obtain a dead body would be listed a little more prominently, but I guess playing with cadavers was just commonplace in the year before Queen Vickie was born.

(Also on FtB)

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