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February 6, 2012
Category: Skepticism
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)
(Also on FtB)
Posted by PZ Myers at 9:46 PM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
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.
(Also on FtB)
Posted by PZ Myers at 8:38 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 4, 2012
Category: Creationism
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.
(Also on FtB)
Posted by PZ Myers at 10:13 AM • 58 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 3, 2012
Category: Cephalopods • Organisms
Next step: lasers mounted on squid mantles.
You puny humans are so screwed.
(Also on FtB)
Posted by PZ Myers at 12:22 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academics • Bad Science
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.
(Also on FtB)
Posted by PZ Myers at 12:05 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 2, 2012
Category: Bad Science • Creationism
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.
(Also on FtB)
Read on »
Posted by PZ Myers at 4:07 PM • 36 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academics • Creationism
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
(Also on FtB)
Posted by PZ Myers at 2:28 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
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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Posted by PZ Myers at 9:30 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 1, 2012
Category: Organisms
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Posted by PZ Myers at 9:08 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
…and this is a 
