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Hurricane Matthew: The Scary Clown of Hurricanes!

LATEST UPDATE IS HERE. CLICK HERE FOR LATEST UPDATE. Update: Wed Mid Day Matthew weakened, strengthened, strengthening Matthew has interacted with land masses in Hispaniola and Cuba to the extent that the storm weakened quite a bit, losing its temporary Category 5 status. But, now Matthew is already showing signs of strengthening, and is likely to grow back to Category 3 or 4 status as it moves over the Bahamas. How bad a hurricane is when it makes contact with land depends in large part on the angle of the attack, and Matthew will likely be affecting several spots in the Bahamas at a…

Is Human Behavior Genetic Or Learned?

Imagine that there is a trait observed among people that seems to occur more frequently in some families and not others. One might suspect that the trait is inherited genetically. Imagine researchers looking for the genetic underpinning of this trait and at first, not finding it. What might you conclude? It could be reasonable to conclude that the genetic underpinning of the trait is elusive, perhaps complicated with multiple genes, or that there is a non-genetic component, also not yet identified, that makes finding the genetic component harder. Eventually, you might assume, the gene will be…

Spooky Action at a Distance

This is an approximate transcription of my physics talk from Boskone, titled "Spooky Action at a Distance," in which I attempted to give a reasonable explanation of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen ("EPR" hereafter) paper and Bell's Theorem. This was sort of a follow-on from last year's "Weird Quantum Phenomena," meant to highlight a specific class of weird quantum phenomena. There's some SF relevance to the ideas involved in EPR and Bell's Theorem. A number of authors have name-checked the idea, most notably Charlie Stross citing "entangled particles" as the mechanism for FTL communications in…

How not to report science and medical news, vaccine edition

I realize I complain periodically about when I get into what seems to me to be a rut in which I'm writing pretty much only about anti-vaccine lunacy. This is just such a week, when the news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, first with Andrew Wakefield's being found to have behaved unethically and dishonestly by the British General Medical Council, only to be followed up a few days later with the news that the editors of The Lancet had retracted his 1998 paper, the paper that started the MMR scare in the U.K. and launched a thousand autism quacks. Meanwhile, the cranks…

Do God and prayer trump scientific medicine?

Late this afternoon, I happened to be sitting in my office perusing the websites for the latest batch of surgical journals, trying desperately to catch up on my reading, something that I, like most academic surgeons, am chronically behind in, when I happened upon the website of the Archives of Surgery. There, the lead article caught my eye, and I downloaded it for later reading. Then, as I perused a few news sites (yes, I was procrastinating; but who doesn't procrastinate from time to time?), and I came across a story about this very study: CHICAGO - When it comes to saving lives, God trumps…

Numeric Pareidolia and God in Π

There's one kind of semi-mathematical crackpottery that people frequently send to me, but which i generally don't write about. Given my background, I call it gematria - but it covers a much wider range than what's really technically meant by that term. Another good name for it would be numeric pareidolia. It's been a long time since I've written about this kind of stuff, and someone just sent me a pretty typical example, so what the hell. It revolves around a mess that he put together as an image, which is pretty much a classic example of obsessive silliness. The general idea of this kind…

How Should We Call Them?

A follow-up on last week's repost (originally from April 06, 2005)... ----------------------------------------------- I've been wavering in how to call the Right Wing. When I say "conservatives" I get attacked for equating conservatism with GOP (with implication that conservatism is good but GOP is not conservative any more). When I call them Regressives, I am told I miss the point, because they should be described as conservatives. Should I just call them Republicans? Not damning enough. People, make up your minds! What follows is a mix of stuff I have already written before on this blog (…

Transmission, pathogenicity, virulence and vaccines, part II.

CDC wants us to get vaccinated for flu every year. Always for seasonal flu, and this year, if there is a vaccine available, for swine flu. They want us to get vaccinated because they think the vaccine works and they want to prevent people from getting influenza, always a dangerous and unpredictable disease, even if most of us usually escape with just a flesh wound. CDC backs up its recommendations by a quite a few scientific studies demonstrating the vaccine is effective, citing figures that the vaccine is 58% effective or 91% or effective or some other number, depending on what group is…

Randomized trial versus observational study challenge, VI: randomization, first part

[Previous installments: here, here, here, here, here] After a detour through the meaning of causation and the need to find a substitute for what can't, in principle, be observed (the counterfactual), we are now ready to consider what many of you might have thought would be the starting point, randomization. It's a surprisingly difficult topic and this post will probably be more challenging for non statisticians, but I feel confident you don't need to be an expert to understand it. First a quick recap. If you want to know if mammography screening will prolong the life of a woman under the age…

The Boy Thing

The minute I announced my pregnancy with Simon, the first question most people asked me was "Oh, are you trying for a girl?"  I admit, the question annoyed me.  The implication seemed to be that everyone dreams of the perfect matched set, one boy and one girl.  In fact, I always had a strong intuition from the first moment that my babies were boys (Isaiah was the only time I wasn't totally sure), and I was never at all unhappy about that.  I also objected to the implied impugning of my math skills - if I didn't want a CHILD, I certainly wouldn't bet on a 50-50 shot ;-). As my house filled up…

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

New Scientist has an interesting article by Patrick Leman on the psychology of believing in conspiracy theories. Belief in conspiracy theories certainly seems to be on the rise, and what little research has been done investigating this question confirms this is so for perhaps the most famous example of all - the claim that a conspiracy lay behind the assassination of JFK in 1963. A survey in 1968 found that about two-thirds of Americans believed the conspiracy theory, while by 1990 that proportion had risen to nine-tenths. One factor fuelling the general growth of conspiracy beliefs is…

Why the Lion Grew Its Mane, a book review

Thanks to Tet Zoo, I sometimes receive books to review, and earlier on in the year I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of Lewis Smith's Why the Lion Grew Its Mane (Papadakis, 2008). Smith is a science reporter at The Times and in this book, billed as presenting 'a miscellany of recent scientific discoveries from astronomy to zoology', he takes us on a tour of some of the newest, neatest science. Despite its title, Why the Lion Grew Its Mane isn't just about animals, but also includes sections on cutting-edge technology, astronomy, genetics and psychology. I don't know enough about any…

Really: photos of the Loch Ness monster

In, as usual, a desperate effort to bring in the hits, I thought I'd go nuts and see what posting about the Loch Ness monster might do for my stats. Hey, maybe I could throw the word sex in there as well. There: sex, there, I said it again. But seriously... anyone who's anyone has heard of the Loch Ness monster. And most people know that various photos, allegedly depicting the Loch Ness monster, have been taken over the years. Many people have heard that some, or all, of these photos are dubious, or fake. But that's where it ends for the vast majority of people. I would imagine that - as…

Wacky Physics: It must be right, because the math works!

Over the weekend, in an attempt to cheer me up, a kind and generous reader sent me a link [to a *really* wonderful site of crackpot science][adams]. It's a crackpot theory about how physics has it all wrong. You see, there is no such thing as gravity - it's all just pressure. And the earth (and all other planets) is actually a matter factory - matter is constantly created in the *hollow* center of the earth, and the pressure of all the new matter forces the earth to constantly expand. And the pressure of expansion creates the illusion of gravity. And according to the crackpot behind it all,…

How Should We Call Them?

A follow-up on last night's repost (originally from April 06, 2005)... ----------------------------------------------- I've been wavering in how to call the Right Wing. When I say "conservatives" I get attacked for equating conservatism with GOP (with implication that conservatism is good but GOP is not conservative any more). When I call them Regressives, I am told I miss the point, because they should be described as conservatives. Should I just call them Republicans? Not damning enough. People, make up your minds! What follows is a mix of stuff I have already written before on this blog…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

60 new articles just got published in PLoS ONE a few minutes ago. Here are some of the greatest hits (IMHO): Enhanced Temporal but Not Attentional Processing in Expert Tennis Players: In tennis, as in many disciplines of sport, fine spatio-temporal resolution is required to reach optimal performance. While many studies on tennis have focused on anticipatory skills or decision making, fewer have investigated the underlying visual perception abilities. In this study, we used a battery of seven visual tests that allowed us to assess which kind of visual information processing is performed…

What's the Connection Between Foster Care and the Ecological Stuff?

A reader sends me a letter and gives me permission to reprint it here, because I suspect he's not the only one with this question: "I think what you are doing with your family is great, but I feel like you've moved away from peak oil and climate change to write about foster care, and I don't see a connection.  I feel bad saying it, but I miss the old stuff.  Is there a connection I'm not seeing?" In some measure this is just a fair cop, in that my subject matter HAS changed as I've spent more time working on issues of families in crisis.  It isn't that I don't have things to say about peak…

Birds in the News 128

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter "Abstract" Male Wood Duck, Aix sponsa. Image: John Del Rio. [larger view]. Birds in Science It wasn't too long ago that paleontologists thought that fossilization was a process where all biological material was replaced with inert stone. However, in 2005, Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University rocked the paleontological world when she recovered a still-elastic blood vessel from inside a fractured thigh bone fossil of a Tyrannosaurus rex that lived 68 million years ago. Recent phylogenetic analyses of…

Birds in the News 82 (v3n9)

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter "Spruce Grouse." Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Pamela Wells. [Larger image]. Birds in Science A paper was recently published in PLoS One that examines the reproductive and evolutionary arms race between male and female ducks to control paternity. Basically, if males develop large and elaborate genital structures that allow them to manipulate females and to bias paternity in their favor, then females will co-evolve specific genital anatomy that allows them to regain some control over…

Testing the Honesty of STACLU, Part 2

Gribbit has responded to my questions. In his response, he admits that he was wrong about the order of the two examples, but misses the larger falsehood in his post. Here's his initial claim, again: We have seen this already. The ACLU fought to gain equality for after school projects so that a gay tolerance group could meet on school grounds after the school day. The fight went all the way to the United States Supreme Court and they won. Shortly there after, the ACLU sent a letter to all Washington public high schools reminding them of this victory and demanded that they comply. However, when…

ID and Theistic Evolution

There is an interesting exchange going on in the comments after my post on ID and Creationism. I want to move part of that conversation up to the top so it doesn't get lost. In particular, I want to focus on an argument made by Jeremy Pierce, author of the Parableman blog. I want to focus on that argument because I think it cuts to the heart of several important questions involving ID and evolution. First, I want to establish what Jeremy is arguing by quoting him. In essence, he is arguing that ID is synonymous with theistic evolution. I first began to detect that this might be his position…

How Did Climate Change Cause The Great More'Easter of 2016?

Storms like last weekend's blizzard and widespread snowfall can happen, in theory, any winter, but large snowfall storms in the US Northeast have been significantly more common in recent years than in previous recorded history. Over the last few years we've seen these large snowfalls happen farther south than usual, as was the case with the 2016 Blizzard. Climate scientists are pretty sure that this blizzard was either outright caused or significantly enhanced (you really can't tell the difference) by human caused global warming. How can a blizzard, a big cold thing, be caused by warming…

Gribbit's Anti-ACLU Hysteria

A reader gave me the heads up on this hilariously ridiculous rant from Gribbit at StopTheACLU. It can be summed up quickly in the following manner: "The ACLU are evil communists who hate God and God is going to strike them down for it." Needless to say, if you're going to argue for that idiotic conclusion, you're going to have to build quite an edifice of logical fallacies and distortions to justify it. It's your typical simpleminded, Free Republic-style screed, full of those quasi-clever lines equating Democrats with commies and painting with a brush so broad that it has its own zip code. We…

Among Cannibals

I have lived among Cannibals, according to a lot of people who claim to know. The number of times that the "tribal" people of the Congo have been called cannibals is too great to be counted, most notably in great literature like The Heart of Darkness but most commonly, I suspect, from the pulpit or soap box by those raising money to spread this or that word. Most Europeans and Americans don't know it, but many people who live in the Congo are quite convinced that the bazunga ... the white foreigners ... are cannibals. I've listened closely to these assertions, made by many individuals, and…

Dear President Obama and Secretary Kerry: An Open Letter on Keystone XL

An Open Letter on the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline from Scientists and Economists April 7 , 2014 President Barack Obama The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Secretary John Kerry U. S . Department of State 2201 C Street NW Washington, DC 20520 Dear President Obama and Secretary Kerry, As scientists and economists, we are concerned about climate change and its impacts. We urge you to reject the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline as a project that will contribute to climate change at a time when we should be doing all we can to put clean energy alternatives in…

Pandemic influenza awareness week. Day 3: Challenges to pandemic preparedness

The scientific community is all too familiar with the dangers an influenza pandemic could bring. The politicians and general public are starting to become aware of the issue as well; indeed, one can hardly open a newspaper or turn on the television without hearing about "bird flu." So, what's actually being done to prevent an influenza catastrophe? What are the issues? What can be done? These are the questions that keep public health officials awake at night, because the answer is always that we're not doing enough. While we may be resigned to the fact that a future pandemic can't be…

How to Read a Scientific Paper

My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general "research methods" class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there's a lot more specialization by subfield), but I'm going to try to give as general an overview of how to approach scientific research as possible in a course with no prerequisites. The following is sort of a rough sketch of a lecture for next week, on how to approach the scientific literature, so comments and suggestions are welcome. This is…

Back To School Special: What to do with Bible thumping students

David Campbell is a life science teacher in Florida who was recently profiled in the New York Times because of his involvement in the debate between Creationism and Evolution. This discussion is being picked up in the Blogosphere, and this is very timely, as this is the time when teachers in most US school districts are just heading back to class. My "back to school" contribution is a repost of one of my more popular bits on the problem of the bible thumping student. This is revised and reposted from my old site. Enjoy: .... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own…

Barash's Talk

University of Washington biology professor David Barash published this op-ed in The New York Times recently. The title: “God, Darwin and My College Biology Class.” Intriguing! Let's have a look. EVERY year around this time, with the college year starting, I give my students The Talk. It isn't, as you might expect, about sex, but about evolution and religion, and how they get along. More to the point, how they don't. I'm a biologist, in fact an evolutionary biologist, although no biologist, and no biology course, can help being “evolutionary.” My animal behavior class, with 200…

Ancestral Monty

You might have noticed that blogging has been a bit erratic lately, and I have fallen off my usual pace of updating every weekday. There's a reason for that! Regular readers of this blog are aware that I have a small obsession with the Monty Hall problem. I managed to convince Oxford University Press that a book on the subject would be a good idea, and now I'm supposed to submit a manuscript to them by New Year's. And since there is a limit to how many hours a day I can spend typing away at a computer, well, you get the idea. I've also learned something else lately. Writing a book is…

The Creation Museum 2: Men in White

Along with the rest of my crew, I entered the theater. Not just any theater, mind you, but a special effects theater. This meant that at certain points during the film your seat would vibrate ominously and a small spritz of water would shoot out from the seat in front of you. More on that later. The film was Men in White, a light-hearted romp in which Satan's minion's, i.e. scientists and college professors, receive their comeuppance from a couple of well-informed, clear-thinking, super-cool angels, named Michael and Gabriel. It was the familiar creationist story -- the one where they're…

Miller Joins the Party

Ken Miller has now weighed in with a lengthy post criticizing Jerry Coyne's views on the compatibility of science and religion. Since most of Miller's essay is focused on specific statements made by Coyne I won't go point by point through it. I suspect Coyne will post his own reply at his blog, and I look forwrad to reading it. I'll just comment that in certain places I think Miller has a point (I think Coyne is mostly right about the big picture, but there are certainly places where I wish he would have expressed himself differently.) In other places I think Miller is not presenting Coyne…

Economics vs. Democracy or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the market

As Winston Churchill once said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." While still humorous in its construction, this statement is hardly controversial in this day and age, when most of the world is (at least in name) governed "by the people". But Bryan Caplan, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and associate professor of economics at George Mason University, would like us to revisit our belief in democracy as the ideal form of government, if not in fundamentals, then certainly in scope. He has written a book…

The Sacrifice of Admetus: How the Evolution of Altruism Reveals our Noblest Qualities

Heracles battles Death for generosity's sake / Frederic Lord Leighton (1869-71) Whereas great scientific theories stand the test of time when they accurately predict the natural world through repeated empirical trials, great literature transcends the ages when it speaks to universal qualities of human experience. Such inspirational works can also, without the authors realizing at the time, reveal the sublime beauty and tragedy of our evolutionary drama. Few classical authors have tapped into this zeitgeist of biological experience as the Greek tragedian Euripides. The conflict between…

A farewell to academia

Loved the teaching. Loved the science. Couldn't take the politics. Couldn't take the tenure stress. That about sums it up. I am sending off today a signed offer letter for employment with Linden Lab, the folks who create and run Second Life. I will be an engineer or ops/developer or something... wait, hang on. Here we go, "Productions Operations Engineer" is the title listed in the offer letter. I will write more about this in the near future, and probably a lot more in the ongoing future. Let me say, though, that I'm very excited to be going to work for Linden. A lot of the rest of…

Steve Pinker's hair and the muscles of worms

I've been guilty of teaching bean-bag genetics this semester. Bean-bag genetics treats individuals as a bag of irrelevant shape containing a collection of alleles (the "beans") that are sorted and disseminated by the rules of Mendel, and at its worst, assigns one trait to one allele; it's highly unrealistic. In my defense, it was necessary — first-year students struggle enough with the basic logic of elementary transmission genetics without adding great complications — and of course, in some contexts, such as population genetics, it is a useful simplification. It's just anathema to anyone…

Morality, outrage, and #amazonfail: a reply to Clay Shirky.

A bunch of people (including Bora) have pointed me to Clay Shirky's take on #amazonfail. While I'm not in agreement with Shirky's analysis that Twitter users mobilized an angry mob on the basis of a false theory (and now that mob is having a hard time backing down), there are some interesting ideas in his post that I think merit consideration. So, let's consider them. Shirky starts by considering how sentiments were running on the Twittersphere Sunday evening, when Amazon still hadn't put out a statement about what was going on, and how those sentiments didn't ratchet down much by the time…

Yet more evidence that vaccines are safe and do not cause autism

Can we just say that vaccines are safe, already? Can we just say that, of all the medical interventions ever conceived by the minds of humans, vaccines have almost certainly saved more lives and prevented more illness? Can we finally say that vaccines do not cause autism? Of course not, unfortunately. I ask the same question about whether we can finally say that the earth isn’t 6,000 years old, but rather billions of years old, and there are still people out there who believe that evolution is a sham and the earth really is only 6,000 years old. Truly, the irrationality of humans is without…

Stanislaw Burzynski versus regulations protecting human research subjects

It's been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time. Well, not really, although it has been a while since I've discussed Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Specifically, I last dedicated a post to him following the death of one of his famous patients, Billie Bainbridge, who incidentally had become famous because her family had managed to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds with the help of some U.K. celebrities. Burzynski, as regular readers will recall, became a frequent topic on this blog last fall after one of his lackeys decided to issue vacuous legal threats…

Epigenetics does not mean that thinking makes it so

You know, I really, really hate the way quacks abuse molecular biology. I know, I know. I've said it before, but certain quacks have a way of willfully misunderstanding the latest advances in genomics, molecular biology, and biology in general. Of course, this isn't limited to just medicine, unfortunately. After all, we have Deepak Chopra and his quantum woo, which abuses physics and quantum theory in the name of "proving" mind-body dualism, a bastardized version of "intelligent design" creationism that is based on Eastern mysticism rather than Christianity, and, of course, a "conscious…

The curious case of Patricia Finn, Esq., antivaccine lawyer

If there's one thing I've learned over the last seven years, it's that there are a handful of people in the "natural health" movement (a.k.a., quackery movement) who can reliably counted upon to bring home the crazy in spades. There is, of course the granddaddy of all conspiracy sites, Whale.to, and its creator John Scudamore, for whom no quackery is too quacky, no pseudoscience too ridiculous, and no conspiracy theory too outlandish. Truly, that is a high bar of crazy to surpass, but there are certainly people out there trying to do it. Perhaps the one I encounter the most is Mike Adams,…

"SmartVax": The Orwellian repackaging of old anti-vaccine tropes

It appears that while TAM9 was dominating all my extracurricular, non-job-related attention, with my having to get ready to give a talk, I failed to notice another thing besides the placebo/asthma paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine last Thursday. But fear not. If it's important (to me, at least, and hopefully to you too), I'll eventually see it, allowing me to toss off a jaunty, "Better late than never!" and then launch into a topic, even if I'm a week late. So it is this time around, except that the topic is so big that it might require more than one post, perhaps spread…

From deep in the heart of the "organized campaign" against Judy Wilyman's antivaccine PhD thesis

Politicians and activists know that one of the most effective ways to discredit critics is to try to portray them as (1) being in the pay of someone else, such as a big corporation, or (2) part of an "organized" effort to criticize them, or (3) preferably both. That's why antivaccine cranks are so fast to deploy the "pharma shill gambit" and cranks like Sharyl Attkisson like to accuse their critics of "astroturfing." Of course, astroturfing, which is the practice of trying to make a public relations campaign promoting a message appear to originate organically from the grassroots rather than…

Framing vaccines

NOTE: Orac is on vacation recharging his Tarial cells and interacting with ion channel scientists, as a good computer should. In the meantime, he is rerunning oldies but goodies, classics, even. (OK, let's not get carried away. Here's one from all the way back in 2008 in response to Dr. Offit's excellent book Autism's False Prophets. Notice how, the more things change, the more they stay the same. One of the major points made by Dr. Offit in Autism's False Prophets is how badly the media deals with scientific issues and stories in which science is a major component. Indeed, he devotes two…

J.J. has a chance to live!

Over the years I've written about a lot of topics. After all, I've been at this for more than a decade now, and I still grind out four or five posts per week, with only occasional breaks for vacations or medical or scientific meetings. Topics have included science-based medicine, antivaccine nonsense, topics of general skepticism, and of course medical quackery, among others. There's one type of recurrent story I've been commenting on periodically since 2005, when I began by discussing the case of Katie Wernecke, and these include stories of children with cancer who do not receive the therapy…

Among Cannibals

I have lived among Cannibals, according to a lot of people who claim to know. The number of times that the "tribal" people of the Congo have been called cannibals is too great to be counted, most notably in great literature like The Heart of Darkness but most commonly, I suspect, from the pulpit or soap box by those raising money to spread this or that word. Most Europeans and Americans don't know it, but many people who live in the Congo are quite convinced that the bazunga ... the white foreigners ... are cannibals. I've listened closely these assertions, made by many individuals, and I'…

More antiscience from an old "friend"

Yesterday, I discussed how pseudoscience--nay, antiscience--may well triumph over science in the Autism Omnibus trial presently going on. One reason that this might happen is because of the primacy of feelings over evidence among the plaintiffs, to whose power even the Special Masters running the trial are not entirely immune. As a fellow human being, I can somewhat understand this tendency in the parents of autistic children. After all, the parent-child bond is one of the strongest there is, making it difficult for even the most rationalistic parent to think clearly when it comes to their…

What to do about Bible-thumping students in the science classroom

.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it's early in the term. A student, on the way out of the room after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about "carbon dating." This usually happens around the time of year you are doing an overview of the main points of the course, but before you've gotten to the "evolution module"... Jeanne d'Arc was a very influential 10th grader. I understand she gave her Life Science teachers a very hard time. This picture is the only contemporary…

Life Science Teachers....

.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it's early in the term. A student, on the way out after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about "carbon dating." This usually happens around the time of year you are doing an overview of the main points of the course, but before you've gotten to the "evolution module" (more on the "evolution module" another time ... or come to the Bell on Friday to hear me rant about that in person). Jeanne d'Arc was a very influential 10th grader. I…

Daniel Hauser and his rejection of chemotherapy: Is religion the driving force or just a convenient excuse?

Yesterday, I wrote about Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who, with the support of his parents, has refused conventional therapy for his cancer, which would normally consist of chemotherapy and radiation. Given his stage and type of tumor, he could normally expect at least an 85% chance of surviving and perhaps even greater than 90%, wherea without therapy he is certain to die of his disease, barring a rare spontaneous remission. The reason given by his Daniel and his mother Colleen is that they belong to a highly dubious-sounding American Indian religion called…