You should have a right to not have babies

Amanda Marcotte does not ever want to have any children, and she has said so quite strongly. She doesn’t even like children. And that’s perfectly reasonable. Around 20% of American women are child-free for life. Are you going to force them to have babies?

Well, maybe. Cassy Fiano was outraged that Marcotte rejects the idea of having children. While ranting about how horrible it was that she has no affection for infants, let alone fetuses, she effectively discloses what it’s all really about.

What’s interesting is how she acts as if floating the idea of adoption for those facing unplanned pregnancies is somehow forcing them into it. No, Amanda. It’s called having sex. You choose to have sex, you choose to open the door to having a baby, no matter what kind of birth control you’re on. Every time a person has sex, there is a possibility that they will get pregnant, barring a full hysterectomy. She compares it to forcing men to donate sperm, surely what she feels is a no-fail argument against “the patriarchy.” The problem with that is that no one made it to where women are the ones who carry babies. It wasn’t something that men engineered. It’s called science, Amanda. It’s just the way it is, fair or unfair. Acknowledge reality and move on.

There’s the simple-minded solution to the whole abortion problem! You’re only allowed to have sex if you’re willing to get pregnant. Thirty million American women should just be abstinent forever, and she invokes science and reality as her justification.

Here’s some different science and reality for you: sex is a normal, healthy behavior for human beings, and almost all the sex acts performed are not procreative: no intent or desire for pregnancy, and often with no ability for impregnation. We do it for fun, because it makes us happy, because it brings us closer to another human being. Yet Fiano blithely declares that reproduction must be a component of human sexuality.

Why? I was happy to have my children, but I have no interest in having any more (and it would be irresponsible to do so). I am not quite ready to give up sex. I have even less interest in trying to dictate to others under what conditions they are allowed to have sex.

It seems Cassy Fiano is more about controlling others’ sexuality with a soupçon of slut-shaming.

Of course, if you want even more fun, read the comments.

Suppose Amanda would have said “I hate Asians. Their slanty eyes and smooched in faces make me want to puke”…or “I hate Blacks. All of them are shiftless, lazy dopers, and we all would be better off if they blew each other away”, we’d recognize the ugliness of her hatred and prejudice. But since it’s against babies and children, that’s another matter. That’s cool, at least for pro-aborts.

This person is a little too happy to indulge in racist stereotyping while equating fetuses with Asians and blacks, I think.

If a creationist take a dump in a science journal, and the science journal later flushes it away, does it still stink?

poop

Yes, it surely does. It reeks.

I completely missed this article — no surprise, it seems everyone did — titled “Fossils Evidences (Paleontology) Opposite to Darwin’s Theory,” by Md. Abdul Ahad and Charles D. Michener, in the Journal of Biology and Life Science, and now you can’t read it because the journal retracted it and deleted it.

The first sign that something might be off in this paper is the title. “Fossils Evidences (Paleontology) Opposite to Darwin’s Theory”? Seriously? No one even stopped to notice how ungrammatical it was?

And then there’s the abstract.

Darwin‟s Theory is a central theme of biology and all theories of evolution. Paleontology, the study of fossils provide convincing and the direct evidences for evolution. Save for, if the organisms of same class arise from the same ancestor as Darwin opine; fossil record should provides a series of fossil from the progressive to older deposits, that show stage of intermediate between specialized modern (existing) living organism, but no so found at all. Nevertheless, silicafied wood is a familiar example of plant fossils. Invertebrates have no hard parts, so, they are rarely form fossils but few insects found in amber as fossils. The entire vertebrate fossils are fragmentary bones. For example fossil of dinosaurs are thigh bone, arm bone, teeth, footprints, track, bite etc., and fossils of ancestors of human are skull fragments, teeth, jaws etc. Even these fossils are negligible amount and are not found in the original form but are moulds, casts, compression, impression, etc. The only unchanged fossil is the Woolly mammoth. Furthermore, transitional fossil is absent; claimed transitional fossils of Archaeopteryx and Seymouria are not transitional, they are true bird and true reptile, respectively. Obtain fossil are of fossil of present day organisms or are fossil of extinct organisms, which may form during a universal flood. Fossil evidences prove that humans have not evolve/descent from monkey lower animal. Even Darwin himself agreed in the “Descent of man‟ that origin of human cannot explain by science. Co-discoverer of natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace never believes that human is evolved from lower animal. Moreover, estimation of age of fossil, age of earth by radiometric method and preparation of geological time table (scale) is imaginary as it overlooks 3.5 billion year. Extinction of living organism never produce any new species, if produce, no need of biodiversity conservation convention to prevent extinction. Living fossils prove that there is no evolutionary relationship between fossils and existing organisms. The fathers of modern paleontology and geology opposed evolution. Consequently, paleontology does not provide convincing, strongest, verified, and direct evidences for evolution as well as fossils evidences are opposite to Darwin‟s Theory. Moreover, the scientists of the most countries except a few have no facility to work with fossils; due to lack of technologies even they have no chance to see the fossils too. That is why the evolutionists as well as paleontologists cunningly have shown the fossils as the direct evidences of organic evolution. Darwin stated that if the geological record be perfect then the main objection of his theory natural selection will be greatly dismissed or disappears and he, who rejects these views on the nature of geological record, would rightly reject his whole theory.

Why, that’s nothing but stock creationist assertions, all presented in fractured English in a hodge-podge fashion. It makes absolutely no sense…but it got published.

I kind of suspect that the Journal of Biology and Life Science has an amazingly slackworthy process of review in place. In fact, I dare say the review process probably involves paying the $100 submission fee, and nothing more.

But wait! There’s more! The authors on that paper are Ahad and Michener. Michener is actually a respected entomologist at the University of Kansas — and he was totally surprised to learn that his name was on a retracted paper, since he’d never seen it, contributed nothing to it, and didn’t even know it existed.

So that’s how you publish a creationist paper: find a journal that will take your money and not even bother to proofread, and then just to add that extra veneer of contemptible dishonesty, use a real scientists name as a co-author.

Guess who’s speaking at the NSTA National Conference

amyfarrahfowler

The featured speaker at this year’s National Science Teacher Association conference in Boston is…Mayim Bialik.

The lucky ones among you are saying right now, “who?”. Others may know her from her television work, but maybe don’t know the full story behind her ‘science’ activism.

She’s an actor who plays Sheldon’s girlfriend on Big Bang Theory. Right there, as far as I’m concerned, we have a major strike against her: I detest that show. It’s the equivalent of a minstrel show for scientists, where scientists are portrayed as gross caricatures of the real thing — socially inept, egotistical jerks who think rattling off an equation is a sign of intelligence. I think it’s literally an anti-science communication show. Who in their right mind would want to be anything like Sheldon, the narcissistic nerd? Who would want to work with people like that? The message it’s sending instead is that if you are a superficial asshole, you should become a scientist, where you will be loved for personality traits that would get you shunned in civilized company. (We also see the same phenomenon in atheism, where so many people think it’s a great excuse to be the insensitive Vulcan.)

But OK, that’s a matter of taste, I will admit, and maybe not enough of a reason to be appalled to think she is going to be speaking to science teachers (although it’s enough for me). And she does have a Ph.D. in neuroscience, you have to respect that.

But…

Mayim Bialik does not vaccinate her kids. She’s the spokesperson for the Holistic Moms Network. I know what you’re thinking: “holistic” doesn’t sound so bad. But take it away, Orac!

Just one look at its advisory board should tell you all you need to know. For instance, there’s Dr. Lauren Feder, who bills herself as specializing in “primary care medicine, pediatrics and homeopathy” and has been a frequent contributor to that bastion of quackery and antivaccine looniness, Mothering Magazine, where she recommended homeopathic remedies to treat whooping cough. It doesn’t get much quackier than that. But Feder is just the beginning. Also on the Holistic Moms advisory board is the grand dame of the antivaccine movement herself, the woman who arguably more than anyone else is responsible for starting the most recent iteration of the antivaccine movement in the U.S. Yes, I’m talking about Barbara Loe Fisher, the founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a bastion of antivaccine propaganda since the 1980s. She’s not the only antivaccine activist on the advisory board, though. There’s also Peggy O’Mara, publisher of Mothering Magazine and Sherri Tenpenny, who is described right on the Holistic Moms website as, “one of America’s most knowledgeable and outspoken physicians, warning against the negative impact of vaccines on health.” Then there’s Dr. Lawrence Rosen, “integrative” pediatrician who appeared at the NVIC “vaccine safety conference” back in 2009 with Barbara Loe Fisher and Andrew Wakefield. In fact, Barbara Loe Fisher, Sherri Tenpenny, and Lauren Feder are featured very prominently on the Holistic Moms Network page on vaccination.

But that’s not all. If there’s one more thing that should tell you all you need to know about the Holistic Moms Network approach to science-based medicine, then take a look at its sponsors: Boiron (manufacturer of the homeopathic remedy for flu known as Oscillococcinum), the Center for Homeopathic Education (and I bet it is homeopathic too), the National Center for Homeopathy, and a whole bunch of other purveyors of woo and quackery.

And he has a lot more to say, as usual.

So why is this woo-peddling, vaccination-denying sitcom star being featured as a speaker at NSTA? I don’t know. Because she has a Ph.D. and pretends to be socially inept on TV? That doesn’t seem to be a good reason. Will Jenny McCarthy be invited to deliver a keynote next year? How about Ken Ham — he’s very into ‘science’ education, you know. Gosh, if we’re going to open the door to quacks, the pool of potential speakers just expanded immensely! Joseph Mercola? Andrew Weil? Deepak Chopra!

Tsk, NSTA. Do you vet your speakers at all?

Still picking nits over Giordano Bruno

The NCSE, which does good work otherwise, is a bit too apologetic to religion for my taste. They’re bumbling all over themselves to criticize Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos because it highlighted the conflict between religion and science, which is always a no-no for the NCSE. Now it’s Josh Rosenau’s turn to complain bitterly about the historical inaccuracy of even mentioning the unpleasant fact that the church has burned people alive.

Against that outpouring of objections from historians of science and others who want to see the rebooted Cosmos live up to the highest ideals of scientific and historical accuracy…

Hang on there, that’s a bit slimy. Who is saying it was inaccurate? Rosenau cites a bunch of people claiming that Bruno wasn’t a scientist and didn’t die for heliocentrism; but the episode nowhere claimed that he was a scientist. It actually said he was a mystic. You can’t complain that the show was wrong, only that it put the Catholic church in a very bad light…which is actually what has all the complainers wound up. How dare you point out the pernicious influence of religious dogma on civilization? That has nothing to do with science!

…PZ Myers insists that we are all Missing the Point of Giordano Bruno. In PZ Myers’s reading, the point of having a science show talk about Bruno and his cosmology (which he arrived at through a mystical vision and which he set at odds with Copernicans because they did not use heliocentrism as a religious argument) was not to tell a story about the history of science and its relationship to society or religion, but to simply alert the world to the fact: “Bruno was tortured to an agonizing death for his beliefs. Full stop.” And more generally: “The Church maintained an Inquisition to torture people who didn’t follow Catholic dogma in thought.”

Rosenau’s argument is that the Bruno story was misleading and inaccurate. Is there anything inaccurate in those quotes? Here’s a fuller summary of what I was saying.

I don’t think it odd at all that the series brought Giordano Bruno to the fore. This is not at all a show for scientists, but to bring a little bit of the awe and wonder of science to everyone. I think it was a good idea to use a non-scientist as an example of how dogma oppresses and harms everyone. Bruno was an idealist, a mystic, an annoying weirdo, a heretic, and for that, the Catholic Church set him on fire.

But somehow, being a weirdo means, in Rosenau’s eyes, that Bruno must be set apart from the real scientists. The church was only burning heretics, it would be a whole different matter if they were burning scientists.

To PZ’s eyes, nothing about that segment rested on whether Bruno was the brave vox clamantis in deserto, calmly championing heliocentrism and an infinite universe. The fact that Bruno wasn’t killed for those beliefs (not, of course, that he should have been killed for any of his beliefs, nor for stating them publicly!), that he didn’t arrive at his conclusions for scientific or empirical reasons, and didn’t try to test those ideas scientifically, are all, in PZ’s telling, irrelevant.

Exactly! Completely irrelevant!

Why is this so hard to understand? How could science function in a world where theological arbiters of the permissible truth can silence anyone who disagrees with them? I should think living in a culture of fear where you could be murdered for saying something the pope didn’t like was a rather effective way of suppressing scientific progress. Kill a few idealists for saying something against church dogma, and suddenly, those scientific investigations begin to look rather dangerous.

How long would a Darwin have lasted if he’d been born 200 years earlier?

But also, I’m getting a little annoyed with these people claiming that Bruno wasn’t killed for that one specific belief about the movement of the earth. He was! We have the list of eight charges for which Bruno was condemned. Note especially number 5.

1 – The statement of “two real and eternal principles of existence: the soul of the world and the original matter from which beings are derived”.

2 – The doctrine of the infinite universe and infinite worlds in conflict with the idea of Creation: “He who denies the infinite effect denies the infinite power”.

3 – The idea that every reality resides in the eternal and infinite soul of the world, including the body: “There is no reality that is not accompanied by a spirit and an intelligence”.

4 – The argument according to which “there is no transformation in the substance”, since the substance is eternal and generates nothing, but transforms.

5 – The idea of terrestrial movement, which according to Bruno, did not oppose the Holy Scriptures, which were popularised for the faithful and did not apply to scientists.

6 – The designation of stars as “messengers and interpreters of the ways of God”.

7 – The allocation of a “both sensory and intellectual” soul to earth.

8 – The opposition to the doctrine of St Thomas on the soul, the spiritual reality held captive in the body and not considered as the form of the human body.

It’s mostly a lot of New Agey sounding bollocks, with a fascination with contradicting bizarre Catholic doctrine with new, equally bizarre nonsense. So? That the earth rotates around the sun was one of his beliefs, and he didn’t come up with it any more than Josh Rosenau or I came up with the idea of evolution—but you still don’t get to murder people for their harmless beliefs, whether they’re original or scientifically tested or not.

Here’s another example that would have really driven the apologists for religion nuts: Michael Servetus. He was also set on fire in the 16th century for ideas that the Catholic Church detested, specifically for denying the trinity (stop right there and think about it: one of the most ridiculous, unsupportable (by evidence or the Bible, even) beliefs of modern Christianity, and they’ve been killing people and committing genocide for disagreeing with it). But Servetus was an early scientist — he was the first to figure out that the heart was a double-circuit pump, identifying the pulmonary circulation.

But most people didn’t know about it, because after they set him on fire, they set his books on fire too. No one knew about this discovery until William Harvey rediscovered it a hundred years later…and the last few hidden copies of Servetus’s books (I think only 3 survived the flames) were revealed.

So he was executed for his theology. But to pretend that this had no consequences for the advancement of science is ludicrous.

Watch the show yourself and judge what point the segment is making. But if PZ is right and the point was to talk about the horrors of the Roman Inquisition, why not expound upon the Albigensian Crusade or the Hussite Crusade or Joan of Arc or Girolamo Savonarola or William Tyndale, who also were put to death for their theological heterodoxies? Why spin a misleading [assertion not in evidence–pzm] tale about Bruno, implying that he inspired and laid the groundwork for a modern cosmology in which the universe is infinite, our sun is just another star, and our planets orbit our sun as other planets orbit other suns?

Yes, let’s! How about, though, if the lackeys for religion count themselves very, very lucky that Tyson only selected one man as an example, rather than exhaustively listing all of religion’s crimes against humanity? He highlighted one example, and moved on, and still the apologists are up in arms over it.

Here’s the thing. Neil deGrasse Tyson is not a militant atheist. He has specifically said that he does not want to make atheism his cause — he has other goals in mind. And yet, even here, people are freaking out because he openly discussed the deleterious effects of dogma on science.

Ham…hates… sharks?

Ken Ham visited an aquarium and was dismayed at the sinfulness on display there.

Visited the Sydney Aquarium (Australia) today – was surprised and saddened at how it’s changed with an incredible emphasis on sharks almost all the way through – it almost seemed like a worship center for sharks and the environment and as well as a church of evolution – makes me burdened even more to get the truth of God’s Word beginning in Genesis out to the culture

That’s right. Ken Ham went to the Sydney Aquarium and was saddened that they had displays featuring fish. What did he expect, Bibles floating in the tanks?

This could be a whole series. Ham visits a park, is surprised at the emphasis on trees and grass. Ham goes to a ball game, is horrified that the people are running and throwing and cheering rather than praying. Ham steps outside his house, notices the unrelenting blueness of the sky, runs back inside to recover his equanimity by watching the Trinity Broadcast Network.

I’d rather see a sea full of sharks than one more bit of idiocy from Answers in Genesis.

Richard Carrier will be everywhere all the time

Tonight he’s on Skeptic Fence. Next week he’ll be speaking in San Francisco. The week after that, he’ll be talking about Jesus in Ottawa.

I don’t know about this. Carrier’s the guy who finally convinced me that Jesus was little more than a glorified legend, largely by pointing out all the inconsistencies in the Bible. I’m beginning to suspect that Carrier must be a kind of congealed myth, himself.

The paper they don’t want you to read!

The climate change denialists are a bit thin-skinned; they’ve also been exposed as a bit on the wacko side. The journal Frontiers in Psychology is about to retract a paper that found that denialists tend to have a cluster of weird beliefs (NASA faked the moon landings, the CIA was in charge of the assassination of political figures in the US, etc.) because the denialists screamed very loudly.

This outrage first arose in response to a paper, NASA faked the moon landing–Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science (pdf) which analyzed voluntary surveys submitted by readers of climate science blogs, in which the respondents freely admitted to having a collection of other beliefs, in addition to climate change denial. That paper found something else interesting, and was the primary correlation observed: a lot of denialists are libertarians. Are you surprised?

Rejection of climate science was strongly associated with endorsement of a laissez-faire view of unregulated free markets. This replicates previous work (e.g., Heath & Gifford, 2006) although the strength of association found here (r ~.80) exceeds that reported in any extant study. At least in part, this may reflect the use of SEM, which enables measurement of the associations between constructs free of measurement error (Fan, 2003).

A second variable that was associated with rejection of climate science as well as other scientific propositions was conspiracist ideation. Notably, this relationship emerged even though conspiracies that related to the queried scientific propositions (AIDS, climate change) did not contribute to the conspiracist construct. By implication, the role of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science did not simply reflect “convenience” theories that provided specific alternative “explanations” for a scientific consensus. Instead, this finding suggests that a general propensity to endorse any of a number of conspiracy theories predisposes people to reject entirely unrelated scientific facts.

Oh, how they howled. Even libertarians seem to be embarrassed at being affiliated with libertarians, I guess. And conspiracy theorists, too? Why, the accusation itself is clearly evidence that there’s a conspiracy out to get them. They protested that because the respondents to the survey all found it through mainstream science blogs, all the responses were false flag operations put out by Big Climate.

What they didn’t realize was that they were generating more data to support the hypothesis. The authors of the first paper then wrote a second paper, the one that is now being retracted by the cowardly publisher, called Recursive Fury: Conspiracist Ideation in the Blogosphere in Response to Research on Conspiracist Ideation, in which they scanned public posts and comments on the first article, and analyzed the text for evidence of conspiracist tropes (it’s a nefarious scheme, they’re out to get us, it’s an organized movement to defeat us, etc.) and found that yes, conspiracist reasoning was quite common on climate change denial blogs.

They also rebutted some claims. The claim that the authors never bothered to contact the denialist blogs to host their survey was shot down pretty easily: they had the email, and further, they had replies from denialists who later claimed they never received any request to host the survey.

Initial attention of the blogosphere also focused on the method reported by LOG12, which stated: “Links were posted on 8 blogs (with a pro-science science stance but with a diverse audience); a further 5 “skeptic” (or “skeptic”-leaning) blogs were approached but none posted the link.” Speculation immediately focused on the identity of the 5 “skeptic” bloggers. Within short order, 25 “skeptical” bloggers had come publicly forward9 to state that they had not been approached by the researchers. Of those 25 public declarations, 5 were by individuals who were invited to post links to the study by LOG12 in 2010. Two of these bloggers had engaged in correspondence with the research assistant for further clarification.

Those emails were also revealed in a Freedom of Information Act request.

The squawking reached a new crescendo. Steve McIntyre wrote a strongly worded formal letter demanding that the defamatory article be removed, and accusing the authors of malice. Further, they complained that analyzing the content of blog posts and comments, public, openly accessible work, was an ethics violation.

Ludicrous as those claims are, Frontiers in Psychology is apparently about to fold to them. For shame.

You know, my university had a meeting with our institutional lawyers yesterday — I was called in to attend the information session for some reason, like having a reputation as a trouble-maker or something — and I was impressed with their professionalism and their commitment to actually defending the faculty and staff of the university. I guess not every organization is lucky enough to have good lawyers of principle.

Oh, well. All I can say is that, thanks to the denialist ratfuckers, now everyone is going to be far more interested in reading the two papers by Lewandowsky and others. I recommend that you read Motivated rejection of science (pdf) and Recursive fury(pdf) now, or anytime — they’re archived on the web. You might also stash away a copy yourself. You make a denialist cry every time you make a copy, you know.

The first author on the papers, Stephan Lewandowsky, has a few comments.

The strategies employed in those attacks follow a common playbook, regardless of which scientific proposition is being denied and regardless of who the targeted scientists are: There is cyber-bullying and public abuse by “trolling” (which recent research has linked to sadism); there is harassment by vexatious freedom-of-information (FOI) requests; there are the complaints to academic institutions; legal threats; and perhaps most troubling, there is the intimidation of journal editors and publishers who are acting on manuscripts that are considered inconvenient.

#upfordebate: @DonLemon Did a chupacabra eat Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?

It’s kind of neat how a twitter hashtag and my contempt for cable news are colliding right now. Apparently, True Skeptics™ are supposed to be willing to debate anything and everything, even if it gives unwarranted credibility to nonsense. The True Skeptics™ must be loving CNN right now, because with the unexplained disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, they are just going to town with weird speculation. Everyone seems to be doing it.

So cable news has to fill up 24 hours of endless talk with something, and this is the perfect opportunity for them: call in a panel of ‘experts’, have an open-minded moderator who feeds all the speculation, and then blather away in the complete absence of information. CNN bubblehead Don Lemon has become the go-to guy for every crazy theory out there, going so far as to ask about the possibility of a supernatural explanation, and here he is babbling about black holes, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Twilight Zone.

There are six nobodies sitting in on this panel. If I were one of them, I would not say that the ideas were unlikely but that I just love the theories — I’d stand up, throw off my microphone, and flip off Don Lemon as I left the set.

Open-mindedness to a degree is a virtue, but not to such an extent that it’s like you’ve got an open head wound and are stumbling about hemorrhaging copiously and smearing flecks of greasy brain tissue on the walls you’re bumping into.

This is why I don’t watch any of the 24 hour news channels. It’s like a bad zombie movie come to life.