The Discovery Institute, clueless as usual

The NCSE has a new executive director, Ann Reid (everybody say hooray, I’m sure we’ll be seeing much more of Dr Reid in the future), and of course the Discovery Institute had a snide post about it, which Ed Brayton has already mentioned, but he missed the real face-palm moment, maybe because it comes at the very end, and he couldn’t bear to read that far. Look at the parting shot they take at the fabulous Eugenie Scott:

Ann Reid, who worked most recently as director of the American Academy of Microbiology, has a serious background as a real scientist compared to her predecessor. Arguably, design in biology is more clearly revealed at the micro level even than it is at the macro. We hope her past employment and studies will serve her well in presenting the scientific evidence to the public with greater objectivity than we’ve been accustomed to from the NCSE.

Eugenie Scott has a Ph.D. in physical anthropology from the University of Missouri, and taught in her discipline at the University of Colorado and at California State University Hayward. She is far more qualified to discuss evolution and biology than any of the pretentious twits employed by the Discovery Institute.

If they’re clinging to a forlorn hope that a microbiologist is going to favor their vague and unscientific hypotheses about an ‘intelligent designer’ more than would an anthropologist, they are going to be disillusioned once again, and are also going to be widely mocked as completely out of touch with science.

A rather remarkable deficiency

There’s a much ballyhooed article from Science going around that promotes the surprising conclusion that dogs were first domesticated in Europe. Dan Graur points out that there is one little problem with the data:

The take home message of the Thalmann et al. paper is simple: Dogs were not domesticated in the Middle East or China as previously claimed; they were domesticated in Europe. Let me repeat the main result of this paper: Dogs were domesticated in Europe; previous claims on the domestication of dogs in the Middle East or China are wrong and have been refuted.

Interestingly, on page 873, it is written:

“Notably, our ancient panel does not contain specimens from the Middle East or China, two proposed centers of origin (5, 6).”

So, the origin of dogs was moved from the Middle East or China to Europe by the simple expedient of omitting any sample from the Middle East or China.

Well, the paper does have the primary prerequisites for getting published in Science: superficially sexy data sets, involving a familiar large and photogenic animal, an unexpected result, with a high probability of drawing the attention of the mass media. That’s what we mean by “significant research,” right?

Say, isn’t that also the formula for a TED talk?

Time for the professional societies to take a stand on Burzynski

The 4th Quadrennial Meeting of the World Federation of Neuro-Oncology is meeting right now in San Francisco, and guess who is presenting there? There are four papers being presented by those criminal frauds of the Burzynski Clinic.

They sure can talk the science talk, can’t they? And they go through all the motions of attending and presenting at meetings of the Society for Neuro-Oncology, which I’m sure looks formidable to the rubes, but when you look at the results of recent reviews of their facilities and protocols (or read the summary in USA Today), they don’t walk the science walk. Read about the patients, or the story of the Burzynski scam. For over thirty years, he has been skating at the edge of credibility by carrying out the rituals of science without going the next step and actually testing his claims, getting rich off desperate people and killing them with bad therapies and sloppy protocols.

I know what these meetings are like. They will be full of professionals in nice dresses and conservative ties, and they will be talking shop and taking notes on the interesting presentations, and I know exactly how they will respond to Burzynskiites: they are beneath them, they will roll their eyes as they skip their talks, and they might grumble a bit at the bar afterwards. And that’s about it. I’ve seen it when creationists get their work into poster sessions at non-peer-reviewed science meetings.

But these guys are worse than creationists. These are con artists giving false hope to dangerously ill patients, using organizations like the SNO as a façade to bilk people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and skirting on the proper protocols to give the illusion that they’re doing legitimate science.

It is a huge ethical problem for these societies to provide cover for quacks. I would hope that, at the very least, attendees take time to read the facts about Burzynski and give these con artists a hard time in public; but more significantly, I think the only appropriate thing for the Society for Neuro-Oncology to do is to kick the bastards out. Don’t let them take shelter under your wing any more.

Sexy T-rex meets lecherous creationist

Charlie Stross has written a story, A Bird in Hand, which rather pushes a few boundaries. It’s about dinosaurs and sodomy, as the author’s backstory explains. And as everyone knows, every story is improved by adding one or the other of dinosaurs and sodomy, so it can’t help but be even better if you add both.

A note of caution, though: Charlie is really, really good at spinning out all the latest scientific buzzwords and deep molecular biological concepts into an extraordinarily plausible-sounding mechanism for rapidly recreating a dinosaur — it’s much, much better than Crichton’s painfully silly and superficial dino-blood-from-mosquitoes-spliced-with-frog-DNA BS — but I was a bit hung up on poking holes in it. It won’t be quite that easy, and it rather glibly elides all the trans-acting variations that have arisen in 70 million years and the magnitude of the developmental changes. But still, if we ever do manage to rebuild a quasi-dinosaur from avian stock, that’ll be sort of the approach that will be taken, I suspect. Just amplify the difficulty a few thousand fold.

Also, it’s way too technical to survive in the movie treatment.

An ominous beginning

There was a creeper caught in Chicago.

A 70-year-old Tinley Park man accused of using dandelions to try to lure four Grissom Middle School children into his car last month…

Why? What horrible thing was he trying to do with these kids?

…told police he was actually trying to teach them about creationism.

Gaaaah! Well, it could have been worse, much worse. But it’s still rather awful that he was trying to poison those kids’ minds.

Police caught up with the man on Nov. 5, based on descriptions the children provided of him and his vehicle.

Asked about the incident, the man said he’d recently returned from a seminar debunking Darwinism. He said he wanted to share the information he’d learned that proved the theory of evolution "is false" with neighbors and children.

Now I’m curious, though. What creation seminar was this that drove a good Christian to drive about, trying to lure children into his car?

And why did the police just let him go?

Aww, we missed his birthday

It’s belated, but maybe you can go read this lovely tribute to Prince Charles by Edzard Ernst.

The young Prince Charles went on a journey of ‘spiritual discovery’ into the wilderness of northern Kenya. His guru and guide was Laurens van der Post (who was later discovered to be a fraud and compulsive fantasist and to have fathered a child with a 14-year old girl entrusted to him during a sea voyage). Van der Post wanted to awake Charles’ young intuitive mind and attune it to the ideas of Carl Jung’s ’collective unconscious’ which allegedly unites us all through a common vital force. It is this belief in vitalism (long obsolete in medicine and science) that provides the crucial link to alternative medicine: virtually every form of the otherwise highly diverse range of alternative therapies is based on the assumption that some sort of vital force or energy exists. Charles was so taken by van der Post that, after his death, he established an annual lecture in his honour.

That’s not very friendly

Hemant is off taking care of personal business, so I guess he didn’t notice this rather unpleasant guest post that is celebrating a decapitation. Islamists in Syria killed the wrong person, one of their own allies…so now we’re supposed to celebrate brutal murder and bloody mutilation, as long as the right guy was murdered and mutilated.

Indiscriminate cruelty and slaughter has long been a way of life for these types. I guess I’m supposed to be sad when it becomes a way of death for them too, but for once I’ll nod along in agreement with Jesus, who is said to have stated the inevitability of violence begetting violence pretty succinctly: “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.”

Mohammed Fares was another Islamist boil on the ass of humanity. It’s an unpleasant procedure, but boils need to be lanced. Or beheaded — same thing.

No. The dead man might have been the most evil creature on the planet, a terrible, awful person who would have spread more terror if he’d lived, but let’s not dehumanize people by calling them diseases and asking for more death and using the Bible to justify violence. You know who else does that, right? Hint: it shouldn’t be atheists.

Wait. Sometimes Christians get it right, too.

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Everything you need to know about Texas creationists

The Dallas Observer has a good history of creationist meddling in the Texas textbook wars. The Gablers, Phyllis Schlafly, Ray Bohlin, the Discovery Institute…they all get a mention, and the sordid descent of the Texas Board of Education into chaos and stupidity are all explained. It doesn’t have a real ending yet, but there are some promising suggestions that the creationists’ influence is beginning to wane.

Support Humanists on the Palouse

They’re doing some fundraising for their Darwin on the Palouse event in February. I spoke there a while back — it’s a great event in an area that needs this perspective.

Just cross the Idaho border, and what do you find? Doug Wilson and the New Saint Andrews College, where you can get steeped in both creationist literalism and racist apologetics. I suspect that they get quite a bit more cash flow than the humanists, so anything you can do to offset the imbalance will be appreciated.

Hey, Brits: You know what you can do with your monarchy, right?

The same thing the Yanks ought to do with their vapid celebrities: time to build the ‘B’ Ark. I have an aversion to those horrible little puff pieces about the Royals that come out of the British press, but I get a lot of my news out of the UK, and every once in a while one of those stories comes wafting by on the data stream, like a giant flocculent, spongy turd packaged in candy floss — and I get an unpleasant splat in my face. So I found myself reading with horror some noise about Prince Charles and homeopathy. Because I love you all so much, I figured I’d share.

After a plodding long prologue somberly discussing the history of Charles’s doddering brain encountering 16th century alchemical balderdash and haranguing the British Medical Association with it, and with his founding of various money sinks for bunkum, we get to his toxic effects on the citizenry.

Nevertheless, Charles’s support has, in no small part, led to a surge in the number of patients seeking such treatments. Nearly six million Britons now see complementary practitioners each year, and one in four would like access to be universally available on the NHS. (Currently, treatments are accessible only in some areas, including Bristol and Lothian.) Over-the-counter remedies, such as arnica cream, have seen a 24 per cent growth in sales in the past decade.

Rachel Roberts, chief executive of the Homeopathy Research Institute, admits that she was once sceptical about holistic medicine but was won over by Charles’s endorsement of the practice. The royal physician is Dr Peter Fisher, clinical director at the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine and an accredited homeopath.

“The Royal family have huge resources and access to everything medicine has to offer, yet they choose homeopathy,” explains Roberts. “I thought, ‘Why would they use it if it doesn’t work?’”

She sees Charles as a revolutionary. “He’s outspoken about his beliefs and doesn’t appear to care that he’s going against the tide of opinion,” she says. “He gives homeopathy a voice. Now we’re seeing a U-turn in how it is being received, and the rest of the world is catching up to where Prince Charles has been for decades.”

Oooh! A bunch of filthy rich people are promoting something insanely stupid, but surely they couldn’t have got to where they are now without being clever and wise and all that, surely? Do I really need to inform the British public that your prince achieved his status in the world entirely by virtue of being born to the right parents, and he didn’t have to earn a bit of it?

Just a suggestion: go read The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favourite Fetish by Christopher Hitchens. It’s short, it’s cheap, it gets right to the point.