DJ Grothe responds

He didn’t care much for my criticism of their advertising copy yesterday, so he sent me an email.

I’m not sure if you [it was cc’ed to several people] want to be kept up on things like this (we try not to get distracted by bloggers who have a habit of taking aim at JREF, RDFRS, CFI or Skeptics Society, etc.) [it’s a “habit” now? And oh, yes, let’s belittle those bloggers. Did he even notice who he was sending it to?], but just in case: PZ did a blog post against TAM today [No, I didn’t. You might have noticed I called it “premium event that brings in professional entertainers and big name celebrities”; that is not a criticism of TAM at all. I criticized their misleading ad.], contra our recent promo email.

https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2013/06/11/a-misleading-claim-by-a-skeptical-organization/

I’m not going to respond [What do you call this?], but it is worth noting that our numbers do hold — TAM is actually significantly cheaper than CSICon, NECSS, etc. [Cherry-picking cons now, I see] when factoring in our low hotel costs, included meal’s, etc. — and it is a much higher quality event by many measures [Do CSICon, NECSS, etc. know of DJ’s opinion of their quality?]. Not to mention that it is a full four days, not just two and a half days. And 3-4 times as many presenters on the program. [That’s the first legitimate point he’s made. It is a bigger event…but that does not make it a cheaper event. That’s reason to say TAM is worth the money, not that it is cheaper.] (The cost factor, the value of TAM, was a bullet point in the recent promotional email.)

PZ compares TAM to a free student-run conference in Springfield Missouri. False comparison, obviously. [Oh. TAM is a cheaper conference as long as you don’t include all those conferences which are cheaper. Got it. And is there something wrong with a conference being “student-run”? I’ve found student-run conferences to be among the best experiences.]

A regular TAM attendee and good egg, Jim Lippard, posted this comment on PZ’s blog, which PZ apparently deleted [Say what? I checked everywhere, and nope, Lippard left no comment here. He did leave this same comment on another blog at exactly the same time. How did Grothe copy and paste the comment without noting it wasn’t on Pharyngula at all? A mystery. Put a skeptical investigator to work on it right away.]:

Jim Lippard says:
June 12, 2013 at 2:20 AM
FYI, TAM does include three breakfasts and two lunches with the registration. Your Skepticon comparison is rather location-dependent–for me, I’d have to fly to Skepticon, while I could drive or fly to Vegas for less than the cost to get to Springfield. A round-trip ticket for TAM today would cost me $197, vs. $504 for Springfield with the same dates (according to Google’s ITA Software). The overall costs would be comparable if I wanted to stay at the conference hotel in both cases (the South Point Casino JREF rate was $45/night for Thu, $85/night for Fri, Sat)–TAM $475+$197+$215 = $887, Skepticon free+$504+$417 = $921, without comparing meals (are they included at Skepticon?). [I responded to this elsewhere (like, where he left the comment), but factoring in the momentary vagaries of airline pricing really is a colossal cheat. I’ve had domestic prices to the same destination wander up and down by $400 over the course of a month. But especially when he’s close enough to drive to TAM, while Skepticon is farther away for him…don’t you think that might contribute to the price difference?]

D.J.

As I said in the previous post:

Again, TAM has a niche, and there’s nothing wrong with filling that niche — but to claim to be the budget conference is thoroughly dishonest.

There was no criticism of TAM at all there — it has a role, it does it well, if you enjoy it and can afford it you should go — but I do think the advertising copy was dishonest and, for a consumer protection organization, they should take a little more responsibility to avoid stretching the truth. I have my doubts that Grothe even read my post, and is instead regurgitating something one of the haters sent to him without verifying its contents…which may be where this claim that Lippard posted it here came from. Also note that the article where Lippard actually commented did a breakdown of costs for him to attend a CSI conference, and it came down cheaper than TAM. Not very skeptical of him, is it?

What is it with these big-name skeptics that they are so thin-skinned about any criticism at all?

Oh, dear. DJ sent me email informing me that the above note was sent to me by mistake…so apparently it’s all my fault now.

Hi PZ — did you miss these emails? I am really surprised you posted the email that I explicitly said I sent to you by mistake, instead seeming to suggest I sent it to you intentionally, and that you actually neglected to mention the correction I immediately sent to you below regarding Lippard. It is a pretty impressive mischaracterization. Does it feel underhanded to you in the least? Do you think you are one of the good guys? It is pretty disappointing, and I wonder if you are able to see why.

D.J.

No, I didn’t see any other emails until I went searching through the mess in my inbox. And now I see that he didn’t intend for me to receive his sneering dismissal of bloggers and people who criticize skeptics, which explains the rather unhelpful attitude in the first message. It doesn’t explain the continuation of that attitude in the message above, though. Still, it’s good to know how he talks about us behind our backs, I guess.

What mischaracterization? I must be one of the bad guys for pointing out the obvious fact that TAM actually IS a rather expensive conference. Everyone knows it; at TAM London I heard a lot of complaints about the ticket price, compared to other events there; every year I see people experiencing a bit of a shock when they learn how much registration costs. And that’s OK — the JREF organizers could be telling everyone how good it is and pointing out all the talent on display (although, really, this same talent often appears at other cons as well). But claiming that it is the least expensive conference is rather ridiculous, don’t you think?

Apparently, the only greater misrepresentation is to dare to point out that it is so.

Anti-vaxxers are as bad as creationists

In Australia New Zealand:

It started when seven-year-old Alijah got a small cut on the bottom of his foot in December 2012.

"Of course we didn’t think it was too serious, it was just a little cut but a couple of days later he started getting symptoms like a stroke on the side of his face," Mr Williams says.

"A couple of days later during the night he started to get cramps across his face. His face would contort and he was in a lot of pain."

After 24 hours in Auckland’s Starship Children’s hospital, the doctors diagnosed Alijah with tetanus, and he was taken to intensive care.

His parents didn’t get him a tetanus shot because they were afraid of vaccines.

In California:

Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, has claimed the 10th victim in California, in what health officials are calling the worst outbreak in 60 years.

Since the beginning of the year, 5,978 confirmed, probable and suspected cases of the disease have been reported in California.

All of the deaths occurred in infants under the age of 3 months, says Michael Sicilia, a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health. Nine were younger than 8 weeks old, which means they were too young to have been vaccinated against this highly contagious bacterial disease.

"This is a preventable disease," says Sicilia, because there is a vaccine for whooping cough to protect those coming in contact with infants, and thereby protect the infants.

However, some parents are choosing to not vaccinate their children. In other cases, previously vaccinated children and adults may have lost their immunity because the vaccine has worn off.

Ignorance kills, and we’ve got people promoting ignorance.

People like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes to talk. When he calls you to discuss vaccines, he talks a lot, uninterruptably. He called Keith Kloor after Kloor wrote a story for Discover about RFK Jr.’s keynote address to a convention of people who think vaccines cause autism. You can read about their conversation at Kloor’s blog. Phil Plait wrote a story about RFK Jr. for Slate last week, pointing out that the idea that vaccines cause autism is a crackpot theory that has been thoroughly debunked, that it is dangerous, and that RFK Jr. is one of its most effective proponents.

Kennedy claims that thimerosal, a preservative used in some vaccines, causes autism. No, it doesn’t. This has been tested out the wazoo, and there’s no connection between autism and thimerosal, or autism and vaccines, for that matter. In order to back up his claim, Kennedy is reduced to completely misrepresenting the scientific evidence.

For a guy whose family has such a distinguished record of public service, Kennedy says some pretty awful things about government employees: “The lies that you are hearing and printing from the CDC are things that should be investigated.” He spoke to one scientist (he named her but I won’t spread the defamation) who, he said, “was actually very honest. She said it’s not safe. She said we know it destroys their brains.”

I asked the scientist about their conversation. She said there is in fact no evidence that thimerosal destroys children’s brains, and that she never said that it did.

There’s a pattern here.

When RFK Jr. challenged the university scientist about a study of the biological activity of thimerosal in vitro, which “everybody accepts because journalists hadn’t read it,” the scientist said, “ ‘Oh, yeah, you’re right about that.’ He backpedaled.” That’s because “now he was dealing with somebody who wasn’t afraid to read science.”

I talked to the scientist, who would prefer I not use his name because he gets death threats from unhinged anti-vaxxers. He said, “Kennedy completely misrepresented everything I said.”

I don’t know why Kennedy is bothering to misquote scientists and trying to get scientific authority to back him up, though, because he doesn’t believe in scientists anyway. He’s got a gigantic conspiracy theory in which all these scientific organizations are lying.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s elaborate conspiracy theory is just as delusional and dangerous. Rather than accepting the findings of the Institute of Medicine, the National Institute of Mental Health, or the American Academy of Pediatrics, Kennedy says the scientists are lying. He says vaccine-makers are intentionally poisoning kids and giving them autism. Only he and his fellow activists know the truth because journalists, although they may report aggressively on the National Security Agency, Defense Department, and Central Intelligence Agency, are cowed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Apparently hereditary political lineages are a really bad idea. The UK has Prince Charles, and the US has Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kiwis and chickens

This is a very nice video that has a metaphor that I quite liked for different kinds of pseudoscience.

So some kinds of pseudoscience are so dotty and foundationless that they’re like kiwis: they are so wrong that they never get off the ground, and they don’t even try. Religion, for instance, is a total kiwi.

Chickens, on the other hand, try to flap mightily and might get airborne for a little bit, but can’t sustain themselves for the duration. These are pseudoscientific ideas that borrow a bit from real science and get it wrong.

I’ve noticed that some skeptics like to set aside kiwis as a special case that is exempt from criticism. I’d like to point out that neither kiwis nor chickens are able to soar.

A misleading claim by a skeptical organization

Say, I got this same email from the JREF that JT did.

TAM 2013 is actually cheaper than any other skeptic conference when hotel, travel, and meals are factored in. Hotel rates for similar conferences range from $150-200 per night, while our TAM group rates go as low as $45 a night! But the group rates end tomorrow, so book your hotel room right now with JREF’s group code AMA0707!

That’s just plain bullshit. TAM is actually one of the more expensive conferences around — it’s a fundraiser for the JREF. There’s nothing wrong with that — TAM has always positioned itself as a kind of premium event that brings in professional entertainers and big name celebrities. But Skepticon is a free skeptics conference in a city that isn’t particularly expensive; I don’t understand how they can claim that TAM is cheaper than any other.

Here’s a full breakdown of the costs of attending a couple of different conferences. TAM is the most expensive. If you really want to attend a national conference that is as easy on the pocketbook as possible, Skepticon is probably the best bargain.

On top of that, there are growing numbers of free skeptical conferences that serve different regions &mdash in this area of the upper midwest alone we had the Madison Freethought Festival and SkepTech this past year, all free, so it’s getting easier and easier to find local events that make travel and lodging even cheaper. And most importantly, they build regional talent and communities.

Again, TAM has a niche, and there’s nothing wrong with filling that niche — but to claim to be the budget conference is thoroughly dishonest.

Isn’t one of the planks that the JREF builds their version of skepticism on “consumer protection”? Let’s have a little truth in advertising.

Dublin, 29-30 June!

In a bit more than two weeks, it’ll be time for the Empowering Women Through Secularism conference in Dublin. It’s going to be excellent, you should go!

I know there has been some concern that Michael Nugent has been enabling certain abusers to mouth off, but as Ophelia mentions, we’ve been talking about it behind the scenes. We haven’t resolved all of our differences by a long shot, and there are still some substantial disagreements, but, and this is an important point of agreement, none of those differences are to be the subject of the conference, which is going to be tightly focused on women’s rights. We might be having some interesting arguments in the bar afterwards, but none of that will be on the podium.

Also, don’t forget that the conference is the work of Atheist Ireland and the always awesome Jane Donnelly, not just Michael Nugent. When Ophelia says now that she has much more confidence in the work of the conference, she has good reason. It think it’s going to be very productive and successful.

One other interesting observation. You may notice that there are men listed as speakers, including me. I think this is appropriate, since women’s issues should also be men’s issues (and vice versa). However, women clearly have priority here — and the way it’s going to work is that the men will be sprinkled throughout to provide that complementary male perspective, but in every case, women will be in the majority on all of the panels. We guys will be very careful not to talk over the women or to launch into mansplaining mode, I hope. The audience can be encouraged to fling rotten fruit at us if we do.

So if you’ve been waffling over whether to go, be reassured. It’s going to be good.

Oh, and if you’re stuck in the midwest and flying across the Atlantic is just a journey too far, don’t forget SkepchickCon, the skeptic track at CONvergence, is the weekend after Dublin. You’ll also be entertained by the spectacle of Rebecca Watson and me stumbling about jet-lagged from our European excursion.

Jonah Lehrer: he’s baaaaack

Lehrer has landed a new book deal. This has sparked justifiable disgust: Maria Konnikova explains why.

Lehrer is not the writer who simply made up a few Bob Dylan quotes and self-plagiarized (the way he’s portrayed in recent accounts of his latest book deal). He is the writer who got the science wrong, repeatedly, who made up facts, misrepresented information, betrayed editors, and lied, over and over and over again, for many years, in multiple venues, not just in a single book. He is, in other words, the writer and journalist who went against the basic tenets of the profession, and did so many times over. He is the surgeon who botched surgery after surgery, the lawyer who screwed up case after case, the engineer whose oh-so-pretty designs toppled after a year or two, not once, but multiple times, and on and on. Why, then, is he not seeing the consequences the way he would have necessarily done in most other professions? Why is he instead getting the equivalent of a fresh docket of cases or a new departmental job: a coveted book deal with a prominent publisher?

He’s slick. He writes with a glib authority, and is a master of superficial plausibility, able to whip out a snappy footnote with a reference just obscure enough to tickle recognition in the brains of knowledgeable readers and to wow the yahoos. He sounds smart. But there’s a real vacancy at the core.

He’s not good at the science. He’s a poor researcher. He’s not a good writer — he churns words around and knows the form, but the content isn’t there.

So now he’s going to paste together another book that will clutter the shelves and deprive better writers of support. Konnikova suggests an action we can take:

And that’s why we, the readers, are the only possible villain—that is, if we choose to be, by continuing to pay attention to Lehrer, by continuing to cover his work, by buying his new book and reviewing it and drawing attention to it. By making it possible for this book of love to be another best-seller.

So let’s make a choice. Let’s not do it. Let’s show Simon & Schuster that they backed a losing horse that has run its last. Let the book flop, not sell. Don’t buy it, resist the urge “just to see” what the fuss is all about. We make Jonah Lehrer. Without an audience, he is nothing, plain and simple.

Won’t work. She’s preaching to the choir — the people who read science blogs already know Lehrer’s reputation, and won’t be tempted in the slightest to buy yet another bit of hackwork from the guy. I have no plans to every pay a penny for that book, that’s for sure.

Lehrer has made a brilliant move, actually. He’s writing a pop psych book about love. He’s going to wave the tattered banner of his past science writing to argue that he has the authority to speak for science on a matter of everyday importance, and his precious scholarly style will add weight to that claim in the minds of his new target audience. And that audience isn’t us. His new audience will be the people who watch Oprah to learn about science.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that Oprah was part of his pitch. This is a book tailor-made for that show: the flawed writer seeking redemption (who also happens to be young and attractive), the pseudo-highbrow style, the subject matter, the “counter-intuitive” pronouncements that will actually line up well with what the audience wants to hear.

I’ll bet you that right now the publicists are thinking up copy to send to the weekday afternoon talk shows, and that by this time next year Lehrer will be working that circuit. And that he’ll make big buckets of money selling off the sad bleeding shreds of his integrity.

Atheism has no desire for martyrs, so please stop creating them

In Syria, you aren’t free to argue in even the mildest terms about gods.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the boy had been arguing with someone about the existence of God, and was heard to say: "Even if the Prophet Mohammad returns, I will not become a believer."

But other sources suggested that the comment was misheard, and that the boy was actually arguing with another customer over giving him a free coffee, saying "Even if the Prophet returns, I will not give you a free coffee."

Qataa was reportedly abducted and tortured for 24 hours, before being dragged into the middle of a crowded street and executed in front of his mother.

It was quite explicit that he was murdered for atheism.

The Observatory said in a statement: “People gathered around him and a member of the fighting brigade said: ‘Generous citizens of Aleppo, disbelieving in God is polytheism and cursing the prophet is a polytheism. Whoever curses even once will be punished like this’.

“He then fired two bullets from an automatic rifle in view of the crowd and in front of the boy’s mother and father, and got into a car and left.”

I curse that cowardly gunman’s god a thousand times, and I won’t give him any free coffee, either.

Mohammad Qataa was 15 years old, and killed for being smarter than a pious thug.

Who else calls us “bullies”?

Why, the Discovery Institute. This video shows Joshua Youngkin of the DI spewing lies like a geyser of bullshit in testimony in Louisiana.

Look at what he claims:

  • Laws demanding equal time for creationism are anti-bullying laws, and all those trained biologists are just big bullies.

  • The Discovery Institute wants more evolution taught in the schools.

  • It’s the scientists who want students to learn less about evolution.

  • The Discovery Institute publishes peer-reviewed research. He gets the title of their journal and their “research” organ wrong, and it’s an in-house journal stacked with creationist reviewers.

  • 800+ Ph.D. scientists have signed their “dissent from Darwinism” document…which is only true if you count dentists and chiropractors as “Ph.D. scientists”.

Mind-blowing, isn’t it, that someone can sit before a legislature and calmly recite such a litany of falsehoods…oh, wait. I guess that happens all the time in legislatures. I guess he fits right in, then.

I’ve pointed out before that the Discovery Institute’s publication history has some serious problems, but about that journal: Jeffrey Shallit has a fine summary.

…pseudoscience is sterile: the ideas, such as they are, lead to no new insights, suggest no experiments, and are espoused by single crackpots or a small community of like-minded ideologues. The work gets few or no citations in the scientific literature, and the citations they do get are predominantly self-citations.

Here is a perfect example of this sterility: Bio-Complexity, the flagship journal of the intelligent design movement. As 2012 draws to a close, the 2012 volume contains exactly two research articles, one “critical review” and one “critical focus”, for a grand total of four items. The editorial board has 30 members; they must be kept very busy handling all those papers.

(Another intelligent design journal, Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, hasn’t had a new issue since 2005.)

By contrast, the journal Evolution has ten times more research articles in a single issue (one of 12 so far in 2012). And this is just a single journal where evolutionary biology research is published; there are many others.

But that’s not the most hopeless part. Of the four contributions to Bio-Complexity in 2012, three have authors that are either the Editor in Chief (sic), the Managing Editor, or members of the editorial board of the journal. Only one article, the one by Fernando Castro-Chavez, has no author in the subset of people running the journal. And that one is utter bilge, written by someone who believes that “the 64 codons [of DNA are] represented since at least 4,000 years ago and preserved by China in the I Ching or Book of Changes or Mutations”.

Never, ever trust a creationist.

The argument from antifreeze

Another day, another stupid creationist argument. This time, it’s some pastor whining that biologists don’t understand how animals survive the winter. We don’t?

These insects are not the only ones that hibernate – there are several others butterflies, insects, and even frog that make antifreeze in the fall and hibernate through the winter.  Insects in all stages of life – eggs, pupa, and adult (CHECK THIS) – have been programmed to make various versions of antifreeze chemicals in order to survive freezing weather.  How did the first Mourning Cloak butterfly learn to make anti-freeze?  If it failed even once, the result was death – an evolutionary dead-end.  God designed this butterfly to survive the brutal winter as an adult butterfly.  The next time you see a butterfly very early in the spring – chances are it is a butterfly that knows how to make antifreeze!

How many attempts to survive the winter did the woolly bear caterpillar try?  When did a certain caterpillar “get it right” and survive?  Remember there had to be both male and female surviving to produce eggs and continue the species.  The original Arctic woolly-bear caterpillar had to make this antifreeze so that its cells would freeze without rupturing for not just one winter…but 13 times for 13 winter freezes…always remembering to produce the antifreeze only just before winter arrived.  Then it had to learn to completely rearrange its body structure to turn into a moth on the 14th spring.

How do evolutionists explain this?  They don’t!  The Arctic woolly-bear caterpillar, the Mourning Cloak butterfly, and a myriad of other creatures were designed to survive through the freezing winter.  When you see design, there must be a Designer and that Designer is God.  Those who wish to deny God’s existence see this marvelous design and say evolution did it – random mutational changes filtered by natural selection caused all this marvelous design to happen…but this is just storytelling and hand waving – it explains nothing.

Gosh, what a surprise — an ignorant creationist. Actually, we do. Winters aren’t all-or-nothing — look at a globe, and we have these things called latitudes, where we can see variation in the intensity of winters. Minnesota gets rather cold in January, while Nebraska is milder, and Texas is milder still. That means it’s trivial to find animals with a range that spreads from mild to cold environments, and that natural selection can have both variation and different selection regimes to operate. This isn’t difficult at all.

Furthermore, anti-freezes aren’t hard to generate: these are just small molecules that lower the freezing point or bind nascent ice crystals to suppress ice formation. These things evolve all the time by chance! Ask Sean Carroll.

Insects have evolved a variety of cryoprotective substances. As winter approaches, many freeze-tolerant insects produce high concentrations of glycerol and other kinds of alcohol molecules. These substances don’t prevent freezing, but they slow ice formation and allow the fluids surrounding cells to freeze in a more controlled manner while the contents of the cells remain unfrozen.

For maximum protection, some Arctic insects use a combination of such cryoprotectants and antifreezes to control ice formation, to protect cells and to prevent refreezing as they thaw. Indeed, a new kind of antifreeze was recently discovered in the Upis beetle by a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Unlike the protein antifreezes of other beetles, snow fleas and moths, the Upis antifreeze is a complex sugar called xylomannan that is as effective at suppressing ice growth as the most active insect protein antifreezes.

The necessity of avoiding freezing has truly been the mother of a great number of evolutionary inventions. This new finding raises the likelihood that there are more chemical tricks to discover about how insects cope with extreme cold.

Carroll has written a book, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution, that explains in detail how the antarctic icefish antifreeze evolved. It’s a truncated pancreatic enzyme; a copy of the enzyme gene acquired a mutation that reduced it to a short 3-amino-acid long fragment (and which was subsequently expanded by duplication to multiple repeated copies) that has chemical properties that suppress ice formation. The blood of the icefish is saturated with this peptide, and it’s produced by the pancreas, just like the original enzyme, secreted into the intestine, just like the original enzyme, and then transported into the circulatory system. The genome of the icefish also contains pseudogenes, copies of original natural ‘experiments’ in the expansion of the antifreeze gene, that provide a record of its molecular history.

Meanwhile, arctic cod also carry an antifreeze protein…but it’s different and of independent origin from the one found in antarctic notothenioid fish.

So, actually, this creationist is completely wrong. Not only can we explain the evolution of antifreezes in animals, we do so in explicit detail, with step-by-step analyses of the molecular events behind them. If you want to see “storytelling and handwaving” that “explains nothing”, you’ll have to go to the loons who say “God did it.”