One Theory to rule them all

I’ve been slow on the uptake on all these conspiracy theories. I was completely unaware of all the “5G causes COVID-19” goofiness until all the cell phone towers being set on fire stories hit the news, for instance. Now Orac informs me of another wacky tale. Did you know glyphosate causes COVID-19? How about glyphosate and vaping? Maybe glyphosate in biofuels? Glyphosate in automobile emissions? Glyphosate in jet fuel? Meet Stephanie Seneff.

I am a senior research scientist at MIT [in computer science]. I have devoted over 12 years to trying to understand the role of toxic chemicals in the deterioration of human health. I have been particularly focused on figuring out what has been driving the skyrocketing rates of autism in America and around the world. My research strongly suggests that glyphosate (the active ingredient in the weed killer Roundup) is a primary cause of the autism epidemic in the United States. When the COVID-19 pandemic began its march across the world, I started to consider whether glyphosate might play a role.

If there is indeed a connection between glyphosate and COVID-19, understanding why and how they’re connected could play a critical role in combating this pandemic.

The only thing missing is a claim that glyphosate in contrails causes autism and COVID-19. Maybe it’s already there if I were to dig deeper, but I’m disinclined to dig even shallowly.

Personally, my theory, which is mine and that of every moderately sensible biologist on the planet, is that COVID-19 is caused by a moderately infectious virus that has nothing to do with glyphosate or jet fuel or rivers or I-5. But that’s just me. And most educated persons.

Even better than hydroxychloroquine!

I can cure the common cold. You may not believe it, but it’s true, and I have followed an established scientific protocol, the same as this study.

Two weeks ago, French doctors published a provocative observation in a microbiology journal. In the absence of a known treatment for COVID-19, the doctors had taken to experimentation with a potent drug known as hydroxychloroquine. For decades, the drug has been used to treat malaria—which is caused by a parasite, not a virus. In six patients with COVID-19, the doctors combined hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin (known to many as “Z-Pak,” an antibiotic that kills bacteria, not viruses) and reported that after six days of this regimen, all six people tested negative for the virus.

My protocol is easy. If you come down with the sniffles and watery eyes and stuffy nose of a cold, you just let spiders run around on your face, wait a few days, and your symptoms will fade away. You may argue that my n is very small and that I lack a control, but look — I’m just following the French model.

Unfortunately, I lack the endorsement of Dr Oz (so far — I expect he’ll jump on my bandwagon any day now, it’s what he does). I also haven’t hidden away any complications.

The report was not a randomized clinical trial—one in which many people are followed to see how their health fares, not simply whether a virus is detectable. And Oz’s “100 percent” interpretation involves conspicuous omissions. According to the study itself, three other patients who received hydroxychloroquine were too sick to be tested for the virus by day six (they were intubated in the ICU). Another had a bad reaction to the drug and stopped taking it. Another was not tested because, by day six, he had died.

I rather expect that a few people might have a bad reaction to my spider protocol, too, but at least I can say that no one has died of my treatment. I wouldn’t expect them to, since spiders are far more benign than hydroxychloroquine.

Even in people without the disease, hydroxychloroquine’s potentially harmful effects range from vomiting and headaches to instances of psychosis, loss of vision, and even sudden cardiac death. The drug is to be used with caution in people with heart conditions and liver dysfunction—both of which the coronavirus can itself cause.

Who knows? Maybe my spider protocol will also cure another viral disease, COVID-19. I’ve been handling spiders for a couple of years now, and note that I don’t have the disease. It could be a preventative. Extrapolating from these observations, maybe I have a true panacea scampering over my hands and nesting in my beard. What have you got to lose? Try it.

I’m just asking for $10 million to expand my colony (we’re going to need a lot of spiders) and that we take a couple of biomedical research labs offline to dedicate themselves to carrying out clinical trials of my cure. That’s all.

Hey! I just noticed that I don’t have cancer, or psoriasis, or guinea worm, or ebola. Spiders must cure everything! I’m gonna have to ask for more money. A dedicated research building? A few hundred assistants?

What have you got to lose?

It’s the 15th Annual Paul Nelson Day celebration!

That’s right, it’s 7 April, which is Paul Nelson Day! I figure I’l have an appropriately wild and festive celebration today by sitting home alone and grading papers. I’m planning to have an orange for lunch — I hope I’m not being too exuberant.

I thought I’d look and see what Nelson is up to nowadays. He’s still writing for the Discovery Institute, he’s working on another book, On Common Descent, which I doubt that I’ll bother to read, and no, he’s never come up with an adequate justification for the concept of “ontological depth”, which he claimed to have been studying empirically.

Just yesterday, though, he posted an essay expressing his gratitude to an atheist philosophy professor, Adolf Grünbaum, in which he is thankful for the methodological rigor of his training. That’s nice. I don’t think it took, though.

He gives an example of what he considers a flawed argument by Grünbaum.

An example: one day in class, Grünbaum was arguing that religious opinions followed geography and ancestry. One was much likelier to believe in the existence of Brahma and Vishnu, for instance, if one were born on the Indian subcontinent, and raised by Hindu parents, than, say, being born in Lincoln, Nebraska — which is true.

That fact is also irrelevant, however, to the entirely separate question “Do Brahma and Vishnu exist?” Moreover, as I explained to Grünbaum, my Jewish brother-in-law Avner, a theist, was raised in Montreal by atheistic, Stalinist parents who intended that Avner should also be an atheist who adored the USSR. But he didn’t adore the USSR. And he most certainly believed in God.

The statistical religious-belief-follows-geography-and-parentage argument Grünbaum was making, however, allowed for occasional outliers such as Avner — meaning that Grünbaum’s position possessed no predictive strength. The holes in his net of social statistics let any human counterexample swim right on through. Thus, Grünbaum’s argument said nothing definitive in any particular case, and since every human being is a particular case — that’s you, me, Avner, Grünbaum (who celebrated his bar mitzvah in a conservative Cologne synagogue), Stalin (raised as a believer who sang in church choirs and was educated in a Russian Orthodox seminary in Tiflis) — the argument just wasn’t very good, by Grünbaum’s own standards. One will believe in the God of one’s hometown and parents, except when one doesn’t. And therefore we’re back to square zero. Does God exist or not? Birthplace and parentage are irrelevant.

But Grünbaum was correct! He wasn’t making a deterministic argument that everyone born in India is somehow compelled by geography to believe in Brahma — obviously absurd because there are Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and atheist Indians — and I doubt that he was trying to directly demonstrate God’s nonexistence, if he was as brilliant as Nelson makes him out to be. It’s also clearly not an absolute, fixed rule, so that Nelson can list a few exceptions is irrelevant.

This is an argument about epistemology: how do human beings know anything about the nature of the god they worship? What Grünbaum was pointing out is that our concept of god isn’t produced by an objective analysis of observable facts about nature, but is the result of influences from culture, community, family, personal subjective experience. Contrary to the beliefs of the Discovery Institute cultists, there is no god who left a distinctive and unambiguous signature on every living thing, and the basis of their belief in an Intelligent Designer is built entirely on bias, ignorance, misinformation, and superstition. Grünbaum was asking his students to question how they know what they think they know about deities, and to recognize that it’s mostly a product of local tradition, not divine revelation or measurable data.

I can believe that Nelson’s brother-in-law Avner was raised as an atheist and later became a believer, but that fact says nothing about how he came to believe, and trotting it out as if it somehow refutes Grünbaum is the real lazy thinking here. I rather doubt that Avner was floating all of his life in a total atheist void when suddenly, in a flash of insight, the entirety of Judaism manifested itself in his mind, and he woke from his godless dream in which the faith came to him to find, to his surprise, that an entire worldwide community of Jewish folk had independently come to all the same conclusions.

Oh, well. It’s part of the tradition of Paul Nelson Day that Paul Nelson will pop his head out of his burrow and make a nonsensical declaration that he cannot possibly defend. Yay.

Dang. I just realized that I don’t have any waffles in the house for the traditional Paul Nelson Day meal, and I’m supposed to stay-in-place and shouldn’t run off to the grocery store to get some.

Michael Egnor agrees with me, I’m having a panic attack

Uh-oh. Michael Egnor is writing about me over on the Discovery Institute site. He’s commenting on that summary of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 virus I wrote the other day, which is fine. What isn’t fine is that he agrees with it.

I threw up in my mouth a little bit.

Reading further, though, he agrees with it for all the wrong reasons, so I feel a little better.

Myers, like the Nature Medicine scientists, uses the scientific inference to intelligent design to search for (and discount) human intelligent agency. Design science is at the forefront of research on the emergence of coronavirus. Based on the available evidence and using the inference to design as a scientific hypothesis, intelligent design of the COVID-19 virus seems unlikely.

That is incorrect. “Design science” is not at the forefront of the research. The authors of that paper came to their conclusion by extensive comparisons of the viral sequence with viruses in other organisms, and by a functional analysis of the structure of the receptor binding domain. Conspiracy theorists and creationists have been poisoning the global conversation with nonsense about the virus being “designed”, so they addressed and dismissed that idea. The primary interest was in the original source, and what properties of the virus make it dangerous to us.

They also pointed out two major adaptations of the virus spike protein: changes to the receptor binding to allow it to bind effectively (but not optimally) to the human ACE2 protein, and an insertion that adds a polybasic cleavage site which also allows the linkage of glycans to the protein that assist in immunoevasion. Two mutations at once! Doesn’t his pal Michael Behe have something to say about the improbability of multiple mutations?

But there is another lesson about design and evolution to be learned from scientific research on this virus. Natural selection, if understood as undirected variation and differential reproductive success, is a destructive process. Natural selection destroys biological functional complexity — it produces diseases, cancer, and pandemics. It weakens and kills. Natural selection does to living organisms what rust does to a machine. Natural selection corrodes and destroys life, and plays no role in creating it.

Not for the virus, it wasn’t a destructive process. What was undergoing natural selection here was the virus, not us, and it has acquired attributes that make it wildly successful — it is now colonizing vast fields of billions of human beings, producing uncountable numbers of progeny, infecting more people at an accelerating rate. The virus is stronger and thriving thanks to those features, and doing very well thank you very much.

Humans are now possibly undergoing a round of natural selection in response. I don’t know if there’s a pool of heritable resistance to the virus in the population, so it’s possible we’re experiencing a field of bullets scenario, where nothing heritable is being selected for, but if there is a genotype that has an advantage here, natural selection would increase their frequency over time. Natural selection could make us more resistant as a species to SARS-CoV-2, and definitely wouldn’t be a destructive process.

Also, one of the features of the virus is the addition of short sequences, so SARS-CoV-2 may have had a slight increase in complexity over its predecessors.

Egnor is basically wrong about everything. Balance is restored to the universe.

Even wealthy people can be crackpots

I saw Cody at Some More News talking about the rich people who are dealing with the pandemic in rich people ways. So Gwyneth Paltrow is buying an expensive custom face mask and jetting off to some exotic place to avoid the problems (she thinks). Grifters are setting up luxurious get-aways for the wealthy to get away…in groups. It’s all very Masque of the Red Death, and one can only hope it ends in the same way for them.

And then there’s Eric Weinstein. Sheesh. He’s supposed to be a smart guy? He does this rambling monolog about “Covid, new physics, and our need to get off the planet” and you just have to laugh. What a buffoon…except of course that he has a lot of money and is beloved by the Intellectual Dork Web.

To paraphrase his message, in case you don’t want to sit through that mess: humanity has been very lucky so far, but the lucky streak has ended and COVID-19 has put the world’s economic systems at risk. We should be asking why we’re so ill-prepared, why we have so few ventilators and hospital beds.

This is an insane risk to be taking with the world’s economy. People are accused of being racist if they call it the Wuhan virus and talk about travel bans.

“What should we do if the economy collapses?” he asks. He’s very concerned about The Economy.

This is where it all goes off the rails. To continue to paraphrase: He insists that we’ve got to get off of this planet. He admits that people called him crazy on the Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro shows when he said that. This virus should have been grown in a lab and escaped. We’re not going to be wise enough to rethink. Are we going to have to reboot from tardigrades?

No, really, he said that. I guess he thinks “we”, whatever he means by that, might die off, and “we” will have to restart as tardigrades. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Then he dismisses Elon’s idea of going to Mars, because it’s too marginal. The moon is too bleak for a colony. The only place with abundant opportunity is the far cosmos.

Wait, what? He doesn’t think there’s any place in the solar system to go (I agree), but he thinks we’ve desperately got to get off the planet (I disagree. He’s nuts). So we’re going to have to take off and travel to other star systems. Again, he uses “we” a lot. Who is “we”? Is he going to bring 8 billion people along with him in his space ship?

So, he points out, we’re trapped by Einsteinian physics, so he casually suggests we just have to invent a new physics. Just like that. Oh, Elon Musk going to Mars is crazy, but coming up with a new physics that lets Eric Weinstein do what he wants, that’s sensible.

That gets us about 8 minutes into him talking at his phone, less than halfway through, and you might expect that the rest would be talking about his New Physics, but no. He asks if he has enough of an audience to talk about his new ideas, and the rest of it is him mumbling at people in the chat and rambling on about how scientists and academia are close-minded and wrong, and how he wasn’t even allowed to attend his own thesis defense. Well, if this is how he defends his ideas, I sympathize with his committee.

It’s both infuriating and entertaining — this bozo is one of the leading lights of the IDW? Wikipedia puts his claims of a “new physics” in an enlightening context.

In May 2013, Weinstein gave a colloquium, Geometric Unity, promoted by Marcus du Sautoy as a potential unified theory of physics. His equation-less unpublished theory includes an “observerse,” a 14-dimensional space, and predictions for undiscovered particles which he stated could account for dark matter. Joseph Conlon of the University of Oxford stated that some of these particles, if they existed, would already have been detected in existing accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider.

Few physicists attended and no preprint, paper, or equations were published. Weinstein’s ideas were not widely debated. The few that did engage expressed skepticism. They were unable to debate more intensely due to the fact that there was no published paper.

Yep, total crackpot.

We are now in a race for the dumbest pandemic advice

Florida takes an early lead, with a Republican lawmaker suggesting we aim a hair dryer up our nose to treat COVID-10.

Florida Okeechobee County Commissioner Bryant Culpepper (R) referenced a program he said he saw on One American News Network on how to combat the coronavirus, the Lake Okeechobee News reports.

Said Culpepper: “One of the things that was pointed out in this interview with one of the foremost doctors who has studied the coronavirus said that the nasal passages and the nasal membranes are the coolest part of the body. That’s why the virus tends to go there until it then becomes healthy enough to go into the lungs.”

He added: “This sound really goofy, and it did to me too, but it works. Once the temperature reaches 136 degrees Fahrenheit, the virus falls apart, it disintegrates. I said how would you get the temperature up to 136 degrees? The answer was you use a blow dryer. You hold a blow dryer up to your face and you inhale through your nose and it kills all the viruses in your nose.”

Do I need to explain that that wouldn’t work at all, and would probably be deleterious to your sinuses?

By the way, One America News Network is a conspiracy-peddling, far right paranoid network that promotes nothing but pro-Trump bullshit. Don’t trust it.

The depth of CFI’s commitment to free speech can only be measured with an atomic force microscope

I have to share this public post by Kavin Senapathy because, by the time I got to the fourth paragraph, I’d facepalmed myself into an angry stupor and was feeling really pissed off at CFI. How can Robyn Blumner and CFI kick themselves in their own asses so hard? It ought to be anatomically impossible, but there they go.

I have an update about how the Center for Inquiry and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry have reacted to my recent Undark essay (https://undark.org/2020/02/20/center-for-inquiry-race-pseudoscience/) in which I criticize their indifference to matters of race, racist pseudoscience, and the white supremacy among their ranks.

Wait for it …

Within days, they removed all of my Skeptical Inquirer articles and my Point of Inquiry episodes from their website.

That’s right, my writing on things like quack autism “cures,” spurious birth practices including lotus birth, the “breast is best” mantra, pesticides, alternative medicine, mom guilt, and more have been unpublished. My podcast interviews with people like Carl Zimmer, Angela Saini, Massimo Pigliucci, Paul Offit, Adam Conover, Alison Bernstein, Iida Ruishalme, Claire Klingenberg, Sarah Taber, Susan Gerbic, Jen Gunter, and more on everything from MSG to OCD to the alarming resurgence of race science have also been removed from their website in apparent retaliation.

I’m not angry about this. I am bewildered, especially because CFI CEO Robyn Blumner is a self-styled “free-speech purist.”

Still, I’m not surprised— erasure and hypocrisy are among the most tried and true tools of white supremacy. As I wrote in my essay, “The most insidious white supremacy doesn’t carry tiki torches of festering hatred. It comes from well-meaning people who nevertheless uphold power structures with whiteness at the top.”

Skeptics: To those without the power to stand up to this as loudly as you’d like to— I see you and I respect you. To those with the power to stand up to this, I encourage you to do so. I also trust that, when you look at yourself in the mirror, you know which camp you belong in.

A particularly telling part of this is that Blumner has been sending emails in which she attempts to disparage me using, of all examples, an excerpt from this post (https://www.facebook.com/kavin.senapathy/posts/10156420934416875):

“My atheist role models growing up were my parents and my uncle. Today, my non-religious role model is, above all others, me. I also have a gaggle of deeply good non-religious friends who, amazingly, found their way to a non-religious belief system without ever reading a sentence by one ridiculous man whose name rhymes with Shmichard Schmawkins or his esteemed colleagues.

Honestly, none of these celebrated mediocre old white atheists are actually necessary. They’re not enlightened. They’re washed the fuck up. Yes, many people *have* found their way out of religion due to their work. But if you think that other brilliant non-religious thinkers who meet and surpass the abilities of these dudes don’t exist, then you live under a racist rock.”

I stand behind this statement.

I’m not sure what part is so particularly offensive, Robyn. My use of the word “white” isn’t the problem— it’s the racist, colonialism-tinged drivel that spews forth from Dawkins’ bigoted mouth and social media accounts.

It’s hard to see the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer reduced to a mere shell of the former pillars of skepticism that once inspired the formation of skeptical organizations stateside and around the world. It appears that certain individuals have infected CSI with their denialism and reductionist Newtonian worldview— a worldview in which “science and reason” can be neatly compartmentalized and isolated from sociopolitical forces. It’s cringeworthy and painful to witness. As one friend and ally put it, it seems that they’re afflicted with a terminal sclerosis.

All of that said, most of the responses to the Undark essay have been overwhelmingly positive. For instance, one award-winning science writer and woman of color who was invited to speak at CSIcon 2020 has informed CFI that she can’t make it this time, but “I would be happy to consider coming to speak at another time in the future if you would consider reinstating Kavin Senapathy, and also appointing more people of color to your board at the Center for Inquiry. Indeed, I’d be happy to join the board myself!”

This person is easily among those I most respect in the entire world and would make a fantastic addition to CFI’s Board. To see her email was a balm for my heart—I don’t want to be reinstated, but I do care, and ultimately still have hope that CFI’s skeptical soul isn’t beyond reviving.

I want to profusely thank all of the individuals and organizations that have shown support to me in the wake of all of this— for one, the Board of the European Council of Skeptical Organizations has stepped up to host all of the articles that have been removed. I appreciate it so very much and plan to take them up on it shortly.

To those still doing the hard work to try and change CFI, both from the inside and outside, you have all of my support. And to those still doing the hard work outside of CFI, you also have all of my support. Don’t hesitate to reach out if there’s something I could do to help; I’m extremely accessible.

We have work to do.

As I wrote, “Tackling these issues of race, diversity, and inclusion is hard, but worthwhile. And if legacy organizations like CFI refuse to confront these issues — both outwardly and within their own ranks — it’s reassuring to know that there’s a growing global community of skeptics who have shown willingness to heed the call. For the sake of the longevity of the skeptic’s movement, it is crucial that they — that we — succeed.”

I’ll sign off with a nod to *all* of the people who take a skeptical approach to their work on the front lines during this pandemic. I’m fairly certain that most who do skepticism well— that is, those who seek the bald-faced truth and strive to abide by it— call themselves things like “teacher,” “nurse,” “journalist,” “scientist,” “student,” “parent,” “Target cashier,” “delivery driver,” “friend,” and much more, and only some of them identify as skeptics. I truly believe that those who claim the badge of “skeptic” must tip our hats to all of the badasses out there who view science not just as a method, but as an integral part of the way they carry themselves in the world.

Oh, well. At least I bailed out of CFI and the skeptic movement 7 years ago. I haven’t regretted it since, it’s become a major shit-show.

Why does Dennis Prager still have a Twitter and YouTube account?

I keep hearing that the various social media services were going to start cracking down on disinformation. If that’s the case, why is Dennis Prager still around? His latest “fireside chat” is just an old ignorant man sitting around lying about the coronavirus.

It’s both sad and horrible. I lasted about ten minutes, roughly half of which is Prager talking about his dog. In the remainder, he made 3 stupid points.

  1. He’s a rational person and he hates irrationality, and those libs are all panicking and closing schools. He can’t stand panic.

    The thing is, though, nobody is panicking. Saying they are is about as convincing as saying you’re rational on your god-soaked propaganda channel. My university is closed, but no one was in a panic; this was a calmly made, rational decision based on the best available evidence. In centers of the epidemic, medical services are overwhelmed and people are dying, and since we aren’t particularly keen on seeing our students die, or bringing an infectious disease home to their more fragile grandparents, we decided to do the reasonable, responsible thing and minimize contact.
    Carl Zimmer posted some vivid data that illustrates why a timely response is necessary. In this graph of cumulative cases in Italy, Lodi was hit first and quickly shut down the city; Bergamo had its first case shortly afterwards, and waited two weeks before shutting down. Now the difference is dramatic. Bergamo has a rising number of cases, while Lodi effectively flattened the curve.

    2. Carl Zimmer: Here is a new, real-world demonstration of how social distancing and other measures can flatten the Covid-19 curve. The city of Lodi had the first Covid-19 case in Italy, and implemented a shutdown on Feb 23. Bergamo waited until March 8. From Oxford University, https://osf.io/fd4rh/?view_only=c2f00dfe3677493faa421fc2ea38e295

    That’s the kind of data officials looked at before making a calm decision. There was no panic. Prager is lying and misrepresenting the situation.

  2. The kids are only lightly affected, so why shut down schools? Yeah, that’s the kind of dumb-ass thing a Prager would say. Young people are less severely affected (but they aren’t immune — there have been deaths at all ages, just many more in older people), but they can carry and communicate the disease. The concern is that children will mill around with each other at school, come home, and next thing you know, white-haired avuncular 71 year old grandpa with the nice dog he loves so much is in the hospital with respiratory failure. And so are all the other older people in his family, and there aren’t enough respirators to go around, and the health care workers are all falling sick and told not to come in, and people are dying because little Billy gave pop-pop an affectionate kiss on the cheek.

    You deserve it, you lying fuck, but it’s not fair to put that guilt on Billy’s shoulders.

  3. Tens of thousands of people die of the regular flu everywhere without panicking. I might panic if I or my wife came down with the regular flu. But instead what we do is the rational thing: we get our flu shot every year, we stay home if we’re sick, and if we’re feeling the symptoms, we don’t head out for crowds to shake hands and hug people. That’s something only an insensitive, uncaring asshole like Dennis Prager would do, which he proudly declares that he is doing.

    The difference is that we have vaccines for the influenza that minimize its effects, and keeps the load on hospitals to a manageable level. We do not have a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. We know that it is more severe in its effects than influenza, is going to have a higher death count, and spreads rapidly. In both cases, we are making a rational, non-panicked decision about how to respond.

    If you accidentally set a piece of paper on fire in your home, you calmly put it out. If you accidentally start a grease fire in the kitchen, the curtains and your sleeve are on fire, the smoke alarm is frantically beeping, you don’t walk away, pet the dog, and make a video about how you set a piece of paper on fire and how clever you were to pat it out, and all the fire trucks and the doctors treating the deep burns on your arm are over-reacting.

Prager has billionaires backing him, though, and he can be as stupid and dangerous as he wants, and YouTube will continue to take his money.

Anyone want to debate a creationist in Minnesota?

I got a phone call from Eric Hovind — he’s looking for someone to debate John Sanford and Danny Faulkner someplace in Minnesota next October. I turned him down flat.

Even if, in your worldview, you think you’ll make fools of them?

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re already fools.”

And that was that. Although he did ask if I’d ask around and see if anyone was interested in taking my place.

OK, so I’m asking around. I don’t recommend anyone taking him up on the offer, but if you must, contact me and I can let Hovind know how to get in touch with you.