So the media aren’t all bad…

Since I was just mean to the British press, here’s a compensatory accolade: here’s a nice, sharp editorial from James Randerson.

ID was itself designed as a Trojan horse for creationism, with its origins in the Discovery Institute, a thinktank in Seattle whose stated aim is “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”.

Even a conservative judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, saw through the sham last year when he heard a case brought by parents who objected to ID being taught in their school. “Intelligent design is a religious view, a mere re-labelling of creationism, and not a scientific theory,” he wrote in his judgment.

Let’s be honest: despite its scientific-sounding frills and baubles, ID is pure religion. It is a reincarnation of an old idea that Darwin dispensed with and it has no place in a science class.

Reason #9 to vote for Pharyngula

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O how desperate he has become. Phil is stripping to get votes now. I’m not going to go down that road (I’d be doomed for sure if I did), so here’s the deal. Vote for me and I’m going to expose my brain rather than my bod: I’ve got this great post on evolution of the vascular system I’ll put up later today if you good, smart people can keep the drooling libidinous minions of the Bad One at bay a little longer, and keep me in the lead. Otherwise, it’s internet memes/quizzes and photos of my cat’s litter box.

Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you hate science.

P.S. Comrade Bérubé insists that my re-education will take great strides forward if I encourage all to vote for him as the Best Educational Blog.

If they can’t get the details right, why trust them at all?

Is anyone else getting a “look how stupid Americans are” vibe from all the British coverage of Ken Ham’s creation ‘science’ museum? It’s another story from the European press that politely echoes Ham’s overblown claims for his grandiose edifice to ignorance, and mostly recycles the same old stuff we’ve heard over and over again. It really does seem to simply parrot whatever the Answers in Genesis con men say with complete credulity…for instance, I’ve seen this strange comment repeated multiple times in these kinds of stories.

Two-thirds of the US population lives within six hours’ drive of Cincinnati, but Mr Ham has bigger ambitions for tackling agnostics further afield.

Hold it. Think. Check your facts. Look at a map, and you’ll see that that domain outside of a circle with a radius of 300 miles includes everything west of Chicago, the entire urban Northeast, and most of the major cities of the South, such as Atlanta. It includes Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, etc., a populous region to be sure, but how can one argue that a small area that excludes California, Texas, New York, and Florida contains the bulk of the nation’s people? That’s an area of about 280,000 square miles in a country of 3,700,000 square miles—shouldn’t that make a reporter stop and think, especially when it is an area that does not include our regions of highest population density?

I’m beginning to feel a “look how stupid the BBC can be” vibe right now, myself. Does anyone know where this mysterious number comes from? Is it Ken Ham lying, or is it the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce lying?

Can you put away the icepick now?

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Comrade Myers signs his confession before the eyes of the Committee

I have been ordered by the Ministry of Justice of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party to publicly confess my shame and apologize for my grave offenses against the WAAGNFNP. I do so apologize. I have been ordered to abjure all attempts to redirect trolls to the distraction of the Glorious Show Trial against the Enemy of the People, Chris Clarke. I do so.

It’s never going to end

Deepak Chopra is still blathering on. I’m afraid that while he can’t shut up, I can ignore him, and this will be my last response to his drivel; it’s also the last time I’ll be linking to the Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington’s exercise in indiscriminate narcissism is not the direction I want to see liberals taking, and while my voice isn’t a significant one, I can at least deny the kook wing of the Left my tiny bit of support.

This time the obsessive small-minded mystic is still whining against science and reason, still railing against his own idiotic imaginings.

But how can anyone seriously defend science as a panacea when it gave us the atomic bomb?

First of all, no one defends science as a panacea. It’s not leading us to utopia, it’s taking us towards a better understanding of the real world…which, contrary to the quacks who claim reality is what you imagine it to be, is often going to expose uncomfortable truths. There is no paradise. There is no perfection. There’s just a world where we have to struggle and compromise, and in the end we all die.

Secondly, the people who whimper about science bringing us bombs (and we’ve also got a few trolls wandering around scienceblogs damning scientists for that) have got it all wrong. Nuclear reactions are a property of the natural world—they go on in stars, they take place beneath our feet. Science did not invent fission and fusion, it only exposed the nature of the event, explained how it worked, and made this knowledge available to human beings. People chose what to do with it. We don’t have any choice in what science reveals. What would you have had 20th century scientists do, intentionally suppress all knowledge of a fundamental property of matter, and all of the unpredictable consequences of that knowledge? And just how would you propose to do that, short of destroying the scientific enterprise all together?

Reason isn’t the savior of the future. That role belongs to wisdom. With all the threats to human survival that we now face, I resort to a phrase coined by Jonas Salk: the survival of the wisest. Although a great researcher in medicine, Salk had the vision to look beyond materialism. He saw that evolution, as it applies to modern human beings, isn’t Darwinian. We no longer live in a state of nature.

Good grief, the inanity, it burns.

No, reason isn’t the savior of the future. It’s just the absolute bare minimum of what we ought to expect from the people to whom we entrust our futures—it’s the foundation of everything we ought to do. I don’t care what other wonderful virtues Chopra wants to tout, if they are built on irrationality and unreason, they are destructive.

I also don’t know what Chopra means by this fuzzy word “wisdom” he’s throwing out in his little essay, but he writes as if he thinks it is something completely orthogonal to reason, but of course it isn’t—unreasoning people can’t be wise, although they may pretend to it, and other irrational people may believe them. He’s using the word in an utterly meaningless way, the same way his kind of people use the words “spirituality” or “vibrations” or “quantum”, as subliminal tokens for indefinable emotions they might have; it’s shorthand for empty pseudo-profundity. It’s the hook the con artist uses to persuade his mark to fork over his respect, but it’s all a lie.

The rest I have no patience for. Chopra doesn’t know what “evolution” or “Darwinian” means, so trying to dissect the meaning he is reading into them as pointless: he’s just reciting buzz words, stringing them together like pretty beads on a string. It’s all noise from a fool.

Enough.

The revolution seems to have begun

Is it too late to join the “We are all giant nuclear fireball” Party? ‘Cuz I’m getting a little worried what with all the show trials of the radicals. Pretty soon they’re going to start banishing people to gulags in icy wastelands like Western Minnesota…oh, say. That’s all right then. I guess they can’t do anything too horrible to me, then.

Other than the Dakotas, that is.

DI: consult a lawyer

I am amused that now the Disco Institute is reduced to complaining that Judge Jones adopted the ACLU’s findings of fact in the Dover trial. It’s true that Jones didn’t write a big chunk of his decision, because he literally accepted the opinion of the DI’s opponents.

Apparently, this is a common judicial practice. I didn’t know that, but shouldn’t the DI know about it? Don’t they have a lawyer or lawyers working for them (they sure have a scientist deficiency)? Couldn’t they have asked someone on their staff whether this was ordinary procedure before they started complaining?

Oh, wait.

Casey Luskin. No wonder they screwed up. That boy has a reputation for rank incompetence and getting the facts wrong.

Satan’s perfect food: Tofu!

What a terrific title: A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals! It’s from Wingnut Daily, of course, and it’s simply one of their kooks taking a germ of fact and amplifying it into a flaming reactionary whimper of fear. He’s complaining about soy.

Soybeans do contain compounds called isoflavones that resemble and weakly mimic estrogens. I’ve read a few papers that discuss their possible effects on human physiology, and they usually fall into the category of “Hmmm…suggestive, no evidence either way yet, needs more study.” Our wingnut author seems to have a different source than the scientific literature, though, because he makes some rather definitive claims.

Doctors used to hope soy would reduce hot flashes, prevent cancer and heart disease, and save millions in the Third World from starvation. That was before they knew much about long-term soy use. Now we know it’s a classic example of a cure that’s worse than the disease. For example, if your baby gets colic from cow’s milk, do you switch him to soy milk? Don’t even think about it. His phytoestrogen level will jump to 20 times normal. If he is a she, brace yourself for watching her reach menarche as young as seven, robbing her of years of childhood. If he is a boy, it’s far worse: He may not reach puberty till much later than normal.

So, I searched PubMed, and there’s nothing on soy and menarche or menstruation; I found a few articles on soy and puberty, and they say things like “The literature offers no evidence of endocrine effects in humans from infant consumption of modern soy-based formulas” and “To date, no adverse effects of short- or long-term use of soy proteins have been observed in humans and exposure to soy-based infant formulas does not appear to lead to different reproductive outcomes than exposure to cow milk formulas” and “Available evidence from adult human and infant populations indicates that dietary isoflavones in soy infant formulas do not adversely affect human growth, development, or reproduction.” There are many more papers on its putative effects on breast cancer and the symptoms of menopause, and even there it’s a study in ambiguity: some reports of slight positive effects, many more stating that there isn’t a detectable effect.

There doesn’t seem to be any strong evidence that eating tofu will turn your sons into girlie-boys, I’m afraid; there are better grounds to be concerned about known endocrine disruptors like atrazine and PCBs.

Of course, I have failed to take into the synergistic effects of water fluoridation, that commie plot, or the corrupting influence of Big Agriculture on science, that capitalist plot. I am amused at the fact, though, that here in rural Minnesota, where the kids rail against those homosexuals, that one of the most important crops these kids’ parents raise is soybeans. I wonder what the effect of this WND wingnuttery would be on conservative farmers out here? I expect that would trigger a more strongly measurable response than what the soybeans are doing to their gonads.

Ah, but what do I know. The author has impeccable credentials.

James Rutz is chairman of Megashift Ministries and founder-chairman of Open Church Ministries. He is the author of “MEGASHIFT: Igniting Spiritual Power,” and, most recently, “The Meaning of Life.”

See? He’s a gladhanding Jesus-promoter who makes his money founding “ministries” and selling self-help books. You can trust him.

Klein KO (1998) Isoflavones, soy-based infant formulas, and relevance to endocrine function. Nutr Rev 56(7):193-204

Merritt RJ,
Jenks BH (2004) Safety of soy-based infant formulas containing isoflavones: the clinical evidence. J Nutr 134(5):1220S-1224.

Miniello VL,
Moro GE,
Tarantino M,
Natile M,
Granieri L,
Armenio L (2003) Soy-based formulas and phyto-oestrogens: a safety profile. Acta Paediatr Suppl 91(441):93-100.