I’m a couple of days late, but Monday was the birthday of the late, great Carl Sagan … one of the greatest science communicators the world has ever seen.
Sagan’s wonder at the beauty and majesty of the natural world was a wonderful antidote to those would proclaim that science is just a dry, dead discipline.
Most importantly, Sagan showed us that a sense of transcendence doesn’t require us to conjure gods and demons.
The universe is wonderful enough.
Apparently Bill O’Reilly thinks teaching science is science classes is fascism. Wait. What?
Dawkins makes some great points in this interview, but people not already on team Dawkins probably wouldn’t come away with any changed opinions.
The problem is a mismatch of styles. O’Reilly fights dirty. In pub-brawl terms O’Reilly’s the guy wielding a smashed bottle and ready to kick his opponent in the nuts.
Dawkins’ refined and rational debating style just doesn’t fit. There’s no reasoning with someone like that.
We need to get street fighting debaters like Christopher Hitchens or PZ Myers in there to smack O’Reilly down.
Opinions still wouldn’t be changed, but they’d do him over a treat.
To quote the incomparable Douglas Adams:
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
I often hear religious believers expound on the wonders of their faith and how it gives them a sense of transcendence; a sense that there’s something beyond this world and beyond our understanding and beyond and beyond and beyond …
It mystifies me when that kind of transcendence is found in religion.
The gods of our mainstream religions are just so small.
Take the Jewish god. He’s a petty misogynist obsessed with diet, fabrics and personal hygiene.
The Christian god (thought to be the same guy once he’d become a father and calmed down a bit) wants his followers to ritually cleanse themselves and demands legal marriage before any rubbing of genitalia can take place.
The Islamic god is also obsessed with sex, calling for adulterers to be stoned and women to cover their bodies lest the men around them fail to control themselves.
Just stop for a minute. Would an omnipotent and omniscient god really be interested in these things?
Look at the stars. Look at the Universe around you. Look at all the wondrous things these gods supposedly created.
We are a vanishingly small island in an unimaginably vast ocean of energies and forces.
Do you really think a being capable of mapping the galaxies cares how many times you wash your hands?
This morning David and Kim (admittedly hardly paragons of scientific virtue) really dropped the ball.
Not only did they give a substantial chunk of air time to Isaac Golden, a “doctor” of homeopathy with some very strange ideas about vaccinating using homeopathy, their resident actual doctor Nikolai Petrovsky completely failed to call Golden on any of the bullshit he was spouting.
Warning: video may induce the urge to hit head on desk.
At timestamp 4:10 Golden claimed to have a homeopathic treatment for swine flu, and it was actually David who asked the very good question: “What is it? What are the components of it?”
Golden started banging on about the “law of similars” and similar nonsense, and Petrovsky still didn’t call him on it.
All Dr. Petrovsky had to say was “I’ll tell you what the components are David … it’s simple. In fact there’s just the one. Water! That’s it! You could fill your syringe up at the tap and it’d do you just as much good as a homeopathic vaccination. In fact, screw the $400,000 the Cubans apparently paid for their treatments. I’ll do it for $50,000 and a slab.”
But no … all Petrovsky could manage was some lame protests that “vaccines work” before being interrupted by Golden with some hand-waving about a “major scientific paper about to be published”.
Just quietly, I’m not holding my breath for that one.
The real concern here is that viewers watching this piece may have come away thinking that homeopathic vaccination is a viable alternative to genuine vaccination.
I’d like to see a follow-up piece, in which it’s clearly explained that the claims of homeopathic practitioners fly in the face of all known scientific principles, that homeopathy has never been shown to have any effect in a properly controlled double-blinded trial, and most importantly, that homeopathic solutions are indistinguishable from everyday tap water.
The Australian Vaccination Network, despite their name and claims to be “pro-choice”, are a rabid group of anti-vaccination ideologues led by the (possibly well-meaning, possibly evil, definitely misguided) Meryl Dorey.
Spreading lies about the contents of vaccinations and debunked pseudo-science about their supposed effects (for the thousandth time: vaccines don’t cause autism!), recently they’ve gone right off the rails. On the AVN blog last week Meryl re-posted an article with some insane conspiracy theories incorporating Big Pharma, the Illuminati, and a nefarious plot to use vaccinations to infect us all with nanobots.
So that’s why they don’t like vaccinations. Huh. Here was me thinking they just had an aversion to needles.
One would hope this lunacy means they’ll stop being taken seriously by the public at large. It certainly won’t look good on their record now that they’re being investigated by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission for breaches of the Public Health Act of 1993.
We’ll be watching with interest to see how that turns out.
The legendary Dick Smith has also gotten in on the action, taking out a huge ad in yesterday’s Australian to publicly denounce the AVN as the menace to society that they are.
The battle continues, and I suspect it will continue for some time. After all, anti-vaxxers have been around for as long as vaccinations.
We must remain ever vigilant and ensure the correct information gets out there.
Vaccinations save lives. Meryl Dorey and her crowd are spreading lies and misinformation. Left unchecked, lies like this will lead to death and suffering.
These are the simple facts.
A few weeks ago I wrote about science journalist Simon Singh and his run-in with the British Chiropractic Association.
Simon’s currently on a tour of Australia as part of the 2009 Festival of Ideas, doing meet-and-greets, promoting his books and talking (in a limited way) about the BCA libel case.
This evening he spoke to the Victorian Skeptics about some of the topics from his book Trick or Treatment, focusing particularly on homeopathy and its somewhat ridiculous underlying theory.
I was hoping that we might get one or two homeopathists or chiropractors popping up for a bit of an argument, but no such luck. It was largely a case of preaching to the converted so it was a very entertaining, but far from controversial, evening.
Having been a huge fan of Simon’s for years (ever since The Code Book and Fermat’s Last Theorem … I’m such a maths nerd), after the talk I bucked up the fanboy courage for a quick chat.
I can’t remember what we talked about (fanboy, remember?) but it did happen. I’ve got the photo to prove it.
Simon’s the one with the cool haircut.
An article by Professor of Theology Tom Frame on “Questions Darwinism cannot answer” is an excellent example of the kind of muddled thinking religious believers tend to display when talking about evolution.
The first clue is the use of the word “Darwinism”, an epithet used almost exclusively by believers with a philosophical axe to grind. The intention is to portray evolution as just another religious belief.
The next clue is passages like this:
A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide.
Apart displaying his gross ignorance of what evolution means, Mr Frame is trying to paint atheism as an immoral position and, by an implied false dichotomy, promote religious belief as the noble alternative.
But all that’s just a sideshow. The real point of the article is summed up in these oh-so-wise words:
Such science is also inhibited from asking whether life has any meaning, as this would require stepping outside the processes that led its practitioners to the point of questioning. Evolution might account for the story of life's beginnings and progress, but it cannot explain its origin nor cast any light on its destiny.
I’ve got a news flash for you, Mr Frame. Religion, for all its pomp and imaginary circumstance, cannot explain any of these things either.
It’s trivial to observe that there’s more to the human experience than science, let alone evolution. But promoting religion as some kind of answer to these ill-defined questions is just smoke and mirrors.
Religion is not an answer. It’s a process of comforting ritual and invocation of myth and throwing meaningless feel-good words at the question to pretend you've answered it.
Real answers come from observation, from verification, from defining the questions carefully and gathering the evidence. None of these things have any place in religion.
And what’s all this about destiny?
Our destiny doesn’t come from without, as Mr Frame wants us to believe. It comes from within. We are its authors.
We can choose to take responsibility for our actions and set our own path, or we can abdicate that responsibility to an imaginary higher power.
We can strive to be an enlightened society that seeks to understand its place in the universe, or we can cling to ancient myths and the fleeting comforts they bring.
Guess which one I choose.
I love a good conspiracy theory.
In times past I’ve been fascinated, bemused, irritated and appalled (sometimes all at once) by everything from Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods and those wacky 9-11 truthers to the idea that the Mayans had rockets and the moon is an alien spaceship.
And don’t even get me started on that Timecube guy.
Dissemination of conspiracy theories has been both helped and hindered by Web 2.0, as both proponents and debunkers are just a few clicks away.
For the moment it looks like the debunkers are winning, but I suspect conspiracy theories will always be with us.
But where do they all come from?
Big Government conspiracies got a boost in the 1990s, as US hegemony expanded and it became very easy to believe we were being lied to. In the 2000s the whole idea came crashing down once it became clear that we were being lied to, but it was incompetence not conspiracy at the core.
And still no secret alien technology in sight.
Big Government conspiracies seem to have shifted now to Big Pharmaceutical and Big Oil, as profit takes over from political power as the assumed driver. As conspiracies go though, these are a lot less interesting. Big companies doing whatever they can to make money? It’s not quite Spaceship Moon is it?
Big Science gets a run as well. This is a particular favourite of anyone whose wonderful new Theory of Everything has been rejected by the scientific mainstream.
The list of Big Science conspiracies is endless.
Evolution? Young Earth Creationists will bang on for days about how it’s a scientific conspiracy to keep the real truth hidden … the truth being that those fossils are all less than 6,000 years old and were actually placed there by Noah’s flood.
Entropy? It’s a lie foist upon the public to hide the existence of perpetual motion machines that could provide free energy to whole world. (An obvious cross-over here with Big Oil).
And emissions? It’s all those left-wing scientists blinded by their green ideology wanting to shut down the factories and throw everyone out of work.
And they’re just the ones starting with ‘E’.
But here’s the thing. Here’s why the whole notion of scientific conspiracy is preposterous.
Scientists are not in cahoots.
They’re in competition.
When any new scientific idea is thrown into the ring there'll be a phalanx of scientists trying their damnedest to kneecap it before you can say phlogiston.
And why? It’s not to be malicious. It’s because that’s how science works.
Ideas that withstand the onslaught are accepted and became the basis for further learning. The ideas that fall are simply discarded.
And you might notice the ideas that fall are also the source of most of the conspiracy theories.
After all, it’s much easier to blame the Masons and the Illuminati and the cabal of Big Scientists than to admit your idea doesn’t really have any merit.
Back in April 2008 British journalist and author Simon Singh wrote an excellent opinion piece in the Guardian, in which he called “bullshit” on the British Chiropractic Association and some of their more outlandish claims.
Singh had taken exception to claims like those in this leaflet which says…
…chiropractic care has helped children with the following symptoms: Asthma, Colic, Prolonged crying, Sleep and feeding problems, Breathing difficulties, Hyperactivity, Bedwetting…
…and rightfully pointed out that no evidence for this kind of Chiropractic efficacy actually exists. Then, he eloquently took the BCA to task for promoting “bogus” treatments.
And what was the reaction of this respectable association? Did they produce the evidence they claim they have, thereby soundly trouncing Dr Singh’s claims?
No. Of course not. They sued him for libel. After all, Singh is right. The evidence doesn’t exist.
In the US, chiropractors and other alternative practitioners know better than to try this sort of thing. Over there the law would require them to prove their treatments are effective. They can’t do that, so they don’t.
But English libel laws are different. They’re heavily weighted in favour of the plaintiff, so the burden of proof is on Singh to prove that chiropractic isn’t effective, rather than on the BCA to prove that it is.
It’s a tough call, but not impossible. What makes it tricky is that the presiding judge latched onto the word “bogus” and interpreted that as implying a knowing deception on the part of the BCA. Now that’s pretty much impossible to prove.
Singh has appealed that ruling and we’ll be watching the outcome of with great interest.
If the ruling is overturned then Singh has an excellent chance of beating the libel charge. What’s more, the likely exposure of chiropractic as a largely ineffective treatment will have the BCA regretting they ever brought the case to trial.
If it isn’t overturned then Singh probably doesn’t have much of a chance at all. Worse, the precedent set will be a huge blow to freedom of speech, and a huge setback to the much-needed skepticism of (I’ll say it) bogus claims like those of the BCA.
Jack of Kent is tracking the details of the case closely, and Sense about Science has a petition with a very impressive list of signatories.
Let’s hope reason prevails.
Once again our friend Stan over at Atheism Analyzed is indulging in his usual nonsense about the intellectual jurisdictions of science and religion.
In short, science adopts a voluntary (“functional”) materialism because it cannot empirically address or measure non-material issues. So any output from science has no bearing – by definition – on the non-material realm.
So let me get this straight: scientists should stay out of religion because science is only concerned with material things?
But this is a fantastic idea! In fact, let’s go one better. Let’s have a complete separation of duties between science and religion!
I can see it now. Science will concern itself only with the material world (that should be easy . . . it’s what it does anyway) and religion will concern itself only with the non-material world.
Both sides will solemnly promise not to encroach on the other’s turf.
Of course that completely does away with the idea of an interventionist God. Such interventions are necessarily material and therefore only in the realm of science.
But that’s ok.
And religions would no longer be able to claim that God works in people’s lives in any material way. Or heals the sick. Or answers prayer.
Still, that sounds workable.
It also does away with all these silly debates about Creation vs Evolution. Evolution wins by default because it’s a material issue, and hence outside the realm of religious enquiry!
Wow. I could really get used to this. Excellent idea, Stan!
This is just too funny.
The misguided loons over at Homeopathy Plus are preparing to tout their magic memory water as a cure for . . . Swine Flu!
... we are working with homeopaths around the world to crossmatch the swine flu symptoms with the homeopathic remedies that will best treat and prevent them.
But never fear, because
... your existing bottle of Flu-Stop still contains the most common remedies used by homeopaths for the treatment and prevention of flu.
Phew, that's a relief. Your existing bottle of magic water will still work until you can get a special replacement bottle of magic water.
Of course, the new Swine Flu remedy will be identical to Flu Stop, because they'll both be just water.
So what is the delay all about? All they need to do is slap a sticker on the "Flu Stop" bottles to make them "SWINE Flu Stop".
But maybe that's not enough.
After all, what font should they use for the sticker? Should they include a picture of a pig? Should the pig be wearing a top hat?
So many decisions. And so little time!
Hurry, homeopaths of the world. We need you!
Oink.
Last night Channel 7 aired a shocking story on vaccinations.
The shock was in its complete lack of tabloid scaremongering, its scientific content and the fact that it was clearly a carefully researched story.
We really needed this. The anti-vaccination crowd has been incredibly vocal of late. The whole vaccines-cause-autism thing just won’t go away, despite its architect Andrew Wakefield being discredited as a fraud.
The anti-vax cause has impassioned believers and celebrity endorsements (most recently Jim Carrey), which have real power to sway a public sadly under-educated on this very important topic.
While the smackdown on Carrey’s ill-informed rant was swift (this one was my favourite), the damage will have been done.
The science is in on this topic but the message just isn’t getting out there. The voices of reason are all too often drowned out by the cries of those irrationally and ideologically opposed to vaccination, and children die as a result.
For all these reasons, Rebecca Maddern is to be congratulated for her great segment on last night’s Sunday Night.
This also gives you some idea of the scientific non-credentials of the anti-vax crowd.
Homeopathic treatment for whooping cough? Please. Your magic homeopathic water does nothing. How could it? After all, it’s just water and nothing else.
It’s a shame that nonsense wasn’t exposed for what it is, but maybe in the next segment. How about it Channel 7?
This is a short satirical article I wrote in a moment of whimsy. However, it’s been brought to my attention that the jovial nature of the piece is not necessarily clear. I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.
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In what is shaping up to be a major theological controversy, priests and ministers have hit back at the suggestion that they should include alternative ideas of species origin in their Sunday School classes.
For many years churches have taught only a traditional view of “Creation”, that the Earth and all humans, plants and animals were brought into existence over the course of 6 days some 6,000 years ago by a being referred to only as “God”.
This position has been challenged recently by the emergence of “Evolution”, a theory which maintains that the Universe and even the Earth are much older, and that humans and animals evolved over millions of years from simpler organisms.
Father Ralph McCluggage of Our Sacred Lady Church said:
“For years we’ve been happily teaching the biblical story of Creation to our children. They grow up with a clear understanding that the world began with a naked couple frolicking in a garden, a tree with fruit they weren’t supposed to eat and an evil snake. This story has everything they need to know: the origins of the universe, where all the plants and animals came from and why women shouldn’t be trusted.
This idea that we evolved over millions of years may be supported by mountains of physical evidence, but the fact remains that it says nothing about it in the Book of Genesis.”
After initial attempts failed to have Evolutionary theory taught alongside biblical Creation, scientists have taken a different tack and are now encouraging churches to “teach the controversy”.
Dr Miles Plankton of the University of Melbourne:
“It’s important to recognise that the idea that God created us in 6 days is only a theory. Evolution is another theory. What’s wrong with kids learning that there are different ideas about how the world began?”
But even this watered-down approach has been met with resistance. Father Ralph had this to say:
“This attempt to force Evolution into our curriculum is nothing more than a veiled attempt to introduce atheism into Sunday School classes.
Now I don’t care what these scientists teach in their science classes. That’s their business. But our Sunday School classes are for teaching the basis of our faith.
All this Evolution stuff may be rational and evidence-based, but the fact remains that it’s simply not religion.”
When the Terminators arrive they will not descend as an alien force upon an unsuspecting public.
The first cyborgs will arrive with a whimper, not a bang.
We will welcome them, not fear them. We will accept them into our lives.
We will do this because we will be them. And they will be us.
The change will come by degrees. In fact, it has already begun.
Our doctors routinely replace bones and joints with with metal and plastic and carbon fibre. Our paralympic athletes achieve extraordinary physical feats with biomechanical prosthetics. Our soldiers wear movement-enhancing armour and have instant communications projected directly into their vision.
This week we’ve had two notable examples hitting the papers: a filmmaker replacing one eye with a camera, and a programmer replacing his finger with a USB drive.
Interesting, but these are hardly quantum leaps towards our cybernetic future. They’re just the next steps down the road.
Gentlemen, we already have the technology.
2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. It’s 400 years since Galileo produced the telescope he would use to change the face of modern science.
To celebrate, the International Astronomical Union is spreading the astronomical joy with the Galileoscope . . . a high quality, ultra-cheap telescope similar to the one used by Galileo himself.
From the website:
You can see the celestial wonders that Galileo Galilei first glimpsed 400 years ago . . . lunar craters and mountains, four moons circling Jupiter, the phases of Venus, Saturn's rings, and countless stars invisible to the unaided eye.
At only US$15 each you can buy one for yourself or donate one to a school.
An appreciation of the night sky is so often the first step to a deeper appreciation of science, so let’s get these out there!
In the UK there’s a growing problem with measles outbreaks.
This is traceable to the fraudulent work of Dr Andrew Wakefield and his attempt to manufacture a link between autism and the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine. Even after being thoroughly debunked, this “vaccines cause autism” nonsense is still out there and has caused a huge drop-off in the rates of child vaccination.
It’s shaping up to be a serious public health issue, largely because of the media coverage given to the likes of misguided souls like Jeni Barnett and Jenny McCarthy.
But it’s just possible that the tide is beginning to turn.
Some real science has finally had some decent broadcast coverage. Enter Dr Ben Goldacre, who made the facts clear in this great piece on ITV1.
Yay for real science!
NASA’s Kepler mission is set to launch in just under six hours.
Kepler is armed with a 95-megapixel camera, but it won’t be taking spectacular images of distant galaxies.
Missions like Cassini (which a few days ago threw back some awesome photos of a small moon embedded in one of Saturn’s rings) have been all abut the pretty pictures. But Kepler is all about the science.
All Kepler will be doing is staring at a patch of sky about the size of your outstretched hand. And it’ll stare at it for three-and-a-half years, looking for tiny dips in the brightness of stars.
If these are repeated periodically (which is why such a long staring time is required) then it might indicate the passage of a planet between us and the star.
This is the next step in our search for exoplanets.
Specifically, we’re looking for Earth-like planets in the habitable zone (also known as the ‘Goldilocks’ zone: not too hot, not too cold, but juuuust right) around distant stars.
Why do this? Because it will help to solve one of the most profound problems ever posed and yet unanswered.
We genuinely don’t know how likely or unlikely our life on this planet really is. The results of the Kepler mission will put some hard data behind this investigation.
It’s a big step on the way to answering the question: are we all alone out here?
I wrote a while ago about the homeopathy scam and its use on poor unsuspecting animals.
That’s bad enough, but it’s even worse to use it on poor unsuspecting children.
And especially heinous is the frankly dangerous idea that homeopathy could in any way be an acceptable method of childhood vaccination.
Check out this nonsense from the Homeopathy Plus website:
Homeopathic immunisation - also known as homeoprophylaxis - is a safe and effective way to protect you and your family against childhood and other epidemic diseases.
Effective? No. Safe? Well . . .
The homeopathic immunisations are “safe” because
they are free of harmful components
and
have none of the adverse reactions or side-effects associated with vaccines.
That’s true. It will have no side effects.
BECAUSE THERE’S NOTHING IN IT. IT’S ONLY WATER.
What is not true is that homeopathic treatment will in any way protect anyone from anything.
After all, how could it?
It’s a valid question, and one that those promoting this ridiculous pseudo-science can’t even answer themselves.
Here’s their “explanation” of how it works:
The nature of potentisation is the mystery of Homeopathy. What is understood is that the potentisation process imprints energetic information from the original substance onto the diluting liquid during the stages of succussion. This liquid is then prescribed according to the Law of Similars as either drops or medicated pilules to the unwell person. They carry the energetic information into the body to trigger a self healing reaction that moves the person back to a state of health.
Notice how you get to the end of the paragraph and don’t know anything more than you did at the start?
That’s because it is nothing but utter, unadulterated nonsense.
This has got to stop.
Ripping off people who are happy to waste their money on placebos is one thing, but if this rubbish starts getting promoted as a legitimate alternative to vaccination, then we have the potential for a serious public health problem.
One of the most common attacks on evolution, particularly by proponents of Intelligent Design, goes something like this:
“Evolution is just a theory. Intelligent design is another theory. Why can’t they both be taught in science classes?”
It sounds reasonable, but there’s a tricky sleight-of-hand in this argument.
When something like evolution is described as a scientific theory, it means something different from the usual everyday meaning of the word “theory”.
In scientific terms, a theory is the highest level of understanding.
For example, it’s a theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. It’s a theory that substances are made up of atoms.
It goes like this: we start with an idea. In the case of evolution it was: “animals evolve over time”.
In the beginning, that was just an idea. The next step was to form a testable hypothesis.
Using gaps in the known fossil record we could predict what must lie in between. If the idea was right, we’d find animal fossils that matched the predictions.
And we did. (Of course this is a greatly over-simplified description of both the hypothesis and the evidence. There’s a lot more to it than just that.)
The hypothesis must also be falsifiable: it must be possible to find fossils that will prove the hypothesis wrong. This is possible, but it hasn’t been done.
So after 150 years the hypothesis has been well and truly confirmed by the weight of evidence. Then, and only then, is the hypothesis elevated to the high status of “scientific theory”.
Yes, evolution is a theory. And it carries all the evidence required to be called that.
The problem with Intelligent Design?
There is no evidence. There is no falsifiable hypothesis. There isn’t even a testable hypothesis.
In fact, when you get right down to it, Intelligent Design is nothing more than an idea.
