Off the Deep End of the Stupid Pool

Let's start with the basics:

1)  Vaccines do not cause autism.  They also do not cause asthma, leukaemia, hay fever, type 1 diabetes, gait disturbance, Crohn's disease, demyelinating diseases, bacterial or viral infections, or bad hair.  At last count, the evidence supporting this claim included 5 randomized control studies, one controlled trial, 27 cohort studies, 17 case-control studies, 5 time-series trials, one crossover trial, 2 ecological studies, and 6 self-controlled case-series studies. Combined, these studies include data from just shy of 14.8 million children, from at least four different countries, and span a period of almost two decades, a time span that meets any reasonable definition of "long term," and quite a few unreasonable ones.  These studies have consistently shown that the risk of serious side effects from the vaccine is vastly smaller than the risk of serious effects from the disease they prevent.

2)  There is no profit motive for Big Bad Pharma, or really, anyone else, to convince anyone that vaccines are safe.  Quite the contrary, the strongest profit motive is, consistently, to convince people that they are as dangerous as possible.  Here are just a few examples:

2a) Mr. Andrew Wakefield had patented a measles vaccine a few months before he proposed that they should switch to the exact vaccine he had patented. His patent would be worthless unless confidence in the extant MMR vaccine could be shaken. All that was a coincidence I'm sure. Since then, he's made a killing selling books to people stupid enough to believe his persecution complex, books that would be worthless if his customers believed that vaccines were both safe and effective. Therefore, Mr. Wakefield has had at least two clear profit motives to convince people that vaccines are dangerous.

2b) Mr. David Mercola has made himself an obscenely rich man partly by peddling a "natural alternative" to vaccination that has never actually been shown to work (on the contrary, its effects are consistently indistinguishable from a similarly-administered placebo). Obviously, his products are worthless if vaccines are seen as safe and effective, giving him a clear profit motive to convince as many people as possible that vaccines are dangerous.

2c) Mr. Mark and David Geier have made themselves quite rich by convincing desperate parents that vaccines cause autism, then chemically castrating austistic children in an (invariably, failed) attempt to cure it. No, by the way, that isn't an exaggeration at all; until they lost their licenses to practice medicine, they literally did exactly that. They called it the Lupron protocol.  Not only are Mr. Mark and David Geier reprehensible excuses for human beings, the treatment they propose has absolutely no chance of working unless vaccines cause autism, so they clearly have a strong profit motive to convince as much of the public as possible that vaccines actually cause autism.  Or at least, they did, until the medical ethics boards of every state where they had been licensed to practice medicine decided that castrating children was crossing a bit of an ethical line.

2d) Pediatricians?  They have a very clear profit motive not to vaccinate.  A recent study analyzed how much money pediatricians actually make off of vaccines (Margaret S. Coleman, PhD, Megan C. Lindley, MPH, John Ekong, MPH, Lance Rodewald, MD Net Financial Gain or Loss From Vaccination in Pediatric Medical Practices PEDIATRICS Vol. 124 pp. S472 -S491).  The conclusion of this study?  At best, pediatricians break even, or, in specific cases, turn a minuscule profit.  On average, they generally lose money every time they administer a vaccine.

2e) As for Big Bad Pharma? The profits they make off of vaccines, per year, essentially amounts to round-off error. They're expensive to produce, difficult to get approved, and high-risk. They also kill profits in other areas of business. Every single dollar spent on, just to name one, the MMR vaccine, saves about $30 more (Zhou, et al., J Infect Dis, 189(2004): S131-145). On average, for every dollar spent administering the vaccines on the standard schedule, around $10 more are saved. Whether vaccines are administered or not, a fair amount of money goes into a pharmaceutical company's pocket, but if we stopped vaccinating, there would be a lot more of it. There is very little to gain on Big Pharma's part for manufacturing vaccines.

Faced with this, a lot of anti-vaccination advocates (the honest ones -- the ones who realize that they can't deny, for instance, that Big Pharma would make a lot more money if they halted all vaccinations, or that a lot of prominent anti-vaccination advocates either have, or have tried to make obscene amounts of money off of that position) go way off the deep end of the stupid pool.  Sure, they'll say, vaccines are a profit killer, and the last thing that Big Pharma would ever want to do is convince you that vaccines are safe, but what they're really doing is causing everyone to get autism (setting aside, for the moment, that vaccines don't actually cause autism), so that they can make money off of treating that.  In other words, Big Pharma cannot possibly have a non-evil motivation for providing vaccines to the marketplace.

To understand just how unbelievably, mind-bogglingly stupid this is, we again need to cover a few basics:

1)  Big Pharma doesn't make any money off of off-patent drugs.  It's called a "patent cliff" for a reason. Here's what happened to the profits Johnson & Johnson made off of Plavix when its patent expired.

This is the norm, by the way, not the exception.  Once a pharmaceutical company loses its patent, it no longer makes any money off of the drug it once had patented.  Then it's the generics manufacturer's turn to make money.  While a lot of pharmaceutical companies have wholly-owned generics companies under their respective umbrellas, the amount made of the drug in generic form is not remotely sufficient to recoup their daily cost of operation.

2)  There are no drugs that cure autism, or even treat its primary symptoms.  The only people who claim otherwise have never shown their treatments to actually work; and often require procedures that are ineffective, and in some cases even dangerous (see above, re: Mark and David Geier).

3)  There are, however, some drugs that can treat some of the related symptoms.

4)  However, none of those drugs are patented.  The primary treatments for symptoms associated with autism are Prozac and Zoloft (whose patents expired in 2001 and 2006 respectively).  In addition, some antipsychotic medications are sometimes used to control energy levels (Resperidol is the most common; its patent expired at the end of 2003, closely followed by Haloperidol, which has been out of patent since the '80s).  Ritalin has been shown to have beneficial effects on people with ASD (its patent expired in 1967).

To be clear, a lot of pharmaceutical companies are researching ASD, and attempting to develop pharmacological interventions that may alleviate its major symptoms.  The amount spent on this research runs in the range of 2-5 billion dollars per year, depending on the company you're talking about.

So, in summary, there are a few rather major flaws with the narrative they are proposing.

1) For this narrative to be true, Big Pharma would have to have drugs marketed that make money off of treating autism.  They don't.

1a) Therefore, if this narrative were true, they would be causing a disease that they have absolutely no way of making money off of, and will not for the foreseeable future.

2) If this narrative were true, it would mean that Big Pharma already knows what causes autism, and therefore wouldn't need to spend billions researching its causes and progression.

2a) So, for this narrative to be true, Big Pharma would have to be knowingly wasting billions of dollars researching the underlying causes of a disease that they themselves are knowingly causing.

4) Finally, and most importantly, for this narrative to be true, vaccines would have to actually cause autism.

4a) So, for this narrative to be true, they would have to spend enormous amounts of money manufacturing all of the evidence evidence that vaccines do not cause autism (since that's literally what all of the evidence says), and concealing evidence that it does (since nobody has yet produced any), to keep a product on the market that they don't make much money off of, in order to increase the prevalence of a disease that they can't make money off of, and won't be able to for the foreseeable future.

The TL;DR version?  They're literally arguing that Big Phrama is an evil, profit-mongering corporation, that is pursuing a strategy that cannot possibly produce a profit any time in the foreseeable future.

Thank you for your attention.

Another reason why Anti-vaccination advocates are idiots

I shouldn't have to say this, but I do.

I receive no funding whatsoever from any pharmaceutical or biotechnology company in existence anywhere in the world.

None.

Zip.

I have never so much as seen a single penny from one in dividends, project support, or salary from any pharmaceutical company. Indeed, all funds I have ever worked for come from competitive grants from the NIH or the AHA. Currently, the entirety of my salary is paid by a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Heart Association. The AHA, in turn, is entirely funded by private donations which the individual donors can apply to their tax returns. I have no knowledge of who the individual donors are, and therefore can have no possible knowledge of their individual motivations or what they wish for my research to show, therefore, it is completely and utterly impossible for any pharmaceutical company to exert any influence upon me, even if I were performing any research which would motivate them to do so. I am not. The AHA has no say on whether, or what, I publish, and holds no power over my academic freedom.

Further, I receive no funding, support, or salary from any manufacturer of vaccines. See above.

Pretty much anybody who speaks out against the idiocy that is the anti-vaccination movement has to include a disclaimer like the above.

Now, here's why they shouldn't have to.

It takes a truly delusional mind to claim, with a straight face, that the reason pharmaceutical companies produce vaccines is to turn a profit. Yes, there are a few vaccines that have made quite a lot of money for the manufacturers. Gardasil, for example, made its manufacturers somewhere in the ballpark of 1.5 billion dollars.

Setting aside the fact that making money off of an exceptionally effective treatment which reduces a woman's chance of developing cervical cancer to nearly zero is not implicitly evil (as much as anti-vaccination advocates would like you to think otherwise), Gardasil is deep, deep in the minority.

In general, vaccine production is so ridiculously unprofitable, convincing manufacturers to make the vaccines is a challenge in itself. The single most-applied vaccine worldwide the BCG vaccine against tuberculosis. Its profit margin is, for all practical purposes, zero, once transportation to the needed areas is taken into consideration.

But for the moment, let us assume that that is not the case. Let's assume that all doses are created equal, profit-wise. A dose of viagra makes the exact same profit as a dose of the Tdap vaccine.

Which of the two will turn a greater profit: one dose of the vaccine, or a month's worth of drugs to keep the symptoms under control?

In short, if vaccine manufacturers were really the profit-grubbing evil entities that the anti-vaccine morons believed they were, they wouldn't make vaccines. They'd want as many of us to catch the disease as possible for one simple reason: it's vastly more profitable to treat a disease than it is to prevent it.

If there is a Hell, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey will spend eternity in an Iron Lung

Okay, let me start with a full disclosure of my own biases:

The anti-vaccination movement is potentially the single greatest threat to public health.

Note that I don't qualify that as "in America," or "in the third world" or "in westernized countries." They are potentially the single greatest threat to public health, period.

Let me go a step further, if you do not get your child vaccinated, or worse, you convince someone else not to get their child vaccinated, you are guilty of child abuse by any reasonable (if not legally-actionable) definition of the term. You're playing roulette with their lives and hoping that they're fortunate enough never to be exposed to any of the diseases which vaccines will protect them from.

Also in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention the following: vaccines are, collectively, the lowest-cost, highest effectiveness, most portable, dispersable, and long-term solution to most of the world's diseases. This, incidentally, is not a matter of my own opinion, it's a matter of track record. Small pox, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, measles, rubella, and other diseases which, in Canada and the US, are little more than a distant memory. It's estimated that one in five people would not now be alive if not for this medical miracle.

Now, let me add a one last statement to the preceding ones. If you do not get your child vaccinated, you are abusing the children that child will go to school with. Morally, I see the refusal to get your child vaccinated as the equivalent of taking a baseball bat to a baby, then walking over to the houses of the children that child will go to school with, and taking a baseball bat to them, too. This, unfortunately, is the leap that the anti-vaccination movement never makes. By not getting vaccinated, you are not only harming your own child, you're harming someone else's.

By that standard of evidence Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey have been brutally bludgeoning countless millions of children.

Metaphorically speaking.

Let's start with the basics:

Vaccines do not cause autism. The one study which has ever presented a link between vaccination and autism was shown to be fraudulent.

In the interest of completeness, here is that particular citation.

Wakefield AJ, Murch SH, Anthony A, et al. Ileal-lymphoidnodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Lancet. 1998;351:637-641

By contrast, however, we have papers showing no link between vaccines and autism:

Dales L, Hammer SJ, Smith NJ. Time trends in autism and in MMR immunization coverage in California. JAMA. 2001;285:1183-1185.

Davis RL, Kramarz P, Bohlke K, et al. Measles-mumps-rubella and other measles-containing vaccines do not increase the risk for infl ammatory bowel disease: a casecontrol study from the Vaccine Safety Datalink project. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2001;155:354-359.

DeStefano F, Bhasin TK, Thompson WW, Yeargin-Allsopp M, Boyle C. Age at first measles-mumps-rubella vaccination in children with autism and school-matched control subjects: a population-based study in metropolitan Atlanta. Pediatrics. 2004;113:259-266.

DeStefano F, Chen RT. Negative association between MMR and autism. Lancet. 1999;353:1986-1987.

Farrington CP, Miller E, Taylor B. MMR and autism: further evidence against a causal association. Vaccine. 2001;19:3632-3635.

Fombonne E, Chakrabarti S. No evidence for a new variant of measles-mumps-rubella-induced autism. Pediatrics. 2001;108:E58.

Fombonne E, Cook EH Jr. MMR and autistic enterocolitis: consistent epidemiological failure to fi nd an association. Mol Psychiatry. 2003;8:133-134.

Honda H, Shimizu Y, Rutter M. No effect of MMR withdrawal on the incidence of autism: a total population study. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2005;46:572-579.

Kaye JA, del Mar Melero-Montes M, Jick H. Mumps, measles, and rubella vaccine and the incidence of autism recorded by general practitioners: a time trend analysis.
BMJ. 2001;322:460-463.

Madsen KM, Hviid A, Vestergaard M, et al. A populationbased study of measles, mumps and rubella vaccination and autism. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:1477-1482.

No link between Thimerosol (a preservative found in vaccines) and autism (or, for that matter, any ill-effects):

Andrews N, Miller E, Grant A, Stowe J, Osborne V, Taylor B. Thimerosal exposure in infants and developmental disorders: a retrospective cohort study in the United Kingdom does not support a causal association. Pediatrics. 2004;114:584-591.

Fombonne E, Zakarian R, Bennett A, Meng L, McLean- Heywood D. Pervasive developmental disorders in Montreal, Quebec, Canada: prevalence and links with immunizations. Pediatrics. 2006;118:E139-150.

Heron J, Golding J. Thimerosal exposure in infants and developmental disorders: a prospective cohort study in the United Kingdom does not support a causal association.
Pediatrics. 2004;114:577-583.

Hviid A, Stellfeld M, Wohlfahrt J, Melbye M. Association between thimerosal-containing vaccine and autism. JAMA. 2003;290:1763-1766.

Madsen KM, Lauritsen MB, Pedersen CB, et al. Thimerosal and the occurrence of autism: negative ecological evidence from Danish population-based data. Pediatrics. 2003;112:604-606.

Schechter R, Grether J. Continuing increases in autism reported to California’s developmental services system: mercury in retrograde. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2008;65:19-24.

Stehr-Green P, Tull P, Stellfeld M, Mortenson PB, Simpson D. Autism and thimerosal-containing vaccines: lack of consistent evidence for an association. Am J Prev Med. 2003;25:101-106.

Verstraeten T, Davis RL, DeStefano F, et al. Study of thimerosal-containing vaccines: a two-phased study of computerized health maintenance organization databases. Pediatrics. 2003;112:1039-1048.

And, just for good measure, studies showing no link between vaccines and inflammatory bowel disease:

Peltola H, Patja A, Leinikki P, Valle M, Davidkin I, Paunio M. No evidence for measles, mumps and rubella vaccine-associated inflammatory bowel disease or autism in a 14-year prospective study. Lancet. 1998;351:1327-1328.

Just to be clear on this.

So, why do people still claim that vaccines cause autism?

Well, let's start with the issues that they have with the above studies. You never, ever, ever hear them go after the actual studies themselves. On the contrary, they always, always, go after the authors. If they got funding from, or were employed by, a manufacturer of vaccines, they clearly could not be trusted (but, for some reason, when one deliberately falsifies their data, that article is gospel). See for yourself: from Generation Rescue's own website, they never once, ever address the science. They present the scientists as if, because they had jobs which involved making vaccines, created a bias in their data. Even if that is true, they never explain, ever, how that alleged bias produces an error in their results.

By contrast, they offer no argument in favor of their own position.

Again, from their own website:

In 1983, autism rates were 1 in 10,000 and there were 11 vaccines in the pediatric schedule. Today there are 36 pediatric vaccines and autism rates are reported as high as 1 in 80 in local school districts in Oregon and New Jersey.

Clearly, nobody ever told them that correlation does not denote causality. For example, consider the following argument:

Since 1988, there has been a dramatic increase in the importation of oranges from Mexico. Also since 1988, there has been a dramatic reduction in the number of traffic fatalities. Therefore, we should increase our importation of oranges in order to eliminate traffic fatalities.

Ridiculous? Exactly. And it's the exact same argument that Operation Rescue is attempting to make with regards to vaccination. One could just as readily claim that Netscape (which did not exist in 1983) causes autism, or that M. C. Hammer pants suppress it.

Put simply, the fact that two events occur concurrently is not evidence that there is a causal relationship, or for that matter, any relationship at all.

That's not to say that correlative data is not very valuable. Often, you can establish causality using correlative data. However, there are a few things which need to be established first.

1) a mechanism of causality must be established. In the case of vaccines, no causal mechanism by which children could even be potentially harmed has any evidence to support it.

2) We must be able to predict ahead of time what will happen, given a set of criteria. I'll come back to this in a second.

3) confounding factors, where present, must be addressed and accounted for. This last one can be very difficult, which is part of the reason why Project Rescue's data is complete bullshit. They make the claims that a) the US has the largest vaccine schedule, and b) the US has one of the highest rates of autism. There are an enormous number of confounding factors here, not the least of which being the fact that autism is a random affliction with an ill-defined pathology, and a tendency to be over diagnosed.

Let's address that second criteria for a moment.

Let's take Project Rescue's own numbers and consider the hypothesis of vaccines resulting in early infant mortality.

Now, first things first. Note that their numbers are the total mortality rates for children under five.

In other words, every child under five who dies in a car accident, every child who ever dies of diseases not included in the vaccine schedule, every child who dies in a plane accident, of cancer, or of any other of the millions of possible afflictions or accidents that can befall a child, is counted in that number.

In other words, while vaccines are a medical miracle, they won't protect your child from an automobile accident, or from drowning in the bathtub, or from falling off of a playground slide. When counted against those causes of death in the countries listed, the number of children who die from diseases which vaccines prevent pales to insignificance. The reason it pales to insignificance is that as long as assholes like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey are having a relatively minor effect on vaccination rates, most people in the US are still vaccinated against these diseases.

If you actually plot the infant mortality rate against the number of vaccines, you get something which shows no clear correlation at all. None. It's a blob of data points.



Which is pretty much to be expected, since the overwhelming majority of children who die under five don't die of something that a vaccine could have prevented. Largely because a vaccine prevented them from dying of it.

But, let's try the other side of the coin. What happens if, suddenly, we stop vaccinating? Let's consider a single disease: diptheria.

Remember, in order to establish causality, we need to make sure that three important concerns are addressed: a mechanism of causality is established, prediction of the outcome in advance based upon that mechanism of causality, and a minimum of confounding factors. The reason I picked diptheria is because it is a disease which is primarily fatal to children under five years old.

So, if we were to look at a country where diptheria vaccinations suddenly dropped off what would we predict?

Remember, we have a proposed mechanism of action: the reason that diptheria rates are so low is because most people are being vaccinated against it. Most children have immunity to the disease from childhood and are therefore not being infected. Therefore, we can predict what would happen if the rate of vaccination suddenly dropped off. Not immediately, but within ten years, we would see a massive increase in the rate of the disease.

In the Soviet Union, in 1991, 2000 cases of diptheria were reported. As the soviet block disintegrated, vaccination rates went into free-fall.

Now, another reason I chose diptheria is because it significantly reduces the number of confounding factors. Transmission is virtually always directly person to person. Break-down of infrastructure would have very little effect upon its transmission.

So, what would the prediction be for diptheria, if the vaccinations stopped?

Well, a number of people carry diptheria asymptomatically, which is what makes it such a dangerous disease. They're contagious, but they don't look like they are. In a population of individuals which is largely immune due to vaccination, these carriers are of no real concern. This is due to something called herd immunity. I'll get to that in a second.

However, if, for some reason, the level of immunity in a population drops, not only can more people catch it, but it can spread more easily through a population.

Sure enough, in the Soviet Union in 1991, 2000 cases of diptheria were reported. That was when the vaccination against it dropped precipitously. Within eight years, over 200,000 cases, with 5000 deaths reported from it. That's a hundred-fold increase.

Now, consider the criteria I laid out before.

1) a mechanism of causality has to be established. Vaccines provide an immunity from disease.

2) we can predict, in advance, the outcome of a specific perturbation, based upon the mechanism of causality. If the above is correct, we should observe a resurgence of the disease after immunization is cut off.

3) confounding factors are reduced. In this case, we're dealing with the exact same population over eight years, and the transmission vector of the disease is well-understood.

And it's not just that. The opposite was observed in the case of Pertussis in the United states. Immediately after the introduction of the pertussis vaccine, cases plummeted into freefall.

We are now seeing the same thing happening in the United States, as a direct consequence of the anti-vaccination movement. People are dying, and people like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey are killing them.

Now, here's the side of things that anti-vaccination advocates don't realize. They're not just harming themselves. They're harming everyone else. That's the side of the equation you never, ever hear from Generation Rescue, or any of the other anti-vaccination movements. A critical component of the vaccination schedule is herd immunity. If enough people in a population are immune to a disease, they are individually better protected against it. You get better protection if you are completely unvaccinated, and are surrounded by a herd, friends and neighbors, who are protected than you are if you are completely protected, and surrounded by a herd which is not. This is a non-trivial point, and something you never hear Jenny McCarthy mention in any of her interviews or press conferences. Every single person who gets convinced not to vaccinate harms not only themselves, but those around them.

In the case of childhood vaccinations, we're talking about children. Children at the Kindergarten level and younger. Even if those children are vaccinated, if enough individuals in their herd are not, they're less well protected.

Seriously. Get vaccinated. If you don't care about your own kid, the least you could do is care about someone else's.

The Evil Evolutionist conspiracy has issued a directive.

Some of you may have heard about Ben Stein's latest movie. Well, the google-bombing gauntlet has been thrown down. Expelled Exposed is a project by the National Center for Science Education exposing the fraud that is Ben Stein's movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" and never was there a more appropriate title. You literally have to leave your brain at the door in order to believe the bullshit spewed throughout the movie.

Fortunately, I don't have to spend my time chronicling the misrepresentations, ludicrous claims and outright falsehoods of the movie. You can find them here: Expelled

If you gotta move...

So I've finally found myself a post-doc position. I'm actually kinda thrilled at this one. It requires me to live in Honolulu Hawai'i for a few years, and may lead to a future faculty position at the U of H. I figure if you're going to move away from your friends and family, there are worse places to do it than Hawai'i. In honor of that, I've added two weather graphics to my blog. One showing the current weather in Calgary, one showing the current weather in Honolulu. I feel the need to remind you that that's the weather right now. Like, in December. Fun, huh?

Actually, I'm also excited about this for things that have absolutely nothing to do with invariably good weather,



beautiful sunsets,



beautiful women,



beautiful beaches,



the opportunity to go hiking twelve months of the year,



amazing sunsets (did I mention that already? Well, it bears repeating),



history,



wildlife,



and amazing photographic subjects.



Actually, I'm excited for a whole slew of reasons, but perhaps the most important one is that I'm simply excited by the work I'm going to be doing. The work will still be in the same general area I've been working in for the last five years, but it will be more on the molecular level. A little less cellular biology, a little more genetics, a little more biochemistry, and a little bit more gene-jockeying. I'm going to be doing both the insertion and deletion of genes in mice, working on developing a working hypoxia model in wild-type mice, and studying the expression of genes in the heart specifically, and what genes will show up in these systems. This is a kind of science I've never done before, and it excites me. It means that I get to spend more time in the lab and less time scribbling equations in a lab book. I'm going to improve on my recovery surgery (something I haven't done in a long time, and haven't done at all on something as small as a mouse), my RT- and QT-PCR, as well as running and analyzing microarrays. In addition, I'm going to be working with a mathematician who wrote a textbook that has effectively been my bible for the last five years. By fortuitous circumstances, I'm going to be working with a former classmate of my brother's, he's a nice guy, and I think I'm going to enjoy working for him. I think we have a lot to do and less time to do it in, but I think that this is going to be an amazing learning opportunity for me.

Oh, and the view out of my laboratory window is the Pacific ocean.

Can you tell I'm marginally excited by this?

Biologists Helping Bookstores

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I'm all for accuracy in filing books in bookstores; and as a biologist it sorta goes without saying that I believe Intelligent Design and Creation Science to be crap, but it seems like this lady isn't making a statement so much as she's making a mess. All she's really accomplishing is giving the employees more work. Bookstores don't file for accuracy, they file books where they'll sell the best. If putting Darwin's Origin of Species along side Harlequin Romance novels would make it sell better, they'd do it.

That said, if you file something in the "Science" section, you expect that it contains factual information. Nobody thinks that you should put a book in the "Modern Medicine" section that advocates smoking ten packs a day and eating junk food. Filing these books in the science section offers pseudoscience books a credibility that they have not earned through the process of peer-review.

Like I said, I'm really not sure how I feel about this, so I offer the link here, and in my blog roll, so you can decide for yourself.

Guest Lecture (yay!)

So I got invited to do a guest lecture at Oxford. Yes, the one in England. Come to think of it, I don't think there's another one out there. But I got invited to do a lecture at Oxford. Cool, huh?

Okay, before I go on, I should point out that it's not as impressive as it sounds. I'd love to claim that they were dazzled by my brilliance from the opposite side of the Atlantic and offered to pay my air fare to get out there and spend a day lecturing and meeting the faculty.

I'd love to claim that, but that would be, at the very least, an exaggeration. A paper I wrote a while back got read and well received at their local journal club and my supervisor got contacted about it. As it turns out, April and I will be in the area in the not-too-terribly distant future, and they asked if I would be willing to give a brief (1-hour) lecture while I was there. So it's technically an invited guest lecture, but if not for the fact that I'm gonna be there anyway, there's no possible way they would've invited me. But, hey, it's Oxford. I mean, Oxford.

Yeah, if you haven't gathered so far, I think it's kinda cool. I have given lectures in the past. Many, many of them, actually. Of course, very few of those (like, one) have been given outside my own university, but I'm not exactly a stranger to lectures like this one. None of them have been outside the country, much less the continent.

So, yes, I'm kinda excited about this.

The Gap between Science and Faith

I had a bit of an epiphany the other night. As those of you who read this page on a relatively-regular basis know, I have a rather deep interest in the recent debate between the theory of evolution and creationism (or its more politically-correct cousin: Intelligent Design), and for the most part, my position has been pretty consistent: teach science in science class. Intelligent design "theory" has no more place in a science class than evolution has in church.

All throughout this time, the one question I never asked, largely because I couldn't see any way of answering it was "why?" Why would people who are otherwise relatively intelligent either deny or ignore the very plain evidence for biological evolution? How can they claim that what they provide is science when just about every claim they make is directly contradicted by scientific data? To take the extreme position of Young-Earth Creationism; namely that the earth (not to mention, the universe as a whole) is actually thousands, rather than billions of years old, one has to completely ignore just about every scientific finding that has been made in just about every branch of the sciences in the last three hundred years. How can they claim to be acting on behalf of a benevolent God, then completely ignore that whole "not bearing false witness" thing She laid out in the book of Exodus?

And more importantly, what on earth makes people dumb enough to listen to them?

Anyhow the realization I came to was remarkable only in its simplicity. People like absolutes. They like for the world to be divided into black and white; up and down; good and evil; us and them. They paint the world in black and white, ignoring in the process that the entire world is a gray area.

So coming back to the intelligent design debate. Basically, what you have is a group of religious fundamentalists whose faith is so weak that they simply cannot accept that a given passage of the bible is not literally true. From their perspective, the Bible is either absolutely 100% correct, or it's 100% wrong. Apart from being a demonstration of unfathomably weak faith, in my opinion; this is also the type of very dangerous thinking that leads to things like crusades, Holocausts and 9/11s.

Once they have people on the hook, though, they start applying the same logic to science. Evolution, they posit, is either 100% right, or 100% wrong. They nitpick little flaws in the theory (real or perceived); with the (oft unverbalized) assumption that unless a scientific theory is 100% right on every single point, then it's completely wrong.

It should be mentioned, critically, that these people claim to be scientists; or at the absolute least, they claim that their approach is scientific; and yet this approach belies a complete lack of understanding of how science works.

The difference between faith and science is that any scientific theory carries with it the implicit assumption that it is wrong. In fact, as soon as a theory is concocted, the first thing you do is start looking for ways in which it is wrong. You design new experiments, you put together new systems, you try new models. In short, the first thing you do once you have a theory worked out is try to prove yourself wrong.

No scientist, to the best of my knowledge, has ever made the claim that the theory of evolution; or any scientific theory, for that matter; is absolutely correct (Although I suppose one might (and I emphasize: might) be able to argue that by calling his theories "laws," Newton was claiming that he was working with immutable truth, but he was a bit of a pretentious asshole; he was a brilliant scientist, make no mistake, but that doesn't make him immune from being a prick). Even as Einstein crafted his theory of relativity, he knew there were parts of the theory which wouldn't be absolutely correct. Even as Darwin put together his theory of evolution, he knew there were some points for which he didn't have evidence. When Hodgkin and Huxley developed the ionic theory of membrane excitability, they knew that the science they were founding would be very different than it was now; and when Frank and Starling came up with the so-called "law of the heart," they knew that it would be added to and changed as time passed. In short, science, by its very nature, changes. It is a living, changing approach to the universe where the assumption is always made that anything we know today may be seen as absurd tomorrow. To try to approach science with the assumption that it deals in a black-and-white world is ludicrous.

And the beautiful irony of the whole situation is this: let's suppose that tomorrow, the theory of evolution is completely disproven. This would pretty much be the ID proponents' greatest fantasy: to see the evil theory of evolution proven incorrect. The irony of the ID position is that if evolution is disproven, that doesn't make intelligent design right. It just makes evolution wrong.

A friend of mine said that trying to mix faith and science was like mixing vanilla ice cream with a spoonful of manure. It won't hurt the manure much; but it'll ruin the ice cream. It's worth noting that he didn't specify which of the two represented which. And he was right. When you mix science and faith; neither one gets the one thing that they both want: answers.

It's official

I just want to point out that when the most exciting moment of your day occurs when you go online to order a textbook entitled Ion Channels of Excitable Membranes, you officially have no life.

Why do Creationists hate God so much?

Creationists seem to have a very low opinion of God.

From their point of view, God's an egotistical prick who requires you to believe in Her as a Conditio Sine Qua Non for salvation. She's basically a boogiewoman with a few magic tricks up Her sleeves.

Now, depending on how you define the term, I absolutely believe in God. I believe that there's a unifying governing mechanic to the universe; a binding logic, if you will; without which the universe is incomprehensible, and which may, itself, be impossible to obeserve (although I'm not ruling out that this could be measured someday). On occasion, I call that "God." I don't, however, believe in God in the Burning Bush sense of the word; and I certainly don't believe that She's the vindictive asshole that many fundamentalists seem to believe She is: vindictive and merciless enough to condemn the majority of the planet who aren't some specific religion to eternal damnation. Frankly, I fail to see how such a God deserves worship.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume that God is an intelligence of some kind. Let us postulate that there is some intellect capable of creating the universe and all life therein by a sheer force of Her will. What exactly makes the Creationists out there believe that such a being can be summarized with a select few verses of a book?

If God created everything, then Her fingerprints are upon every tree and rock. She's in every sunset and sunrise, everything living and nonliving. Her brushstrokes are in every piece of trash, every building, and every cloud. If God created everything, then the place to find Her isn't in a book; it's in the world you see when you lift your nose out of it. If God created nature, then the place to look for Her is in nature itself. That's where you're going to find God's thoughts, not in a book written by people who have been dead for two thousand years.

Postulating the existence of God, reading the Bible won't tell you what She's thinking; but looking at what She's done so far might give you some insight.

Creationists don't reveal the message God sent, they ignore it. They ignore the one textbook they can possibly know that God wrote (postulating Her existence): the universe itself; in favor of a book which has been translated, re-translated, and re-interpreted time and time again. Postulating the existence of God, they choose to ignore what She actually did, in favor of the world's longest-running game of "telephone" which may describe what She's done. They assume that God's message can be written in a few select lines of text, and won't even consider the possibility that maybe the truth is bigger than the words used to describe it. They make humanity into some kind of special creature and they make God into a two-bit deity with a couple of funky magic tricks up Her sleeves.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that scientists are much closer to having an understanding of God (postulating, of course, that She exists) than any creationist is. At the very least, those who believe in Her certainly have a far higher opinion of God than most creationists seem to. Einstein once said: "I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details." The observant among you will realize that he never once claimed that he already knew Her thoughs. Merely that he wanted to know them. And therein lies the fundamental difference between Creationism and science. Science is humble enough to acknowledge that they don't have the answers; creationism is arrogant enough to assume that they do, based solely upon a book which She might have had a hand in writing.

Now, if we only look at the evidence for evolution, then what do we have? Postulating the existence of God, She's telling us that we're not special or more important than any other living creatures; more than that, She's telling us that we're connected to every living thing on Earth. We're connected to every tree, every plant, every microbe and virus. We're connected to every animal and insect. We're a part of each and every one of them, and they are a part of us.

Extend that a little further; bring cosmology into the mix. Now, not only are we connected to every living creature, but everything nonliving as well. We're connected to every star, every planet, every rock. We're connected to the air we breathe, the water in the streams. We're connected to every single galaxy; every nebula; every piece of trash on the ground; every blade of grass; down to the most insignificant lonely atom in deep space.

If we ignore the book for a second and look at nature, then the one conclusion that we can draw is that God (postulating Her existence) is telling us something far greater than is written in any Bible; indeed, something far greater than its authors could possibly have imagined. She's telling us that we are connected, albeit distantly, with absolutely everything.

Postulating the existence of God; what more profound and moving message could possibly be sent?

The logic (or rather the absence thereof) in Intelligent Design

Let's ask ourselves perhaps the most pertinent question in Intelligent Design theory; one that nobody seems to be able to answer: What is the scientific theory of Intelligent Design, and how may it be empirically tested?

Not one person yet has been able to answer this one simple question, and I openly challenge anyone who is within the sound of my electronic voice to provide an answer.

Evolution has been tested time and time again. It has been the prevaliling scientific theory to explain the diversity of life on earth for over 150 years; ever since Darwin was tromping around the Galapogos Islands. The fossil record supports it; modern genetics supports it... In fact, to date, not one study has been performed which contradicts evolution.

But let's suppose, hypothetically, that one had. One day a scientist stumbles upon irrefutable evidence that evolution simply cannot be the mechanism by which life on earth arose and diversified. Let's presume, just for the sake of argument, that tomorrow, we find out that the theory of evolution is wrong.

Guess what? The theory of Intelligent Design still wouldn't be a scientific theory.

See, according to the IDiots out there (although they don't explicitly say so, their strategy so far makes it quite clear) hacking holes (whether real or perceived) in the theory of evolution equates to proving Intelligent Design.

This is, of course, bullshit. No scientific theory is accepted until they at least have a solid falsifiable hypthesis and have either supported or disproven it. Frankly, where Intelligent design is concerned, it is very possibly impossible to falsify an act of God; and since She isn't coming forward to tell us how She dun it, Intelligent design will have to be viewed as it is by the scientific community: pseudo-intellectual crap.

Now, I know that the tone of this posting is a little harsher than I usually use, and I apologize, but the simple truth is that I see Intelligent Design as a slap in the face to everything I've decided to dedicate my professional life to. To take religion, specifically the book of Genesis, cloak it in pseudoscience, then try to force-feed it to high school students as if it were an accepted scientific theory; that is something I simply cannot accept. As a scientist, I simply cannot look upon Intelligent design with anything less than utmost contempt.

On Evolution, and God.

So I was chatting with a fundamentalist Christian friend of mine about evolution. It should be mentioned, critically, that my friend, while strongly Christian, does not ascribe to the dogma of the Intelligent Design proponents. He accepts evolution as having occurred; however, in his words, "that doesn't necessarily mean that God wasn't in there somewhere." He sees the book of Genesis as, and this is too good a quote for me not to use directly: "God simplifying natural history down to a level that a bunch of illiterate goatherds standing on a hill could understand and remember," which is basically what I've been saying since I found out about the whole Evolution/Intelligent Design debate; albeit somewhat more eloquently.

The thing, he said, that bothered him was the fact that Evolution required you to start with the assumption that God doesn't exist.

That was the epiphany moment for me. Ever since I learned about this so-called Intelligent Design theory, it confused the hell out of me why some people, many of whom are actually relatively intelligent, would deny the findings of just about every single branch of the natural sciences just to maintain that the Earth is only a few thousand years old; and that all animals in existence were magically created in their current form. At that moment, I finally understood: here's a perception that Evolution somehow denies the existence of God; and God's a really tough chick to argue with.

Okay, first off, I don't want this to be an essay on the existence/non-existence of God. That's a question best left to philosophers, theologeans, and people who are a lot smarter than me.

What I do want to get into is whether or not evolution theory actually denies the existence of God.

The short answer is "no."

Evolution theory, in all the forms it has taken since Darwin, and its application as far as abiogenesis and the origins of life on earth says nothing whatsoever about whether or not God exists. It says notning about the existence or functioning of any god or gods. It's basically orthogonal to the question; roughtly as orthogonal to the question as how your microwave oven works.

Is it possible that radioactive decay rates spontaneously change as soon as we're not looking at them? Maybe; but until we have some observable data to support that premise, the scientific approach demands that we avoid speculation and work from solid data. Is it possible that God made the world to "look" old to every experiment we could possibly perform? Again, yes, it's possible, but following that logic through to its natural conclusion, it could be argued that we have no solid proof that all five of our senses are not illusory, so therefore, we know absolutely nothing about the world around us.

The point is that if no observations exist, and no observations can be expected to be made, speculation is pointless, from a scientific standpoint. Sure, speculation can be fun, and it can also draw you in new and interesting directions that you may not have previously considered; but as far as actually understanding a phenomenon, it often reflects far more upon the experimentor's personal baises than it does upon the actual nature of things.

The point is that science works upon what can be observed. Practically by definition, God is an unobservable entity; whether She exists or not. So science simply ignores the question. It's irrelevant to whether or not the theory of evolution is correct or not. We can speculate all we want as to whether God exists, and whether or not She was involved in the creation of life on earth, but all this would be beside the point. Evolution is possibly the single most-supported theory in the biological sciences. While I object to the term "unifying theory" on principle (largely because a lot of people think that it sounds too much like "God"), if the biological sciences have a unifying theory, then evolution would be it. From the gross anatomy of complex animals, to the smallest molecular pathway in our individual cells, there's a certain elegance about the system; and the only scientific explanation which simultaneously explains the magnificent diversity as well as the shocking similarities between the various organisms is Evolution.

Whether or not God was involved is a separate issue.

On Intelligent Design, and the Scientific Method

This occurred to me last night: assuming that the state of Kentucky makes Intelligent Design a part of its science curriculum in the coming year (which is seeming increasingly inevitable), can Intelligent Design be taught concurrently with Scientific Method?

The Scientific Method is the basis for all scientific theory. A falsifiable hypothesis is generated, that hypothesis is subjected to a series of experiments which either validate or disprove it; and from that a theory is created which explains the experimental results. Then the process begins all over again.

Intelligent design has never been subjected to scientific scrutiny. No falsifiable hypothesis has been created; no experimentation performed; ergo no theory has been advanced.

So that raises the obvious question of how can we, out of one side of our virtual mouths, tell high school students that the scientific method is the manner in which postulate becomes theory; while out of the other side we promote Intelligent Design as a valid scientific theory? If you can tell me how that is not fundamentally hypocritical, you're smarter than I am.

Now, if someone wants to study Intelligent Design in, for example, a comparative religion course; or a social studies course (the sociology of Intelligent Design proponents is actually quite fascinating), I have absolutely no issue with that. But to present it as a scientific theory is a slap in the face to those of us who do genuine science. Frankly, it's insulting.

I've decided to devote my professional life to the pursuit of scientific knowledge; to understand, through scientific methodology the world around me. To have a small group of people present barely-veiled religion, calling it theory, and teaching it to students as valid science is an affront to everything I have tried to learn in the last ten years.

Not only that, but as far as I can tell, if they want any student to actually believe Intelligent Design; they're going to have to stop teaching the scientific method. In other words, they will be teaching science class, without actually teaching them how to do science.

Now, someone has to have thought about this before me; since I'm not smart enough to have been the first. So why isn't this issue getting far more mention than it is?

Theory of Intelligent Falling

I think it's about time we did away with this whole outdated "gravity" idea, don't you?

Seriously, what kind of moron actually believes that there's some kind of magical, invisible pulling force between any two massive objects? Why only two? What idiot came up with the idea that massive bodies warp spacetime in their vicinity, creating a greater potential as you get closer to the mass in question? Come on, has anyone ever actually seen a four-dimensional space!?

Let's be candid: Gravity is a theory, not a fact; and we shouldn't be teaching it to young children as such. Most students in science class have never even heard of Intelligent Faller theory; much less studied it. They're taught that some mystical "gravitational" force (whose origin, by the way, we have not determined) pulls objects downwards with a force proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. What jackass came up with that theory!?

This so-called "Gravity" fails to explain the notable absence of "transitional fallers." Instead, all objects fall into one of two classifications: fallers or non-fallers. Gravity fails to explain why a helium-filled balloon, possessing mass, fails to fall. Furthermore, it fails to explain one of the glaring errors of its own theory; the fact that all objects fall at the same rate. If the force is proportional to the mass of one of the objects, a object twice as massive should fall twice as fast; in direct contradiction to observed data.

Come on, people, this isn't how science is done! Science deals with facts and proof, not theories and evidence.

No, clearly, the only explanation which completely describes falling objects is that G-, I mean, an Intelligent Faller makes them fall.

This is really the only explanation that makes sense. Really, how dumb would we all have to be to believe that objects fall automatically, when the Bib-, I mean, when it's obvious that ther's a devi-, I mean, an ultra-intelligent invisible hand pushing objects into the ground?

We hereby propose that Intelligent Faller theory be immediately included in the science curriculum to be taught side-by-side with the so-called theory of "gravity." Students should be taught how holes in the theory of gravity can be filled simply by invoking a dei-, um, assuming the existence of an Intelligent Faller. We suggest that students become familiar with the Intelligent Faller theory, and how data published in approximately 300 CE clearly supports the existence of an Intelligent Faller.

As final proof of the existence of an Intelligent Faller; one who can make objects fall or not fall for those of True Fai-, um, those who understand his theory, we hereby propose that all students who study Intelligent Falling Theory be required immediately to jump off the nearest tall structure.

Kansas Evolution/Creation debate heats up.

Oh, Crap.

Well, the good thing about all this is that Canada will be about a million miles ahead of the US in the biological sciences in about ten years. Which means that the US will be desperately seeking people who actually have some scientific literacy.

Which means that I, an American citizen who is not required to acquire a visa to work in the states, will be a rather valuable commodity in a few years.

But I'd like to bring up this debate for a moment. I'm not particularly inclined towards any religion (although, I confess, I've been leaning a little in the direction of Taoism lately). I'm not baptized; with the exception of very special occasions (Christmas, Baptisms, funerals), I have never attended church; and depending on who you ask, that means that I'm going straight to hell.

I went to a Catholic school for six years. Not being Catholic, my parents went to a degree which some would call obsessive to protect me from any kind of brainwashing. They encouraged me to learn as much about as many different religions as I could, and they taught me to look at the world with an opened mind. As early as the age of seven, I had a rather minimal understanding of Islam, as well as a very shaky knowledge of Buddhism. My knowledge in either of those hasn't increased significantly since then, but I at least had some understanding of what they taught. It wasn't until recently that I understood why my parents felt, at the time, that it was so important for me to learn these things, to have the widest possible perspective by the time I entered first grade. I think it has a great deal to do with the fact that my parents have possibly the greatest understanding of history, and its lessons, of any people I have ever met. They realized that some of the greatest atrocities in history have been perpetrated over the answer given to one of two questions: 1) do you believe in God, and 2) do you belive in my God?

One of the side-effects of my upbringing is that I claim, with absolutely no vanity whatsoever, that I have a greater familiarity with the Bible than many people who profess to be Christian. And it seems to me that the people who assume that the Bible has a blanked answer for absolutely everything don't appear to have ever read it.

There are passages in the Bible which specifically endorse Slavery; stoning someone to death for working seven days a week; and burning someone for wearing mixed threads. Passages in the bible specifically prohibit the eating of shrimp and lobster, while specifically endorsing the consumption of Locusts (something I don't get, considering that shrimp, lobster and locust all share the same phylum).

The bottom line is that if you read the Bible with the intention of interpreting it in an absolute, literal manner; most of what it says is patently absurd.

Now, although some people are very careful not to say that Intelligent Design or Creation is the way to go because it's what the Bible says; it's pretty clear from their rhetoric that that's the direction they're going.

This is entirely based upon a strictily literal interpretation of the book of Genesis. So not only are they forcing a religious agenda on a group of people who may or may not share their beliefs, but they're focing a religious agenda based upon an absurd interpretation of the text.

Let's start with the facts, shall we? Creationism and Intelligent Design have no scientific basis, period. They make no testable predictions, the present no results, and since they have no results, they have no reproducibility. These are considered to be the defining characteristics of a scientifc theory.

Which brings me to my next point: a great deal of noise is being made about the fact that Evolution is a theory, not a fact.

Well, in this sense, I suppose they are correct. Evolution is not a fact, but like any good scientific theory, it is a collection of many facts. It is not the explanation of a single detail, but the sum of all data; all facts; collected. By definition, a scientific theory must explain all available facts. If data is collected which directly contradicts one's theory, that theory must be changed.

In short, Evolution is not a fact, it possesses far more power than any one fact. It is the culmination of almost 150 years of observable, reproducible data. It is the sum total of all knowledge available to scientists at this moment.

Does Evolution have all the answers? Hell, no. But nobody's claiming that it does. That's why science is a continuous process. Every question answered raises more questions.

The Intelligent Design proponents assume that by casting a shadow of doubt upon Evolution; namely that it doesn't explain everything; then Intelligent Design is the only viable option. This is at the very least a shaky interpretation of the scientific method, and depending on how you look at it, may be manifestly dishonest. No scientist ever claims to have all the answers. No scientific theory claims to explain all observed phenomena. Intelligent Design offers the blanket explanation of "God dun it" to slap a band-aid over any unexplained phenomena. It has not testable hypothesis, it makes no predictions about future data.

Ergo, it is unscientific, and has no place whatsoever in the science classroom.

Now, in the interest of balance, I should also mention that I find pure Athiesm to be an unscientific approach as well. Admittedly, evidence of the existence of a higher power; God, Allah, Jaweh, Vishnu, Shiva, to name a few; is somewhat lacking. However, that a higher being somehow pushed things along is also a hypothesis, and the fact that that hypothesis lacks any experimental data to back it up at the moment does not necessarily disprove it. I point out that many of Einstein's theories lacked any experimental support until many years after his death (the speed of gravity, for instance, was only recently measured); and so far, he's been largely correct in many of his predictions.

The point that I'm trying to make is that science can neither assume nor eliminate the possibility that a higher intelligence was at work during the creation of life on earth. However, science deals with observed facts and evidence. So-called Creation Science has provided neither.