I can be as illogical and superstitious as the next person – though I like to justify it as thinking metaphorically…. – but I hope this isn’t the case if the next person happens to be a fundamentalist of any stripe. Looking through TW’s posts here (e.g Bad bad Medicine ) and some of the sites we’ve linked to, such as Pharyngula, I detect some bizarre themes that have been challenged by these blogs.

1. evolution (obviously)
2. vaccination
3. AIDS therapies

No matter how hard I try, I can’t really find any coherent connections between the major works of the God-of-Abraham religions and these topics. Not least because the theory of evolution and the medical science behind development of vaccines and anti-virals DID NOT EXIST at the time that the infallible books were dictated straight from the mind of God onto paper.

Evolution is the easiest topic for following the fundamentalist logic. The Bible says the world was created in 6 days, in a specific order. Obviously, if the Bible is always infallible and not metaphorical, this must be what fundamentalists believe. But it’s a Jewish book. I’ve not heard of any major Jewish movements against evolutionary theory. However, I believe that orthodox Jews do actually attempt to keep up with a fair number of the multiple prohibitions in Leviticus. So how is it that fundamentalist Christians can treat the Bible as literally true in every word and avoid doing all these observances? As pointed out repeatedly on the blogsite God is imaginary, many of these rules and the penalties for breaking them are genuinely repulsive to most people’s thinking. You can see why there would be problems putting them in practice today – not to mention pretty severe opposition. So the Christian fundamentalists have already dispensed with huge chunks of the Bible.

Did Jesus say “Follow everything in the Old Testament word for word, except for the million instructions for living in Leviticus”? I’m not too familiar with the New Testament but I’m pretty certain this instruction doesn’t appear anywhere. in fact, I doubt that Jesus is ever actually reported as having said “The Old Testament is true, word for word” but I am happy to be corrected on this.

Even if we were to accept that the world was created in a week and “the exact length of time for all the begats in the Bible to have a generation each” ago, then why does this stop evolutionary processes being true? Ah ha, because, man is supposed to be set apart from the animals. Good job we don’t need to breathe and communicate amd move and grow and eat and excrete and reproduce then, because, otherwise, we would be like animals.

Evolution is one thing. It requires some level of logical thought to grasp its principles. It could be replaced at anytime by some other theory of the natural world. However, it seems to have proved itself by the very fact that advances in biology – based on the theory – are already developed to the point that our knowledge is giving us enough control over nature to threaten our survival of the planet in new and exotic ways. (Just as our mastery of physics and chemistry and engineering prove themselves daily – nuclear weapons and poisons and transport machinery – they all work. :-))

But vaccinations? Treating AIDS with effective medicines on the basis that it’s caused by HIV infection? How can these possibly conflict with any Biblical teachings? I just don’t get this one. Medical science has made its fair share of mistakes, OK. All the same, being a science, medicine is obliged to test the effectiveness of its cures and develop new ones if the old ones aren’t working. Vaccinations are the best way to prevent suffering and death on plague scales. Does the fact that the Bible is full of plagues suggest that vaccinations are irreligious because they stop these Biblical events happening? Does God really want to see the people who live in countries that are too poor to provide effective vaccinations wiped out? Because that seems to be the Intelligent Design going on at the moment.

The AIDs-denying stuff is just demented. It has been associated with unneccesary deaths in South Africa, with spurious “natural” treatments being advanced in a country that has a desperate need for working and affordable anti-virals.

In both these cases, lack of access to vaccines and medicines don’t seem to be leading to better health.

Not being a theist myself, I probably don’t have a right to say this, but the fundamentalist position assumes the existence of a God who is is just pure evil. He sends illnesses on the basis of his moral judgements of people’s ways of life, and these illnesses somehow attack the most blameless. His aim is really poor if he’s trying to strike at wickedness and his arrow of destruction hits a year-old baby living in a shanty-town. Now, worshipping a Supreme Being like that, out of fear of what He might do if he’s not treated to a constant sycophantic chorus, seems to be both sacrilegious and craven.

Well, even a new month does little to stem the reams of anti-evolutionary nonsense that some websites produce. This current example (which was, as is often the case, found from Pharyngula) ticks lots of the boxes for the nonsense woo-worshippers who want to disprove evolution by any means possible. Sadly they rarely seem to care how idiotic their attempts are, and I suspect they work on the principle of if each attempt convinces one person, as long as they do lots of attempts it will work. (Bit like spam mail really)

Anyway, via the wonders of modern technology (what looks like a server side PHP script) the “Random Mutation Generator” website claims to demonstrate what it views as a flaw in the theory. When you visit the site (and really, css was common place on the internet years ago, there is NO excuse for that web design), you get a text box in which you can write words then press the “mutate” button and see what happens.

Now, as an example of server side scripting this is fine (although it could just have easily been done with JS on the client – then it would at least have been AJAX-Cool). It is certainly not an example of how evolution takes place, nor is it an example of how random mutations in DNA occur. This is a script. It is arbitrary and constrained by the code used, the concepts behind that code and the skills of the programmer. Calling the “submit” button “Mutate!” does not make it evolutionary.

I am not sure if the person behind this site is a creationist / ID proponent but it seems that their attempt to disprove evolution by actually disproving intelligent design. Now, laying all the woo and sheer nonsense to one side, if we can for one minute accept the generator as an example of evolution (urgh, but stick with me), it shows that the oft used ploy of “directed evolution” is false. The generator takes a recognisable English word (the “creators” start point) and through random mutation (which certainly happens, even IDers agree to that) tries to show it can not become a different recognisable English word.

Now, correct me if I am wrong but I dont recall anything in Evolution which that applies to. There is plenty in ID which it does though.

Well, here is one which intrigues me sometimes: Is Atheism a religion? Personally, it is an easy one. “No” is the only answer I would ever come up with.

Things get a bit more complicated when Theist X says things like “the dictionary defines Atheist as some one who does not believe in God, this is in itself a belief, therefore Atheism is a religion.” On lots of questionnaires which ask for religion “Atheist” is included as an option, some don’t even have “none” as a choice.

Now, to me this is nonsense but I can (grudgingly) see some reasoning in the chain of logic and wondered what others think. Personally, I like the variations on the quote “Saying Atheism is a religion is like saying not collecting stamps is a hobby.”

Microsoft Vista for home users was released this week. There remain concerns that it has security problems. E.g. the BBC headlined its Vista announcement as “Vista security claim challenged”. It reported the release as something of a damp squib for Microsoft – hinting at a leaky product with relatively few sales.

In fairness to Microsoft, this may be something of a kneejerk anti-Microsoft response. Windows operating systems have long had reputations for being leaky. However, it’s more likely that Microsoft products aren’t particularly vulnerable to intruders They are just much more widely dispersed and more likely to be on home users’ PCs that are wide-open to attack.

According to the Register, surely better informed than the BBC,

Microsoft launched its latest operating system – Windows Vista – on Monday, a move that will make finding easily exploitable vulnerabilities a lot harder, according to security researchers.

The Register points out that security was the main focus behind the development of Vista and Microsoft seem to have addressed most of the current security issues.

Other operating systems tend to be more secure the lower the number of users. Why would hackers bother developing complex intrusion strategies for operating systems like FreeBSD, that can be found on relatively few machines, unless the development turns out to be really easy? Attacks on Windows machines must bring much greater rewards in terms of numbers of compromised machines, even if it’s initially harder to find vulnerabilities and write the code.

Where Open Source software seems less vulnerable is in the fact that end-users usually have some control over what their operating systems are doing and how. If a Windows user’s anti-virus software doesnt identify an intrusion – pretty likely as lots of malware is designed to disable the AV and trick you into thinking it’s still working – it is well nigh impossible to identify it by looking at file changes.

All aspects of Windows drop files all over the hard disk, some of which are just taking up disk space (on the offchance you decide to install an obscure variant of a scanner that’s available only in Sumatra) and some of which are crucial system components. The registry can give the King James Bible a serious run for its money on size. An average user’s registry would not fit in the hard disk space of a PC from ten years ago. Entries are duplicated, imaginary users are created at will – have you ever had anyone use your PC as “guest”- do you really need an Admin user and Guest user, as well as yourself, on a single user PC.

All this guff mounts up. So when you have worm that burrows into the registry and changes a couple of obscure keys – how on earth do you tell? You have a random file, “diceymalwarefilename.exe”, in the Windows PreFetch directory, how on earth are you supposed to know that. You didn’t even know you had a PreFetch directory.

Install a reasonable number of apps – that’s why you have a PC, surely – and you have numbers of files that match the population figures for several European countries. Each one drops files wherever it sees fit. A goodly number start processes that run every time you start up, even though you may have forgotten you had even installed the thing months before.

These are all arguments for Linux, not because it’s intrinsically more secure, but because at least the end-user can identify some of the things going on on his or her own PC. The one you’ve paid for. You didn’t sign a licence agreement when you got the operating system or applications that said “I am happy for the manufacturer to do what ever they see fit on my hard disk and not to give me any information about what they are doing”

(Maybe you did, did you ever read one? Me neither.)

Otherwise Vista looks like it will be pretty good. The BBC’s vaunted Apple alternative is just a joke. Apple seems more like a toy manufacturer at the moment than a serious PC contender. They are making nice toys/fashion items, grossly overpriced.

Fortune has smiled upon us… we have another chance to take a swipe at both Islam and Christian crackpots. This time the Christian ones are fairly minority (hopefully) but the Islamic one is fairly influential. Both are the same theme – vaccination.

Apparently Dr Abdul Majid Katme, head of the UK’s Islamic Medical Association (and a member of the Muslim Council of Britain) that good Muslims should not vaccinate their children. In a nutshell Dr Katme’s arguments are that the vaccines are not halal and may contain or have been made using pork-based gelatine. well, that is a good reason to encourage your followers to let their children suffer. The Time article has the following quote:

He claimed that Muslims must allow their children to develop their own immune system naturally rather than rely on vaccines.

He argued that leading “Islamically healthy lives” would be enough to ward off illnesses and diseases.

“You see, God created us perfect and with a very strong defence system. If you breast-feed your child for two years — as the Koran says — and you eat Koranic food like olives and black seed, and you do ablution each time you pray, then you will have a strong defence system,” he said.

Amazing, isn’t it. Predictably MMR comes in for a bad rap but that has become par for the course in today’s (un)enlightened age. As mentioned on Orac’s blog this whole line of thinking is not only insane for him, but threatens to undermine the herd immunity vaccine programs strive for. I think this quote from Orac sums it up brilliantly though:

“Islamically healthy lives”? Oh, yes, because Muslims were so much more healthy and resistant to disease hundreds of years ago, before vaccines were developed for common and often deadly diseases like smallpox and childhood diseases like rubella and the importance of modern sanitation was understood. Epidemics were never a problem, right? Again, what medical school did Dr. Katme graduate from?

It is worrying that Dr Katme is considered an Islamic moderate and, as part of the MCB, is working towards greater integration between Muslims and the rest of the UK. Things like this are open season for the right wing nutjobs to take a swipe at Islam, and will end up causing more suffering for Muslims anyway. Who said logic and religion could go together…

Islam is not alone though. Christianity has it’s own share of the cranky crackpots. I am not really sure what Christian doctrine is anti-Vaccine but on a web site titled “Vaccination—Vatican’s Medical Inquisition Revealed at Last!!” it is nicely spelt out for me… It seems that vaccinations and immunisations are a secret plot by the Catholic church. Seriously. Now this site is properly ranting, for example:

Dr. A.R. Campbell (another Great Scot) was a Texas doctor who discovered that smallpox was only spread by the bite of the bloodsucking insect called the BEDBUG or Cimex Lectularius. Cimex is the Latin for “bug” and Lectularius is Latin for “couch” or “bed.” Dr. Campbell proved that smallpox is not contagious and is not an airborne disease.

I can only assume (by style, structure, grammar and content) that this site is the work of some one who, in the UK, would be detained under one of the sections of the Mental Health Act. It gets worse though. Some (obviously deranged) Christian groups seem to think that vaccines come from the abortion industry (?) and that there is a biblical case against vaccines. From the latter (which is a long winded ranting diatribe of nonsense):

The Bible teaches that only God has the right to understand the realm of the supernatural (Gen. 40:8), and that intrusion into the realm of the occult makes one worthy of death (Ex. 22:18)(Also see Leviticus 19:31; 2 Kings 21:6; 23:24; 1 Chron. 10:13-14; Isaiah 8:19; 19:3).

It is interesting that several of the Greek words translated “witchcraft” and “sorcery” have the root pharm, from which our words “pharmacy” and “pharmaceuticals” are derived. This root (pharm) refers to “drugs, potions, and poisons.” Those who are familiar with the practice of sorcery both among primitive tribespeople and “sophisticated” Westerners have noted that the drugs are often used to induce altered states of consciousness which, in turn, are claimed to bring increased knowledge, sensitivity, or even contact with spirits or “entities.”

Abortion is witchcraft. There’s far too much evidence to attempt to differentiate the two. To participate in vaccinations tied to the abortion industry is to participate in two rituals of witchcraft.

Now, I was working on the principle that these two crackpot websites were from the same person (similar writing styles), but sadly, I think they are actually signs that at least two people have this insane idea.

What is the world coming to?

A huge settlement has been dug up at Durrington Walls, Wiltshire (near Stonehenge) according to the BBC. The BBC has footage and a radio summary as well.
This is fascinating. All the same, I can’t resist a rant about the BBC report and the archaeologists’ comments, assuming the BBC quoted them correctly.

• Firstly, the article is entitled “Stonehenge builders’ houses found.” Surely this says that the homes of the Stonehenge builders have been located. Clearly not.
  The body of the article says that the “The dwellings date back to 2,600-2,500 BC, the same period that Stonehenge was built.” Well, this is precise to within 100 years. I didn’t know that we could date Stone Age remains with such precision (but I will assume that some scientific method, such as radio-carbon dating was used, rather than assumptions based on “culture.” ) Giving the researchers the benefit of the doubt that both structures were built in the same 100 year period, where is there any evidence that the people who lived here put in shifts on Stonehenge? I’d love to be proved wrong on this but it seems unlikely.
• If it was the builders’ village, why did they carry out miles of extra walking every night, after a tough day’s megalithic rock shifting? Durrington is “near” Stonehenge, if you are in a car driving along the Salisbury road. It is no mean stretch on foot.
• The text suggests that the archaeologists have identified a huge village. Why do they have to assume that it was mainly a ritual site? Did Stone Age people not bother with the normal business of living ANYWHERE? Do we only care about ritual sites? So, when we find signs of everyday life, they have no value unless they can be tied to a ritual site? (Preferably, one that’s known around the world and would attract preferential funding?)
• Orienting sites to get the most sunshine in the winter must have been a practical necessity before electric light. We build our own houses to get the most light in the kitchen. Does facing the winter sun necessarily suggest some obscure calendrical purpose, what about practical architectural knowledge?
• The claim is that the site wasn’t occupied all year round- hence it was ritual in origin. From my limited understanding of early agricultural societies, I would have thought that some of the year would be spent in semi-nomadic search of food. After wandering around finding the best sources of game and vegetables, a return to permanent winter quarters makes senses. With little else to do in the bleak months, humans create occasions, like Christmas, to fill their time and cement social bonds. This doesn’t mean that rituals are the primary purpose of the winter lay-off, rather that the ceremonies are created during the leisure and social time it provides.
• Another piece of “evidence” for a largely ritual purpose is the large number of burials on the site. It was a large village. People must have been died with regularity. Do our current cities exist for mainly ritual purposes because we bury or cremate our dead within them?

Congratulations on a really important find. This rant is just a complaint that archaeology can be blinkered by ritual-centrism. This stops us from seeing Stone Age peoples as human beings – our own not very remote ancestors – who must have had more urgent things to do than to spend their entire lives focussed on cosmic rituals.

As mentioned on the Compuskills web blog, the blogs hosted by compuskills (what a mouthfull!) will start to blacklist sources of comment spam. As of yesterday the list stood at a moderate:

• 62.149.14.43
• 5.255.119.75
• 6.232.107.234
• 18.72.250.54
• 95.225.177.4
• 85.255.119.132
• 75.46.50.213

But new IPs will be added each time they are the source for four or more spam comments. (expect a few more to be added between now and the next published list!

Thanks to a link on Pharyngula (amazingly aptly titled “John Kasich is a big fat idiot“), I came across a YouTube clip from Fox News where a frankly idiotic fox news presenter is frothing in an amazing manner about the Blasphemy Challenge.

Not living in the US, there is a tendency to miss out on the ranting, and preaching, which seems to be tolerated on network television. I am curious if there is anything similar in the UK – and I really hope not.

Watch the video but be careful not to be drinking at the time. I can pretty much guarantee you will end up choking on some bits. The ranting about how the Blasphemy Challenge is corrupting kids, how Christians are going out playing basketball and the Challenge is an insult to them all, even better – how this is an attack only on Christianity (despite the blasphemy being a sin in Islam and Judaism as well, but I don’t think Mr Kasich will ever be able to educate himself that much).

It really is a good example of how ignorant some people can be, and how despite their claims to being a “Christian” with all the charity, forgiveness and kindness that implies, people use it to be a rude, offensive idiot. Even if Kasich is just playing up to the ratings (almost certainly) it speaks more for what a small minded low life he is than anything else.

Shame on them all.

There are items about kids’ weight on the BBC website and The Guardian (G2 bit) today. They combine to add another ton of guilt onto parents, especially as parents are atavistically afraid of starving their children.

The Guardian has pages about how to stop your kids becoming overweight and the BBC is fretting about anorexia. They are both pushing the age boundaries downwards for concern over children’s eating, to birth in the case of the Guardian article; and to 8-years old on the BBC site.

I really have problems with this obsessing over weight and pushing our obsessions onto children. Ironically the Guardian article continually intercuts pages of obsessing over weight with the message that you shouldn’t stress your kids about dieting and their weight. That seems incredibly contradictory advice to me and some of the advice seems quite demented. Only allow one hour of TV a day, as kids gain a stone a year for every hour of TV that they watch. Argh. What possible evidence supports this? The writer refers to the food traffic lighting scheme – eat as much as you like of green foods (basically veg) a third of your palm size portion of amber foods (potatoes, bread, rice, dairy) and eat red foods once or twice a week (treats). This sounds exactly like the sort of rules people get from Weightwatchers or Slimmers World. There are lots of other injunctions about mealtime rules and what to put in a packed lunch and so on.

Do I have to use the pseudoscience word repeatedly? I’ll just use it once and leave you to apply it with Tourette-style enthusiasm at random.

There are justified complaints about advertising “foods” aimed at children but noone seems to complain about dragging kids into our insanely weight-obsessed culture, where food takes on infinite bizarre meanings.

The BBC goes to the other extreme, following the well-worn path of :

• Identify an issue that can be seen as a pressing social problem
• Stir up concern by claiming that kids are at risk
• You may have to go a year younger every couple of months when you trawl for victims, because anorexic thirteen year-olds no longer cut it as shock-horror stories
• It’s always a good idea to have some medical element. People are interested in health. It holds the possibility of a cure

The common point in both these stories is the issue of control. Both the Guardian and BBC writers acknowledge that food is an area where children seek control. The proferred solutions seem to consist of imposing controls, whether in the home or in hospital Anorexics or Obesity Units. The anorexic kids are being subject to control by being force-fed the very foods that other kids are supposed to be deprived of.

She has to eat a daily diet of about 2,500 calories consisting of all the food she hates most – chocolate, chips, cream and cheese. It’s a prospect she dreads.

Common sense seems to suggest to me that food shouldn’t become a control issue. Adults’ anxieties over food and fatness and thinness are being transmitted to children. Who insist on learning from reality rather than words – picking up all the things about us that we don’t want them to acknowledge and treating our hypocritical words with contempt. Maybe generally negotiating controls could actually move the conflict into other areas of the relationship between adults and children and might serve some purpose.

Also, maybe we could stop fighting biology. Kids love sweet things – it’s a survival mechanism. They naturally eat when they are hungry and their bodies store excess to grow from. They naturally burst with life and enthusiasm for running and climbing and exploring – all the things that burn their food and build their bodies. As adults, we generally don’t live like this – being constantly active, eating when we are hungry – which is why we can’t regulate our own hunger. We bring up kids to live as we do then get confused when their body mechanisms respond. Or their minds respond to their own hunger for control and the social obsessions with weight by exerting control over their bodies through starving them.

As a society, we can’t bear to see our own attitudes to our bodies mirrored so mercilessly by our offspring. We get obsessed with forcing them to show us a pretty mirror and we distract ourselves from living like human beings by trying to make our kids look as if we do.

Just when you may have thought Technorati was approaching normal behaviour, this happens:

I would say it is getting repetitive but that is, surely, stating the obvious. Despite there being a positive number of blog posts each day (chart) of the last 30 days, Technorati claims to have no posts. It is doing this an awful lot at the moment.

Before this blog creates the impression it just doesn’t like Technorati (which is close to the truth now), I just want to highlight the importance of an “open standard” for things like this. People writing blog posts have no real way of knowing if their comments are getting picked up by Technorati – and if you don’t appear in the three posts listed on that page, people are very unlikely to ever read your posts. Even Google is more open and honest about how it indexes pages.

On it’s own this would be bad enough but it could be argued that blog creators will blog no matter who reads it. The bigger problem is for people searching with Technorati. The results you get from a search are almost randomly arbitrary. When you search, you have no idea if you are getting the latest posts, most relevant posts or anything. It is madness.

Now I actually don’t want the likes of Google to take over as the Blog search engine of choice (it has just as many flaws but different ones), however as Technorati seems to be spectacularly dropping the ball this may be inevitable.

So much for the weblogs being the “great publishing revolution” that allows the masses to become journalists. Unless you get millions of links you wont show up on Google, and your chances of showing up on Technorati seem to depend on you having a MySpace blog or some other covert whim.  Does this need new software to solve it? Are search engines like IceRocket better? At the moment I dont think so, but times change…

It is hard to go more than a day or two without coming across some nonsense where an ID/Creationism proponent tries to pretend they have even the slightest clue about Evolution – no matter how little they actually know and how little scientific education they may have had.

Today’s chart topper is from Pat Boone, that well known student of the scientific method, evolutionary biology and other scientific disciplines. From a quick web search it seems his background on the topic is being apparently descended from American frontier hero Daniel Boone and being a devout born-again Christian (he was raised in the conservative Church of Christ – Wikipedia). All good reasons why he should have a privileged insight into the validity of Evolution…

Anyway, on a WorldNetDaily page titled “Charles Darwin’s unfunny joke“, Mr Boone feels he can deconstruct Darwinian evolution. The post is funny, although maybe not in the way Pat Boone hopes. It is funny that he thinks what he is writing is logical, sensible or in any way refutes evolution. It really is bad science at best.

Take this from one of the early paragraphs:

“But it’s science,” you say. No, not really. Certainly, not yet, if it ever will be. It’s a theory, an extremely farfetched, unproven theory and – at its base, its fundamental core – terribly unscientific!

The mind boggles. Not only does he show he has no idea about evolution, here he shows no understanding of science. He hasn’t even bothered to research the basics. He says “It’s a theory” as if that means it is something “less” than other science. He obviously feels the Theory of Relativity is far fetched, the Theory of Electromagentism is flawed and Quantum theory is unscientific.

I actually thought ID / Creationists had realised their mistake with attacking the terminology of “Theory” or “law” but obviously not. There follows a paragraph with more logical fallacies than I care to highlight at this time. (Emphasis mine)

But this unfunny joke has been taken very seriously by a host of scientists, and now most educators, and it has been universally accepted as “fact” by most universities and school systems. And woe to the teacher, from grade school through college, who dares to question this improbable, unproven theory. If he or she dares to suggest or present the alternative theory of Intelligent Design – the vastly more plausible notion that this incredible universe and all living things point logically to a Creator with an intelligence far beyond our feeble comprehension (no matter how many Ph.D. degrees we might have among us) – lawsuits and intimidation will surely follow that teacher.

Amazing. I nearly choked on my drink when I read that. It is even funnier when you read it in the context of Pat Boone being a man without a PhD (who is this mysterious “us” he talks about..?) and his earlier denigration of the term “theory.” One the very remote off-chance anyone still thought he had the slightest idea what he was talking about, he writes this:

Had you thought about that? If all life on this planet were actually in a process of “evolution,” would every species evolve in lock step, regardless of different environments? Or wouldn’t there be all the intermediate steps still in evidence, at various places around the globe? Wouldn’t there be plenty of evolving apes, tending toward homo sapiens, in the jungles and rain forests, possibly developing verbal skills and capable of elementary math and reasoning?

Great isn’t it. He really has no idea what evolution involves and predicts, but he still feels able to ridicule the theory. The fact he is ridiculing a theory he has made up for the sole purpose of his ridicule (classic strawman for the spotters) seems to go right over his head. He really is a funny guy. One day he may realise where the true joke is.

It’s five minutes to midnight on The Doomsday Clock, kept by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists since shortly the atomic bomb was first used.

In case you don’t know, the clock represents how close the world is to annihilation (midnight). Some confusion here because I assumed it had been at five to midnight since it was invented, but apparently, it hasn’t been this close since the height of the cold war.

When BAS scientists met to assess the current threat level, they targeted climate change due to carbon emissions as the new villain. They don’t mean that climate change itself will trigger doomsday but that its impact will lead to wars, which combined with the proliferation of nuclear materials and technology will be likely to go nuclear.

This is a very important point and worth making over and over. And it’s a good use of an image that hits home the message.

All the same, I’m a bit sceptical of the assumption that they have an authority beyond their own field because they are nuclear scientists. Stephen Hawking is brought in to push the message home with his added mystical authority. The message is coming across as “we, as a group who understand the science, also understand the politics, so this is a scientific conclusion.” It’s not “science” but an attempt to make a point about the social consequences of science.

It certainly isn’t science. I don’t know the timescale they are using so it’s not clear if five minutes represents a year, a century or five standard minutes. It’s not possible to predict the social consequences of the mutually reinforcing interactions between atomic technology and environmental change. There aren’t a set of equations that can predict global politics. This lessens the impact of their very powerful “five minutes to midnight” image. It doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as anything other than a conceptual device.

They are obviously intelligent and have reached the obvious conclusions from the evidence. Maybe people will pay some attention. I certainly hope so, although I would rather they didn’t have to set themselves up as secular popes to get the message across.

Tags: Science, Bad Science, doomsday, climate, Carbon Emissions, Global warming, Nuclear Science, Doomsday Clock, Philosophy, society

As mentioned in a previous post, Katie is a 14 year old girl who has Hodgkin’s lymphoma and her parents have eschewed proper medical treatment in favour of alternative therapies and prayer. That alone would be bad, but reading through some of the comments on her blog opens a whole new can of worms.

One might imagine that almost all the comments are basically “we are praying for you Katie” and “with God’s help you will get through this” (neatly ignoring the fact God gave her cancer in the first place, God prevented her parents treating her and God is causing the cancer to spread). In this situation, I can actually forgive the people posting because they are just expressing their feelings towards this in the only manner they know how. It is almost nice that all these people are praying for Katie – I will leave the issue about all the other people who are dying because they dont have a blog so no one is praying for them until another post.

The one which got me was this: (some numbers “x” out to reduce the free publicity)

At 11:23 PM, John Noble said…

DO THIS NOW! Go to www.immunopower.com and order Immunopower for Katie. This formula was developed especially for cancer patients by Dr. Patrick Quillin who was VP and Director of Nutrition at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America for ten years. Then CALL the Center for Advanced Medicine (760) xxx-9xx2 and reserve a phone consultation with Dr. Quillin. If you have questions call Noreen Quillin at (760) xxx-5xx3. You may tell her that John and Rod in Houston referred you. We have been following your story since it made the front page here in Houston. As you may already know, cancer is caused by nutritional deficiencies and toxic overloads. That is why it is so important to immediately contact Dr. Quillin so that he can help find and correct the deficiencies and overloads that caused the cancer to occur in the first place. The key is to restore the immune system with an aggressive nutritional program, which combines a specially designed supplement formula with specific anti-cancer whole foods. This approach has had proven results, especially for advanced cancer patients like Katie.

How shocking is that. Still, it is nice to see we now have a cure for cancer and the world’s medical researchers can rest at last. Given it seems so simple, it is strange anyone dies of cancer any more.

Crackpottery should be made illegal.

Now, this is going to be short (ish) but mainly because I am aware that it is a sensitive issue and I am (oddly) loathe to upset people, however it is something which has managed to get my hackles up.

In a nutshell, there is a blog about Katie, a 14 year old girl who is dying of Hodgkin’s Disease. This is a story which has been picked up by various blogs (Orac for instance, but may others). No matter what, this would be a sad story and I am sure most people’s hearts go out to the girl and her family.

There is just one small problem with the whole story. Katie’s family have chosen to not head down the “conventional medicine” route for her treatment and instead opted for prayer. Now I know it is not the BMJ or anything but Wikipedia has this to say about the cancer Katie has:

Hodgkin’s lymphoma was one of the first cancers to be rendered curable by combination chemotherapy.

You would hope, that as she is young and was otherwise healthy, early (proper) treatment would have given Katie very good chances with this one. Sadly her family thought otherwise. She was denied accesss to Chemotherapy and instead relied on a combination of crackpottery and prayer. Needless to say, it has not worked. I am going to avoid linking directly to her sites or the blogs made by her family. I am not going to really talk about her or her condition any more. This is about the bad science.

Her father has put together some blogs about her / for her. At the top is this bit of shockingness:

Katie is now 14 years old and was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease, a lymphatic cancer when she was 13. This site is a request to pray for her. Call her prayer pager 1-361-333-KATY (5289), enter your ZipCode and # key, to let her know you have prayed for her. Updates of her progress will be posted on the site. The Power of Prayer is Awesome. See beginning story at www.prayforkatie.blogspot.com.

Sadly for Katie, the power of prayer is not awesome. Pretty much every time it has been studied it shows people who are subject to prayer show improvement over those who are not prayed for. People who are prayed for and know about it show less improvement. If your faith does mean you feel praying for Katie will help her, then dont call her “prayer pager” just do it. And if Prayer works, why wont God cure amputees?

It is really sad to see this girls chances have been destroyed because so many people seem to think that “hope” is a better alternative to treatment. It is even sadder to read the comments on Katies blogs and see so many other people seem to rate the value of prayer that you just know there will be other, needless, deaths.

Shame on them. If their God exists, they are going to hell.

In a previous post, I mention that a comment on Uncommon Design was suggesting the book The Privelged Planet was a good one for IDers and creationists to read and use to rebut evolutionary theories.

In that post I didnt really go into the book, as I felt it deserved one of its own. It really is bad science at it’s best so no wonder the ID / Creationism lobby jump all over it. I expect Steve Fuller will be writing about how we need to re-define science to accomodate this books nonsense before too long (although the book appears to be fairly old).

Now I do have to point out, I have not read this book. I doubt I will ever be able to bring myself to spend any money on this book as the thought of giving the authors a penny in royalties makes me want to choke on my own vomit. The book does have a website though, and this serves ample evidence of the crackpottery involved. For example the FAQ provides the following:

Q #1: Is the fact that we can see “perfect” solar eclipses related to our existence?

A: The Earth’s surface provides the best view of solar eclipses in the Solar System. The Earth’s surface is also the most habitable place in the Solar System. Is this coincidence just that? In The Privileged Planet, we argue that it isn’t. The conditions that make a planet habitable also make its inhabitants more likely to see solar eclipses.

That alone is enough for me to realise the book is going to be nonsense.