John Oliver on Media Hyping Science

Brian Greene & Richard Dawkins discuss God.

The Copy Co-Op: reworking the "selfish" gene.

The nucleosome. Image generated from the protein data bank file deposited by Luger et al in 1997.  This a representative model of the atomic structure of one nucleosome the basic packaging unit of chromatin. Chromatin is the mixture of DNA and proteins that make up chromosomes, the heritable parts of living things.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on "Agnostic" vs. "Atheist"

Frans de Waal and Jeff Schloss: a Conversation about Science and God

A Must Watch - The REVISIONARIES

Watch The Revisionaries on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

GMO Cancer Study in Rats - Sketchy Science

Listen to the following interview with science-writer and Yale University professor Carl Zimmer to see how the release of the recent study from France that claims genetically-modified corn causes increased rates of tumors in a special breed of rats is misleading.

Buzz Aldrin Punches Bible-totin' Moon-landing-denier Smack in the Kisser

Ken Ham Sandwich

$4.4 million granted to study "free will"

Free will is an imaginary concept made up by religious people to rationalize other imaginary concepts like heaven and hell and good and evil.

There, may I have the money and get back to a question science can address?

What's that? Not so fast, you say? I first need to pay homage to the Christian philosophers that have continually tried to wriggle their way into relevant dialogue with the help of wealthy philanthropists?

One such source is the John Templeton Foundation. There is an article in the Chronicle Review of Higher Education this week that explores some of Templeton's recently funded projects. The topics are disappointing. Free will, immortality, and evil top the list. All of them being studied from the slanted angle of philosophy rather than science.

Here is Nathan Schneider in a piece titled "The Templeton Effect"

In the past few years, Templeton has been stepping up the number of its six- and seven-figure awards for people in the discipline to study what the foundation calls the "Big Questions." These "Big Questions" are the kinds of out-there topics that make philosophy seem bold and exciting to a college freshman but can feel thoroughly desiccated after a few years in graduate school: free will, the universe, evil, hope, consciousness.

Controversy, though, always follows money, especially when it's Templeton money. Partisans of Richard Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists have long despised the foundation, interpreting its interest in dialogue between science and religion as an attempt to buy undeserved credibility for the latter at the cost of the former. Adds Brian Leiter, "It's clearly more of a windfall for philosophers who have some sort of vague religious angle to what they're doing." Yet he also points out that Mele is an exception. His foregoing work on free will expressed scant interest in the religious implications—which makes it all the more noticeable that his Templeton project has a component devoted to theology.

Read the rest of this article here at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

For me, the problem with Templeton funding is where the foundation is choosing to make these grants - Universities.  By distracting wide-eyed college freshman with a false carrot at the end of a never ending tunnel of philosophy Templeton is doing a disservice to institutions of higher learning.  If the foundation wants to give grants for young people to enter the seminary fine, but I'd prefer they keep their money out of the University. 

Philosophers may argue with me and say that Templeton funding is a boon to their field and that I should not rain on their parade. I call bullshit here. Why do you need funding above and beyond your salary? By accepting money for pseudoscience "experiments" you are hurting your field. If you are taking these huge sums and buying nicer armchairs you are no better than the clergy fluffing their nests with church donations. 

I will grant that not all people who have received some money from Templeton have automatically been turned into faith-pushers. Brian Greene and Tracy Day launched one of the most powerful science expositions in history with a starter grant given in part by Templeton - the World Science Festival.  Though there have been some controversial panels at the World Science Festival these should not overshadow the general awesomeness this festival offers. I have volunteered there three years in a row and it just keeps getting better. I highly recommend it.

A Cure for Homeopathy: Critical Thinking

Creationist Cousins

Just discovered this part of the rap guide to evolution by Baba Brinkman. Love the funky back-beat. Bobbed my head the whole time :)

Science and the Religious Right

This week on the Point of Inquiry podcast Chris Mooney interviews author Peter Montgomery. The discussion is long so I felt compelled to transcribe the following exchange which I think neatly sums up their respective positions.

Chris Mooney: I wrote a book called the Republican War on Science and it had this section on the religious right messing with science. And so what turns out is that if you take away their god-inspired moralistic language about sex, abortion, or whatever, then they make up phony scientific arguments that are secular. So suddenly adult stem cells are better than embryonic stem cells, and they've got phony science on that. Or, condoms don't actually work, and they've got phony science on that. Or, abstinence education DOES work, phony science, here it comes. Or what are the other ones? It goes on and on. Abortion causes breast cancer, abortion causes mental illness. They start makin' all this stuff up. But REALLY it's the religion driving the policy view.

Peter Montgomery: Well that's right but the thing about the fact that they feel compelled to make up phony science, I think it's a good thing because that science can be exposed and challenged as bogus and phony and as no real basis for policy and that's what our side has to do better. If it's just about disputing their theology then you kind of get stuck on who's got god right. And there's really no way to know who's got god right. But it is a lot easier to know who's got science right. And even though they have a tremendous propaganda machine that backs a lot of these bogus scientific claims, those are things that we can engage on, we can challenge them and we can martial the consensus support of the scientific community to challenge those claims.

Listen to the entire discussion here.

While Peter Montgomery was making this point I immediately thought of the incessant denial of anthropogenic global warming among some very vocal conservatives. From my perspective, the best part of this debate is when conservatives fund scientific assessments of climate change and find exactly the same conclusions as have been reported over and over by federally funded researchers. The climate is changing and human generated carbon dioxide is largely to blame.  This recently happened to the Koch brothers. The satisfaction in seeing real science vindicated is priceless. 

Miscreant Mimicry Among Creationists

For four long days my colleague Carl Zimmer has been wielding the battle axe for sound science education, fighting the good fight for evidence and evolution. In the aftermath of this battle I have noticed a disturbing trend among the current generation of evolution denialists - they are shape-shifting!

First, a brief history of the debate.

Since the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 a sub-group of stubborn Christians have been in a perpetual war with reality. Over the years the deniers of evolution have changed their name in order to re-frame their rhetorical attack on the mounting evidence supporting evolution. For the better part of the twentieth century they went by the title "creationists." They sincerely believe an imaginary sky-father "created" all living things six thousand years ago and just plopped them all down on earth in their present form before taking the next day off for a nap.

All was good from their perspective and they were allowed to tacitly poison science education in the United States for more than a century.

But alas, that pesky establishment clause in the US constitution caught up with them. In a 1987 Supreme Court decision six of the nine justices came down squarely on the side of science. Edwards v. Aguillard established that teaching creationism along with evolution in science classrooms is unconstitutional.

The stubborn creationists were undaunted. They knew what any good snake-oil salesmen knows. When your name gets smeared, just change your name. So began the rise of the "intelligent design" proponents. The idea being that the overtly Christian feel of the word "creation" would be remedied with a switch to the more scientific sounding "intelligent-design."  With this new name came new propaganda. Well, not really, as writing is tough work! So they just took an old creationist text-book and changed some words around a little bit so they could slip it into science classrooms without calling it creationism. The book was called "Of Pandas and People." 

The problem with this book was that the editors were lazy and left bits of the old "creationist" language behind in textual fossils. Where the text once read "creationist" it then read "cdesign proponentists."

In 2005 a group of nosy lawyers and science educators took issue with the use of this book in a science classroom in Dover, Pennsylvania. As a result the book and the faith-based science education it promoted was banned from science classrooms. It was deemed by a federal appeals court to violate the precedent set by the 1987 Supreme Court decision mentioned earlier.  

What's a creationists to do?

Here we are seven years later in a scary place where the intelligent design movement has dispensed with identifying themselves altogether and are now just publishing propoganda with scientific-sounding names.  

Enter the copy-cats.

In evolutionary biology some species copy the shape, color, smell, or sound of unrelated species. They do this to protect themselves in order to survive. This is called mimicry. Remember the scene in the Wizard of Oz when the scarecrow, tin man, and lion dress as the wicked witch's guards to enter her fortress unharmed? That is what I'm talking about.

Guess what? Evolution deniers are doing this like crazy! They are cloaking themselves in scientific sounding names so they can slip through the cracks and deliver their propaganda to students of biology caught unaware.

 Listen to these names.  Biologic Institute, Evolution News & Views, and Science and Human Origins.

These are a facebook page, a website, and a printed book respectively.

Coming to these titles cold one would assume they are legitimate organizations for teaching biology and evolution.  Not so. All three are propaganda outlets for the notorious "Discovery Institute."  (*)

You may know about this Seattle based outfit by their incessant call to "teach the controversy." Their goal being to have intelligent design taught along side Darwinian natural selection in biology classrooms around the country. This is total bullocks as there is no controversy. The physical evidence of evolution is overwhelming and grows with each new discovery in biology. This idea of being fair and balanced regarding every single topic discussed often confuses speculation and facts. Lawrence Krauss describes this dilemma well.

Too often in the media, speculative ideas are treated on the same footing as well-tested ones. As a result, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between them. This is particularly unfortunate when firmly grounded ideas that are known to accurately describe the physical world (such as evolution and the big bang) are passed off as mere theoretical whims of a group of partisan scientists.

As a scientist, writer, and educator it is highly disturbing to see this kind of re-branding by the intelligent design community. By conflating scientific ideas with assumptions of faith and slapping a sciency-sounding name on their front page these groups further damage an already crippled science education program in the United States. Shame on them!

Back to Carl Zimmer.

Intelligent design proponents have been goading Carl with snarky ad hominem attacks on a combination of online forums including Facebook, his Discover Magazine blog - the Loom, and their own comment-free web space - "Evolution News & Views." He has been gracious with the amount of attention he has paid this group of pseudo-academics. Carl has responded at length to a series of games they have been playing with him over the past four days. Read all about it here. 

My advice to Carl is the same advice being given all over the web lately - Don't Feed the Trolls! That being said, I think he has done a great job of staving them off so far and keeping his talents where they belong, on HIS blog. As I walk away from these ceaseless trolls I keep in mind the perennial duty to play the role of a catcher in the rye. For as long as my words last I will attempt to catch those who have fallen into fuzzy-logic and irrational faith-based thought and bring them back to reason. I want to thank Carl for reaffirming my dedication to this goal and for exposing the harmful mimicry going on in the intelligent design community.  

(*) ~ in a previous version of this post I had incorrectly stated that the Discovery Institute and the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY were of the same ilk. I was informed via a facebook friend that those organizations had cuts ties when the Dover descision came down in 2005. So as not to offend I have deleted mention of the creation museum. That batch of crazy is brought to you by Ken Ham. Apologies for the error and I hope this paragraph is sufficiently transparent.

Lawrence Krauss - words of wisdom

"Too often in the media, speculative ideas are treated on the same footing as well-tested ones. As a result, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between them. This is particularly unfortunate when firmly grounded ideas that are known to accurately describe the physical world (such as evolution and the big bang) are passed off as mere theoretical whims of a group of partisan scientists.  One of the most useful tasks a popular exposition of science at the forefront can achieve, it seems to me, is clearly differentiate that which we know yields an accurate description of nature on some scale from those things we have reason to suspect one day might do so. And the worst thing such an exposition can do is confuse the two."

                                                   ~Lawrence M. Krauss

                                                        from Hiding in the Mirror

I had the good fortune of meeting Lawrence Krauss last Friday as he recorded the radio show "On Being" with Krista Tippett at Chautauqua Institution here in Western New York.  He was happy and irascible in front of a large crowd of religious people in the open-air "Hall of Philosophy." 

Throughout his interview he drove home his point over and over that God and science do not mix, that science is the best method for learning and religion is a collection of childish myths and we all need to grow up. The gasps from the crowd were priceless. 

Krauss took the opportunity to explain how the discovery of the Higgs boson affects our understanding of the universe. A subtle point not covered by many popular outlets is that the Higgs field barely interects with photons. This accident of our existence explains how photons can travel at the speed of light while the rest of matter is slowed by the strong nuclear force and the newly verified Higgs field.  

While speaking of the Higgs Krauss urged the audience to embrace the ecstatic awe discoveries like these can provide without the need for faith. He stressed the satisfaction that comes from a secular humanist view of the universe.

Krauss pointed out that faith leaves humanity helpless in making policy decisions. He proposed policy be decided based on evidence. A strangely novel suggestion in the current political atmosphere. He said it bothered him greatly that McCain and Obama choose to have a presidential debate on faith rather than issues that actually matter like approaches to human health and disease, energy, and the environment. What did we learn from the faith debate in 2008? That both candidates had it. So what?!?!

When you do not base you moral and ethical decisions on evidence you end up with the republican party!

One of the best moments of the day was when an elderly woman asked Dr. Krauss "what can science tell us about love?" He responded with a wonderfully humanist answer I will paraphrase from memory.

Science can tell us a lot about love starting with chemistry and physiology. From a scientific world-view a person can approach love honestly. I can tell you that I am deeply in love right now. When I feel love I am seeing and sensing shared values in another human being. Of course I am sexually attracted to the  person but on a deeper level I see myself in her. I see the ideals, the things I aspire to most in her. That reflection can easily come from a scientific approach to love.

After the interview I picked up a copy of his book Hiding in the Mirror and was pleased to see him described as a "writer-scientist" on the back cover. From now on I aspire to be a "writer-scientist" myself. Too often I think people who go from doing science to writing about science feel the need to re-label themselves "science-writers." I see no need for this re-branding. We are all scientists!

Though I did want to ask him many different questions I choose the one most important to me. I asked him if he supports Open Access. He replied with gusto.

"Yes, of course. In fact astrophysics pioneered open access with the invention of the ArXiv. I see journal articles as for archival purposes. I don't even read journals anymore, just the ArXiv."

As a biochemist I had not heard of this resource and was happy to look it up and experience it first hand.  With this awareness fresh in my mind I was shocked to see the ArXiv all over science news this week. A law newly passed in the UK requires all research publications made possible with tax-payer funds be made openly available to the whole world online. The astrophysics ArXiv was used as an archetype for how to make this happen.  Brilliant!

While I do look forward to a world with wider and wider open access I approach this world with Lawrence Krauss and his words of caution in mind. Carl Sagan had something to say about this as well.

"We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.

For our collective understanding of the universe to mature we need to have a lot of ideas. This means there will be countless bad ideas. The trick, I think, will be not to get caught in an eddy in the river of knowledge. Dogma, fear, and superstition have proved themselves sure paths into those stagnant waters. 

I applaud Lawrence Krauss for encouraging us to grow up.

Hypatia - Carl Sagan and Stephen Greenblatt

I am currently reading The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt and it is fantastic in my humble opinion. Many thanks to Jack for the high recommendation. 

I have just finished the section of the book where Greenblatt tells the story of the great library at Alexandria and the demise of its last librarian, Hypatia in 415 C.E. I was reminded of the above video from Carl Sagan's Cosmos series. There are a few differing details in the two accounts; Sagan says the mob used abalone shells, Greenblatt says they used broken pottery. Either way the scene painted marks a terrible inflection point in history. 

A woman of legendary beauty and intellect, Hypatia's death epitomized the decay of natural philosophy in the wake of spreading Christian fundamentalism. In the moment of her death as a mob of zealous Christians carved her flesh the pendulum of history began a millennium of descent into fear and superstition. 

I can not help but think of the current state of natural philosophy here in the United States. It scares me that people I run into on a daily basis probably are not aware that the inclusion of "under God" in our national pledge of allegiance, the inscription "In God we Trust" on our currency, and the adoption of the same phrase as our national motto all happened in the year 1952! 

These tacitly Christian phrases were injected into our national identity as a result of McCarthy era fear-mongering. A perceived spread of communism pushed the US government to pass reactionary legislation echoed by the Patriot Act.

The founding fathers were more like thinkers in the great library of Alexandria when they adopted the inclusive motto "E Pluribus Unim." 

My question is, when did our Hypatia die? 

Today, it is the height of irony to pull out a nickel and see this!

Ed Brayton, fellow freethinker and blogger posted this on Facebook a few days ago and it has been resonating in my head ever since. Ed writes the blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Rebecca Watson on Homeopathy and the FDA

Rebecca Watson has been at the center of a lot of heated debates lately over at Pharyngula as well as the recent subject of a famous you-tuber named Thunderf00t. This dust-up stems from her suggestion that something ought be done about sexual harassment at various free-thinking conferences like The Amazing Meeting (TAM) and so on.  All this controversy coupled to me finally listening to the skeptics guide to the universe podcast on a regular basis, brought me to Rebecca Watson's Blog - Skepchick. On the sidebar I found this wonderful video (above). Though it is old by web standards (posted 8 months ago) I want to share it today to give anyone with even a passive interest in the whole current controversy a view of Rebecca Watson unfettered by the kerfuffle. I stand in solidarity with her as I think she is a force to be reckoned with in the world skeptical thinkers. I have dealt with a constant barrage of alternative medicine hocus pocus thrown at me my entire life. Read about my experience with this here. From my perspective I appreciate her concise description of of the shortcomings of homeopathy and also the suggestions of how to participate in raising awareness about this perennial scam.

Eugenie Scott on Climate Change

Whenever I am asked what I think about global climate change I immediately try to understand the perspective of my questioner. I do not respond to the question until I find out how old they think the earth is. If their response in anything less than 4 billion years I can not begin a conversation about climate change.

Why not?

Well because if a person does not comprehend geologic time then I can safely assume they do not trust the scientific method in general and they are not going to pay attention or care about any climate change data I might present to them.  So this brings me to the following video. In order to begin a global conversation about climate change we need a more wide-spread acceptance of the scientific method.  The history of the evolution vs intelligent design debate is a great model for this campaign of public awareness.  It is my opinion that it ought to be used as a template for beginning the climate change conversation.

Drano for your heart?

There is a growing number of people around the world who believe they have found an alternative treatment for clogged arteries. The idea is to use a kind of molecular Drano and slowly remove the plaques that line the artery walls. It is called chelation therapy.

Is there any evidence that shows this treatment is good or bad?

Almost...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has completed data collection on a large-scale double-blind clinical trial to assess the efficacy of chelation therapy to treat coronary artery disease (CAD). This study is called the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy or TACT. Though the trial itself has had its own trials and tribulations the study is now complete and the results are being mulled-over by the primary researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine with the intention of publishing results within this calendar year - 2012.

UPDATE: Publication of results now postponed until February 2013!

Why am I interested in this? Doesn't this study pang of "alternative medicine" aka - quackery? 

I await the results with extreme anticipation because of my father. 

My decision to go into science and complete a PhD in biochemistry was made in direct response to my father and his seemingly unreasonable evangelism of chelation therapy as treatment for clogged coronary arteries. My father is a firm believer that chelation therapy saved his life. I think he perhaps got lucky somewhere amid the myriad "alternative" treatments he underwent with no scientific way to assess whether the chelation therapy helped or harmed him. The reality is that until this point there has not been a sufficient study to make a scientifically sound assessment of this treatment.   

While I was in high school in the late 1990s my father (now 80 years old) had heart problems - namely congestive heart failure and arrhythmia. He was a lawyer-turned-vitamin salesman and had it in his head that he did not want to end up dead like many of his contemporaries. I watched as many of his life-long buddies had open-heart surgery only to die weeks or months later from pneumonia, MRSA or other illnesses brought on by their chest cavities having been cracked open. 

After having a spiral CAT-scan of his heart at age 65 my father was told he had up to 80% blockage in some of his coronary arteries. His cardiologist suggested bypass surgery but my father did not want his chest opened up. He had heard through friends in Erie, PA that he could try an alternative treatment with no surgery. He signed up and against the advice of his cardiologist began to receive weekly doses of intravenous EDTA and tetracycline in order to remove the plaque from his arteries. He repeated this every week for many months. After the initial intravenous treatment he switched to a maintenance program of monthly EDTA suppository that he has been on ever since. 

The idea that EDTA or ethylene diamine tetraacidic acid injected in a person's blood could wrestle away calcium deposits (aka apatite) from the walls of hardened arteries seemed to-good-to-be true to me. This was until I went to the dentist's office in graduate school.  I had and still have a orthodontic retainer behind my lower front teeth (I am now 29 years old).  Every 6 months I have to have the accumulated plaque removed from the back of my lower front teeth which builds up due to higher concentration of dead and dying bacteria there due to the retainer.  While I was in graduate school visiting the school dentist the dental hygienist told me that keeping plaque cleared from a person's gums helps fight heart disease by keeping plaque in their coronary arteries low. I was flabbergasted. Here I had a direct link between  bacterial plaque and coronary artery disease.  I could understand that calcium deposits on the tooth enamel were similar to calcium deposits in hardened arteries.  I saw that injecting high concentrations of EDTA would impose Le Chatelier's principle on the calcium ions present in a clogged coronary arteries and thus reduce the size of the atherosclerotic deposits. Despite this theoretical comprehension I was and still am highly skeptical of EDTA chelation therapy. I see my father's success with the treatment as anecdotal. Perhaps he was not as likely to have a heart attack as his vital statistics would have him believe.  My skepticism remains.

Beyond the chelation therapy, my father has for as long as I can remember advocated "preventive medicine" like vitamins and various concoctions sold by his former company - Rexall Showcase International (Now called Unicity).  My father  had unfortunately fell into a pyramid scheme run by a bunch of crooks in the early 90s. I could see right through this bullshit when I was 12 years old! A company named "Sundown" acquired the brand-name "Rexall" in 1985 and used it to lure in "sales associates." Think AMWAY for vitamins. Rexall Drugstores had a shining reputation with old-timers like my father who remembered the good-old-days when Rexall Drugstores were synonymous with root-beer floats and grandpa's heart-burn remedies. Sundown bought the company and used the brand-name (with no connection to the remaining chain of Rexall drugstores) to sell vitamins and weight loss products in big package deals to "sales associates" who could then sell the product to whomever they could convince. I recall the most touted of the panacea powders my father peddled was called BiosLife 2. A disgusting chalky version of what we know as "Emergen-C." But, as Rexall Showcase International's stock tanked, my father's enthusiasm for the brand waned.

In addition to Rexall my father has also evangelized the writing of Julian Whitaker MD. Dr Whitaker as Dad so fondly calls him, writes a weekly newsletter lauding the new advances in "alternative medicine" and telling all subscribers exactly where they can purchase all the new supplements - FROM HIM. 

As much as all this bothered me as an adolescent what really bothered me was that I could not have a rational conversation with my father - a very reasonable man. I love my father and I could not understand how he was so sucked in to to all this crap. I have a hypothesis that he so desperately wanted to be healthy and live a long time so he could be with us into old-age, that he would believe anything. I can't say that he was wrong as he has survived several bouts of congestive heart failure and a mini-stroke. But the fact that he was so manipulated by executives at Sundown/Rexall Showcase International fills me with an uncontrollable animosity towards these snake-oil salesmen. 

I am admittedly skeptical of most of my father's self-prescribed therapies. But as for TACT I have my mind open as "THERE WILL BE DATA!" The pricipal investegator in this study is Gervasio A Lamas, M.D. of Mount Sinai School of Medicine. I have heard that the results will be published and made publicly available around June 2012. Please join me in the assessment of said data! Finally I can have a rational discussion with my father grounded in data on a subject quite literally near and dear to his heart. 

Lamas, G., Goertz, C., Boineau, R., Mark, D., Rozema, T., Nahin, R., Drisko, J., & Lee, K. (2012). Design of the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) American Heart Journal, 163 (1), 7-12 DOI: 10.1016/j.ahj.2011.10.002

Ernst, E. (2000). Chelation therapy for coronary heart disease: An overview of all clinical investigations American Heart Journal, 140 (1), 139-141 DOI: 10.1067/mhj.2000.107548

Hot Debate: Dawkins and Pell

This debate is well worth and hour of your time. Cardinal George Pell of Australia debates Professor Richard Dawkins on God, evolution, intelligent design and climate change.