Expelled exposed

OK, you must have read about it by now. So here’s my contribution to getting the right Expelled to the top of the search rankings.

Nuff said.

Qualified to lead?

After the GW Bush debacle, many of us in the reality-based community support the idea of a science debate for the USS presidential candidates (Science Debate 2008). But it seems to me this idea doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Would you be happy getting brain surgery from a lawyer? Do you want chief executives determining minimum wage levels? Would you trust a professional soldier to determine whether defence budgets should be cut in favour of education? Should religious nutters like Tony Blair be allowed to determine scienctific or economic policies?  

It seems utterly bizarre to me that democratic countries choose to elect as leaders people who completely lack any knowlegde or understanding of key subjects, from the importance of randomised controlled trials to the Cuban missile crisis. Civil servants from China to Britain have to undergo tough exams, yet their leaders can be pig-ignorant. Why do we tolerate this? It’s crazy.

It seems to me every democratic country should, with the help of its citizens, develop a curriculum for politicians, covering everything from science to medicine to economics to history. There could, for instance, be a basic test politicians have to pass simply to stand for election, and a more advanced examination for politicians to undergo before they can take office.

Of course, getting agreement on a curriculum will be a challenging task in itself. But that debate could be very interesting in itself, in exposing the often-ludicrous beliefs on which many people base their everyday decisions. Ideally, of course, we should aim to eliminate all beliefs in favour of educated guesses.

Natural breeding more dangerous than genetic engineering

OK, that title is slightly mischievous. When I say natural breeding, we’re not talking normal hot plant sex here, but something even hotter: bombarding the hapless veggies with gamma radiation to induce mutations.

It might not sound very natural to you and I, but according to regulators around the world, this counts as natural compared with genetic modification. If you induce a change by genetic engineering, you have to prove it’s safe. Do it by mutagenesis and no one cares.

Except a team in Portugal are now claiming that mutatagenesis results in more changes in gene expression (which genes are turned on or off) than genetic engineering. For greater changes read more potential to produce (more) toxic substances. After all, plants are primed to produce toxins to deter those that want to eat them.

In fact, history shows that even old-fashioned conventional breeding can be dangerous. The Lenape potato bred in the 1960s turned out to have dangerously high levels of solanine, the toxin found in all potatoes. The Magnum Bonum, an century-old breed from England reintroduced into Sweden in the 1990s, was similarly toxic. (“Old”; “traditional”; “natural”: gotta be good, hmm?)

The kiwi fruit bred in New Zealand from an inedible (but not toxic) Chinese berry and introduced to the US in the 1960s never underwent safety testing and caused allergic reactions in some people (recently shown to be due to a protein called actinidin). Hybrids between ordinary potatoes and related species have been found to produce a novel toxin not found in either parent called demissidine.

The list could go on and on. My point is not that genetic modification is wonderful but that we should be wary of everything we eat, however it was bred or created.

“Faith schools”

Many months ago, I signed a petition calling on the UK government to abolish faith schools. Tonight, I got an email telling me there was an official response.

Let’s start with the last line:

Many parents who are not members of a particular faith value the structured environment provided by schools with a religious character.

Now, why can’t state schools provide a “structured” environment? What is a structured environment anyway?

Parents like me want the best education for our children, and we’ll lie through our teeth about our beliefs to get it if we think the state-supported religious schools in our area are better than any others. I know lots of parents who have lied about their beliefs to get into such schools. I even know some people who have been asked to lie on their friends’ behalf.

Parents’ dishonesty has nothing to with any inherent superiority of faith schools, just the fact that these schools tend to have been around longer, have more money and, most of all, the pick of the best pupils.

It gets even worse:

Religious Education (RE) in all schools, including faith schools, is aimed at developing pupils’ knowledge, understanding and awareness of the major religions represented in the country. It encourages respect for those holding different beliefs and helps promote pupils’ moral, cultural and mental development.

I have no problem with teaching people about different religions. Teaching them to “respect” superstitious rubbish is another matter.

And the idea that “moral development” depends on learning about religion just makes me despair. We’re in real trouble if that’s true.

It get worse still:

In February 2006, the faith communities affirmed their support for the framework in a joint statement making it clear that all children should be given the opportunity to receive inclusive religious education, and that they are committed to making sure the framework is used in the development of religious education in all their schools and colleges.

Really? The faith communities support faith schools? Well I never.

They think children should be given the “opportunity” to receive religious education? Of course, they want the opportunity to spread their lies to impressionable young minds.

What is unbelievable, in this day and age, is that any government is sponsoring and supporting those lies, let alone the British government.

PZ Myers, I hope you’ll pick up on this on Pharyngula. You might think the US is behind Europe in terms of religion and evolution, but really, you’re way ahead of us in banning religion from state-sponsored education.

Mighty stupid mouse

I’ve just had to spend half an hour or so disassembling and reassembling my “Mighty Mouse”. (If you don’t know what a Might Mouse is, be thankful.) 

Sure, the sideways scrolling is neat. But I think the convenience is outweighed by the time you have to spend trying to clean the damn thing to get the up-and-down scrolling working again. Eventually it stops working altogether, as mine did months ago. 

Fixing it was pretty easy but it’s just not something one should have to do. I can’t believe Apple is still selling the same flawed design. (Steve, are you using one?)

All Apple needs to do to fix it is make cleaning the scrollball properly a two-minute job rather than a half-an-hour job involving screwdrivers, knifes and glue. In the meantime, if you haven’t bought one, don’t.

A load of shite

OK, I’m coming to this party very late but I can’t let this go. Some reality-challenged editor at the New Statesman published this rubbish about global warming having stopped in 1998, which, as usual, lots of people leapt upon in their desperation to avoid facing the truth.

Personally, I didn’t have to look beyond the byline to know the article isn’t worthy of anything other than scorn. The author was apparently known among his erstwhile colleagues at the BBC as David Shitehouse for his habit of writing seemingly great scoops that turn out to be utter rubbish, or very old news rehashed, or both. (The other British science journalist whose work also deserves instant dismissal is Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times. If he writes it, you can be confident it ain’t true.)

The reality is that the long-term temperature trend is very much on the up, despite the fact that we’re at the low point of the 11-year solar cycle, which means we’re receiving less heat from the Sun than usual. See here, here or here.

American Non-Thinker

I don’t know much about the site called American Thinker. What I do know is that if they publish pieces like this, by idiots like him, that a name change is clearly called for.

To spare you from damaging your brain by looking at this yourself, this is how the writer describes himself:

Sensible people don’t want to live in dangerous times. But solutions do not come from denial. They come from facing facts, thinking about them and taking proper actions. I am a scientist, writer and policy consultant.

And this is what he writes:

Unfortunately for [the International Herald Tribune], nobody has proven that CO2 is a “greenhouse gas” on the real Planet Earth, as opposed to laboratory jars. So the IHT just smuggles in the inference with the scare words “greenhouse gas.

A scientist? I don’t think so. Facing facts? How much further from facing facts could you be?

The evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is overwhelming. Sure, it’s complicated. But people really should acquaint themselves with at least the basic facts before spouting such utter nonsense.

The missing link

All the excitement in the science blogosphere about the Judgment Day documentary on the Dover trial of evolution vs “intelligent design” led me to this post.

It’s ancient by blog standards, but a nicely written piece about yet another transitional fossil.

Uncomplementary

There are a surprising number of things I can agree with in the novelist Jeanette Winterton’s article on homeopathy in the Guardian. Such as her insistence on the disastrousness of AIDS denialism and the importance of conventional ARV treatments for HIV.

But I’m going to focus on what I disagree with. She starts with the standard “alternative medicine works because it worked for me” line. Do you know, I had a cold the other day, but I listened to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and within a day or two I was fine. Amazing medicine, that album.

The point is that most people get better all by themselves, yet tend to attribute healing powers to all sorts of things, like waving your hands around while praying to a non-existent deity. The only way to find out whether something really does make a difference is to run double-blind, randomised controlled trials. Individual cases prove absolutely nothing.

Winterton then goes on to acknowledge the touchy-feely aspect: we feel better if someone takes our woes seriously. Fine, but do this effect have to be dressed up in mumbo-jumbo? She also acknowledges the placebo effect, which admittedly is hard to deliver as a conventional medicine – it can only be done effectively by rogue doctors like the fictional Dr House.

But then we come to the utter rubbish. She admits trials of homeopathy show it doesn’t work but then dismisses them by an appeal to individual cases. She’s answered her own question (as per above paragraph), but just can’t see it.

Worse still, we then get “the appeal to magic” to explain the non-existent efficacy of homeopathy: science doesn’t know everything and “nanoparticles” blah blah blah. At least the word “quantum” doesn’t make an appearance but the rest is sheer idiocy and superstition – and Winterson should recognise it when she sees it, as readers of Oranges are not the only fruit will understand.

Jeanette, Jeanette, use that mind of yours. More here, here and here.

As alternative medicine goes, homeopathy is at least mostly (but not entirely) harmless. What really annoys me is that here in the UK, taxpayers like me are funding this irrational nonsense.

Weak thinking

New Scientist’s editorials can be very good but this one really irks me.

It starts by suggesting the Beyond Belief II conference went easy on religion. That’s not quite the impression I’ve got from other accounts, like PZ Myers’, though of course such things are very subjective.

It then mentions David Sloan Wilson’s view that religions might have been an adaption that boosted group survival through, for instance, ensuring compliance with the group, and states:

To want to cleanse society of religion before understanding its evolutionary roots and purpose seems strangely unscientific.

Now I don’t think David would argue that just because religion might once have had an adaptive role, that the same is necessarily true in modern times. And I don’t think you need to understand religion’s evolutionary roots to see it is a) factually wrong, and b) often maladaptive in the modern world.

It may be true, as the article states, that replacing religion with science is fanciful. But what’s not fanciful is separating the state and religion. Prying the dying hands of the Anglican church from the British state is a long overdue move.

What’s also not fanciful is separating education and religion. I am appalled by the state funding of faith schools in Britain. It is child abuse, as Dawkins put it.

The point is that neither of these will be achieved as long as society continues to pay lip service to superstitious nonsense just because it’s old superstitious nonsense that lots of people still fall for, partly because of the links with the state and education. The “new atheists” should be feted for highlighting this insanity, not castigated for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.