evidence

Precession’d!

Jason Thibeault, , 1 Comment

I can’t believe I missed these lulz as they were happening. Well, I can, as I was way too busy having an absolute blast hanging out with some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met over the past week and a half, between Science Online and the drastically insufficient time Jodi and I spent with Ben and Stephanie Zvan. Anyway, I’m sure you won’t mind if I dogpile on this topic just a smidge later than everyone else has. And hell, I needed SOMETHING to write on the plane ride home — this is as good a topic to snicker derisively on the sidelines about as any, no?

The Bad Astronomer Phil Plait's favorite astrology image. One of my favorite images too, now that I have my hat in the astrology fight.

Recently, astrologers had their noses tweaked when a news reporter explained the precession of the equinoxes, and for some wholly unfathomable reason that phenomenon gained media traction enough to dominate quite a few news cycles. This isn’t exactly news, though — it’s a phenomenon known to astronomers for centuries now. As our corner of the cosmic ballet cycles on, our solar system is slowly shifting through our galaxy in such a way that the zodiacal signs assigned to people for being born between certain dates are no longer the same signs that one might see if they were to view the actual sunrise on a given day. The signs are, and have always been, merely a metric of what constellation the sun happened to “pass through” on that particular date. Generally, the only valuable data you can get from knowing someone’s sign, is what time of year they were born — and in days of yore, this might have been exceptionally useful, for instance knowing that certain times of year different levels of food availability or different climate difficulties, and thus certain “signs” were statistically more likely to survive through infancy. However, what times of year the sign is supposed to correspond with, change on a fairly regular schedule — about every thousand years, the equinoxes will have precessed one full sign.
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Precession’d!
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Reducing Irreducible Complexity 2: Biological Boogaloo

Jason Thibeault, 9 Comments

I should be somewhere in the air at the moment, on my way to Science Online. I’m probably pretty excited at this point. Either that, or very very tired. Or, I suppose, both. They’re not mutually exclusive.

Further on QualiaSoup’s excellent Reducing Irreducible Complexity, some of the counterarguments he received and why they’re, well, basically, wrong.

Why is it that religious apologists think that by attacking evolution, despite the mountain of evidence for it and lack of evidence against it outside of one gigantic argument from incredulity, would somehow prove their god? Even if you knock out evolution as a plausible answer (and you really ought to stop trying — scientists have been trying for 150 years and haven’t managed!), how exactly does that prove YOUR god over the god your neighbor proposes? Or the multiple gods someone proposes down the street? Or the giant star turtle suggested by the guy living under the bridge across town?

Edit: yeah, so, flight was cancelled. Twice. Rescheduled to tomorrow. Gives me more time to blog, sure, but dammit, I could be relaxing at the Marriott having a drink over lunch with Stephanie Zvan in an hour if it weren’t for this nor’easter.

Reducing Irreducible Complexity 2: Biological Boogaloo

Pope quote more nuanced than I thought – but he’s still no moral authority

Jason Thibeault, , , 10 Comments

My mea culpa on this one quote — widely reported out of context, which I accepted uncritically as the full context based only on its widespread dispersal — doesn’t mean I’m softening my opinion on the Pope’s past duplicity and his inability to own up to simply being wrong about anything. Nor does it mean that I was particularly wrong about my assessment of his quote, even with context, though the distinction you have to cut for it is rather fine.

Daniel Fincke pointed out at Camels With Hammers that I was wrong about what the Pope was trying to say when I denounced any claims to moral authority he once had in this post, stating that he all but admitted morals are subjective. Having read the full address, the section that everyone’s been quoting as stating that pedophilia was in some way acceptable in the 70s, is in actuality a claim that some people with that philosophy “corrupted” the otherwise incontrovertible stranglehold on objective morality the Catholic church claimed — and therefore this (wholly fictional) pedophilia meme was drawing the Church away from the objective morals that exist in their doctrine.
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Pope quote more nuanced than I thought – but he’s still no moral authority

Presuppositional apologetics, in a nutshell

Jason Thibeault, , 14 Comments

This entirely explains why, in the last post’s comments, Peter of Atheism Presupposes Theism claimed that because there is no objective moral imperative to accept evidenced facts as facts, he could simply disagree with the facts under the subjective nature of the moral framework we understand today and he’d therefore be free to do anything he wanted, including pedophilia.

If you presuppose that there is a God, without evidence, then you are forced to defend a number of ideas that are undercut by actual demonstrable facts about reality. Facts like that morals are a tool of society to keep society stable, and are subjective, demonstrable by the existence of multiple moral codes across multiple societies. Presuppositionalism is, frankly, intellectually bereft. It depends on philosophical legerdemain when evidence exists to the contrary that can be easily and directly observed. You may not be under any objective moral imperative to be intellectually honest in arguing for your case, but you damn well better, lest you be proven a complete idiot in public.

Presuppositional apologetics, in a nutshell

RCimT: Religion/sexuality link roundup

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , 48 Comments

Been a while since I’ve done one of these! I have to get some tabs off my Firefox and I don’t really have a lot of time to blog them individually, so here you are.

In case you haven’t seen it, Stephanie has weighed in on the hilarious conflation of sex-positivity and pedophilia a theist has accused Justin me of recently. As is her wont, Stephanie did not address the hilariousness of the religious apologist’s claims. Instead, she posted an essay, and a suicide note, that will cut you to the quick, no matter where you believe the source for morals might be. Hopefully the apologist will simply shrivel up and blow away at this. I mean, I doubt it, but I can’t help but hope so.
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RCimT: Religion/sexuality link roundup

British Medical Journal: Wakefield study “an elaborate fraud”

Jason Thibeault, , 1 Comment

To anyone who’s been at all interested in the pseudoscientific nonsense that’s sprung up around vaccines, claiming to link them to autism, this is excellent news. Andrew Wakefield, now stripped of his medical degree for admitting to falsifying data in his infamous MMR-Autism study (the lie that launched Jenny McCarthy’s “mommy knows better than science” career) has been outright accused of “elaborate fraud” by the British Medical Journal after a very thorough investigation into his study. This is important, not only because the UK is one of the most hostile jurisdictions to libel/slander in the world (and therefore this case against him must be exceedingly well documented), but also because this is the first time someone has unearthed solid evidence and accused Wakefield of mendacity rather than error in building his false case against the MMR vaccine. The BMJ’s summary table:

How the link was fixed

The Lancet paper was a case series of 12 child patients; it reported a proposed “new syndrome” of enterocolitis and regressive autism and associated this with MMR as an “apparent precipitating event.” But in fact:

  • Three of nine children reported with regressive autism did not have autism diagnosed at all. Only one child clearly had regressive autism

  • Despite the paper claiming that all 12 children were “previously normal,” five had documented pre-existing developmental concerns

  • Some children were reported to have experienced first behavioural symptoms within days of MMR, but the records documented these as starting some months after vaccination

  • In nine cases, unremarkable colonic histopathology results—noting no or minimal fluctuations in inflammatory cell populations—were changed after a medical school “research review” to “non-specific colitis”

  • The parents of eight children were reported as blaming MMR, but 11 families made this allegation at the hospital. The exclusion of three allegations—all giving times to onset of problems in months—helped to create the appearance of a 14 day temporal link

  • Patients were recruited through anti-MMR campaigners, and the study was commissioned and funded for planned litigation

Andrew Wakefield spawned a legion of pseudoscientists who have sowed misinformation and uncertainty about vaccines, and CHILDREN HAVE DIED BECAUSE OF IT. And he did it all because he had a patent on a competing way to vaccinate kids. And he was paid over £450000 by lawyers who were involved in trying to build cases against the medical community on behalf of parents of autistic children.

Fraud doesn’t even begin to cover it. The man is a mass murderer, and beyond that, has spawned a movement of well-meaning but misguided mothers to perpetuate the lies that are empirically harming children. Harming children and breaking down herd immunity against certain diseases, potentially giving them purchase to resurface in new and novel ways. If some kind of super-mumps appears and decimates populations, that blood should rightly be on his head.

Maybe all the money he’s made off these dead, dying and potential future dead kids, will help him buy a new conscience.

British Medical Journal: Wakefield study “an elaborate fraud”

How does one prove astrology? BY STARTING OVER.

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 23 Comments

The undying zombie astrology thread has attracted another latecomer to the party, this time Curtis Manwaring of Astrology X-Files, an astrology software developer who put together a seemingly testable hypothesis and added it as a comment on that thread. I’m moving my response to its own post, because frankly, nobody seems to be reading any of the follow-ups that have linked to it, and would rather continue the fight there. I’m tired of the single zombie thread, which is responsible for the vast majority of my database difficulties, causing me to hack my website to absurd degrees as a result. If it keeps attracting newcomers, I’ll close it, and add a comment saying “this post is closed, please visit any of the posts linked on page 9 of the comments if you want to continue the discussion.”

The meat of Curtis’ comment appears to be a way to test astrology, or at least one aspect of it. My problem with the suggestion is the same that I’ve had with the concept of astrology as a whole — it depends on a foundation that is simply not there. It builds on hypotheses that have simply never been proven, but rather always taken for granted. For instance, the hypothesis that there is any sort of correlation between the planets’ movements and people’s individual lives. Beyond this, much of what he suggests appears to disagree with other astrologers in the thread — even if you exclude Jamie “Darkstar” Funk of Dark Star Astrology (who has since attempted to shed his association with his ridiculous arguments here by changing his name). And to make matters worse, it appears to misunderstand statistical significance, the importance of sample sizes, and the importance of controlling for variables.

This is, as all my discussions against unfalsifiable and self-perpetuating memes, a long one. Grab a coffee.
Continue reading “How does one prove astrology? BY STARTING OVER.” →

How does one prove astrology? BY STARTING OVER.

Assange and the Fallacy Fanboys

Jason Thibeault, , , ,

The Julian Assange rape case, as I’ve asserted elsewhere, is separate and distinct from the ongoing Wikileaks fallout. However, as with most such celebrities in a sudden and potentially career-ending scandal, the advent of the rape allegations against him have caused any number of conspiracy theorists to emerge from the woodworks — not only to defend Assange as the victim of an international conspiracy perpetrated by the Evil American Empire, but to simultaneously smear the two women who allege he took advantage of them, using any number of rape myths to do so. Among the more galling of these fallacies is the repeated assertion that the allegations against him are “sex by surprise”, which is in actuality a “polite company” euphemism for rape in Sweden.

In taking to the field on various forums discussing the rape allegations, Stephanie Zvan has evidently noted some disturbing trends amongst those conspiracy theorists and other fanboys. She’s begun cataloguing them in the following posts:
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Assange and the Fallacy Fanboys

Thunderf00t buys into the “hype” hype

Jason Thibeault,

In toto, the video he made is correct on the facts, except it glosses over one key fact — the press conference was basically exactly what people are demanding of scientists day-in and day-out with regard to scientific outreach. It is imperative that we “dumb down” science to an extent, to communicate its importance to people that otherwise couldn’t care less and would demand the programs be cut for being useless. The paper itself may have underwhelmed him, but he has no leg to stand on when he attacks the press conference as far as I’m concerned.

By my understanding, the press conference did actually explain exactly how they figured out that arsenic is used in the bacteria where phosphorus would be normally. So we have that “direct structural evidence”. Maybe not for DNA specifically, but if there’s a significant lack of phosphorus in the sample, that’s pretty good evidence all by itself that the arsenic in the sample is being used in its stead. At that, there are already very good bits of direct structural evidence of arsenic-based structures in existing, so-called conventional life. So, where’s the beef of his complaint exactly?

The original “hype” for the press conference was that the discovery impacts the search for extraterrestrial life. If this is wrong in any way, I’ve yet to hear it from anyone claiming this is just hype for NASA.

Thunderf00t buys into the “hype” hype