Denialism Blog

Month: June 2007

  • Speak of the devil

    David Kirby seems to be planning his escape from the autism debate. At Huffington post, he demands that science perform epidemiological studies that compare the healthiness or autism rates of unvaccinated versus vaccinated children.

    Most people (save for a handful of fringe parents who believe that autism is some altered state of being, worthy of celebration) are probably just plain tired of autism and the fight over its cause. They really want to settle this debate and move on.

    I know I do.

    The irony is that the multi-million-dollar court battles, the melodramatic headlines and the alarm over parents retreating from vaccinations are all so terribly unnecessary.

    All we need do is conduct a thorough study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children, and see if there is any difference in their rates of autism spectrum disorders.

    …

    Critics of the study idea, who insist that vaccines have been 100 percent exonerated, ridicule the Maloney bill as a redundant, monumental waste of time and money.

    Even so, their position is a bit hard to understand. No matter what happens in Vaccine Court, (which many say is the wrong venue for such a fight, anyway), this tired old debate will drag on for years, God help us.

    …

    If the results showed that vaccinated children were, all around, more healthy and robust than unvaccinated kids — that would pretty much kill all lawsuits right there, send waves of reassurance to billions of parents around the world, and make people like me shut up and go away.

    I would, blissfully, not write about autism and vaccines again. (I have a new book deal to occupy me, about corporate vs. environmental health, which my publisher St. Martin’s Press will announce shortly. I am not an autism activist, and this is not my crusade).

    Wow, that offer of Kirby going away would almost make it worth it. However, it’s interesting that the denialists will assert that mercury is the culprit despite no credible evidence for this hypothesis, and then demand that more studies be performed.

    While I wouldn’t object to the idea of more study on principle, I really don’t think that this would actually make people like Kirby and the anti-vax denialists go away. After all, they don’t believe the existing science exonerates thimerosal, they have moved the goalposts again now that thimerosal has been removed from vaccines. Why should we believe any more studies will satisfy them?

    People like Kirby have no credibility here. They’ve never accepted scientific findings, they have rejected them in the past as conspiracies and cover-ups of the truth. You have to pry their discredited findings they’ve cherry-picked from their cold dead hands. Why should we think such a study won’t lead to another move of the goalposts?

    Anti-vaccination sentiments have existed for hundreds of years. They’re not going to go away with just one more study. They’re not the type of people that are convinced by science, if they were, Kirby would have shut up and gone away long ago.

    By all means, do the study, but don’t expect an end to the anti-vax denialism. Just expect another goalpost-move.
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  • Who are the denialists? (Part IV)

    It’s time to talk about the anti-vaccine (or anti-vax) denialists. Considering the Autism Omnibus trial is underway to decide whether or not parents of autistic children can benefit from the vaccine-compensation program, a fund designed to compensate those who have had reactions to vaccines and shield vaccine makers from the civil suits which drove them out of the country in the early 1980s. I think it’s topical and necessary to set the record straight about vaccines, their risks, and many benefits. To do this though, we’ll have to talk about the history of and resistance to vaccination, the history of autism and the current alleged epidemic of autism, and the denialist arguments used by the anti-vaxxers to suggest that vaccines are linked to the disorder.

    (more…)

  • A confluence of idiocy

    You know how dumb Egnor sounds with his mind outside the brain cell-phone silliness? He sounds as dumb as Deepak Chopra writing more brain-dead new agey nonsense for the Huffington Post.

    To gain credibility, the mind outside the brain must also be mirrored inside the brain. If your brain didn’t register what the mind is doing, there would be no way to detect the mind. Like a TV program being broadcast in the air, a receiver picks up the signal and makes it visible. The brain is a receiver for the mind field. The field itself is invisible, but as mirrored in our brains, it comes to life as images, sensations, and an infinite array of experiences.

    The brain is like a cell phone receiving signals from above. Wait no! It’s like a TV!

    This is how pathetic the proponents of intelligent design are, and for that matter, the crystal-clutching hippies that fall for Chopra woo. Without even meaning to, their arguments reflect each other, because they’re both based on magical thinking.

    So far, the phenomenon of mirror neurons hasn’t been isolated to single neurons in the human brain. Due to the complexity of the laboratory work, it hasn’t traveled very far into the general public. This means that mirror neurons will be held captive for the time being by the belief system of neurology, which is overwhelmingly materialistic. That is, the brain being a solid object comes first while mind, if it exists at all, comes second. Yet I would argue that most of the things we most cherish about the mind, including empathy, language, and learning, depend on mind coming first, and the mirror neuron serves its purposes.

    Maybe the brain really is like a TV set. Sadly, Deepak Chopra and Michael Egnor are both stuck on the same stupid channel.

  • More prediction of the past – from the future!

    Casey Luskin is also celebrating the death of the “junk” DNA hypothesis over at Evolution News and Views. You see, a Wired magazine article has breathlessly reported what we’ve known for decades. And guess what? Just like Sal Cordova, Luskin has a really interesting view of the history of biology and the “junk” DNA timeline.

    Except he has even better proof that ID was responsible for our discovery that non-coding DNA had a function. You see, I thought Sal Cordova was a moron for suggesting that Behe’s prediction of function for non-coding DNA in the late 90s was something to brag about, after all, we knew the junk wasn’t junk in the early 80s. But Luskin has evidence that ID was predicting function for non-coding human DNA even earlier!

    Proponents of intelligent design have long maintained that Neo-Darwinism’s widely held assumption that our cells contain much genetic “junk” is both dangerous to the progress of science and wrong. As I explain here, design theorists recognize that “Intelligent agents typically create functional things,” and thus Jonathan Wells has suggested, “From an ID perspective, however, it is extremely unlikely that an organism would expend its resources on preserving and transmitting so much ‘junk’.” [4] Design theorists have thus been predicting the death of the junk-DNA paradigm for many years:

    As far back as 1994, pro-ID scientist and Discovery Institute fellow Forrest Mims had warned in a letter to Science[1] against assuming that ‘junk’ DNA was ‘useless.’” Science wouldn’t print Mims’ letter, but soon thereafter, in 1998, leading ID theorist William Dembski repeated this sentiment in First Things:

    Wow! In 1994 Forrest Mims wrote a letter that wasn’t even published suggesting that non-coding DNA had function!

    How could we have ever doubted the importance of intelligent design for advancing the scientific enterprise. After all, without investing a single cent in actual research, they were able to read about all of our research into DNA structure and function and tell us something we already knew! And they were able to do this mere decades after we already figured it out in a letter that no one even saw! This is fantastic.

    I wish I had the ability to predict the past from the future.

  • Silverstein: How the "Serial Abrogators of 'Human Dignity'" Can "Keep Their Wealthy American Friends"

    I just received my July issue of Harper’s Magazine, complete with an article about lobbying and public relations in Washington. Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall, but it’s too good for me not to share some highlights.

    It seems to me that this article screams for a legislative intervention and for an ethical rule at newspapers: the strengthening of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (You can search registrations under FARA here), and a requirement for oped writers to disclose their financial conflicts of interests. After all, what makes this all possible is newspapers like the Washington Post that routinely publish opeds by these think tanks.

    I explained the background in an earlier post. Basically, Harper’s Ken Silverstein posed as a business interest from Turkmenistan, and approached four major Washington lobbying firms to see what they’d do for a foreign government with serious human rights issues.

    APCO Associates, winner of PR Week’s PR agency of the year award in 2006, offered Silverstein a four part plan. First, “policy maker outreach,” which is simply setting up meetings with Congressmen. The others were more interesting:

    …APCO promised to “create news items and news outflow,” organize media events, and identify and work with “key reporters.”

    […]

    In addition to influencing news reports, Downen added, the firm could drum up positive op-eds in newspapers. “We can utilize some of the think-tank experts who would say, ‘On the one hand this and the other hand that,’ and we place it as a guest editorial.” Indeed, Schumacher said, APCO had someone on staff who “does nothing but that” and had succeeded in placing thousands of opinion pieces.

    Discussion about the strategy’s third item–building “coalition support,” which meant developing seemingly independent and therefore more credible allies to offer favorable views about Turkmenistan–was brief.

    […]

    How could we use think tanks and academics?…[the fourth element] …One possibility, Downen said, would be to hold a forum on U.S.-Turkmen relations, preferably built around a visit to the United States by a Turkmen official. Possible hosts would include The Heritage Foundation, the Center for Strategic & International Studies, and the Council on Foreign Relations. “Last week I contacted a number of colleagues at think tanks,” Downen went on. “Some real experts could easily be engaged to sponsor or host a public forum or panel that would bring in congressional staff and journalists.” The only cost would be refreshments and room rental–Schumacher joked that

    […]

    Another option, he explained, would be to pay Roll Call and The Economist to host a Turkmenistan event. It would be costlier than the think-tank route, perhaps around $25,000, but in compensation we would have tighter control over the proceedings, plus gain “the imprimatur of a respected third party.”

    This is all typical Washington PR, but the frankness with which groups like Heritage can be hired to do the dirty work is troubling.

  • The Egnor Analogy

    Michael Egnor is to “argument from analogy” as a fish is to __________.

    A. Fire
    B. Victorian Literature
    C. Mathematics
    D. Water

    Imagine scientists living on an isolated island who have developed sophisticated science and culture, with one exception: they deny that telecommunication is possible. For assorted reasons, they deny that the human voice can be transmitted through space, except as vibrations in air. We’ll call this civilization the ‘Verizon Deniers.’

    One day, they find a cell phone (it dropped from a plane or something). They turn it on, and they hear things. They hear hissing, cracking, and what sounds like voices!

    The Verizon deniers are amazed! So it’s off to the lab, and soon the Verizon denier scientists have the answer. They show that all kinds of things — chemicals, mechanical impacts, electrical interference — can change or ablate the voices. They find that certain sounds the voices make are consistently associated with patterns of activation in the cell phone circuits. They found that some aspects of the voices — tone, amplitude, etc. — are localized within the cell phone. They conclude that the voices are simply an emergent property of the cell phone circuits!

    However, one of the scientists, a Verizon accepter, isn’t so sure. He says:

    “What if the cell phone is necessary for all of the noises, but only sufficient for some? What if some of the noises in the phone are actual voices of living people, and are merely transmitted through the phone, but not caused by it?”

    The Verizon deniers say: “How can you prove it?”

    So the Verizon accepter goes to work. He studies the properties of all of the noises the phone made. Some of the noises, like the hiss or the cracks, he can explain as an emergent property of the phone — just oscillations from the circuitry transmitted through the speaker to the air.

    But the voices are different. The sound of the voices certainly has some properties like those of the circuit — frequency, amplitude, power, etc — but there’s more to them. They have meaning. These ‘voice’ noises express anger, love, purpose, judgment — all properties that are not inherent to electrical components.

    …

    Too simple? I propose that any credible theory of the mind must at least provide a basis for discerning that a voice from a cell phone is generated by a person, not the phone. It’s a kind of inverse Turing test — it tests the theory, not the machine. As I see it, none of the materialistic theories of the mind would provide a clear basis for identifying the voice in a cell phone as a person and not as an emergent property of the phone. If a theory can’t get a cell phone right, I don’t trust it with the mind.

    When are these guys going to learn you can’t undo real science with a bunch of poorly argued analogies that aren’t even apt?

    And am I imagining things or is he suggesting our expressed thoughts, words and emotions are coming from the ether? The brain is just like a cell phone receiver for the soul? This guy’s a neurosurgeon, surely he knows about things like aphasia?

    I guess aphasia resulting from stroke or injury is just damage to our cell phone-like “circuitry” in our brain that’s receiving signals from the soul. It’s either that or he’s seen “Being John Malkovitch” too many times.

    Paging Dr. Chopra, you’re needed in the neuro ward.
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  • Can Advertising Kill?

    The courts, prodded on by libertarians, civil libertarians, and corporate-funded think tanks, have afforded more and more protection for “commercial speech,” expression in the business interest of the speaker. Commercial speech has a lower level of protection than religious and political expression, but still, in order for the government to regulate it, it has to have a good reason to do so, and the regulation has to be effective.

    Expanding protections for commercial speech makes it more difficult to regulate advertising for consumer protection purposes. It makes it harder to enforce privacy laws, to limit the spread of billboards, and to control DTC drug ads.

    Sometimes, one wants the government to be limited in its control of advertising, because censorship can masquerade as consumer protection. For instance, the state of Virginia once banned advertising of abortion, but the law was invalidated as unconstitutional.

    Supporters of expansive protections for commercial speech often argue that advertising is often more important than political speech. They argue that advertising brings more information into the market, and thus makes the market more efficient. Consumer protections aren’t needed because the market will out bad speakers and bad messages in favor of good ones.

    I’m not so sure about this. It seems to me that speakers with strong commercial interests will flood the market with their messages, and overwhelm the truth. They’ll even intimidate people who call attention to dangerous products.

    The consequences of this can be severe. You probably remember Vioxx. Well, the newest potentially dangerous (and in this case pointless) heavily-advertised product appears to be Bengay. The Washington Post reports:

    …Now, muscle creams have drawn attention because toxicology tests revealed last week that the April death of a 17-year-old in New York was caused by overusing such rubs.

    “Anyone educated [in athletic training] in the last 25 years doesn’t advise kids to use that stuff,” said Jon Almquist, athletic training specialist for Fairfax County Public Schools. “The demand is due to marketing. That’s the only reason why [athletic] trainers even have it.”

    Arielle Newman, who ran for Notre Dame Academy in Staten Island, was found dead at her home on April 3. Toxicology tests showed that her blood contained lethal amounts of methyl salicylate, an active ingredient commonly found in products such as Bengay and Icy Hot. The New York medical examiner’s office reported Newman had used “topical medication to an excess,” causing salicylate poisoning over time.

    […]

    The marketing appeal of muscle creams is one of the few reasons the products still are popular today, Almquist said. He said they provide little more than a placebo effect for their users.

    “The chemical [in the rubs] is just an irritant to get the skin warm,” Almquist said. “It doesn’t do a whole lot physiologically. Physical rubbing [a muscle] is going to cause the most change.”

    There will come a time where the marketers will get together and broadly challenge the FDA’s role in limiting advertising around drugs. When that challenge happens, it’s going to be critical for scientists to point out all the examples where advertising drove the use of dangerous products. Let’s try to build the record, and I’ll start–

    -Listerine used to be advertised as effective in preventing deadly diseases, such as the flu and TB.
    -Lysol used to be advertised as a douche!

  • The Crank HOWTO en espanol

    La Corte de los Milagros translates the Crank HOWTO!

    I’m flattered. Thanks Martin.

  • Sal Cordova Quote Mines Nature (I'm shocked!)

    I just knew it. The second I read this abstract I just knew that the Uncommon Descent cranks would dust off their old “Junk DNA” harangue and suggest that if it wasn’t for them, no one would believe that all that non-coding DNA had a purpose. Sal Cordova obliged, and it’s the usual embarrassing misread of our literature.

    Heaven forbid that scientists should be so brash as to not infer purpose into everything without studying it first. I’ve been waiting to use “promiscuous teleology” in a post, I guess this is my chance. But that’s not even necessary in this case, this is such an egregious misreading of this result by Cordova that we can nail him just on his lack of reading comprehension and knowledge of biology, let alone his historical revisionism. That is if we’re not assuming he’s being purposefully dishonest – given his history of quote-mining that wouldn’t be stretch.

    Let’s start with a timeline of non-coding DNA:
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  • Harper's Magazine on Washington Lobbying

    Watch your newsstand for the July issue of Harper’s Magazine. Today’s Wall Street Journal reports today that Harper’s Ken Silverstein has written an article describing his experience posing as a businessman with interests in improving the image of Turkmenistan. He approaches lobbying firms, and hints that he represents a front company that can direct oil revenues to officials in Turkmenistan.

    The results are very revealing. They show how lobbying and public relations strategies work–attack opponents as “biased,” hold bogus conferences to lure journalists hosted by others (the so called “third party method”), etc. These are activities that take place every day in DC, and they work.

    Both APCO Associates and Cassidy & Associates gave Mr. Silverstein a sales pitch outlining their strategy and successes in similar cases. They recommended an aggressive campaign against “biased” news stories, organizing conferences at which sympathetic views could be aired, finding ways to get members of Congress to take paid trips to Turkmenistan and emphasizing how much the U.S. would benefit if Turkmenistan further opened its economy to outside investment.

    APCO recommended holding forums for journalists, academics and politicians, hosted by a third party, where a Turkmen politician could give a speech. To avoid the feel of a paid advertisement, the lobby firm suggested possible names for the forum such as “Energy Security” or “Caspian Basin Pipelines.”

    Cassidy took credit for helping to clean up the image of President Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea. Three years ago, he had been ranked the world’s sixth-worst dictator by Parade Magazine. The firm pointed out he was no longer in the top 10.

    And get this–APCO won PR Agency of the Year in 2006 from PR Magazine!

    Of course, these tactics are used outside Washington, and PR firms even use academics in their efforts. Earlier this year, the Boston Globe reported that “eSapience,” a consulting company, had engaged a number of top academics to remedy the image of a common (but rich) alleged fraudster:

    Business ethicists are questioning why the academics, affiliated with some of the top business and law schools, joined a campaign to repair the image of Maurice R. “Hank” Greenberg , who was forced to resign in February 2005 as chairman of American Insurance Group Inc., billing him at rates of $400 to $1,000 an hour.

    […]

    The academics, working with eSapience, a little-known Cambridge company calling itself a new media and research firm, included Richard Schmalensee , dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management; David S. Evans , adjunct professor at University College London; and Richard Epstein , a University of Chicago law professor.

    Their mission was “to change the public conversation about Maurice Greenberg ,” according to a confidential plan summary. This was to be accomplished, in part, by organizing invitation-only events where “influencers” would hear Greenberg weigh in on insurance issues and by penning papers, editorials, books, and other content aimed at putting the executive in a favorable light, the summary said.

    […]

    The eSapience plan, though it doesn’t name him, seems aimed at discrediting Eliot Spitzer , the crusading former New York attorney general who is now the state’s governor. As attorney general, Spitzer filed a half dozen civil charges against Greenberg, accusing him of using accounting tricks to mask AIG’s underwriting losses and faltering reserves. Some of the charges were later dropped, and Greenberg continues to contest the remaining charges.

    […]

    While they aren’t mentioned in the suit, the eSapience plan summary presented to C.V. Starr lists several other academics as members of what it calls its “core academic team and network,” suggesting “they are ready to begin the development of the papers, articles, opeds, books, monographs, and other content related to our key themes,” such as the onerous insurance regulatory environment.

    Three of those listed, Harvard Business School professors Josh Lerner and Andrei Hagui and Boston University law professor Keith Hylton , last week said they played no role in the Greenberg campaign. Another, Robert Hahn , executive director of AEI-Brookings Center for Regulation, didn’t respond to a request for comment.