It lives up to it’s title.
H/T boingboing
Author: MarkH
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Autism Crankery at Huffpo – Again
RFK Jr. writes the standard crank screed in Huffpo, and it’s like a mirror reflection of the CBS news crankery that Orac takes on.
Let’s see, it’s a crank screed so it at a very minimum has to have four elements. The wacky idea, a bunch of inflated non-evidence, conspiracy theories to deflect criticism, and finally, notions of persecution. Let’s see how RFK Jr. does.
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Seed Schwag – and Banner design time
I don’t know how many people knew about this – the sciencebloggers were informed a little bit late, but Seed had a competition on threadless to design a t-shirt in honor of our benevolent overlords, Seed publishing.
Here’s the winner
Also, you guys may have noticed our rotating masthead. Well, I’m announcing our own little competition, to design more banners for the denialism blog!
The banner submissions must be 756 width by 93 height. You can make a completely revolutionary new design or keep the basic format and add new fun symbols of cranks. Here’s our basic banner (pops) – click for the full size to save.
Email me your entries or host them yourselves and link in the comments. I’ll put up a gallery – or in the likely event that only one person participates – the submission after about a week. We’ll decide a winner and their banner will run for a full week – and then we may rotate in some of our other favorites.
So, go nuts! Make a banner that reflects what you think of when you think of cranks.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Egnor Analogy
Michael Egnor is to “argument from analogy” as a fish is to __________.
A. Fire
B. Victorian Literature
C. Mathematics
D. WaterImagine 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.
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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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The Crank HOWTO en espanol
La Corte de los Milagros translates the Crank HOWTO!
I’m flattered. Thanks Martin.
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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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