Category: science

0 Is this “The African Way”?

November 10, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · cultural tolerance · culture · science · skepticism

The cliché goes “what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

I went on at great length this morning about why we must intervene when we see superstition hurting people – that our fear of appearing paternalistic has overpowered our reason and paralyzed us into inactivity. Maybe this will illustrate what I mean:

The dismembered body of a young albino boy has been found in a river on the Burundi-Tanzania border, reports say. The boy, aged nine, was taken from Makamba province in Burundi by a gang that crossed the border, the head of Burundi’s albino association said. Albino body parts are prized in parts of Africa, with witch-doctors claiming they have special powers. In Tanzania, the body parts of people living with albinism are used by witch-doctors for potions which they tell clients will help make them rich or healthy. Dozens of albinos have been killed, and the killings have spread to neighbouring Burundi.

Albinism, as anyone who has taken a high school science course knows, is the result of a single-gene mutation. When two recessive alleles are expressed in one individual, the skin does not produce melanin – the substance that gives skin its colour. Albinism among Europeans is rare enough, but not so dramatic when it happens. Among the dark-skinned population of southern Africa, an albino person is a stark contrast.

There is nothing at all in the recessive allele that grants any particular properties to the body parts of albino people. It regulates the expression of a particular protein sequence, that’s it. The same kind of properties that make my hair curly and black, whereas my neighbour’s is wavy and blonde, are the kinds of differences we are talking about. There’s no magic in it at all – certainly not anything that will affect your wealth or physical function.

The only real tangible side-effect of albinism that goes beyond simple difference in colour is that albinos are a target for kidnappers and murderers. This isn’t as a product of their skin, but as a product of a specific set of beliefs about their skin. Here’s a challenge for you readers: read a simple article on Mendelian genetic theory (like this one from the University of Arizona) until you feel like you have a general grasp of the idea. Now talk to a friend or family member who is not particularly “sciency”, and teach them the theory. I’d be surprised if it takes longer than 15 minutes for them to grasp the basics. Then, ask them if albinos are magic.

My point is that it is superficially easy to arm someone with enough basic scientific knowledge to know about single-gene mutations, and that they don’t grant magic powers. Trivially easy. Why are we not doing this in Africa, where what they don’t know is literally killing people?

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2 Superstition is not culture

November 10, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · cultural tolerance · culture · ethics · religion · science · secularism · skepticism

I’m not sure where this blog is going. To be honest this started as a way to organize some of my thoughts on some issues that I think are important, and a way to comment on some of the stuff I saw going on around me. It always blows me away whenever a friend or acquaintance says to me “I read your blog” – I never really imagined that anyone would bother to read the random cognitive ejaculations that I put up on the internet on a regular basis, at least not beyond my Facebook friends who creep my profile in the morning. However, a handful of people who are complete strangers to me read this stuff, which is a head trip for me.

Another way you know that you’re making it as a blogger is when people start sending you links to blog about. So I must give a hat tip to Fred Bremmer (who is certainly not a stranger to me) for bringing this article to my attention:

There is a great thudding taboo in any discussion of Africa. Western journalists and aid workers see it everywhere, yet it is nowhere in our coverage back home. We don’t want to talk about it. We don’t know how to. We smother it in silence, even though it is one of the most vivid and vibrant and violent parts of African life. We are afraid—of being misunderstood, or of sounding like our own ugliest ancestors. The suppressed topic? The African belief in spirits and spells and ancestors and black magic.

What follows is a dissection and examination of a serious problem in any culture, but one that is particularly pronounced in the continent of Africa – the role that belief in spirits plays in the quality of life of the people there. Those of us who are aware of European and Western bias and colonial arrogance are often loath to criticize the practices in other countries. After all, who is to say our ways are better than theirs? Isn’t it sheer paternalism on our part to presume to criticize another culture’s practices? Maybe we have something to learn from other ways of doing things!

Unfortunately, this line of thinking has paralyzed into a kind of arch-liberal refusal to even appear to criticize dangerous practices:

Soothsayers demand money for their “powers,” like the one who tells Naipaul that there are curses preventing his daughter from getting married and if he wants them lifted he’ll have to pay. It licenses bigotry. A community can announce that a malaria outbreak is due to the old women of the village waging witchcraft, and slaughter them. It licenses some deranged delusions. During the war in Congo, a soothsayer announced that you could be cured of HIV if you ate a pygmy. I visited a pygmy village where several men had “disappeared” as a result.

If your neighbour is about to feed his kids cyanide to “cleanse” them of “toxins”, is there really a virtue in standing aside and allowing him to do so out of some kind of misguided respect for his beliefs and his right to decide what is best for his kids? Should our oh-so-tolerant sensibilities extend to idly abetting murder? Of course not, and I can’t imagine any rational person suggesting otherwise. The debate is not, or at least should not be, about whether to intervene; it should be about how to intervene. Again from the article, contrast this approach:

Juliana Bernard is an ordinary young African woman who knew, from childhood, that claims of black magic and witchcraft were false and could be debunked. She told me: “If I can understand [germ theory], so can everybody else in this country. They are no different to me.” So she set up a group who traveled from village to village, offering the people a deal: For just one month, take these medicines and these vaccinations, and leave the “witches” alone to do whatever they want without persecution. See what happens. If people stop getting sick, you’ll know my theories about germs are right, and you can forget about the evil spirits.

Just this small dose of rationality—offered by one African to another—had revolutionary effects. Of course the superstitions didn’t vanish, but now they were contested, and the rationalist alternative had acquired passionate defenders in every community. I watched as village after village had vigorous debates, with the soothsayers suddenly having to justify themselves for the first time and facing accusations of being frauds and liars.

And this one:

On a trip to Tanzania, I saw one governmental campaign to stamp out the old beliefs in action when I went to visit a soothsayer deep in the forest. Eager to steer people toward real doctors for proper treatment—a good idea, but there are almost none in the area—the army had turned up that morning and smashed up her temple until it was rubble. She was sobbing and wailing in the wreckage. “My ancestors lived here, but now their spirits have been released into the air! They are homeless! They are lost!” she cried.

Once again, there is a clear right and wrong here – one of these approaches works and the other does not. If we, with the best of intentions, rush in to places and smash superstition to bits, we remove the symptom without addressing the cause. However, when rational discussion is allowed to take place, the dialogue and cultural understanding of these superstitions can change. This is not to say that we shouldn’t vigorously oppose superstition in its various guises or speak out against it whenever possible, but that mandating disbelief is just as dangerous as mandating belief.

This article is about Africa, but of course my response to it is not really. While I am concerned for my African brothers and sisters, I am not from Africa. I am from Canada, where our own particular brand of superstition rages apace. We can look to the African struggle against superstition as a model for our own (albeit down-scaled) problems here. Destroying the religious infrastructure is not only unethical, it is unproductive. What has to happen is that people are encouraged to think critically about all topics, and that the privilege that religion currently enjoys be removed.

Returning to Africa for a moment, I’m sure there are some bleeding hearts among my readers who are happy to decry my paternalism – who am I to pass judgment on another culture? I encourage you to read the following:

The final time I saw Juliana, she told me, “When I go to a village where an old woman has been hacked to pieces, should I say, ‘This is the African way, forget about it?’ I am an African. The murdered woman was an African. It is not our way. If you ignore this fact, you ignore us, and you ignore our struggle.”

It is equally paternalistic to say “well rationality and science are all well and good for us, but Africans should have to deal with superstition.” We have a moral duty to promote the truth as best we know it, and to instruct others in the use of tools that have been observed to work.

TL/DR: Those who fear being overly paternalistic when it comes to the superstitions present in other individuals and cultures risk being equally paternalistic on the other side when they ignore the consequences of doing nothing.

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4 The problem of morality

November 8, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · crommunism · ethics · law · psychology · religion · science

There’s a popular recurring question that often comes up in discussions with religious people who wish to challenge atheists: namely, why should be be moral if there is no god? If atheists don’t believe that there is a judge that overlooks the world, why bother doing good things? After all, there are no eternal consequences to our actions, what could possibly be the atheist’s motivation to either do good things or refrain from evil things?

My issue with this question is that on its own, it seems like an interesting line of discussion – what makes us be moral? If I abandon my beliefs, what would motivate me to continue to do good things? Is there another source of human morality? However, it is rarely asked in this spirit. Usually, it comes in a more snarky form – “if you don’t believe in God, why don’t you go rape and murder babies?”

The usual response is that if the only thing holding you back from raping and murdering babies is your belief in God, you should probably be under psychiatric evaluation. This response, while sufficiently dismissive of a stupid question, is not really an answer to what would be a reasonable criticism if not for the invocation of infant rape. If I, as an atheist, don’t believe that someone is keeping an omniscient record of all my misdeeds, what prevents me from engaging in minor (or major) transgressions when I am reasonably certain I can get away with it? Why, for example, would I turn in a wallet I find on the ground to the police instead of just stealing it? Why not lie to a woman at the bar in order to convince her to sleep with me? Why contribute to charity or volunteer in the community if there is no reward for my good deeds later?

Evolutionary biologists speak of genetic sources for altruism, pointing to analogues in the animal kingdom in which non-human animals show group cohesion and empathy. They lay out a reasonable pathway by which genes for altruism might prevail over genes for selfishness at the expense of others, through a process of natural selection. Philosophers point to Kant, Hume, Rawls, and other secular ethical writers as providing a basis upon which a general non-religious moral code can theoretically be built. Assuming that maximum human happiness is the point of any worthwhile moral code (and yes, this is an assumption, but what else would be better?), then a reasonable and increasingly evidence-based system can be derived from philosophy. Legal authorities point to the evolving code of law as a way of incentivizing good behaviour and punishing bad behaviour. Psychologists note that ethical instruction often leads to ethical behaviour below the level of conscious awareness – we “naturally” act morally because we’ve been taught to do so.

Suffice it to say, there are a variety of ways to answer the question of why someone would be moral without belief in God. Any one of these on its own would be a sufficient rejoinder, and having them all operate in parallel is certainly reassuring to someone who is particularly interested in the question. However, the question embeds a certain assumption that often goes unquestioned – does belief in God make people behave better? After all, the implication of the poverty of morality in the godless is that there is in fact a moral code inherent in belief.

I’ve had religious instruction, which includes learning a list of things that are right and wrong. This should not be confused with legitimate ethical or moral instruction, which I didn’t receive until late high school. I was, for example, taught that extramarital sex is wrong, as are masturbation and homosexuality – pretty much anything that isn’t face-to-face sex with the lights off with my wife is morally wrong. I was taught that abortion is morally equivalent to murder. I was taught that faithfulness was a virtue. Now I was also taught a lot of things that I still agree with – murder is wrong; charity is good; forgiveness, justice and prudence are high ideals. However, with all of these things, I was told that the reason they were good is because they had been rubber-stamped by Yahweh. I should perhaps note that I was not taught that condoms or homosexuality were wrong in school – those things came from Rome but I felt perfectly justified in ignoring any Papal edicts that were bat-shit insane.

It would be, as I said, many years before I learned the processes by which I could evaluate why I believed in the things I did. I had of course by this time rejected the idea of Biblical truth – the story of Onan says it’s wrong to masturbate but it’s okay to fuck your niece as long as you think she’s a prostitute. It was abundantly clear to me that there may be some morality in the Bible, but it is definitely not the source of that morality. I would later learn that much of what we call “Christian Ethics” were actually written by Greek philosophers and later adopted by the church.

Of course all of this is somewhat inconsequential to the central question of whether belief in god is accompanied by better behaviour. Does the idea of an omniscient god really motivate people to refrain from evil actions? Does the promise of eternal reward really motivate people to do good deeds? The answer to the first question seems to be ‘no’, or at least ‘not necessarily’. Anecdotally, we know that religious people are responsible for some of the greatest atrocities throughout history (far from atheists, it is the priests who are the baby rapers). In fact, the more one adheres to religious doctrine, the crazier she/he becomes and the more likely she/he is to commit (what she/he thinks is justified) violent acts. Although there is a clear path from religious belief to violence, these are anecdotes only.

CLS reviewed a Pew Forum survey on religion and found that those United States that had the greatest level of religiosity had poorer performances in self-restraint and morality toward others than those state with lower levels of belief. There is most certainly a chicken/egg problem in this analysis, but it does sufficiently demonstrate that there is no reliable correlation between level of religious belief and morality, at least for the population at large. If people do in fact believe that there is a god watching them, it doesn’t seem to affect their behaviour in a meaningful way. I’m sure if this blog were more popular I’d have trolls inundating me with stories about how Jesus saved their crack-addict cousin’s life, or how Allah saved them from prison, or what-have-you. I am as uninterested in anecdotes that refute my point as I am in those that support my point.

How about the second question? Does religious belief make people more charitable in anticipation of a future reward? A study of European countries and their willingness to donate to poorer countries seems to suggest that those with more closely held religious beliefs do in fact donate more money than those who are less religious. The findings are incredibly nebulous and hard to interpret, but it seems from the general findings that while it varies from country to country, religious people are more charitable than the non-religious.

This is in no way disconcerting to me – as I suggested above there is a relationship between instruction and behaviour. If you are constantly entrained to give money to the poor, and your social environment is structured such that there is strong normative pressure to do so, it is unsurprising that you will comply. A study I’d like to see is to take people with similar levels of religiosity, show them identical videos of starving children, have one video narrated in a secular fashion and the other in a religious fashion and see if there is a difference in pledged funds.

At any rate, there are a variety of reasons why an atheist would choose to be moral, not the least of which is the fact that moral actions often benefit the giver as well as the receiver, whether that is in the form of feeling good about yourself, or in the form of making a contribution to society. There is no reason why an atheist would be less moral than a religious person, and despite all their vitriolic assertions to the contrary, it is easier to justify abhorrent cruelty from a religious standpoint than it is from an atheist one. The so-called “problem” of morality is only a problem if you assume that YahwAlladdha is the author of all goodness in the universe, completely contrary to any evidence that can be found either in scripture (aside from all of the passages just asserting it – look at His actions) or in observations of the world. Human beings have to struggle every day to be good, and leaning on the broken crutch of religion doesn’t seem to help any.

TL/DR: Believers accuse atheists of having no basis for morality. This accusation is unfounded – biology, philosophy, law and psychology all provide explanations why people would be good without belief. There does not seem to be a strong relationship between religiosity and morality, except insofar that being instructed to do something that your peers are all doing might motivate you to perform some specific behaviours.

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13 Movie Friday: Race, The Power of an Illusion

November 5, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · movie · race · science · skepticism

Is race biological? Well… kind of. The external physical traits that we call race are biological, but it doesn’t go much deeper than that.

This is a really cool PBS series that someone on reddit brought to my attention. It’s Friday, so it’s a movie, but you can still learn something. I learned a bunch of stuff watching this.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

This is one of the reasons I like science. It has the power to allow people (in this case, high-school kids) to work through, challenge, and debunk “traditional” ideas that have no merit. It’s also why I think skeptics are so well-suited to this kind of discussion – we’re happy to follow an idea only so far as there is evidence for it. When it comes to race, there just isn’t sufficient evidence to support the stark differences we see in the population; we have to look at alternative explanations.

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14 CFI Skeptics ‘welcome’ creationist Jonathan Sarfati, PhD

October 30, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · religion · science · skeptivism

Once again thumbing my nose at the publishing guidelines for Canadian Atheist, I am cross-posting the summary I wrote on this event here. Readers should be aware that I was not present at any of the described events. What follows is my amalgamation of the impressions of a diverse group of skeptics working in different cities.

This past week, British Columbia was host to creationist lecturer Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, a PhD in chemistry who gave a series of lectures entitled “Evolution: The Greatest Hoax on Earth.” The title, while pithy enough on its own, is based on the title of the international bestselling book The Greatest Show on Earth by British biologist, professor and novelist Richard Dawkins.

Dr. Sarfati, founder of Creation Ministries International, asserts that evolution is a hoax based on his literal interpretation of the story of Genesis – in which God created the universe in 7 days about 10,000 years ago. One must admire the courage and temerity of a man who looks at pre-human fossils dated orders of magnitude older than that; rock formations dated billions of years old; and abundant cosmological evidence putting the age of the universe even older than the rocks; and says “nope, ten thousand – book says so.” Maybe ‘admire’ isn’t the right word…

What did we do?

Upon hearing that we would be paid a visit by such a luminary figure, British Columbia skeptics decided that if creationist propaganda was going to be spread around our fair province then audience members deserved to hear what the scientific evidence had to say. After all, forewarned is forearmed. Centre for Inquiry (CFI) Vancouver, in partnership with our colleagues at CFI Okanagan, the University of British Columbia (UBC) biology department, UBC Okanagan (UBCO), the UBC Freethinkers and the UBCO Skeptics contacted the venues where Sarfati was scheduled to speak – UBC’s Vancouver campus, The Pacific Academy in Surrey, and UBC’s Okanagan campus – and requested permission to set up an information table in the lobby.

The Pacific Academy, a privately owned venue attached to a Pentacostal Christian school (K-12) in Surrey, declined our request to set up a table. While we were understandably disappointed – especially given CFI’s past willingness to allow creationists to push their propaganda (usually in the form of “if there’s no God, how did all this stuff get here? Therefore, God.”) at our events – we recognized that private businesses have every right to hold whatever events they like. The Surrey event was attended by around 800 people of all ages.

We were able to prevail upon UBC to allow the presence of science within the morass of apologetics by reminding them of their obligation to present information that is consistent with the policies of the university. While creationism might be entertaining, evolution is a fact. We were lucky to be able to borrow on the heft and credibility of our colleagues within the UBC biology department.

The Vancouver lecture was not quite as well-attended, perhaps due to the fact that people in a university environment know a bit more about science than the general public. Many of the students we encountered there attended out of sheer curiosity – having heard about the evolution vs. creation “controversy” (only controversial to those within the creationist camp). They thanked us for being there to present the evidence, rather than… well, we’ll get to that later.

The UBC Okanagan lecture was again not quite as popular as the one held by the Pentecostal Church in Surrey. Our volunteers were present to provide some information to those who might not have a background in biology. Feeling a bit cheeky, some of us wore t-shirts that said “Creationism: a Philosophy of Ignorance”, referring to the argument from ignorance that Creationism is based on (“I don’t know how this works, therefore it must be God’s doing”). Our esteemed presenter wasn’t particularly pleased about that, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Overall, our presence was welcomed by audience members. We were careful not to force information on people, preferring instead to wait for curious parties to come to us. We were not there to sell anything or to force an agenda, merely to make information available and give people a chance to pre-empt some of the more egregious lies inherent to creationism.

What happened at the lecture?

While the bar for creationist lecturers isn’t set particularly high, either in terms of evidence or persuasive arguments, Dr. Sarfati did his utmost not to clear it. Instead of presenting evidence for the truth of creation (which would be impressive, because there isn’t any), he instead presented a series of shallow, recycled and easily- (and oft-) refuted arguments. Some of the highlights:

The second law of thermodynamics says that organization can’t increase in a closed system, therefore beneficial mutations cannot happen and evolution cannot occur. Never mind that the Earth is not a closed system, gets regular energy from the sun, and beneficial mutations have been observed to occur (a PhD in Chemistry really should know this)…
Science comes from Christianity (therefore… God?). Never mind that the Christian church repeatedly blocked scientific progress that was contrary to dogma, that science has explained many things that were supposedly divine “mysteries”, and that during the Dark Ages – when the church was at its height of power – it was the Muslim world that made the greatest contributions to science…
Noah’s flood explains everything, from the Grand Canyon to the divergence of species. Never mind the fact that contemporary floods don’t seem to have the magical properties of Noah’s flood, that building a ship capable of holding 2 of every animal in the world would require a level of technology we don’t even have today, and that there is no evidence anywhere of a flood that covered the entire world and then carefully planted specific types of animals only in certain places…
Fish float when they die, therefore they can’t fossilize, therefore fish fossils are evidence of being buried by mud slides from Noah’s flood. Never mind the fact that you do not need Noah’s flood to create mud slides that bury fish. It happens all the time. Never mind the fact that fish sink after their air bladders lose integrity, or that fish without bladders sink right away, or that fossil records are not the only – or even the strongest – evidence we have for evolution…
If you put a frog in a blender and turn it on, you’ll never see a live frog be reassembled. I’m not even sure if this one is worth taking on, and someone should probably call the SPCA.

After the lecture there was a Q&A session. Dr. Safarti wasn’t too pleased to see our volunteers in the first place (someone put a copy of Biology for Dummies on the podium – perhaps not polite, but certainly funny), and mentioned our insouciant t-shirts a few times in Kelowna. He became even more hostile when we pointed out some of the more egregious fallacies in his argument, interrupting the questioners, accusing us of trying to convert people to atheism (a big scary deal to Dr. Safarti), and assuring us that the answers were in one of his books, but he couldn’t answer it right now. The Vancouver event was attended predominantly by students and evolutionists, who did not respond well to these evasive tactics and cheered on those who took the creationist presenter to task for them.

Our reception was somewhat frostier in Kelowna, where the crowd was not quite as pro-science as in Vancouver. Our questions, rather than being met with tacit approval, were the cause of some consternation to the audience. One attendee, a professor of philosophy, attempted to demonstrate some of the logical problems with Sarfati’s arguments – an audience member threatened to put the professor in a head lock. Perhaps it goes without saying that we didn’t win any popularity contests there. Hopefully we got mentioned in a few church sermons the following Sunday.

Needless to say, Dr. Sarfati was not pleased to have people present who are aware of history, science, and basic logic. His hostility was not saved for skeptics either: he made many disparaging comments about atheists, Muslims, and made disparaging remarks about other Christians who believed in evolution. Perhaps being a jerk and a buffoon isn’t relevant to the fact that his presentation was frankly a big steamy pile of BS, but it certainly didn’t help his cause.

What did we learn?

The British Columbia branches of CFI are working on our “skeptivist” approach – bringing the tools of skepticism out into the open and engaging the public. We were lucky to have partners at UBC, as well as the support of the national branch of CFI. We were once again received positively by most of the audience at the event we attended – a reception we can at least partially attribute to being polite and non-pushy (being a good-looking group of ladies and gents probably didn’t hurt either).

People are understandably curious when someone tells them “the thing you’ve been taught is a hoax”. I’m sure that many of the attendees were either confirmed creationists for whom science is blasphemy, and more than a few were science-literate skeptics present at the lecture for a chuckle. Our mission was not and has not been, to convert the whole audience to one way of thinking; it was to present the actual evidence and allow people to make their own decisions. We are confident that after hearing “both sides” of the creation/evolution issue, reasonable people will choose the side with the evidence on its side over the one that relies on distortions and outright falsehoods to make its point.

Our information tables were visited predominantly by the people we were hoping to attract – science-weak university students who were there out of curiosity. They thanked us for being there, knowing that evolution is embraced by the scientific community but not being too sure about why. While skeptics and atheists are often accused of “preaching to the converted”, we were glad to have an opportunity to “preach” to those whose understanding of biology is less than full.

Dr. Sarfati is perhaps not the greatest challenge facing us in the creationist camp. While folks like Ken Ham at least have some kind of charisma, Dr. Sarfati has pictures of blended frogs and slander against non-believers. However, it is important to counter pseudoscience and fraud whenever it appears, particularly when it’s on our university campuses, no matter how unimpressive the speaker may be. We are happy to have been a part of this, and optimistic that we may have given people some things to think about.

0 Some Hallowe’en crapitalism

October 28, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · crapitalism · forces of stupid · religion · science

So I realize it’s not actually Hallowe’en, but I don’t care.

I’ve explained before why it’s important to fight against belief in superstition – in order to co-operate with each other we need to use transparent and reality-based mechanisms. If we instead rely on dewy-eyed “respect” for each other’s ridiculous beliefs, we can end up doing damage to each other and ourselves. When the stakes are low, it’s entirely practical to ignore the more weird things that those around us think are true. Case in point: a close friend of mine believes in ghosts – while I think it’s weird to think that dead people have “spirits” that stick around and appear to random people, but cannot be detected except by the flawed human eye/brain, it’s really not worth it to try and change his mind. After all our friendship is not based on ghosts, and it’s only come up once in the hundreds of conversations we’ve had.

However, sometimes people believe in ridiculous shit and it absolutely does matter:

Eighty mainly elderly people recently jailed in Malawi for up to six years for practising witchcraft should be freed, campaigners say. George Thindwa from the Association of Secular Humanism told the BBC the convictions were illegal as there was no law against witchcraft. He said the problem was that many officials were “witchcraft believers”. The justice minister disputed the allegations, saying the justice system was “reputable”.

Regular long-time readers will remember Malawi from previous posts about religious vs. secular values, the stupidity of sodomy laws, and of course their ass-backwards stance on women’s rights and polygamy. Basically, I’m not a fan. Well now they’ve been caught putting people in jail for being witches.

And then of course, there’s the absolutely ridiculous claim from the justice minister that the system is “reputable”. Yes, it has a consistent reputation for being full of shit. That’s not the same as being reputable.

Justice Minister George Chaponda told the BBC that a person could only be found guilty of practising witchcraft if they confessed to being a witch. But our reporter says the records showed all the suspects had pleaded not guilty. “We are intervening in this matter because we are concerned we still have prisons in Malawi [with] people being accused of being witches,” Mr Thindwa told the BBC’s Network Africa programme. “The courts were wrong 100%, [and] the police, to actually accommodate cases.” Most of those recently sentenced were women usually accused by children of teaching them witchcraft.

I don’t think the people of Malawi are inherently evil, or inherently stupid. They are however held captive to inherently stupid and evil ideologies, by which measles vaccinations are tools of the devil, polygamy is the right of every woman to be protected by a man, and the accusation of a child carries the same weight (in fact more weight) as any sort of evidence. This is why I am completely unashamed to call out bullshit in as loud a voice as possible – to do otherwise would be to grant assent and respectability to all kinds of crazy half-cocked hypotheses, like the existence of witchcraft.

But luckily we live in the enlightened West, where we’ve outgrown such idiocy, right?

A self-described witch in Moose Jaw, Sask., says she’s outraged that religious groups have pressured a local museum to cancel a Halloween seance. The Western Development Museum had been planning to hold a fundraiser on Oct. 29 called Ghosts of the Past, at which, for a $30 entry fee, adult participants could learn about ouija boards and “attempt to make contact with the spirits.” The event was cancelled, however, following complaints from religious leaders and residents, some of whom expressed fears the seance would conjure up evil spirits.

Good grief. If you want to see some medieval stupidity writ large in public, look no further than your religious communities. Of course, these are the good, moderate Christians who are all about tolerance and acceptance. Not those crazy fundamentalists who believe in weirdo nonsense. It’s a good thing there aren’t any of those types of crazies around.

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0 The real Doctor Evil

October 19, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · ethics · health · medicine · science

Stuff like this chills me to the bone:

A doctor struck off by the General Medical Council for exploiting people with multiple sclerosis could be facing legal action by patients. A firm of solicitors said hundreds of “vulnerable people” who travelled to the Netherlands for treatment may seek compensation. Dr Robert Trossel treated them at his clinic in Rotterdam, following initial assessments in the UK. He charged thousands of pounds for unproven stem cell treatments.

I take heat from friends, from colleagues, and especially from my nemesis for my stance that sometimes the patient is the person who is the least equipped to make the decision about his/her health care. The reply inevitably comes that “people have a right to make their own health care decisions,” or that “scientific orthodoxy” is dangerous so we shouldn’t trust the evidence. I even field regular criticism from friends that think that we should be allowed to pursue unproven medical techniques (or even those that have been shown not to work) because it might benefit some people (either through placebo or through some kind of individualized magic powers that therapies supposedly have that isn’t detectable through clinical trials).

I offer this case study as an example of why I hold the position that I do, and am happy to defend it without shame. This doctor abused and perverted the trust that his patients placed in him as a caregiver, and used it to perform illegal experiments on them. The reason he was able to do it is because he led them to believe that his ‘treatment’ was going to help them recover from multiple sclerosis – a disease that can paralyze you and take away your autonomy. It is no small wonder to me that people would be willing to do just about anything to obtain relief from a disease like this, even if it’s something that is simultaneously expensive and risky.

As before, I am dismayed that I didn’t pay more attention in English class, or that I’ve largely ignored the vast bodies of literature in the English language, because I find myself at a loss to adequately put my disgust for this kind of predatory and exploitative fraud into words. The kind of callous disregard for the obligation that a health care provider has toward their patients, and for human decency in general, that this doctor has exhibited shocks me to my very core. He drew thousands of dollars from people based on a combination of their trust and desperation for a cure. These are dollars that these people could have used to get home care, or travel, or invest in real research, that have instead been wasted because Mr. Trossel (a doctor no longer) thought that he was above petty concerns like clinical equipoise or biomedical ethics.

It’s for this same reason that I am opposed to expediting the research process for this so-called “liberation therapy” proposed earlier this year. While I am hopeful that the procedure works, my optimism is tempered with a healthy amount of skepticism, precisely because the support for it is emotional rather than rational. This is why we have channels through which research must go – to avoid tragedies of the type perpetrated by this vulture.

After a fleeting improvement, Mr Pear’s [a patient who received the experimental procedure] condition has now deteriorated significantly. Mrs Pear said: “When you are sitting in front of a neurologist who is saying ‘look, there is nothing you can do’, you clutch at straws. I am not saying we are the most intelligent people on God’s Earth, but we certainly are not completely stupid.”

It’s almost a shame that there is no god or supernatural force to hold accountable those who would prey on the vulnerable like this. Luckily, we live in a world that has systems in place to provide a measure of justice, and I hope that someday Mr. Trossel comes to realize how evil and heartless his actions were.

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0 Free speech vs… The Canadian Government

October 14, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · politics · science · secularism

As I said yesterday, the best way to cement your tyranny under the guise of legitimate government is to silence the opposition. Without an effective opposition, you won’t have to worry about people hearing any positions other than those that you agree with. Without the ability to hear/voice dissenting opinions, people will be largely ignorant of anything other that your sanitized version of “the Truth”.

So what do you do when your opposition is reality itself?

Easy, you pervert the scientific process:

The federal government engages in “unacceptable political interference” in the communication of government science, says the head of a group that represents both government press officers and science journalists. “Openness is being held ransom to media messages that serve the government’s political agenda,” wrote Kathryn O’Hara, president of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association, in an opinion published online Wednesday in the international scientific journal Nature.

It’s a deviously effective stratagem to ensure that conservative governments will be elected in perpetuity – make sure that nobody can access unbiased information. Pretty soon, scientists will be government appointees. After all, the current federal minister of science is a chiropractor who thinks that evolution is a “religious question”; it’s fairly obvious that if Stephen Harper even understands science he doesn’t particularly like it.

Now far be it from me to suggest that politicians outside the Conservative party aren’t just as corrupt and willing to clamp down on science they don’t agree with, but according to the complaint previous governments have not done this. As with the gun registry and the census, the current government seems particularly eager to ignore whatever evidence doesn’t support its agenda. The danger with picking and choosing which evidence to follow – aside from the fact that it will result in bad policy – is that people become inherently less trusting of scientific results. We then get anti-vaccine lunatics, creationists, 9/11 “Truthers” and their ilk looking more and more plausible, as we begin to trust the evidence less and less.

The other danger is that, and I cannot stress this enough, politicians are not scientists (particularly, paradoxically, the minister of science). As I’ve said countless times before, science requires specific training in the meth0dology. Understanding science is not simply a question of being smart, any more than fixing the engine of a car or performing heart surgery is. All of these things require dedicated study, an underlying knowledge of the theory, and a great deal of experience. Politicians do not have this at their disposal. To suggest that science reporting should be filtered by the inexperienced brains of politicians is as ridiculous as saying that you need a doctor’s note for an oil change.

This is particularly true when the politicians in question are not simply ignorant of science, but opposed to it. There was a huge public outcry back in November when a former Pfizer executive was appointed to a position on the board of the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR). The fear was that the presence of someone with such close ties to the pharmaceutical industry on the board of a federal health board would be biased against preventive and non-medical intervention, in favour of the industry of his origin. Whatever your feelings on this – Leona Aglukkaq addressed my concerns to my satisfaction in her reply to my indignant e-mail – the concern is just as legitimate in this case. We have a group who has revealed itself to be opposed to the use of science in policy becoming the sole arbiter of what science is worth reporting. Like putting Big Pharma in charge of health care research or letting the oil companies decide energy policy, letting this anti-science government strangle the lines of communication between scientists and the public is a horrendously stupid idea.

Here’s a picture of an otter:

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3 Movie Friday: Neil DeGrasse Tyson on UFOs

September 24, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · movie · science · skepticism

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is probably my favourite public figure in the sciences. No disrespect to Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Bill Nye, Lawrence Krauss, or any of the other multitude of famous scientists out there fighting the good fight for public education in science and skepticism, but I will always carry a torch for Neil. He’s a charismatic, animated, and engaging speaker who is happy to be in the limelight, without being so academic as to turn non-scientists away from the information.

Since I talked about the argument from ignorance earlier this week, I thought I’d share with you Dr. Tyson’s thoughts:

Whoops, wrong video… here it is:

This guy should be teaching science in every classroom in the world. He tears down the mystique about the scientific method and why it works better than the other ways we try to discern truth (divine revelation, hunches, common sense…).

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5 Another proud moment for Christians

September 9, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · crapitalism · forces of stupid · news · science

Imagine that human civilization is the Little Engine That Could, chugging along up the hill chanting “I think I can, I think I can” as it struggles to reach the zenith of a fair and just society that minimizes human suffering and maximizes human happiness.

Now imagine someone drops a giant boulder in the middle of the track and says “No you fucking can’t!”

Boulder, thy name be religion:

U.S. regulations expanding stem cell research have temporarily been blocked by a U.S. judge. A non-profit group, Nightlight Christian Adoptions, contends that new guidelines on stem cells drafted by U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration will reduce how many human embryos are available for adoption.

I’ll wait for you to extricate your face from your palms before I start in on this. Do it slowly, you might have fractured something.

Okay, ready? Good.

First off, nobody adopts an embryo. It is possible to bring an embryo to term and act as a surrogate birth mother, then claim the child as your own. Unless something dramatic has happened to the number of women who are willing to pursue this option, or unless in-vitro fertilization has stopped, there will always be far more unwanted embryos than willing wombs.

Second, there are lots of live babies and children waiting for adoption. Stem cell research will do absolutely nothing to diminish this supply, and stopping stem cell research in the name of ensuring a sufficient number of adoptees doesn’t diminish it either; on the contrary, it may actually increase the size of this population by reducing the number of potential adoptive parents.

Finally, embryonic stem cell research requires the consent of the genetic parents. There are lots of people who pursue IVF who aren’t comfortable destroying their genetic material, ensuring that there will always be a renewable supply of embryos for those women hell-bent on getting pregnant with someone else’s child.

There is literally zero merit to their argument, but a federal judge decided to grant it anyway because it’s not as though delaying the progress of science is going to cause any suffering. Well, except those people with Parkinson’s, Cystic Fibrosis, Muscular Dystrophy, ALS… the list goes on.

This is why secular humanism is a better model for stable and progressive government than theocracy – it is less sympathetic to the capricious whims of a shrieking horde that enters a battle with no evidence and spurious argument. I anticipate that this ban will be overturned by a higher court, but it’s a solid reminder that in the battle between happiness and suffering, American Christianity is on the side of suffering.

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