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Category: skepticism (page 3 of 3)

Action item: Counter the Anti-Vaxers

Via Pharyngula and Podblack:

The State Library is hosting an anti-vaccination event tonight, 1 June 2010 with Meryl Dorey of the so-called ‘Australian Vaccination Network’. They’ll be promoting their noxious brand of pseudoscience. Alt-Med is always a problem, but in this case, the stakes are higher. They tell worried parents that they’ll be harming their children by vaccinating them, when in fact the risk of death and disability from disease is much higher without vaccination than with. So more WA kids are going to die as herd immunity diminishes.

Your orders: meet Kylie (along with me and the Perth Skeptics) at the coffee shop at the State Library at 6:00 tonight. Let’s spread some good information.

A good source for info is the Immunise Australia Program.

Michael R. Ash commits if-abuse

Religious apologists are fond of using the trappings of science. Maybe it’s because science poses the greatest challenge to their claims (so they’d better sound like they know about it), and maybe it’s because they’re trying to borrow science’s credibility.

But it’s not easy to see exactly how the efforts of apologists and true believers are different from real science. I think I’ve worked it out. And since it’s a shame to leave it buried in the comment section of the Undying Thread, I’m pulling it up here into the light.

Here’s how it works according to science. It takes evidence to establish a claim. The more extraordinary the claim, the more evidence it takes. Without that evidence, the claim is rejected. The starting point is an assumption that the claim is not true. Basic stuff.

For example, I do not believe that there was ever a significant population of Hebrew or (reformed) Egyptian speakers in North or South America during alleged Book of Mormon times because there’s no evidence for it. No fragments of Hebrew script, no Egyptian loan words in existing languages. But future discoveries could overturn my disbelief.

Apologists and true believers do it the opposite way. The religious belief is assumed to be true without adequate evidence. Religious claims are accepted as long as they’re not specifically refuted by enough evidence. And the more deeply held the claim, the more evidence it takes to disabuse them of it.

Of course, it’s impossible to amass enough evidence to convince a true believer. For one thing, you can’t prove a negative. For another, many of their claims are not even falsifiable. And evidence can be ambiguous, so it will never disconfirm their view 100 percent. Which means that you can bring alternate explanations and evidence that refutes their view all day long, and they’ll just cling to the sliver of probability that remains, saying “I could still be right.” That sliver of hope is all they need.

So this is the tack that Mormon apologists have to take. They must know that there’s no evidence to establish their view, but as long as they can muddy the waters enough to create a sliver of possibility — redefining words, finding loopholes, and creating fanciful hypothetical scenarios — the faithful are satisfied and don’t notice that there’s not enough evidence to establish their claims.

We, as scientists and critical thinkers, do ourselves a disservice when we play the game their way. Trying to argue them down to zero probability is impossible, but that’s not our job. The burden of evidence is on them to establish their claims.

With that very long intro, let’s take a look at Michael R. Ash’s latest. This one’s about the word ‘Lamanite’. He’s already admitted that you can’t find DNA from Lamanites in current Native American populations, but the lack of evidence isn’t going to stop him from believing in them. He argues that their DNA was ‘subsumed‘ into a larger population — a wildly improbable event.

Ash details the problem:

If we theorize that the Lehites in the Book of Mormon were a small incursion into a larger existing New World population, and that their DNA was swamped out by the dominant and competing haplogroups,

Remind me: why were we theorising that? Because it’s well-supported by evidence? No, because it allows the religious theory to maintain a sliver of probablity. Carry on.

…some members may wonder who — of the surviving modern populations — are the “Lamanites”? In the Doctrine and Covenants, for example, the early Saints are directed to go preach to the Lamanites. How could the Native Americans in Joseph’s world be Lamanites?

It’s worse than that. If you can’t find any genetic Lamanites, how is the Book of Mormon going to come forth unto them? How are they going to ‘blossom as the rose‘? The redemption story falls apart.

Ash’s answer: Redefine the word ‘Lamanite’ away from genetics and toward culture.

The answer is found in culture and genealogy.

While culture is learned and typically passes from parents to children, people can change cultures or assimilate into different cultures. Thus we have Americans who are culturally American, although they (or their ancestors) might have come from Africa, Europe, Asia, or many other parts of the world. Terms such as “African,” “Asian,” “Jew,” “LDS,” “Indian,” and so forth are social constructs, not biological or genetic classifications.

Shorter: Cultural terms are just constructs, so it’s okay to refer to people by a term that was completely made up by some guy.

Finally, we have genealogy, or one’s ancestry. Everyone has two parents, and each parent has two parents. If you go back two generations (to your grandparents) you have four ancestral slots filled by two grandfathers and two grandmothers. As we go further back in our genealogy the number of ancestral slots increases geometrically.

Fail. He means ‘exponentially‘.

Update: No, I fail. See comments.

These slots don’t represent the actual number of ancestors, however, because intermarriage among relatives will cause some ancestors to fill multiple ancestral slots.

No, silly, it’s because parents can have more than one child. So each person on earth doesn’t require two unique parents; lots of people will have the same parents. Minor point, but it is a worry that he’s not good at understanding things.

If we could create a genealogical chart for a modern Native American back to Lehi’s generation we would have over 1 octillion ancestral slots (that’s more than 1 trillion times 1 quadrillion). Now obviously he would not have 1 octillion ancestors (there haven’t been that many people in the entire history of the world). Some ancestors would fill many of these ancestral slots. Nevertheless, on a genealogy chart, there would be 1 octillion ancestral slots. From how many slots would our Native American be descended? All of them. If Laman (or a descendant of Laman) was an ancestor in just one of these 1 octillion ancestral slots, then it can legitimately be claimed that our Native American is a Lamanite descendant.

Wow, the descendants are all Lamanites even if there was just one real Lamanite in an octillion?

What if there was none? No Lamanite ancestors at all. Because that’s the way it’s looking.

We can discount Ash’s complex web of theorising at one stroke, because there’s literally no evidence for Lamanites. But he’s working the opposite way: if we assume that the Book of Mormon is true, and if this incredibly improbable genetic swamping happened, and if words mean what he redefines them to mean, and if there’s one Lamanite back in the genealogy, and if you put on these special 3D glasses and squint a bit, then it’s remotely possible that the Mormon view could still be right. And you can keep going to Church, pay tithing, and stop worrying.

I’ll ask it again: What’s more likely, that Ash’s very complex and improbable overlapping scenarios happened in such a way as to not leave any evidence? Or that someone wrote a fake book?

Ash is once again redefining words and constructing fanciful hypotheticals to create a semblance of plausibility for his religious theory. That’s not good enough. He needs to bring publicly verifiable evidence.

Atheist YouTube party

For this week’s UWA Atheist and Agnostic Society meeting, it was Atheist YouTube Party! With me as programmer. I really enjoyed the chance to share some of my faves. Here they are, as a YouTube playlist. Prepare to be offended and/or enlightened; the choice is, as always, entirely up to you.

NOTE: I think there might be a bug in the YouTube embedded playlist feature. The embedded playlist below skips the first video, which in this case was Tim Minchin’s “The Pope Song”. If you want to see it first, you can either click here to go to my blog post of a few days ago, or click here to find a working playlist on a different page.

Since I didn’t have a rock-solid net connection in the lecture room, I decided to take the precaution of downloading the videos as mp4’s using KeepVid, and then making a playlist in VLC. It made things go much more smoothly.

By golly, it works!

The little machine works better if you click on the ‘nifty’ graphic above. It’s not going automatically for me.

10^23: Homeopathy Overdose in Perth

I’m happy to report that I survived the Homeopathy Overdose. Imagine, if you will, about twenty Perth Skeptics standing outside a chemist’s on Beaufort Street, snarfing down tiny white pillules. It was all to highlight the point that homeopathy is bunk, and unsupported by any scientific evidence. Other skeptic groups around the world held similar events.

Many of the Perth skeptics chose sleeping pills (and subsequently failed to fall asleep). But I went for the hard stuff. Arsenicum album is a homeopathic nostrum that is supposedly derived from arsenic. You’d think that if you ate a lot of them, you’d experience some form of arsenic poisoning, but I ate half a bottle of those horribly sweet crunchy things (Oldest Boy ate the other half), and we experienced no ill effects at all. Actually, I’m lucky I didn’t die — who knows what crap they use as filler.

But wait: there’s a reason that I didn’t die of arsenic poisoning. Homeopathics are deluded — sorry, diluted — so that no trace of the original stuff remains. The pills I took had a dilution of 30C. A dilution of 1C is a 1:100 ratio, so 30C would be 10^60 molecules of water — a one with sixty zeros. 10^60 molecules of water is a lot. It’s about 27 billion earth volumes. (Back of the envelope calculations here.) That’s how much you’d have to drink before being certain of getting one molecule of arsenicum album with a 30C dilution. And some dilutions go a lot higher than that. There is no chance any of the original stuff is still there.

Homeopaths admit this, but still claim that the water retains some ‘memory’ of the remedy. Baloney and hogwash. If the water ‘remembers’ the arsenic, then it should also remember the urinary tract of every person it’s passed through, as well as all the effluent carried through it over the years.

Why do people believe this stuff? Probably because homeopaths, with no need to do real research, can spend all their time making up far-fetched explanations for their silly bullshit.

The 2010 Overdose was great fun, and a good way to make the point that homeopathy is a scam. And I shall never forget the look on that motorist’s face as she passed us, gleefully chomping away.

Obligatory YouTube clip.

How to make your own shroud

From the Department of Ersatz Relics, a new development:

The Shroud of Turin has been reproduced by an Italian scientist in another attempt to prove that the cloth bearing an image of Christ’s face is a fake.

A professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia said he had used materials and techniques that were available in the Middle Ages.

These included applying pigment to cloth and then heating it in an oven.

Tests 20 years ago dated the fabric to between 1260 and 1390, but believers say it is an authentic image of Christ.

This reminds me of 1991, when two men revealed that they were responsible for making all those crop circles. If anyone doubted them, they went ahead and demonstrated how they’d done it, using ropes and boards. By showing how they could have faked the crop circles, they essentially discredited the alien hypothesis in the minds of most people. Occam’s Razor and all that.

If anyone still believes that the shroud is authentic, I suppose this won’t convince them. But now it’s been shown that it dates to no earlier than medieval times, and could have been made with the technology of that time. Occam’s Razor suggests that this is the most likely scenario.

h/t to Jessica

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