Now, to be fair, there are very real plots and cover-ups which were eventually exposed. Unfortunately for many conspiracy theorists, most of them were either somewhat simple and almost boring, involving bribes, public denial of alarming facts on the news, or hopelessly over-elaborate and destined to go off the rails if they ever got underway. In fact, the most sinister and successful conspiracies are of those by terrorist organizations so often ignored by New World Order enthusiasts, who take their cues from some version of the Taxil Hoax, and see them as nothing more than tools of evil governments, sinister reptilian overlords, or aliens who live on the dark side of the Moon, ready to launch an invasion. Some conspiracy theorists will quite literally see the signs of nefarious machinations in absolutely anything and everything for seemingly no reason. Just take a look at the SPLC’s list of today’s trendy conspiracy theories embraced by the far right and quite a few on the far left, albeit with their own partisan adjustments to the plot and the villains.

In the world of the ardent conspiracy theorist, government mistakes and corporate avarice are cast as shrewd and cunning moves by brilliant puppet masters in charge of anything everything, training their secret armies for the moment they’ll divide the world according to the agreements they’ve drawn up in secret meetings of the various lodges, think tanks, and conferences regularly held by secretive offshoots of their organization in posh hotels and Masonic temples. The most adamant proponents of bizarre conspiracies will even resort to what’s known as negative evidence, arguing that their inability to collect anything more than circumstantial concepts based on hearsay and trying to connect every dot even when those dots shouldn’t be connected, is actually a perfect demonstration of how good the cover ups are as well as how widespread the conspiracy really is. The notion that the news today focused on the superficial not because it’s being manipulated by the Illuminati or a government plot to distract its citizens from important events, but because their fellow citizens just don’t care, as disheartening as that it, never seems to enter their minds.

I can understand the desire to feel like a hero in a thriller, uncovering some complex international conspiracy, taking on The Man, and getting access to things marked off limits to many of us. But for every authorized and approved campaign to torture terrorist suspects in secret prisons, there are thousands of cover-ups of bribes for someone’s friend or campaign contributor, and for every secretive society which had any sway with anyone important or powerful, there are thousands of imposters. This fact alone should show that the vast majority of conspiracy theories out there simply wouldn’t work. They’d constantly interfere with each other in spectacularly disastrous ways and if there really is a secret society behind them all, we could ignore it as that of ambitious, but totally incompetent buffoons. Maybe, rather than connecting dots and looking for hidden meanings where we really don’t have to, we should default to greed or incompetence instead of picturing brilliant tacticians on the quest to carve up our planet and sell us all to the Grays of Zeta Riticuli as slaves.

[ illustration by Then One Art ]

While we do need more critics willing to ruffle a few feathers to ensure factual accuracy, an idea defended by the cited article in The Chronicle, we also need to ask ourselves an important question. Can people even take criticism today, or are we so busy smiling and being polite to endure a negative comment? As I’ve pointed out before, the web has given cranks courage and loyal audiences, and fawning media coverage focused on an unstoppable search for controversy and ratings has pampered and enriched them. Even more disturbingly, a flood of overly positive self-help movements which see sadness or disappointment as a pathology, and will even demand that you treat potentially terminal conditions as just another “growth opportunity” (try saying that contempt-worthy expression in quotes without a grimace), have indoctrinated our culture with the idea that a narrow idea of civility is more important than facts, that tone is more important than correctness, that being a walking smiley face is much better than being a little wonky and analytical. The side effects of all this? We’re crawling with more cranks and pseudoscientists than we know what to do with, the media happily marches to their tune, hoping for a controversy, and we’re not allowed to say anything mean about them because if we do, then we’re just meanies. Never mind what the facts and figures say. If we can’t be supportive, we’re to silence ourselves and sit out on the sidelines like kids in time-out.

Being nice is slowly tying a noose around our necks as we shy away from important discussions and from all the things we need to do to ensure a better tomorrow, starting with promoting science and technology to train new generations of thinkers and innovators. They don’t have to become scientists, though if we were to make some changes to most scientists’ highly limited job prospects, more of them may be willing to be scholars and researchers, but a scientific education in general would better prepare them for a world in which we need experts who constantly question and invent. And any good scientific education requires a thick skin, a curious mind, and the ability to take and dish out detailed, point by point criticism. That’s what kids should be learning today instead of how to answer Section 5 of Standardized Test Z, and that’s what we’re killing by insisting that the world around us should have no conflicts, only good vibes, much like the ones extolled by Deepak Chopra and his fellow anti-scientific, intellectually void woo-meisters. It’s completely unhealthy that when skeptics point out a few flaws in an argument, the cranks are expected to clutch their chests in panic and cry about their hurt feelings rather than answer the critiques and it’s the skeptic asking question who’s considered to be in the wrong. I accept that counter-arguments may be incorrect, but dammit, get off the fainting couch, quit playing Ms. Manners, and prove your thesis! Because that’s all we really want from you in the first place…

Simply put, no matter how many arguments you possibly bring up against his strategy, Mooney won’t even try to entertain the thought that maybe, just maybe, he’s barking up the wrong tree. Sadly, this seems to be a trait he shares with some of today’s most virulent cranks who use misleading discussions about tone and civility to wield verbal mallets over their critics’ heads, much like Chris did in Unscientific America. And staying true to the blame-the-scientists-for-everything approach he’s been busy honing for the past year or so, he used his article in the Washington Post to deliver the following hybrid of indictment and lecture to scientists…

Experts aren’t wrong in thinking that Americans don’t know much about science, but given how little they themselves often know about the public, they should be careful not to throw stones. Rather than simply crusading against ignorance, the defenders of science should also work closely with social scientists and specialists in public opinion to determine how to defuse controversies by addressing their fundamental causes.

Well there, problem solved. All scientific experts need to do is become diplomats who have their fingers right on the pulse of public knowledge and address the public’s lack of literacy using a soothing, gentle voice. Just sit back and watch hysterical anti-vaccination activists, rambling anti-scientific fundamentalists, and even climate change denialists trying their best to emulate Glenn Beck simply vanish into thin air. Or not. While it’s awfully nice when people admit that they don’t know something and are willing to learn, ask questions, or just stay on top of what’s going on in the world of science and technology, sadly, this isn’t what happens when we come to fervent cranks who spread nonsense in the media, which will present them as legitimate experts for controversy’s sake, even if the controversy the ratings-hungry editors want to promote is of their own making. And the same goes for religious zealots who prize their holy books over observable, falsifiable discoveries we made over the last few hundred years because they desperately want the approval of an invisible creature that they believe watches over them like a parental figure and will send them to Hell if they question their dogmatic notions. Mooney never had a solution for these groups or ideas for how to control the damage they cause as he lays the blame on scientists and tells them to get socially savvy.

Of course the slight problem with this idea is that scientists are well aware of the problem and today, many a graduate are supposed to take a class on effectively communicating scientific information to non-experts. The notion of a scientist with a blog interacting directly with critics and fans alike was once seen as just a random experiment of those who didn’t have papers to write or lab work to finish. Today, scientific blogging is growing and more and more scientists are trying to reach out and educate the public through the web. However, many turn quite bitter and snarky after seeing just how many people rebel at the idea that they might not know best, that they might be wrong, and that maybe, they need to sit down and just listen to someone else for just a bit before indulging in long-winded pseudoscientific rants, or reciting the latest conspiracy theory. Part of this is a growing lag in the quality of scientific education in the U.S., helped in no small part by fanatical ideolgoues on state school boards and those who homeschool their kids only to indoctrinate them with religious dogmas rather than allow them to study something actually scientific in schools. Another part is the sudden idea that any and all opinions are valid on any issue, even if some of those opinions come from someone who studied the subject at the University of Google and got her PhD at Whale.to or Above Top Secret.

It’s not enough to just inform the public. We also have to make sweeping changes to make sure that crankery and pseudoscience are illuminated as nothing but that, and by making sure we don’t give those who espouse anti-scientific woo or fire and brimstone dogmatism undue credit. How do we do that? That’s an open debate which still needs to happen on a national scale. But I wouldn’t look to Mooney for any answers. He’s too busy rehashing himself, enjoying his haul from Templeton, and blaming scientists and skeptics for not getting how the public thinks because placing any responsibility on the public would make him one of those bitter, cranky, uncivil skeptics and scientists he likes to target, and we just can’t have that, can we Chris because we simply couldn’t alienate your audience of highly concerned accommodationists with cash, could we now?

[ illustration by Lina Blixt ]

This is exactly what’s going on with newspapers which are retracting their Climategate claims, citing that a few months ago, the researchers at the University of East Anglia’s were cleared of any and all wrongdoing by an independent panel which wasn’t swayed by denialist hype and the conspiracy theories swirling around a stack of carefully cherry-picked, out of context quotes and e-mails. So it took them about seven months to get to the bottom of a story, catch up on what’s going on from a legal standpoint, and actually note that the e-mails were much ado about nothing and were more than likely intended to cause of a scandal through very selective editorial process on the part of the hackers who released them to the howls of ecstatic delight in the denialist community, which used them to spread quasi-New World Order conspiracy theories and argue that winters should be warm and toasty in a warming world, otherwise, there’s no such thing as climate change. I mean what do you expect from newspapers? Accuracy? Research? Taking their time before reporting something? No time for that! There’s a hot breaking story that could reel in millions of page views!

Now, after having gotten their views and collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars per Climategate article, it seems rather pointless to apologize and retract their stories. The damage is already done and it would take a very naive person to assume that the same people who do everything in their power to deny climate change or insist that nothing bad could possibly happen if it’s actually in progress, will suddenly drop their beloved conspiracy theory because an independent panel said there was nothing behind it. To climate denialists, the notion of an independent panel in this case is an impossibility because in their minds, everything is simply a part of a conspiracy to control the world through climate change legislation for the benefit of alternative energy companies. Though the long story of coal and petroleum companies funding anti-environmental astroturfing because they stand to lose billions if they don’t try to license green tech somehow doesn’t seem to bug these denialists in the slightest as they smugly deliver their pseudo-expertise across the web. Sure, far from all environmentalists are saints and cap-and-trade is not the answer, but we’re not going to deal with problems by denying they exist on the basis of our personal feelings towards those to whom environmentalism is now being marketed as a luxury product rather than as viable ideas for future standards…

Now, we could chalk up the current fear of the aforementioned epidemics and the desire to find a convenient scapegoat to the human tendency to confuse causation and correlation. But these problems go even further, reaching back to how health issues are tracked by experts and reported by the media. Rather than suddenly being overwhelmed with cases of cancers and autism, advances in medical technology and ongoing studies are just now letting us pin down the true extent of the problems. And while American waistlines are exploding with frightening speed, this uptick in girth is due to a confluence of factors that have been playing out for more than three decades and show no sign of stopping. Of course, as I’ve noted many times before, the media has a knack for reporting facts in a particularly inept manner and packaging everything as a controversy, even if the only controversy taking place is in the minds of rabid activists and cranks making money off their passion. So we’re hit with reports that show growing numbers of this or that, but with zero back story, or other numbers we could use to build a more complete mental picture.

There are few health hysterias in which the media has been more complicit than the autism scare. From free passes for the greedy, immoral, profiteering quack that is Andy Wakefield, who eagerly helped a trial lawyer manufacture the entire autism-vaccine link for fame and profit, to writing softball, fawning editorials about his fanatical disciples, and promoting a whole army of conspiracy mongering cranks who make a living with scare tactics about autism and vaccines, editors and writers did just about everything possible to propel what doctors call autism spectrum disorders right to the top of the public’s consciousness. So what happens when a certain disorder, especially a rather vaguely defined one, is given so much attention? More parents will rush kids to doctors should they fail to miss a developmental milestone by more than a week. This is partly why we can expect an area where well-off families tend to live to have much higher rates of autism diagnoses. What’s the other reason? It may be the parents themselves since older parents tend to see a higher risk of autism in their children, which could very well be related to recent findings about autism’s genetic triggers.

Not helping matters is the drastic liberalization of autism’s diagnostic criteria which can easily lead to a high rate of over-diagnosis. In other words, the so-called autism epidemic is actually more of a process in which doctors are trying to establish the true incidences of autism, and during which, parents scared by media hype and profiteering quacks rush more and more kids to medical professionals more and more likely to diagnose more and more cases of autism. It’s hard to know how many kids today are being over-diagnosed, but today’s autism could become tomorrow’s ADHD. Or did anyone forget the sudden ADHD epidemic we had just ten or so years ago and quietly swept under the rug when doctors started diagnosing it less and less, seeing huge, unwarranted rates of ADD and ADHD diagnoses sweeping across the nation and ever more kids being given medication for few good reasons? Even though the average rates of autism diagnoses today are hovering at roughly 1% of adults, teens and kids, that number could be extremely inflated thanks to a double punch of the media’s trademark hysterics, and the medical bureaucracy loosening up diagnostic standards to excess.

Cancers are a different story, one where a higher number of diagnoses can actually mean good news. Yes, it sounds very counter-intuitive if more and more people have cancer, but we need to take a look at how most of these statistics are tabulated. Today, cancers are being detected earlier and earlier, in some cases as just a few clumps of abnormal, potentially malignant cells. In fact, the rates of diagnosis are so high, there’s even talk of over-diagnosis in the cancer field, with some physicians arguing that some of the cancers we’re now detecting simply don’t have enough time to harm the patient who is overwhelmingly likely to die of something else long before the tumor fully develops and starts doing its damage. And on the other end of the diagnostic spectrum, more and more people are surviving their cancers as chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery bring a growing number of patients from the brink of death. There are even nano-mechanical cancer treatments in the works, treatments that could extend patients’ lives even more if they’re proven to be effective in a standard randomized, double-blind clinical study involving thousands of patients. Together with new cases, more early diagnoses, and more cancer survivors, the rates of the diseases appear to be climbing, but the numbers bury a story of substantial progress against a once unconditionally terminal menace.

Finally, I wanted to tackle a stranger media-promoted epidemic, that of obesity. It’s true that Americans see an ever growing rate of accreting waistlines and even if we were to fix the BMI measurements to differentiate what could be called healthy weight (i.e. lean muscle mass) from fat, obesity rates would still be extremely high. In an effort to find a scapegoat, many people will blame the food we eat and it’s quality. In other cases, there are advocates for “fat acceptance” that go in the other direction, saying that extra weight is a-ok and that all the very extensive studies linking excess heft to serious health risks that can easily shave years off people’s lives, are actually inconclusive. In reality, the problem behind obesity rates is compound, including our natural cravings for calorie dense foods, lack of exercise, ridiculously oversized portions which are sometimes less about how much food someone needs to be satiated and more of a testament to human gluttony, and yes, the quality of what we eat. The epidemic of obesity is actually real, but what the media often fails to report is that it’s not just a sudden explosion, but something we’ve entirely done to ourselves and for which we have no one to blame in the matter but our own lack of self control and decision-making. And today, that lack of control is pulling down the average life expectancy of Americans, another fact you don’t often hear in the media reports…

[ illustration by Sven Prim ]

Venter is the Lady Gaga of science. Like her, he is a drama queen, an over-the-top performance artist with a genius for self-promotion. Hype is what Craig Venter does, and he does it extremely well, whether touting the decoding of his own genome several years ago or his construction of a hybrid bacterium this year. In a typical Venter touch sections of the bacterium’s DNA translate into portentous quotes, such as this one from James Joyce: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to re- create life out of life.”

Now, is it just me or does Horgan have some sort of a bone to pick there? Sure, Venter is well connected and well funded, his projects are extremely ambitious, and he likes to set bold goals. However, he doesn’t pitch a pet project as a potential solution to all universal problems like Wolfram, or just talk a big game, aiming for the sky while still learning how to walk, like de Gray. He lays out his goals quite clearly, focuses on the actual science at hand, and produces tangible results. His presentation at TED in 2008 touched on the potential of creating synthetic life to solve global problems, but he didn’t imply that the technology was almost there and if we want to see it come to fruition, we should just watch him and his team. Ok, so he put in a watermark with a high brow quote into a synthetic genome, so what? What would Horgan rather have him do? Add “this is a test genome” and nothing fancier than that, otherwise Venter is an unabashed glory hound?

It seems that Horgan is taking out his frustration at the sensationalistic media coverage of scientific topics, an unfortunate norm nowadays, at a scientist who gave them a great story from which to spin tales of the future and fantastic proclamations. While he emphasizes that Venter didn’t actually create new life in the lab, neither did Venter and the only people who did were reporters and philosophers, who tend to either lack the scientific skills to adequately interpret what actually happened, or want to make a big pronouncement despite lacking a reason to do so. And to counter them, Horgan decided to bend the story to the other extreme and plays up the mysteries of life’s origins and how far we seem to be from understanding how living things appeared.

[Bioethicist] Arthur Caplan declares that Venter and other scientists have dispelled the notion that life “is sacred, special, ineffable and beyond human understanding.” Wrong. We still have no idea how life began, or whether life exists only here on our lonely planet or pervades the cosmos. One of the great ironies of modern science is that as we gain more power over life, it remains just as fundamentally mysterious as ever.

Sorry Mr. Horgan but no. Scientists and many of those who follow their work understand life as a very complex biochemical reaction, a view which already demotes life from its post as a sacred, incomprehensible enigma so we can study it in the lab. Whatever you say about Venter’s experiments, they do help us get a much better idea of how life began by experimentally reducing living things down to their most basic parts, drawing a more defined line between living and non-living. When we know what chemistry has to take place in order to make a living, self-reproducing cell, we can further break it down in its core components and figure out some possible scenarios of how the building blocks of our universal common ancestral population came together, as well as from where these building blocks might have come.

We will probably never know exactly how life got started on Earth, but we’re seeing some glimpses as to how that may have happened thanks to experiments done by Venter and his team, as well as those what build on his work. There are many years of work still ahead, but to pretend that we’re just as ignorant about the origins of living things as we were some 50 years ago, when DNA was just being formally identified for what it really was and the concept of synthesizing genes was still the stuff of wild, science fiction comic books, is simply no longer an option. At least not an intellectually honest one anyway.

Let’s consider a few examples, shall we? For starters, why don’t we go back to a recent report on widespread inaccuracy in popular science stories which caught outright fabrications by major newspapers? When facts aren’t being collected from reputable experts but get substituted for whatever the editors think will be a better, more controversial story, its not hard to see how easily pseudoscience can creep into key issues just waiting to be hijacked by denialists. If that’s not enough, consider the ridiculous media circus over Ida The Fossil by a part time paleontologist and full time media hound, Jørn Hurum, and how one scientist’s quest for airtime to the detriment of doing proper due diligence and peer review had creationists trumpeting “yet another failure of evolutionism” across newspaper comment sections and anti-scientific blogs. And speaking of giving fodder to religious zealots, what about major UK newspapers distorting a psychologist’s research of religious beliefs to make it seem as if there was scientific proof that we’re born with faith when that wasn’t at all what the actual science implied? Finally, didn’t New Scientist once run a ridiculously over-hyped and sensationally titled tale about Darwin’s conception of the tree of life which fired up creationists and incensed biologists?

The list can easily go on and include fawning exposes of anti-vaccination activists and “shocking reports of vaccination gone terribly wrong” by credulous reporters, as well as conspiratorial coverage of the CRU e-mail leak which devolved to full blown accounts of sinister geo-engineering schemes. Even an exploratory paper talking about the potential benefit of an enzyme found in a certain fruit for certain cancer patients tends to turn into an advertisement for this fruit being a potent weapon against cancer with no regard for the mile long list of qualifiers and limitations painstakingly listed in the study being abused by grinning talking heads. Then, when the very same talking heads finally take the time to read some of those limitations confirmed in another study, they do their best impression of a manic depressive and present it as the end of all promising research into a cancer treatment involving the aforementioned enzymes. The public thinks that the scientists are flip-flopping on their research while the reality of the matter is that the media doesn’t know what it’s talking about, including when it’s important that reporters get their facts straight. Remember how the press mishandled the swine flu outbreak, overhyping the disease to the point that people no longer thought it could be a serious problem?

So now, after considering how badly the media deals with science, imagine a loud and splashy denialist idea pitched to an editor who rushes it on the air, then has pundits pitting pseudoscientists against experts while giving the cranks the same kind of standing as the real scientists. Then, as the story spreads, it’s covered by journalists who don’t know what questions to ask of the denialists they interview and are usually easy prey for technobabble and flashy con artists pretending to have science on their side. Suddenly, what was once just a small denialist community gets a platform, dedicated followers, a steady stream of coverage, and editors who are all too happy to put them on the air and milking the ensuing debates for ratings. This happens day in, day out, and we can’t discuss denial without pointing a finger toward the media and holding reporters responsible when they put ratings and potential controversy over factual accuracy.

[ photo illustration by Gilad Benari ]

Maybe the media outlet had a massive surge of traffic after it ran its first story about the search for otherworldly life, maybe the number of comments on its subsequent stories in the same vein went off the charts, or maybe it’s just a slow news day, but quite a few of the biggest newspapers and blogs around the world just keep on repackaging the same ten articles about the day we may find an alien world scurrying with living things. Don’t get me wrong, there are some very important studies that certainly deserve extensive coverage in the world of popular science, like the finding that water in meteorites can affect the chirality of amino acids, or that after exposure to typical cosmic radiation, certain chemicals in space debris become nucleobases in RNA, and a few curious ideas about finding traces of forests and vast biospheres just by looking at the light they reflect. However, articles like the Telegraph’s newsflash recounting that meteorites might have helped spark life on Earth simply fail to add anything even remotely new to an extremely popular and oft repeated theory.

I know, exciting research regarding potential aliens doesn’t happen every day. Trying to find something which may be radically different from life as we know it in almost every imaginable way without knowing what it is we’re actually trying to track down is very difficult. Even if we were to stick to searching for clear markers of life we could readily identify, these efforts require a major investment in an entire fleet of orbital telescopes and years of searching to find another terrestrial planet we could photograph with a high enough resolution to get some concrete data, something that’s simply not going to happen overnight or any time soon for that matter. Profound science like this takes time, effort and a commitment to press onward with space exploration efforts for decades to come, something sorely lacking in today’s political climate. Maybe the very real potential for the developed world to throttle back its scientific and technical leadership thanks to today’s short sighted politicians could be the pop sci subject of choice on a slow news day since this problem hasn’t been getting through to the public nearly as well as another rehash of basic astrobiology primers…

[ illustration by Frieso J. Hoevelkamp ]

I’m not sure that Miller is particularly flattered by an article which casts him as “an honorable man” surrounded by mindless lunatics from both sides of the debate, in keeping with the Mooney/Hagerty/Gilgoff/Ruse style of portraying atheists. You see, in the press, atheists are not allowed to hold complex or nuanced opinions. They must be single-minded, condescending, cantankerous loudmouths with nothing of value to add to a debate, the exact counterpart to fundamentalist caricatures and just as dull and unpleasant. It’s really dishonest and crude, and yet this is exactly what so many reporters today seem to do. They’ll wipe their dirty shoes all over a group of atheists, reduce what these atheists say in interviews down to a few simple sound bytes reinforcing the big story, and refuse to acknowledge that there was anything more to the atheists’ position than what they chose to quote and how they decided to re-interpret these quotes. This is in part how Mooney got his $15,000 grant and a trip to England, and how reporters create controversy where there really isn’t one.

Now you might ask, what about religious fundamentalists? How can you ridicule the coverage atheists get but not acknowledge that the Religious Right gets the same kind of short end of the media stick? Well, we had a chance to hear plenty of anti-evolution activists rant and rave in their own words and on their own blogs. That’s why in my refutations of creationist arguments, I link directly to the source where they’re free to say what they’d like and how they’d like to say it without a reporter in sight. Whatever ignorant statements they make to incur a scathing critique from science bloggers was their choice to make. Although even a friendly reporter might not stop you from being a rhetorical menace to yourself, as the Scharfenberg piece illustrates with this quote from Miller about the potential role of God in our daily lives via quantum magic…

This sly intervention, Miller argues, is vital to the Creator’s project: if God were to re-grow limbs for amputees, for instance — if God were to perform the sorts of miracles demanded by atheists as proof of his existence — the consequences would be disastrous. [...] “That would reduce God to a kind of supranatural force and by pushing a button labeled ‘prayer’ you could accomplish anything you wanted. What would that do to moral independence?”

Really, the idea of the universe’s quantum mesh being putty in a supernatural being’s hands is something I’d expect from New Age sophists rather than a distinguished scientist. And let’s be serious, fundamentalists are not just using the prayer button anytime they want, they abuse it at every opportunity. The idea that God isn’t supposed to get in the way seems to just beg the question of why we need a God if we’re not going to directly interact with him. While a kind of Deist, refined watchmaker of a deity might be just fine for Miller and a host of theologians, for billions of people, gods are very personal and they also push that prayer button whatever they get the chance, hoping for a miracle. This argument about moral independence is an age old way of excusing the inability of the faithful to provide definitive proof for their deity and that faith translates into direct actions by a supernatural entity. It’s a red herring to put it bluntly. But Miller and other accommodationists using theological hand me downs as legitimate reasons to squeeze religion into science is ok because those atheists are just bad people who don’t have a single nuanced or valid opinion in their heads, right?

Ultimately, this kind of accommodationism isn’t about building bridges between facts and faith. If it was, there wouldn’t be a crew of rabid atheist villains in the narrative. Instead, atheists would be treated with at least the slightest modicum of respect and their positive words about Miller and religious scientists would be given the time of the day. Instead, writers like Scharfenberg, Ruse and Mooney are far more interested in pandering to their religious readers with backhanded swipes at the atheist menace. Oh they’re willing to build bridges and have open dialogues, just as long as those icky unbelievers aren’t involved since acknowledging that atheists have something of value to say might tick off their religious readers and result in one less payday.

[ illustration by Lina Blixt ]

The biggest problem with the Time feature is that instead of the facts of the matter, readers are treated to Karl Greenfled’s fawning and disappointingly cavalier treatment of a very serious ethical issue in medicine. Having a child diagnosed with a condition that’s poorly explained and understood is terrifying. Parents want a solution and treatment plans, but the problem in the case of an autism diagnosis is that responsible doctors need to rely on clinical testing and their work is tightly regulated by a number of laws and institutional standards. They can’t promise magical cures or offer to try untested, experimental regimens based on highly speculative, often very limited studies without having a good idea that this will actually help the child. Add on top of that the highly speculative nature of an autism diagnosis and it’s potential genetic links, and you’re dealing with a complex set of cases where unnecessary experimentation could do far more harm than good.

But now, the quacks have gone marching in. Not restrained by the policies by which most doctors must abide, they can give worried and desperate parents a scapegoat in the form of vaccines, and promise cures based on a hefty dollop of creative license in interpreting the results of speculative studies and alt med notions. How could parents resist a solution being dangled in front of them, especially when their primary doctors offered a wait and see attitude, even doubting that little Johnny or Sally might have autism? Selective hearing goes wild and the parents begin viewing mainstream medicine as a hurdle to progress, not realizing that doctors aren’t in a rush to subject their kids to countless pills, diets, and a barrage of expensive treatments not because they don’t care or they want to be cruel to the parents, but because they have no evidence to believe it will help. The quacks, on the other hand, will try and bill for anything and everything. Having sunk thousands of dollars and a whole lot of heartache into all sorts of biomed woo, the parents want to see any improvement, no matter how small, as the result of all those novel cures rather than natural improvement or a misdiagnosis.

Organizations like Generation Rescue make things even worse by doing all they can to reinforce these views and trying their damnest to make vaccines out to be the cause of every imaginable pediatric evil, from blaming a whole host of random chemicals in them as the trigger for autism, to claiming that children are subjected to far too many vaccinations even though kids receive only 5% of the antigens they would’ve gotten just 30 years ago. Not only that, but they will dismiss any study showing that vaccines are safe and effective as a paid for piece of propaganda by Big Pharma, demanding a custom made vaccinated vs. unvaccinated trial without which they claim all the benefits of vaccinations are just a tenet of faith. Even if someone actually does such a cruel and unethical study and confirms that vaccines really are beneficial, they’ll find a way to reject it. One of a myriad of the hacks they employ will find that the uncle of a cousin of a friend of one of the nurses who worked with the study group was a salesman for a pharmaceutical company, or something like that, and dismiss the entire effort out of hand as more propaganda from vaccine makers, manipulated by their secret agents. But of course doing such a study would be ethically reprehensible and very problematic to carry out in the first place.

First of all, the control group will be exposed to illnesses which used to kill thousands of children on a regular basis without the benefit of having antibodies to fight them off. There really shouldn’t be a long explanation as to why this is incredibly irresponsible and would fail any ethics review by those who would fund this study. The other issue would be the herd immunity built up by the prevalence of vaccinations in most communities in the developed world. The 80% to 90% of vaccinated children would help those who aren’t vaccinated from having the chance to catch some diseases. However, when that level of vaccination falls, cases of measles, rubella, and other preventable childhood diseases reemerge, showing right then and there that vaccination works and works quite well. Anti-vaxers have been doing these sorts of experiments in the UK, US and Australia, causing public health emergencies in the process, certain that the risks of vaccines outweigh the benefits despite the sharp drop in vaccinations often corresponding to a sharp rise in childhood diseases.

So why would anti-vaxers even suggest doing these kinds of ethically questionable and dangerous studies to prove a point at the expense of their kids’ health? Because they’re absolutely sure that the only good study is a study that confirms their personal opinions and any research that fails to do so must be wrong. This is why all the calls for a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study on the blogs of anti-vax luminaries declare that a proper study will confirm the fervent beliefs about vaccines. In other words, instead of following the evidence, they refuse to even consider any scientific work that doesn’t agree with their convictions, and continue to send children who were diagnosed with autism to quacks who torture them with unnecessary, dangerous and expensive cures and pseudoscientific treatments. And when reporters write fawning and teary-eyed articles about their pretty and famous spokespeople and the hope of worried parents that something will magically cure their kids, this dark side of the anti-vax movement is hidden from the world exactly when it needs to be exposed.

[ illustration by Denis Zilber ]

As you can probably imagine, one of the biggest topics to be scientifically abused are articles concerning the climate change debacle. And we’re not just talking about Christopher Booker’s self-serving op-eds here, but major news organizations getting the story wrong to keep up the ideological back and forth, going as far as to invent conclusions from scientists and scientific organizations. Nobel Intent explains what happens after one blogger did a little fact checking into the story about the imminent start of another ice age in the Daily Mail and of course, Fox News, which rushes to entertain any story contrarian to global warming models…

A prominent climate blogger contacted both Latif and the [National Snow and Ice Data Center]; he quotes Latif as saying, “I don’t know what to do. They just make these things up.” Referring to the “facts” attributed to it by the article, the NSIDC’s director said, “This is completely false. The NSIDC has never made such a statement and we were never contacted by anyone from the Daily Mail.”

There’s also the ridiculous tale of Jenny McCarthy being brought on as an autism expert by ABC to critique a study on whether certain diets help in combating autism. They don’t. But nevertheless, McCarthy demanded that the medical establishment starts accepting anecdotal and very subjective evidence from parents whose method of dealing with their kids’ autism is to spend thousands of dollars on biomedical quackery as solid evidence that their ideas are really working. It seems that ABC decided that the looks and fury of a former nude model are a sufficient counterbalance to medical degrees and controlled studies carried out by experts. Even inviting doctors who are passionate adherents of biomedical woo would’ve been a major step up from this. As long as ABC is at it, they should probably contact me about the latest discoveries in the field of chemistry. No, I’m not a chemist and have about as much of a grasp of the subject beyond the basics of the atomic theory of matter as Jenny McCarthy has of epidemiology and pediatric medicine, but I can be really passionate. Or do I have to show some skin before I fully qualify to be a TV “science expert”?

And of course we should mention space news while talking about science abuse in the media. According to a doomsday article in The Telegraph, our planet will be decimated by a supernova in progress called T Pyxidis since when it goes off, our atmosphere will be stripped away. Though if you were to ask an astrophysicist who knows the actual science behind the headline, like Dr. Ian O’Neill, you’d see that the rumors of our imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated. True, it’s possible for our planet to suffer a blow from big gamma ray bursts of dying stars, but to generate the kind of fearsome GRB that should make us all run for cover, the stars which produce them would have to be both very massive and very close. Since our galaxy is dominated by red dwarfs and our own Sun is in the top 10% of the galaxy’s stellar population by mass, the odds of being fried by a rogue death ray of a star collapsing into the a black hole aren’t all that great. We should also note that for an actual GRB hit to take place, the dying star’s poles have to be pointed at Earth, which isn’t the case with some of the real candidates for a dangerous blast in the near future, and by near, we mean about 100,000 years.

Science abuse in the media is nothing new and lest you think only natural sciences are hit hard with the kind of distortion that makes experts pull their hair out, even computer science gets confused with sci-fi on a pretty regular basis, so much so that engineering academies are thinking about legal codices for AI. You know, a bit like the ones from the Animatrix episodes chronicling the downfall of humanity. The ones we don’t have yet because we lack requirements for them and because they’ll take many decades and billions of dollars to build even when we do. And when robots stop hauling in the page views, there’s always a psychological study to mangle for a quick and easy religious debate transparently manufactured for cheap hype…

[ illustration from a piece by Jesse Mead ]

So when we take into account the sheer onslaught of happy thoughts with which Americans are flooded from self-help books, television and even business magazines, it’s not a stretch to imagine that living in this happy bubble of mandated saccharine affirmations might eventually turn toxic and make its way into a field where it’s far more harmful than helpful. You may recognize these quotes from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Guardian column since it recently made its rounds across the web and major skeptical blogs…

The cheerfulness of breast cancer culture goes beyond mere absence of anger to what looks, all too often, like a positive embrace of the disease. In 2007, New York Times health columnist Jane Brody quoted bike racer and testicular cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, who said, “Cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me”, and cited a woman asserting that “breast cancer has given me a new life. Breast cancer was something I needed to experience to open my eyes to the joy of living.” Betty Rollin, one of the first American women to go public with her disease, testified that she has “realized that the source of my happiness was, of all things, cancer – that cancer had everything to do with how good the good parts of my life were”.

Is it just me or does this sound like a case of medical Stockholm syndrome? Having seen what cancer does to people up close and personal, these are absolute last words I would ever choose to describe the disease. It’s a terrible, scary, aggressive and often fatal illness. Love and affection is something you need to experience if you really want to get the most out of being alive. Cancer? That’s something you should hope you never have to fight. Rather than give you a new appreciation for life, it will drain you as it devours your insides, create tons of medical bills and quite possibly make your last months of life into a living hell. Sure, the boisterous, upbeat talk from survivors being published in those happy-happy fluff pieces sounds vaguely positive, but something tells me that when Lance Armstrong was getting ready for brain surgery to remove a tumor spawned by one of the many metastases in his body at the time, he wasn’t cheering with joy. Oh and there’s more…

In the most extreme characterization, breast cancer is not a problem at all, not even an annoyance – it is a “gift”, deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude. One survivor writes in her book The Gift Of Cancer: A Call To Awakening that “cancer is your ticket to your real life. Cancer is your passport to the life you were truly meant to live.”

Doubled over in pain with a chemo pump in your chest? Oh that sounds wonderful! Sign me up. Now if only a doctor who discarded actual medicine in favor of fluffy nothings could tell me to purge all my negative thoughts so the aggressive tumors ravaging my body magically go away, I’d be all set. And of course, as Ehrenreich will show us in her column, the King of Woo, Deepak Chopra would there for me in this joyous, uplifting transition between being healthy and on the verge of a slow and painful death! I know that if I survive, I’ll be so thankful to whatever deity I worship for all the pain, stress, expense and surgeries. Oh and let’s keep in mind that if you’re diagnosed with cancer and you’re not exhilarated about the chance to come to terms with your own mortality, it only makes things worse and you’ll be the person to blame for your continued illness. Being scared and alert, looking for any way to fight the cancer and stay alive? That’s just going to make things worse.

This mandate of happy thoughts even in the face of potential death is disturbing for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most notable one is this. Putting up a wall of positive affirmation between something that’s truly wrong or disconcerting is a defensive response. It’s a way to shut off the real world so we can mute the stress it so often brings and by not acknowledging very real and pressing problems with platitudes so saccharine, a few episodes of Oprah should prompt you to get checked for diabetes, we build up an intolerance to reality. In the bubble of forced smiles, there’s no criticism, there’s no need to worry about mortality, no need to fix what’s terribly broken. Everything is a gift, everything is a chance to live your life to the fullest, everything should get the happy thought treatment and be met with gratitude and a giggle. Even death itself. This is where the generally useful philosophy of trying to make the best of the cards you’ve been dealt, becomes a borderline pathology.

As noted before, woo makes for good business and while the web allows a lot of great information to spread across the world in no time at all, it also allows pseudoscience to spread just as efficiently. The web makes no judgments about the correction or the validity of the information it hosts. It’s just data floating between vast arrays of servers. But even TV networks and news agencies who do have editorial control over what they’ll put out, choose time and time again to present something as controversial, to give every crank a voice and every maniac a bullhorn to sound off, regardless of the validity of what they say. By contrast, most science bloggers who know how to debunk such claims, set the record straight and promote the kind of science and reason we should all exercise do it in their spare time, and most get lost in the online chaos, and many scientists seeing what’s going on in the media and on the web, don’t want any part in this mess.

And that presents us with a major problem. The contest between good science and woo is highly asymmetric with many part-time skeptics who need to make a living, trying to stem the tide of endless pseudoscience and anti-intellectualism coming from people for whom peddling agendas that run contrary to science and reason is a full time job. Politicians who attack scientific projects as a waste of public money do it to get themselves a better shot at another term. Ken Ham who built the museum of ignorance in Kentucky runs a group with a very significant cash flow and enjoys a salary on par with an upper level corporate manager. The blowhards who work for the Discovery Institute also get six figure salaries and millions in grants. Deepak Chopra makes a killing by peddling woo and it’s a safe bet that Ray Comfort can make his mortgage payments. The cranks are deeply committed to spreading ever more anti-science because that’s what pays the bills. And when it comes to the anti-vax movement, we’re talking about a quasi-religion with a terrifying grudge against medicine.

So here’s the question, what can you do about it? Should you just send all the cash you can to JREF or blogs you think are doing a great job battling pseudoscience? While that certainly wouldn’t hurt, there are more ways to help skeptics make a difference in the media without spending a dime. All you need is to apply just a little effort. When you see a good skeptical or educational article, send it around, submit it to a social bookmarking site, or link to it on your blog if you have one. Send it out via Twitter or discuss it in a forum you frequent. If you see pseudoscience being reported by news agencies, contact their editors with links to skeptical analyses on the situation, especially when it comes to local media outlets. Basically, go out and spread science and good skepticism as far and wide as you can. It sounds so basic and simple, but so few people actually do it that the media at large is barely aware of skeptical movements. By constantly reminding them about growing skeptical blogs with links, you would help raise the profile of the skeptics and the readership of their blogs.

I know this seems like a very simplistic and almost obvious method, but the problem is that so few people do it and without taking the time to really spread the word about good skeptical and popular science blogs which offer real insights and solid facts, skeptics will always only reach a limited audience. Of course the skeptics need to play a part in this too. We need to work together and help with linking and word of mouth references while keeping fresh content and good science coming at a steady pace. One good place to start would be to submit your information to Grassroots Skeptics and get involved with local skeptic groups as well as reach out to new audiences. Try to get your work syndicated and yes, go ahead and treat your blog like a business so you can set traffic goals, create promotional plans and expand your audience. And above all, remember a very important point. You need to engage people, challenge their beliefs and promote discussion. There’s the often made assumption that the facts speak for themselves but in reality, data is mute. You need to animate it and expose the agendas of those who try to spread pseudoscience for cash and personal fame. Then your message will be far more effective when readers choose to disseminate it into the media world.

[ illustration by Rolan Gonzalez ]

Over the last ten years, we’ve been inundated by a constantly growing stream of punditry and in a quest to give every view its time in the sun and equal treatment, we’ve managed to empower a contingent of people whose disregard for education, expertise and those with different political beliefs are nothing short of amazing. From old fixtures of partisan inanity, to new sensations like Glenn Beck, a man who seems to be a living, breathing incarnation of Above Top Secret, Prison Planet and Infowars, pundits have taken over TV. Whereas before, we knew that personal opinions and editorial agendas were being mixed into our news and accepted the subtle attempts at media manipulation as an unspoken given, the bias and partisanship of the news today is brazen and immediately apparent in the most obvious and ridiculous ways. When comedians are trusted more than news channels and the hardest hitting reporting comes after South Park and Futurama reruns, we have to be willing to admit to a crank infestation in the mass media.

Likewise, with ever growing access to medical and scientific information on the web, there are plenty of those who believe that reading WebMD or looking up a few concepts in physics online give them the knowledge to seriously debate with scientists and experts who dedicate their entire lives to the topics they study. Fueled by anti-intellectualism which sees genuine expertise as nothing more than elitist pretense and assumes that all kinds of complicated things like cosmology or oncology are actually simple and can be mastered with a quick reading of a few web pages on the subject, the graduates of the University of Google have been the engines behind the rapid spread of the anti-vaccination movement, 2012 doomsday alarmism, homeopathy, Electric Universe and countless other pseudosciences with which we’re confronted today. And when politics enter the debate, things can get out of control. Just show a global warming denialist some snow and he’ll thunder how the very fact that we can still get a blizzard in winter is proof that the planet can’t possibly be warming up. Right. Because obviously, a potential five to six degree warming means it will never snow again. Ever.

The years of neglect for teaching critical thinking and curiosity in favor of cramming for standardized tests and blatant anti-intellectualism from partisan pundits and post-modernists alike has come back to bite us and bite us hard. We seem to have jettisoned the idea of experts and authority and replaced it with manufactroversies for ratings and blowhards who generally have no qualifications other than a strong opinion on the matter. We started taking medical advice from Oprah and Jenny McCarthy instead of actual doctors. We see conspiracies everywhere we turn. And we have to be so nice and considerate towards everyone and everything that unless we want to be flooded with complaints about being mean and bitter, we have to give everyone a pass, from a creationist who wants to dismantle science education after having a chat with God, to homeopaths and faith healers who want to force insurance companies to pay for things that don’t work. And perhaps worst of all, the cranks are highly paid professionals in their con artistry while the skeptics and scientists who try to keep them in line can’t even hold a candle to their income.

It’s not all gloom and doom though and there is a way out of this mess. But it’s not going be done in a day or a year. This turn of events took years to develop and it will take years to be wound back, starting with better and more reasonable education standards. Rather than teach kids the tests and allow the school administrators to treat them like products to be churned out on a steady schedule, create curriculums what will challenge the students, make them think, give them variety and accelerate how fast they learn. Education should stimulate, not become routine memorization and repetition. Next, there has to be an emphasis on math and science to emphasize the need for R&D, expertise, knowledge and groom a new generation of critical thinkers and high aiming innovators. These changes won’t come on their own or even with a nice letter to your local lawmakers, but after intense, thundering campaigns that don’t just affirm the need for science but tell a story of a nation in decline as far as innovation is concerned. Rather than just assume that the facts speak for themselves (they often don’t to those who are not aware of them), underline the problem. People should fear a future without a powerhouse R&D economy and we need to explain to them exactly why in the most brutally honest way we can. Nice obviously isn’t working. Perhaps honest and straight to the gut is the way to go.

Yes these are lofty goals and they will take a lot of time and effort, but if enough people start caring and getting tuned into the skepticism movement to help spread good science and the why we need to change the way we do things, maybe, just maybe the next decade could be the decade of scientists, researchers, engineers and artists who work for a better future for us all while inspiring others to do the same…

There are plenty of cancer studies involving the radiation emitted by wireless devices, however, a big problem with these studies is the delay between the technological advancement of the devices and finding tumors. It could take up to a decade for tumors to grow and over this time, the subjects change five or six generations of cell phones and wireless devices. Which ones are responsible? How did their emissions cause tumors? Are the tumors really cancerous or benign? Is there an identifiable, statistically significant trend in specific cancer types among the heaviest cell phone users? These questions are difficult to answer since there are so many kinds of cancers and tumors, and since cancers are a degenerative condition more likely to appear with age, as we’re living longer and longer lives, it means that more and more people are living to develop cancers and a simple correlation isn’t enough to make the case for cell phones being a major health hazard. There’s also the important issue of how radiation from headsets would even cause tumors.

Still, that hasn’t stopped both doctors and journalists from claiming that our wireless devices are slowly killing us, or at the very least, harming our kids in unpredictable ways. For example, last year, The Independent ran an article which linked cell phone use of pregnant women to behavioral problems in children. Oddly, most of the cited problems sound an awful lot like borderline autism spectrum disorders, so much so, that it’s kind of surprising that anti-vax groups haven’t been going after cell phone makers. The study itself monitored over 13,000 kids born in Denmark during the early 1990s and concluded that mothers using handsets more than twice a day had a 54% chance of seeing their children develop emotional and behavioral problems. And even stranger, when the kids started using cell phones they were 80% less likely to develop certain social skills. It seems, however, that the reporter forgot to look at the study’s abstract, which states that the results may be completely unrelated and could be due to a wide variety of other factors not tracked by the researchers.

But while the article above and others like it seem to follow the Science News Cycle, sometimes, alarms are being sent out by medical professionals. As noted in the AP story about the proposed bill, preliminary results of a study on cell phone use prompted the director of University of Pennsylvania’s cancer center to send out a warning which asked to keep children away from headsets for the safety of their developing brains. Since the study wasn’t named, it’s hard to track down its actual results, however the fact that doctors are jumping on one of the oldest technophobic urban legends of the last few decades is disconcerting. This is a situation in which you need skeptics to look over the available information and decide if there really is any evidence for the a cell phone induced spectrum of cancers. So far, studies seem to show either a slight risk of benign tumor growth or absolutely no notable effects of cell phone use. Research projects that find any risk of malignancy tended to suffer from poor controls or had a sample too small to be meaningful. This is why it’s been so hard to reach a consensus on the issue and the researchers tend to stay away from making definitive claims.

So with all due respect to Rep. Boland, but her gesture to protect the citizens of her state is based on over-the- top media reports rather than sound science and would more likely scare people and propagate urban myths than help avoid cancers or other health hazards. What this example shows us, is just how easily bad science in the press can become pointless laws and why we need responsible, skeptical science reporting instead of scary stories about cell phones frying people’s brains extra crispy with deadly radiation, based on skimming a study which makes no claims to this effect. It might not move as many papers or generate that many hits, but it would cut down on senseless panic and potentially, needless and confusing laws.

See: Divan HA, Kheifets L, Obel C, & Olsen J (2008). Prenatal and postnatal exposure to cell phone use and behavioral problems in children. Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.), 19 (4), 523-9 PMID: 18467962

Considering that Bill is getting up there in age, getting so worked up is probably not good for his heart. In fact, prolonged stress can shave years off your life. But he’s still at it, taking every possible opportunity to make his paranoid fantasies and indignation heard. To give you an idea of what a Bill Donohue rant sounds like, try to imagine an apoplectic banshee howling into the wind. And just to make it more accurate, think of the banshee as a cross between Rush Limbaugh and a toddler having a temper tantrum. Or Glenn Beck. Either way, you’ll get a very similar result. But I digress a little here. What I really wanted to note was the way Bill truly outdid his own rabid demagoguery in the above mentioned column with the following quote…

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.

Holy FSM on a pasta box! Did he perchance want to walk by a college campus and spit in someone’s face as well, just to put the icing on the cake? Or maybe crash a secularist meeting with his wife and have her praise his virility as lewdly as possible in public? Oh, wait a second… That’s right. Our paragon of morals and values is divorced, so ladies, if you’re in the market for a 61 year old with no control over his emotions and most likely to see you as nothing more than a method of boosting the population of people like him, he’s available. And at this point, it’s hard to know how to best mock his inane ramblings because he does a pretty good job of it with no help from me, or anyone else. That quote is just such a perfect combination of cheap, false piety, paranoia and vicious hatred, you want to slide it into a holster and use it like a bludgeon for future debates.

Look, it’s one thing to defend people who have to bear the brunt of real hate speech. But to offend people who you loathe simply because they’re not like you because you can, because you want to, and because you want to use your religion as an excuse to do that? That’s pathetically low and disgustingly exploitative of your faith in the kind of base, earthly way that pretty much every high brow message of the Bible warns you not to do. Then, just to top his already ridiculous antics, Bill wants to boil down the entire idea of how a civilization will proceed in its social development to breeding, in the most offensive method possible. So is that all it is? Pump out an extra couple of babies, the GOP needs all the votes it can get? Does he not realize that he’s using his fans as nothing more than human canon fodder in a bandwagon fallacy?

Maybe, one day, Bill will realize that when someone calls you hateful, offensive and exploitative, you don’t jump up and proceed to spew out the most hateful, offensive and exploitative thing you can. Frankly, it’s amazing to me why there are people who want to be defended by someone with the ability to make them look worse with pretty much every attempt to advance their interests in the press. It has to take an impressive level of denial or a total lack of self-awareness to use Bill Donohue as your face to the outside world.

[ illustration of a dark soul by Neil Blevins ]

Just take a look at the comments on the story about Ida’s failure to deliver and it’s pretty clear that the vultures have picked up the scent and took to the air. Some are even starting to take exploratory bites. We’ll get to that issue in just a minute, but first, let’s go back to Jørn for a moment and emphasize that it’s these kinds of crazy, ridiculous stunts that the peer review process is supposed to prevent. By not letting experts review his work as he shouted his discovery from the rooftops as loudly as he could, amplified by a giant media klaxon, Hurum is now being very publicly reveled as an incompetent glory hound. When you’ve given the likes of Ken Ham good reason to laugh at you and say that the anti-science ravings of his crew were actually spot on in their analysis of an ancient fossil while you were off by a mile, you might as well just find another career.

Now, lest you think that the scientific community was enamored with the fossil until they realized that it wasn’t all that and the alchemical formula for the Philosopher’s Stone, let’s review PZ’s discontent with the hype, the skepticism voiced by Carl Zimmer, the bitterly snarky post from the astoundingly tame Ed Yong, and just for good measure, the disclaimer from New Scientist. And this is just a very cursory sampling. Keep in mind that Hurum and his team kept everything secret until the big reveal and had the media world ready to explode with the supposedly sensational news. Even if Ida really was a very distant relative, the coverage was going to be overblown by any reasonable standard. The doubt expressed by experts, and found to be correct, just adds insult to injury. But in this case, with the creationist noise machine trying to keep up the manufactroversy, Jørn should’ve been walking on eggshells and science journalists should’ve checked ten times over whether they were being sold on nothing but hype and showmanship as SEED Magazine pointed out while the story made its rounds through the international media.

So to all the creationists out there, yes, Ida was an overhyped media property rather than some sort of proof of evolution as we know it. However, the hype was in the media. Scientists were skeptical, found the fossil to be just a wonderfully preserved specimen of an evolutionary dead end and are off to study the countless known and confirmed fossils that trace our lineage. If you say that scientists were sure they confirmed everything they knew about modern biology when Ida was revealed, you’re lying, plain and simple. Your ideology hasn’t been magically validated and evidence for it still totally absent. And to Jørn Hurum, maybe spend a little more time on writing the paper and checking with other scientists before you announce that you found the remains of an alien spaceship or whatever it is you think will get you a spot in the history books, ok?

Usually, I try to ignore these kinds of stories because those who write them tend to be hecklers without a lot to say. They just want attention, someone to talk to them, and having the spotlight turned on them for an instant or two so they taunt atheists into snapping back at them. But in this case, the over-the-top nonsense just has to be corrected. Basically, Hagerty’s thesis is that because some atheists want to remain low key and others want to speak out about the darker side of religion and religious abuses happening around the world loudly and clearly, there’s going to be a grand ideological showdown in the movement. The underlying message? Of course all those angry, bitter, disorganized, overly opinionated atheists would be fighting with each other and coming up with different ideas to promote their worldview. Totally unlike all those religious denominations that split over the millennia from their parent religions and spent centuries at adds with each other, often violently.

Did the Hagertys of the world who rush to report every time Hitchens looks funny at a religious symbol stop to think for just a few nanoseconds that very few bother to point out when some pastor spews hateful drivel that condemns those who don’t believe his stories to Hell? When was the last time there was a great controversy about some priest’s verbal spit at atheists? Isn’t that a little hypocritical? Hold on, scratch that. Isn’t that blatant hypocrisy on parade? Why can you get away with piling abuse on a certain group of people if you’re clutching a Bible or a Qu’ran, but not if you’re holding up a college textbook on genetics or quantum mechanics? Because that’s what society allowed for thousands of years and that makes it ok? And then you’re going to throw verbal hissy fits after those of us who actually have real world evidence for our claims tell you we had enough? Time to get off the high horse, really. Having a religious belief doesn’t make you any better or more moral. It simply makes you a social primate who wants to belong to a group.

Tell you what, if you really think that not believing a deity detailed in holy books because I’ve seen no evidence for such a supernatural entity and basing my life around the real world makes me a terrible, immoral person, go right ahead. It’s not like I can stop you. If you think that helping people not because I want to earn a brownie point with a cosmos spanning, omniscient being that looks after the universe (yet somehow has time to peek in your shower and list every sin you commit in it), but simply because it helps people, is a sign of stupidity or evil, then by all means, mark me as a nefarious degenerate. But if all that keeps you from letting go of all self- control is the threat of being punished in the afterlife, I daresay that you’re probably not as good as you might think and you have no right to claim the moral high ground. And if you think your pontifications on what or how people should believe somehow make you seem enlightened or helpful, allow me to tell you that in reality, the effect is just the opposite and you come off as a condescending blowhard instead.

[ illustration by Jeremy Kalgreen for Amorphia Apparel ]

On his blog, Hood very clearly shows that the reporters who talked to him were interested in pushing a certain kind of story and technical details like the actual findings, what they meant and how they could be applied just got in the way. The journalists and editors wanted a line about definitive proof that humans are wired to have a religion to stir up controversy and so they cherry-picked scientific work about our predispositions to believe religious doctrines and how they might have evolved to come up with a fluff piece espousing the same “but it’s natural to believe in God” defense priests have been using for decades. In reality, humans are predisposed to accept the ideas of supernatural entities as causal agents of the universe but their actual beliefs depend on a particular indoctrination. According to Hood, religion as we know it today is indeed a cultural phenomena.

I talked about the early emergence of mind body dualism and how it relates to the notion of an after-life and my particular research interest, psychological essentialism. I said that I thought many supernatural beliefs had a natural origin in the way children reason about the world and that while story-telling was one way of transmitting beliefs, in many instances [the] cultural stories reflected notions that were intuitively plausible to children. In fact, I categorically said that religions were cultural constructs as Richard Dawkins had proposed. Where I differ from Dawkins (and again this is very clear in the book) is the likelihood of removing supernatural beliefs through education but this is an empirical question that is not yet resolved.

So if the reporters were actually responsible science writers, what they would’ve said is that we’re suggestible to religious indoctrination as part of our evolutionary lineage. As social animals, we need order and structure in society and organized religions can provide it, which is why one of the reasons religions stayed around as human civilization built from villages into city states and eventually nations and empires. If you want to claim that a belief in your religion is somehow natural, there’s not a shred of scientific evidence for your assertions because being a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew or a Wiccan is a matter of choice or indoctrination, not something with which humans are innately born, just something they could be taught to believe. Hood’s research simply tries to shed light on the psychological dynamics of how faith in the supernatural propagates.

This case is a clear illustration of why we need competent science writers reporting on science, not just hacks after a false controversy and with absolutely no regard for the facts involved. If anything, their coverage was a gross misrepresentation of scientific work for the sake of selling copies and generating page views. We keep wondering why people seem to be in the dark about so many scientific developments and this focus of using an edgy research topic as mangled fodder for culture war debates is one of the reasons. If you think anybody will put a stop to this, you’re sadly mistaken because for many media outlets today, accuracy and legitimacy of their reporting comes as a distant third to popularity and ad sales.