Puritans in charge

H. L. Mencken once quipped that "Puritanism [is] the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."  We always associate Puritanism with the 17th century, with funny hats with buckles and dark clothing and women in modest dresses -- and the torture and execution of witches.  In other words, as a thing of the past.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

However, there is a deep streak of Puritanism in our culture still.  The simultaneous obsession with and revulsion over sex in the United States is peculiar, to say the least.  You can't go to a mall without being accosted by images of nearly naked models of both genders in places like Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch.  Movies and television are full of references to sex, both oblique and overt.  And yet a lot of the time, we alternately act as if sex is shameful or depraved, or as if it simply doesn't exist.

And in no realm does our split attitude show as clearly as in how we educate children about their own bodies.  Any time someone proposes frank, realistic sex education in schools, parents have a meltdown about the erosion of morality in the United States.  As if their children won't become sexually active unless they find out about it in class.  As if there weren't an inverse correlation between teen birth rates and the degree to which birth control, HIV prevention, and general sex education is addressed in the schools.  As if abstinence-only education programs haven't been shown over and over to be completely ineffective at reducing teen pregnancy and the incidence of STDs.

Ignore it and it won't happen, seems to be the usual approach.

Of course, when simply ignoring sex doesn't work, the modern-day Puritans choose instead to go on the offense.  Witness the recent push by lawmakers in Kansas to prosecute teachers who "expose students to material of a sexual nature."

We're not talking about pornography here.  The whole thing got started by Representative Mary Pilcher-Cook, who flipped her frilly white bonnet when she found out that there was a poster displayed in Shawnee Mission High School that had the question, "How do people express their sexual feelings?" and listed "oral sex" as one possibility.  Pilcher-Cook said, in a quote that I am not making up, "Children could have been irreparably harmed by viewing this poster... because it affects their brains."

"State laws should protect parents’ rights to safeguard our children against harmful materials, especially in schools," Pilcher-Cook went on to say.  "The fact that the poster was posted without fear is a problem in and of itself."

Phillip Cosby, head of the American Family Association of Kansas and Missouri, was quick to jump to her defense.  With respect to children finding out about sex, he said, "It’s a tsunami.  And maybe we’re the Dutch boy who’s just putting their finger in the dam."  He went on to say that he can't even watch a Kansas City Royals game with his grandchildren without their seeing a commercial for erectile dysfunction.

So how is that a problem, Mr. Cosby?  When my sons were young, I can see the conversation going this way:

Television commercial:  "See your doctor if you think this medication might help your erectile dysfunction." 

My kid:  "Dad, what's 'erectile dysfunction?'" 

Me:  It's a problem some older guys get, where the penis doesn't work as it should.  There's a medication that can help." 

My kid:  "Oh.  Okay.  When's the baseball game going to be back on?"

Yup.  They'd clearly have been scarred for life.

It isn't that I'm not cognizant of the importance of a child's age with regards to what sort of material they're exposed to.  With sexuality, as with most things, there is a point where children become capable of understanding, and it's not a good idea to push ideas on kids for which they're not emotionally ready.  But we seem to have no particular problem with trusting educators to make those judgments in other realms, do we?

No one is assigning Macbeth to nine-year-olds, for example.

But there's something different about sex, apparently, that makes it taboo at any age.  Instead of being honest with our children about their own bodies, we're teaching them that their feelings and desires are inherently shameful.

I still remember a couple of years ago in my neuroscience class, when we were talking about neurotransmitters.  I brought up endorphin, which is a neurotransmitter associated with pleasurable feelings of all sorts, and I mentioned that endorphin is released in the brain during orgasm.

One student looked a little taken aback.  I asked him what was up.  He said, blushing scarlet, "I've never heard a teacher use that word before."

This kid, by the way, was in 11th grade.

Why shouldn't we be honest with kids about their bodies as a source of pleasure and as a way to connect with their partners, and not just as a tool for reproduction?  When we take a step past the focus on men and women as baby-making machines, it's usually only to warn students about the risks.  Only rarely do we make any effort to give teenagers a well-rounded view of sexuality.  How do we expect young people to approach sex in a respectful and responsible fashion when we won't even bring up the topic?  And considering the fact that teenagers are usually hyper-focused on sex anyhow, isn't it better to discuss it openly rather than pretend that if we ignore it, it'll go away?

But the undercurrent of Puritanism that still exists in the United States makes it unlikely that such an approach will be realized any time soon.  If we're still at the point when a state legislator wants to have criminal charges levied against a teacher for mentioning oral sex, we have a very long way to go.

The random comment department

Two news stories I came across this weekend are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

First, a paper in the Journal of Advertising, by Ioannis Kareklas, Darrel Muehling, and T. J. Weber of Washington State University, tells a frightening but unsurprising story.  Their study shows that people who are presented with data about vaccination safety are more likely to consider online comments from random individuals as credible than they are information from institutions like the Center for Disease Control.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Here's how the experiment was set up:

Participants were led to believe that the pro-vaccination PSA was sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while the anti-vaccination PSA was sponsored by the National Vaccine Information Council (NVIC). Both PSAs were designed to look like they appeared on each organization's respective website to enhance validity. 

The PSAs were followed by comments from fictitious online commenters who either expressed pro- or anti-vaccination viewpoints. Participants weren't told anything about who the commenters were, and unisex names were used to avoid potential gender biases.

The researchers then presented participants with a questionnaire to determine how (or if) their views on vaccination had changed.

"The results kind of blew us away," said Kareklas in a press release.  "People were trusting the random online commenters just as much as the PSA itself."

Which, as I said, is disheartening but unsurprising, given that people like Jenny McCarthy are the public version of a Random Online Commenter.

Kareklas et al. followed this up with a second study, to see if the commenters were believed even more strongly if they were identified as doctors (as opposed to one of two other professions).  The commenters who were self-identified doctors had an even stronger effect -- i.e., they outweighed the CDC information even more.

Which explains "Dr." Andrew Wakefield.

And this brings me to the second story, which comes out of Kansas -- where a bill has been introduced into the legislature that would prevent professionals from mentioning their titles or credentials in opinion articles and letters to the editor.

The story about how House Bill 2234 was introduced is interesting in and of itself.  The bill was offered into committee by Representative Virgil Peck (R-Tyro), but Peck initially denied having done so.

"I introduce bills in committee sometimes when I’m asked out of courtesy," Peck said.  "It’s not because I have any skin in the game or I care about it.  I’m not even sure I introduced it, but if he said I did, I did."

Our leaders, ladies and gentlemen.  "Not even sure" what bills they introduce regarding issues they don't care about.

While on the one hand, the Kareklas study does point out the danger -- if someone thinks you're a doctor (for example), they're more likely to be swayed by your comments even if you're wrong -- in what universe is the public better off not knowing the background of the person whose words they're reading?

Representative John Carmichael (D-Wichita) nailed it.  With regards to the bill, he said, "If you are in fact a professor at The University of Kansas, that is part of your identity and part of your resume.  To muzzle an academic in identifying him or herself, and their accomplishment, not only does it have the effect of denying them their right to free speech, it also denies the public the right to understand who is commenting and what their, perhaps, bias or interest might be."

And that last bit is the important part.  My views on education -- which I throw out frequently and often vehemently -- are clearly affected by the fact that I'm a public school teacher.  Whether that makes me more or less credible would, I suppose, depend on your viewpoint.  But how on earth would you be better informed by not knowing what my profession is, by having less information with which to evaluate what I've said?

The Kareklas study and the bill introduced by Virgil "What Bill Did I Just Introduce?" Peck highlight one tremendously important thing, however; the general public is incredibly bad at critical reading.  One of the most important things you can do, when you read (or listen to) media, is to weigh what's being said against the facts and evidence, and consider the possibility of bias and appeal to authority.  The Kareklas study shows that we're pretty terrible at the former, and the Kansas bill proposes to eliminate our ability even to attempt the latter.

All making it even more important that children be taught critical thinking skills.  Because if adults don't consider information from the Center for Disease Control to have more credibility than opinions coming from an online commenter, there's something seriously wrong.

Lawsuits and sinking ships

It's been a bad week for the creationists.

First we had the news in Kansas that U. S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree has dismissed a lawsuit by Citizens for Objective Public Education that claimed that teaching evolution amounted to the endorsement of atheism, calling it "without merit."

COPE objected to the Next Generation Science Standards, which are unequivocal in their support of the evolutionary model, saying that they "lead impressionable students into the religious sphere by leading them to ask ultimate questions like what is the cause and nature of life in the universe — 'where do we come from?'"

This casts science teachers in the role of theologians, COPE says, even though science "has not answered these religious questions and never can."

What's interesting about this is that they're partly right.  Science is closing in on more and more of the big questions -- how the universe began, the origins of life on Earth, whether life might be possible on other planets orbiting other stars.  But where they get this badly wrong is that these aren't religious questions.  Religion answers these questions one way -- "god did it" -- and then promptly says "q.e.d." and closes the book.  It makes no tests of its claims, runs no experiments, does not revise the model if new data comes to light.

Science teachers aren't theologians.  Far from it.  Science and religion as methods are diametrically opposed to one another.  If science and religion come to different answers about a question, you have to choose one or the other.  There is no reconciling them, because their ways of arriving at the truth have little in common.

But in a way, by teaching evolution, we are making a statement with some theological import.  We're saying that science works, that it is in this case a better way of knowing the truth than religion is.  But this isn't that shocking, really.  Even most extremely religious folks trust science in a host of other areas.  It's not like fundamentalists are asking us to jettison the periodic table in favor of revealed truth regarding the composition of matter.  Evolution has become something of a last-stand battleground, where science's evidence-based answers and religion's evidence-free claims are coming to blows.

Crabtree, predictably, danced around that point a little, merely claiming in his ruling that COPE had not been able to provide specific enough details of the injuries NGSS is supposed to have inflicted upon innocent children.  I guess it wouldn't be politic for a federal judge to come right out and say, "Get your damn noses out of the science classroom."


So this has understandably put creationists on the defensive, and far be it from Ken Ham not to be the leader of the pack.  He announced this week that he's starting a billboard campaign in Kentucky, aimed at people who have laughed at his "Ark Encounter" project:

What I find most amusing about this is that he has somehow linked an understanding of science with being liberal, which last I checked weren't the same thing.  But as a ploy, it's pretty shrewd, given that he's operating in a part of the United States where "liberals" are right up there with "baby eaters" in popularity.

But as Hemant Mehta points out, there are a number of other problems with Ham's claim, first and foremost being that atheists could care less if Ham builds an ark, we just want him to follow the law while he's doing it.  (Recall that the whole project came under legal scrutiny when it was found that Ham was requiring all of his employees to sign a contract promising that they'd adhere to biblical literalism, which is illegal for a for-profit corporation that is in line for $18,000,000 in state tax breaks.)

And as Mehta also mentioned, you can't sink this ship largely because it's on land, and we're not really friends.  But Ham has never been known to allow reality to intrude on his vision, so there's no reason we should expect him to start now.

In any case, these efforts strike me as desperation, and it may be that we're seeing the last gasps of this fundamentally anti-science worldview.  At some point, they're bound to give up, right?

One can only hope.  If the creationists are struggling in states like Kansas and Kentucky, it might be that as a nation we can finally move past Bronze Age mythology as a primary basis for understanding.

The water turned to blood

One of the things that bugs me the most about attributing supernatural causes to natural events is that it is, fundamentally, a lazy stance.

Something odd happens, something for which there is no ready explanation.  It amazes me how quickly people jump to "it's a miracle of god" or "an angel did it" if it was good, and "it was Satan" or "a demon did it" if it was bad.  Conspiracy-based explanations are the same; how much simpler it is to say, "a secret evil government cadre is responsible" than it is to look carefully into the phenomenon and really find out what's going on.

I bring this up because of a pond in Wichita, Kansas, which just a couple of days ago turned blood-red.

The owner of the pond, Freddy Fernandez, is pretty sure there's a rational explanation, and when he posted the photos on Facebook, he was adamant that he didn't think it was anything but some peculiar but completely natural phenomenon.  "I just don't want people showing up, thinking this is some Biblical phenomenon or something like that," Fernandez said.

Well, a lot of people beg to differ.

Within hours the photos had been shared thousands of times, and the explanations -- if I can dignify them with that term -- began to fly.  Now, remember; none of these people had actually seen the pond personally, or done any tests of the water.  All they'd seen were a couple of photographs.  But still, here are a few of the thousands of suggestions Fernandez received:

• The water was poisoned by the government as part of a FEMA-based plan to kill everyone in the Midwest.
• The pond water was contaminated by chemicals rained out from "chemtrails."
• The blood-red color is a new life form, a highly pathogenic bacteria that was seeded there by bioterrorists.
• Because it's "water turned to blood," this is a sign of the ascendancy of the Evil One, and we should all be on the lookout for the Antichrist.

It was the last one that seemed to be the most popular.  Amongst the missives Fernandez received was one from a gentleman named Edward Cantu that read, "These things happen at the time of the End when Jesus Returns.  Prepare for the coming of the Lord Jesus by repenting of all sin and recieving [sic] Jesus as Lord and Savior.  Ask Him to fill you with His Holy Spirit. God Bless you."

Of course, the more likely explanation is that we're looking at some sort of algal bloom, similar to what happens during a marine "red tide."   But remember:  I haven't been there, either.  I also have run no tests, sampled no water.  The difference is that I used the words "more likely."  I don't know what the blood-red water is, and I'm perfectly content to wait until scientists run some tests (presuming any do) before I settle on an explanation I believe.

That's the thing about being a skeptic; you don't have to have answers immediately.  Or, perhaps, ever.  If there's something you can't explain, you say, "I can't explain that."  Then you look for a rational explanation, using the known facts, and whatever scientific techniques are at your disposal.  You don't immediately jump to saying "it must be the government" or "it must be chemtrails" or "it must be the Antichrist." 

It all reminds me of a former student who couldn't stand not understanding things, not even for a moment.  Her anxiety levels when confronted with having to suspend patiently a state of ignorance were off the charts.  (As you might imagine, science was problematic for her, as in learning science you so often have to keep slogging your way forward, hoping the water will clear eventually.)  One day, I was showing my class how to do a rather difficult numerical analysis technique, and I had a set of data we were going to be working with.  So I put the data on the board, and said, "Copy the data, and after everyone's done I'll tell you what to do next."

So my anxious student copies furiously, finishes first, and then starts to babble.  "What do we do now?  Do you want us to graph it?  Will we need a calculator?  Should I get out graph paper?  What do you want me to do with the numbers?"

And one of her classmates turned to her and said, "Kate, just let the damn data sit there and relax for a moment, okay?"

To which I say: amen.  Just let the damn pond be.  Someone in Wichita who has a background in experimental science will undoubtedly figure out what is going on, and then we'll have an answer.  Until then, it's perfectly okay for the skeptics to wait.  Settling on an answer, based on essentially no hard evidence, is the lazy way out.

COPE, Kansas, and the battle over evolution (again)

It's with a sense of "Oy, here we go again" that I must tell you that a group of parents in Kansas calling themselves COPE (Citizens for Objective Public Education) have sued the Kansas State Board of Education for adopting the Next Generation Science Standards, which explicitly endorse the teaching of evolution.

Here's the gist of the suit:

The Plaintiffs, consisting of students, parents and Kansas resident taxpayers, and a representative organization, complain that the adoption by the Defendant State Board of Education on June 11, 2013 of Next Generation Science Standards, dated April 2013 (the Standards; http://www.nextgenscience.org/) and the related Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas, (2012;
(http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13165#), incorporated therein by reference (the "Framework" with the Framework and Standards referred to herein as the “F&S”) will have the effect of causing Kansas public schools to establish and endorse a non-theistic religious worldview (the “Worldview”) in violation of the Establishment, Free Exercise, and Speech Clauses of the First Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clauses of the 14th Amendment.

So it's pretty much same old, same old.  They never get tired of the game, somehow, despite their repeated defeats, most tellingly the stinging slapdown they got in the Kitzmiller vs. the Dover Area School Board decision of 2005, which read, in part:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID [Intelligent Design] arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community...  It is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research. Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena...  ID's backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.

So, yeah.  Ouchie-wawa.  But if you're on a Holy Crusade, you never accept defeat.  So they're back at it again, with (one hopes) the same results in store for them.

What makes this more interesting, though, is a piece on the subject by the eminent neurologist, writer, and skeptic Steven Novella, in his wonderful blog NeuroLogica.  The post, entitled "Kansas Citizens Vote to Reject Science," is (of course) a thorough rebuke of the motives and rationality of COPE and any members of the judiciary who might agree with them, but it contained a passage that made me frown a little:

Science does not require non-theism. It does not even require naturalism. Science merely proceeds as if the world is naturalistic, that there is cause and effect and nothing magical that violates cause and effect. This is called methodological naturalism – science is a set of methods that work within a naturalistic framework of cause and effect.

Science is officially agnostic, however, toward any deeper philosophical conclusions about whether or not anything supernatural actual exists. It simply relegates such questions outside the sphere of science.

This does not mean that philosophers cannot rely on empirical evidence and scientific notions to argue for a naturalistic universe. That is my personal belief – the simplest explanation for why we cannot know about anything supernatural, and why science works within the assumption of naturalism, is because naturalism is actually true. But science does not require that belief.

While I agree with him insofar as his views speak of religion in general, I disagree entirely when they are applied to specific religions.  And, after all, almost no one belongs to a "religion in general."  There are religions that see no conflict whatsoever between science and a belief in god (the Unitarians, for example).  There are others which very much do.  So it's all very well to say that "science is officially agnostic... about whether or not anything supernatural exists," but when push comes to shove and science runs headlong into religion, a Southern Baptist (for example) is going to have to decide where (s)he stands on the matter.

It's a little disingenuous, I think, for Dr. Novella (however much I respect him and approve of his views) to say that mandating the teaching of evolution in public schools is outside of the purview of religion, just as religion is outside of the purview of science.  But if part of your religious belief is that god created the world in six days, six-thousand-odd years ago, then my saying that the Earth is six or so billion years old, that organisms have evolved into the forms we have today, that there was no Great Flood, and so on, certainly has religious implications.  By stating that the latter are to be taught in science classes -- and I believe, of course, that they should be -- I am stating, not so subtly, that your religion is wrong on those points.

You can surely see how both viewpoints can't be true.

So, however much we'd like to accept the Stephen Jay Gould idea of non-overlapping magisteria -- that science and religion both have their places, and those places do not intersect -- there is a significant percentage of Americans who don't see it that way.  Young-Earth creationists, in particular, are completely correct in seeing scientific statements as affecting, and in many cases negating, their religious claims.

To them, scientific statements are religious statements.  Not that science and religion have the same methods; in fact, precisely because they don't.  They have accepted the religious way of knowing as the ultimate truth -- anything that comes into conflict with that, then, must be false and evil.

Now don't get me wrong; I think the members of COPE are a bunch of irrational nitwits.  Their stance about evolution is demonstrably incorrect.  However, that doesn't mean that their claim -- that teaching their children evolution is a practice that carries with it an intrinsic statement about their religion -- is false as well.

So as much as I wish we would stop pussyfooting around and playing nice with these people, the Establishment clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."  At first glance, this would clearly seem to place religion in the context of a personal practice -- making any public mandate of a religious point of view illegal.  But what if, as in this case, kids are being made to learn, and to treat as truth, a viewpoint that directly contradicts their religious beliefs?

How is that itself not a religious statement?

I dunno.  Makes me glad I'm not a judge.  Despite my inclination to tell the members of COPE, "Hey, y'all just get yourselves back to the 17th century where you belong, I'm sure there are some witches y'all need to take care of back there," I'm not sure it's that easy.  I hope that this latest lawsuit goes the way of Kitzmiller vs. Dover, but however it's decided, I don't think the war is over quite yet.