Blind spots

Authors reveal more in their work, sometimes, than they may have intended.

That thought crossed my mind more than once while reading the book Hadrian by British historian, antiquarian, diplomat, and writer Stewart Perowne.  The book is a history and biography of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who was the emperor of Rome from 117 to 138 C.E.  Hadrian is considered to be one of the better rulers Rome had -- generally fair-minded, astute, and intelligent -- although considering he's competing against guys like Caligula, Nero, Domitian, and Elagabalus, that may not be a very high bar.

A sculpture of the emperor Hadrian, circa 130 C. E. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Djehouty, München SMAEK 2019-03-23n, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The book, which was published in 1960, was interesting enough, if a bit dry and pedantic at times (did we really need an entire chapter devoted to minute details about the architecture of the Pantheon?).  But there were a couple of times that what he wrote made me do a double-take.

The first time came when he was discussing the Roman program of expansion and colonization, and engaged in a digression comparing it to the policies of the British Empire between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.  Perowne writes:

No other country has ever had a finer or more generous record in its dealings with other races than the English.  No great power, since history began, has occupied, and advanced to autonomous sovereignty, so large an extent of territory in so short a period.  The advance, it is true, was from the very first, when the American colonists set the precedent, encouraged by the inhabitants of the territory concerned; nevertheless, it did not take long for England to adopt as a principle that the aim of all colonial enterprise is the elevation of the colonials, and their establishment as independent states, in whatever form of association they may choose with Great Britain. 

Say what?

I think there are citizens of a few nations I can think of who would beg to differ.  Great Britain fought like hell not to let a good many of their colonies gain their independence.  It was only when faced with sustained revolt -- and the impossibility of continuing a minority rule over the unwilling -- that they grudgingly granted sovereignty.  (And a great many of those nations are still struggling to overcome the long-term effects of colonialism -- oppression, exploitation, wealth inequality, and bigotry.)

I know there's the whole "man of his time" thing you hear about writers in the past, and which has been used to look past even the horrific racism that threads through a lot of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.  Here, it's not quite that extreme, but was still kind of startling to read.  And perhaps there are still a good many of us who have the tendency to consider our own country as intrinsically superior, even if we wouldn't necessarily put it that way.  But it's somewhere between baffling and appalling that someone who was a historian, who devoted his life to investigating and understanding other cultures -- who, in fact, worked as a diplomat in Malta, Aden, Iraq, Barbados, Libya, and Israel -- could come away with the impression of the British Empire as the Gentle Guides of the Civilized World.

Stewart Perowne in 1939, while serving in the British diplomatic corps in Libya [Image is in the Public Domain]

Now, mind you, I'm not saying the British were any worse than a lot of other militaristic colonial powers.  The history of the world is one long sorry tale of the powerful exploiting the weak.  But to write what Perowne did, especially with his extensive knowledge and experience, is evidence of a blind spot a light year wide.

Then there was the sniffy, superior bit he threw in about Hadrian's male lover, Antinoüs.  Hadrian, in fact, was pretty clearly gay.  He was married to an apparently rather obnoxious woman named Vibia Sabina, but the marriage was an unhappy one and produced no children.  His devotion and love for Antinoüs, however, was the stuff of legends; the two were inseparable.

Hadrian and Antinoüs [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany, Marble Busts of Hadrian & Antinoüs, from Rome, Roman Empire, British Museum (16517587460), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Perowne writes:

It was in Bithynia that Hadrian formed his famous and fatal attachment to Antinoüs, a lad of whose origin nothing is known, except that he came from the city of Bithynion...  Antinoüs, at the time when Hadrian met him, must have been a lad of about eighteen.  He was broad-shouldered and quite exceptionally handsome...  Whether the relations between the emperor Hadrian and his beautiful young favorite were carnal or not, we cannot be sure.  But what we can be certain of is this: that for the next nine years Antinoüs was the emperor's inseparable companion, that many people did suppose their association was based on a physical relationship, and that they did not reprobate it in the least...  However much we may deplore this fact, it simply is not possible to equate ancient and modern canons of morality.

He can't even bring himself to write "homosexual" -- but comments that it is unsurprising that later Roman authors used the word Bithynian as "a euphemism for something vile."

After reading this, you may be shocked to find out that Stewart Perowne himself was gay.

In a bizarre parallel to Hadrian's own life, Perowne reluctantly agreed to marry explorer and writer Freya Stark in 1947, but the marriage was unhappy, childless, and possibly even unconsummated.  Eventually the two divorced after it became obvious that Perowne's sexual orientation wasn't going to change.  He finally put it into writing to his wife, but once again meticulously avoided using the word homosexual:

It is difficult to say what "normal" is – my friend a counsellor of St. George's Hospital always refuses to use the word and in both men and women, you have a wide and graded range from ultra-male to ultra-female with naturally most people in the middle ranges...  Now for myself, I put myself in the middle group.  I have ordinary male abilities.  I like male sports some of them, and I love the company of women.  In fact, I find it hard to exist without it.  At the same time, I am occasionally attracted by members of my own sex – generally.  For some even pleasurable reason – by wearers of uniform.

I was simultaneously appalled and heartbroken to read those words, from the pen of the same man who called Hadrian's love for Antinoüs "something vile" and implied people were right to "deplore" it.  How deeply sunk in self-loathing would you have to be to be able to write both of those passages?

That a culture could produce such a tortured and damaged soul is a horrible tragedy.  And how many others did this happen to, men and women we don't know about because they never ended up in the public eye, but lived their entire lives in fear, shame, and obscurity, never able to openly love who they loved for fear of condemnation, imprisonment, or even death?

I'd like to think we've grown beyond that, but then I look around me at my own culture, where books are currently being banned merely for including queer people -- where even mentioning we exist is apparently improper -- and I realize that it's still going on.

So my reading of Hadrian got me thinking about way more than just a long-ago emperor of a classical European civilization.  It started me wondering about my own blind spots, things about myself and my culture that I take for granted as The Way Things Should Be, and which a future civilization might rightly shake their heads at.  

And thinking about Perowne himself made me recognize what complex, contradictory, and fragile creatures we humans are.  Will we ever find a way to move past all the antiquated hidebound moralizing, and simply treat each other with kindness, dignity, and compassion?  To live by the rule that has been set up as a guiding light in many cultures, but is best known in its biblical form -- "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"?

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Cats and quakes

I ran across two stories yesterday that fall squarely into the "You People Do Realize You Have Bigger Problems To Worry About, Right?" department.

In the first, we have a senior Saudi cleric who has issued a fatwa on people taking selfies with cats.  Well, not just with cats.  Also with wolves.  But since cat selfies are way more common than wolf selfies (more's the pity), I can see why he specifically mentioned the cats.

The subject came up because of a question asked at a talk that Sheikh Saleh Bin Fawzan Al-Fawzan was giving, in which someone asked about a "new trend of taking pictures with cats which has been spreading among people who want to be like westerners."  Al-Fazwan was aghast.

"What?" he asked.  "What do you mean, pictures with cats?"

Because that's evidently an ambiguous phrase, or something.  Maybe it has subtleties in Arabic I don't know about.

So the questioner clarified, and after he got over his outrage, Al-Fazwan gave his declaration.  "Taking pictures is prohibited," he said.  "The cats don't matter here."

Which is kind of odd, given that he was being filmed at the time.  But rationality has never been these people's strong suit.

"Taking pictures is prohibited if not for a necessity," Al-Fazwan went on to say.  "Not with cats, not with dogs, not with wolves, not with anything."

Wipe that smirk off your face, young lady.  Allah does not approve of you and Mr. Whiskers.

So alrighty, then.  Now that we've got that settled, let's turn to another thing a prominent Muslim cleric is worrying about, which is: gay sex.

Of course, gay sex seems to be on these people's minds a lot, and also on the minds of their siblings-under-the-skin the Christian evangelicals.  But this time, the cleric in question, Mallam Abass Mahmud of Ghana, has said that the practice is not only prohibited because it's naughty in Allah's sight (although it certainly is that as well), but because it causes...

... earthquakes.

"Allah gets annoyed when males engage in sexual encounter," Mahmud said in an interview, then went on to add, "Such disgusting encounter causes earthquakes."

As an example, he says that this is why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.  Although as I recall from my reading of Genesis chapter 19, it wasn't an earthquake in that case, but having "fire and brimstone rained down upon them... so that the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."  But I guess since gays are apparently the most powerful force of nature known, there's no reason why they couldn't also cause a volcanic eruption or something.

On the other hand, if two guys having sex is causing the ground to shake, they must really be enjoying themselves.  I don't know whether to feel scared or jealous.

What crosses my mind with all of this is that there are a few more urgent concerns in the Muslim world than worrying about cat selfies and guys making love.  Human rights, tribalism, poverty, wealth inequity, corruption, terrorism, radical insurgencies, drought.  To name a few.  You have to wonder if focusing their followers on nonsense is simply a way of keeping the hoi polloi from realizing what a horror much of the Middle East has become under the leadership of people like this.

And given the reactions they got -- which, as far as I can tell, were mostly nodding in agreement -- it appears to be working.  So if you go to Saudi Arabia or Ghana, just remember: no kitty selfies or gay sex.  Or, Allah forfend, you and your gay lover having sex then celebrating by taking a photograph of the two of you with your cat.  That'd probably just cause the Earth to explode or fall into the Sun or something.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The modern glass ceiling

Rosalind Franklin has become justly famous for her role in discovering the three-dimensional structure of the DNA double helix.  Her specialty was x-ray crystallography, which involves bombarding a crystal with x-rays and photographing the scatter-pattern produced as the x-rays rebound off the atoms in the crystal.  From that photograph, a trained eye can make a good guess as to the arrangement of the atoms in the crystal.

The analogy I always used in my biology classes was a thought experiment: Imagine that you and a couple dozen friends are in a large darkened room, empty except for an object in the middle whose size and shape you can't see.  You and your friends are lined up around the perimeter, and have to stay with your backs against the wall.  You're asked to determine the shape of the object by hurling tennis balls in various directions; if the tennis ball misses the object, your friend on the opposite side of the room gets hit; if the ball hits the object, it ricochets off and lands near another of your friends somewhere else in the room.

Given enough tennis balls and enough time, and recording the results of each throw, you could probably make a decent guess about the size and the shape of the invisible object.  That, essentially, is what x-ray crystallographers do.

Easy concept, difficult in practice.  Franklin was exceptionally good at it, and produced the famous photo that proved the double-helical structure of DNA, accomplishing what dozens of other researchers had failed to do.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Rosalind Franklin, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The trouble began when the paper was written that described the conclusions drawn from the photograph -- and the paper's lead author, Maurice Wilkins, didn't include Franklin's name on the list of authors.  Franklin herself died of ovarian cancer in 1958, not long after the paper's release, and so was unable to defend herself; but the reasons for the omission become crystal-clear when you hear comments from James Watson (of Watson & Crick fame) about Franklin's role in the lab.

"There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents," Watson wrote.  "Her belligerent moods interfered with Wilkins’s ability to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA...  Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place… The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab."

The marginalization, or outright disparagement, of women in academia was ubiquitous back then.  Most of us are rightly outraged when we read about how Franklin and her accomplishments were dismissed.  And we often congratulate ourselves on how far we've come, and name examples of women, minorities, and LGBTQ people who have risen to the top of their fields.

The problem is, this is not so far off from the "there is no such thing as racism... look, I have a black friend!" nonsense you sometimes hear.  As evidence of this, consider the nauseatingly condescending article that appeared only a couple of days ago in the Wall Street Journal.  Written by Joseph Epstein, this article illustrates with disgusting clarity that we've not come far from Watson's "the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab" attitude:

Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter.  Any chance you might drop the “Dr.” before your name?  “Dr. Jill Biden ” sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic...  As for your Ed.D., Madame First Lady, hard-earned though it may have been, please consider stowing it, at least in public.

Excuse me?  "Fraudulent?"  "Comic?"  "Kiddo?"  Can you imagine condescension like this being aimed at a white cis/het man?  A Ph.D. or Ed.D. does confer the right to use the honorific "Doctor" before your name, Mr. Epstein, whether you like it or not.  Not only that, it is a completely deserved acknowledgement of the intellect and diligence of the person who earned it.  I "only" have a master's degree, and I worked my ass off to achieve that.  I know a number of people with doctorates in various fields (a good many of them non-medical), and from their experiences I know how many years of hard work it takes to do the original research required for a doctoral degree.

It is horrifying that this article was written, and unconscionable that the Wall Street Journal elected to publish it.

The smug, smirking tone of this op-ed piece is emblematic; here, over fifty years after Rosalind Franklin conducted her groundbreaking research and was robbed of public acknowledgement of her role, we are still not past the way the patronizing, self-congratulatory patriarchy uses its position of power to minimize (or ignore entirely) the accomplishments of anyone who isn't a white cis/het male.

It may come as no shock that Joseph Epstein has been pulling this bullshit for years.  For fifty years, in fact.  The privilege of white cis/het males in this society extends to overlooking outright sexism and bigotry for decades.  Not just overlooking, but giving it tacit acceptance by the fact that it appears in a major publication.  Take a look at the paragraph he wrote in a piece call "Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity" in The Atlantic in 1970:

They are different front the rest of us.  Homosexuals are different, moreover, in a way that cuts deeper than other kinds of human differences—religious, class, racial—in a way that is, somehow, more fundamental.  Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality, living evidence of our despair of ever finding a sensible, an explainable, design to the world.  One can tolerate homosexuality, a small enough price to be asked to pay for someone else's pain, but accepting it, really accepting it, is another thing altogether.  I find I can accept it least of all when I look at my children.  There is much my four sons can do in their lives that might cause me anguish, that might outrage me, that might make me ashamed of them and of myself as their father.  But nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual.  For then I should know them condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men, their lives, whatever adjustment they might make to their condition, to be lived out as part of the pain of the earth.

It's tempting to say, "Well, that was 1970."  Which might be an excuse if Epstein had ever apologized or retracted what he'd written.  The best he could do was a mealy-mouthed reference to his 1970 article in the Washington Examiner in 2015, in which he said, "I am pleased the tolerance for homosexuality has widened in America and elsewhere, that in some respects my own aesthetic sensibility favors much homosexual artistic production...  My only hope now is that, on my gravestone, the words Noted Homophobe aren’t carved."

So it's probably too much to expect Epstein to back down with respect to his smug dismissal of Dr. Jill Biden's degree.  The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, should issue a retraction and an unqualified apology.  This has nothing to do with her being the wife of the president-elect.  It would still be the case if she was an ordinary citizen in any part of academia.  The "glass ceiling" isn't gone; we're just very good at pretending it is, at acting like today we've shucked all the old problems of discrimination and bigotry.  But that a major newspaper is publishing -- even on its "Opinion" page -- something this blatantly demeaning, condescending, and rude is somewhere beyond appalling.

We need more women and minorities to be belligerent (to use James Watson's word) -- to refuse to accept the disparagement of their accomplishments, to give a pair of middle fingers to the entrenched establishment Epstein represents, that feels threatened whenever anyone from outside attempts an ingress.  How much talent, passion, and intelligence has been thwarted because of this attitude?  We can not tolerate this any more.  It has to be shouted down every single time it rears its ugly head.

If we really have progressed beyond the bigotry of the mid-twentieth century, if we really have gotten to a place where this generation's Rosalind Franklins would be welcomed and appreciated, we need to call out the Joseph Epsteins of the world, loud and clear. 

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If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Sex, choice, and genes

Sometimes a piece of research makes me simultaneously think, "Okay, that's pretty interesting," and "Oh, no, this is not going to end well."

That was my reaction to the latest study of the genetics of sexuality and sexual orientation, which appeared in Science this week.  The paper, entitled "Large-Scale GWAS Reveals Insights Into the Genetic Architecture of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior," was the work of a huge team headed by Andrea Ganna of the Center for Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and looked at genetic correlations amongst almost 500,000 individuals with their self-reported same-sex sexual behavior.

Before we launch off into how this is being spun, let's look at what Ganna et al. actually wrote:

In the discovery samples (UK Biobank and 23andMe), five autosomal loci were significantly associated with same-sex sexual behavior.  Follow-up of these loci suggested links to biological pathways that involve sex hormone regulation and olfaction.  Three of the loci were significant in a meta-analysis of smaller, independent replication samples.  Although only a few loci passed the stringent statistical corrections for genome-wide multiple testing and were replicated in other samples, our analyses show that many loci underlie same-sex sexual behavior in both sexes.  In aggregate, all tested genetic variants accounted for 8 to 25% of variation in male and female same-sex sexual behavior, and the genetic influences were positively but imperfectly correlated between the sexes [genetic correlation coefficient (rg)= 0.63; 95% confidence intervals, 0.48 to 0.78]...  Additional analyses suggested that sexual behavior, attraction, identity, and fantasies are influenced by a similar set of genetic variants (rg > 0.83); however, the genetic effects that differentiate heterosexual from same-sex sexual behavior are not the same as those that differ among nonheterosexuals with lower versus higher proportions of same-sex partners, which suggests that there is no single continuum from opposite-sex to same-sex preference.

To put it succinctly, and without all the scientific verbiage: sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender are complex, and the differences we see amongst humans are not attributable to a single cause.

Which you'd expect, I'd think.  The old binary divisions of male vs. female and heterosexual vs. homosexual are so clearly wrong it's a wonder anyone still thinks they're correct.  Transsexual and anatomically intersex individuals are hardly rare; and I know for a fact bisexuality exists, because I've been equally attracted to women and men since I was aware of sexual attraction at all.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

But this doesn't square with how some people want the world to work, so immediately this paper was published, it began to be twisted out of all recognition.

First, there was the "we wish the world was simple" approach, as exemplified by Science News, which for the record I'm about fed up with because for fuck's sake, they should know better.   Their headline regarding the study was "There's No Evidence That a 'Gay Gene' Exists," which is one of those technically-true-but-still-misleading taglines the media seems to be increasingly fond of.

No, there is no single "gay gene."  But reread the passage from the original paper I quoted above; the gist is that there is a host of factors, genetic and otherwise, that correlate with sexual orientation.  Here's a more accurate phrasing of the paper's conclusion, from Melinda Mills, writing about the study in the "Perspectives" column of Science: "The genetic correlation identified in the GWAS of whether a person had ever engaged in sex with someone of the same sex and the more complex measure of proportion of same-sex partners was 0.73 for men but only 0.52 for women.  This means that genetic variation has a higher influence on same-sex sexual behavior in men than in women and also demonstrates the complexity of women's sexuality."

Even the lower 0.52 correlation for women is pretty damn significant, considering that correlation runs on a scale of 0 to 1 where 0 means "no correlation at all" and 1 means "perfectly correlated."

But that didn't stop the next level of misinterpretation from happening, predictably from the anti-LGBTQ evangelicals and other crazy right-wingers, who would prefer it if people like me didn't exist.  All they did is read the headline from Science News (or one of the large number of media outlets that characterized the research the same way) and start writing op-ed pieces crowing, "See?  No gay gene!  We told you homosexuality was a choice.  Now science proves we were right all along."  Add to that the alarmists who went entirely the other direction and suggested that the Ganna et al. research could be used to identify non-heterosexuals for the purposes of persecution, or even eugenics, and you've got a morass of hyperemotional responses that miss the main conclusions of the study entirely.

So can I recommend that all of you read the fucking research?  For the Right-Wing NutJobs, let me just say that if you have to lie about what a study actually says to support your viewpoint, your position must be pretty tenuous from the get-go.  And while I sympathize with the alarmists' fears, it's hard to see how the Ganna et al. research could be used for any sort of nefarious purposes, when the best genetic correlates to homosexuality numbered around a half-dozen, not all of them showed up in every LGBTQ person studied, and even aggregated only predicted correctly around half the time.

So the whole thing got me kind of stirred up, as measurable by the number of times I felt obliged to use the f-bomb to express my frustration.  Which you'd have predicted, given my (1) bisexuality, (2) background in genetics, and (3) hatred of popular media mischaracterizing science.

In any case, the take-home message here is threefold:

1. The universe is a complex place.  Deal with it.
2. Wherever human sexuality comes from, it isn't a choice.  If that offends your sensibilities or conflicts with your worldview, you might want to re-examine your sensibilities and worldview, because as far as I can tell reality doesn't give a rat's ass about what you'd like to believe.
3. Don't trust headlines.  Always go back to the original research before forming an opinion.  Yes, reading scientific papers is challenging for non-scientists, but that's the only way you'll know your understanding is on solid ground.

So that's the latest highly equivocal piece of the nature-nurture puzzle, the outcome of which you'd probably have expected from knowing the history of the question.  As much as I'd like it if these matters were simple, I'm much happier knowing the truth.  I'll end with a quote from the inimitable Carl Sagan: "For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to my heart; the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life.  In The Three-Body Problem, Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu takes an interesting angle on this question; if intelligent life were discovered in the universe -- maybe if it even gave us a visit -- how would humans react?

Liu examines the impact of finding we're not alone in the cosmos from political, social, and religious perspectives, and doesn't engage in any pollyanna-ish assumptions that we'll all be hunky-dory and ascend to the next plane of existence.  What he does think might happen, though, makes for fascinating reading, and leaves you pondering our place in the universe for days after you turn over the last page.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Involuntary conversions

New from the "They Needed A Grant To Figure This Out?" department, we have: a study showing that LGBTQ individuals who have undergone "conversion therapy" or other attempts to change their sexual orientation have a higher incidence of depression.

Whodathunkit, ya know?  Amazing what happens when you take a person and tell them in no uncertain terms that a part of their personality over which they have zero control is bad and they have to fix it, and woe be unto them if they don't.

A study done at the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University tracked the outcomes for LGBTQ students, comparing ones who had experienced attempts to alter their sexual orientation with ones who hadn't.  The results were unequivocal.  Students who had been through "conversion therapy" or some equivalent had:

• over twice the likelihood of a suicide attempt;
• over twice the likelihood of depression (if the student had experienced these attempts both by parents and also external agencies, that number rose to triple the likelihood);
• lower socioeconomic status five years after leaving college;
• lower educational attainment;
• and lower average weekly wages.

Honestly, I get why the study was done.  If you have hard data behind an argument, it's a lot more difficult to refute it.  But here's the problem; the people who are arguing for conversion therapy are not, by and large, arguing from a standpoint of evidence.  The vast majority are basing their stance on religion, or the simple fact that thinking about gay sex makes them feel squinky.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

As far as the first one goes, people need to wrap their brains around the fact that their religion tells them what they are supposed to do, not what I am supposed to do.  As my mom used to put it, my rights end where your nose begins.  As long as what you are doing is in no way harming me -- such as what gender(s) you are attracted to -- I should have no right whatsoever to dictate your actions.

As far as the second, my response is: grow up and get over it.  I detest cooked carrots, to the point that I can barely stand to look at someone eating them.  (It is just about the only food I really dislike.  As my dad once quipped, my favorite two kinds of food are "plenty" and "often.")  But if I started telling people they couldn't eat cooked carrots because I can't stand the thought of it, my guess is that they would (quite rightly) tell me to go to hell.

Same thing here.  Maybe you find same-gender relationships disgusting.  Then don't have one.  Which is what I do when someone offers me carrots.

What's more, don't spend your time thinking about it.  Is it just me, or do these rabid evangelical types ever think about anything else?  Seems odd to me that people who claim to be so completely repulsed by the thought of a same-sex relationship talk about them to the exclusion of every other topic, with the possible exception of "Trump is the messiah," and if you don't do whatever Trump wants, you will be on the receiving end of a divine smite.

So this is in truth a huge problem, and I don't want anyone to interpret my first paragraph as dismissive.  I began that way because I have such a difficult time imagining how it's not so self-evident that it would appear obvious to everyone in the world.  If you have a child, and you set out to systematically destroy a fundamental part of their being, it's going to do horrific damage, and in the end, very likely be unsuccessful.  You might convince these poor young people not to seek out a relationship, which is bad enough; it's dooming them to a future in which they're alone, in which to fall in love is seen as succumbing to evil.  But you're not going to change their sexual orientation, because that's hardwired into our brains.

No one asks a heterosexual when they "chose to be straight."  Why should the situation be any different for LGBTQ individuals?

In short, conversion therapy is child abuse, and it inflicts permanent harm.  How it is not illegal, I have no idea.

But maybe this study will bolster the case that it should be.

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If you are one of those people who thinks that science books are dry and boring, I'll give you a recommendation that will put that misconception to rest within the first few pages: Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements.

Kean undertook to explain, from a human perspective, that most iconic of all images from the realm of chemistry -- the Periodic Table, the organized chart of elements from the simplest (hydrogen, atomic number 1) to largest and most complex (oganesson, atomic number 118).  Kean's sparkling prose shows us the personalities behind the science, including the notoriously cranky Dmitri Mendeleev; tragic, brilliant Henry Moseley, a victim of World War I; and shy, self-effacing Glenn T. Seaborg, one of only two individuals to have an element named after them while they were still alive.

It's a fun read, even if you're not a science geek -- maybe especially if you're not a science geek.  Because it allows you to peer behind the curtain, and see that the scientists are just like the rest of us, with rivalries, jealousies, odd and misplaced loyalty, and all the rest of the faults the human race is subject to.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The right to bigotry

New from the "What The Hell Did You Think Was Going To Happen?" department, we have: states that have passed "Religious Freedom Restoration Acts" -- which allow doctors and other professionals to refuse services to LGBTQ people on the basis of "freedom of religion" -- have markedly poorer health outcomes for sexual minorities than ones that have not.

An analysis done in Indiana by medical researchers at the Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health analyzed the number of "unhealthy days" -- days on which the individual reported poor physical or mental health -- before and after the passage of an RFRA law, as a function of whether the subjects were heterosexual or LGBTQ.  The results couldn't be clearer.  Before and after the passage of the RFRA, the number of unhealthy days climbed for LGBTQ individuals, but remained constant for heterosexuals; and the same statistic in states that did not have RFRAs showed no change for either demographic in the same time period.

"Although we can’t say for certain what caused this significant increase in unhealthy days for sexual minority people in Indiana, the change coincided with intense public debate over enactment of the RFRA law," said lead author John R. Blosnich, assistant professor at the Pitt School of Medicine.  "If some other general, statewide factor was at work, we would expect to see the same increase in unhealthy days for heterosexual people in Indiana, and we didn’t see that."

"The Indiana case suggests that the character of the RFRA law might be an important factor in its broader impacts on public health,” said study co-author Erin Cassese of the University of Delaware.  "Some RFRAs are stronger than others, and Indiana’s RFRA law ‘has teeth’ in the sense that it can be used in private litigation, including cases where businesses wish to deny services to sexual minorities. It also permits courts to grant compensatory damages against whomever brings the suit – making a court challenge to a service denial a much riskier proposition...  This project adds to a growing body of research demonstrating that experiences of discrimination are associated with poor health outcomes in a range of minority populations.  While debate over RFRA laws doesn’t typically engage with questions of public health, this project suggests negative health outcomes might be a consequence of this type of policy, and thus warrant some consideration by policymakers."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I find it absolutely infuriating when mainstream Christians portray themselves as a persecuted group whose religious views have to be enshrined in law even if those views allow them to discriminate against others.  And here I thought one of the main teachings of Jesus was "love thy neighbor as thyself."  I guess what Jesus meant to say was "love thy neighbor as thyself, unless thy neighbor is the wrong color, wrong religion, or likes to do things with his or her naughty bits that make you feel squinky."

Oh, and then there's the part about "First, cast out the beam from thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to remove the mote from thy brother's eye."  Also kind of inconvenient, that.

And lest you think this is only a problem in the United States, Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been staunchly defending a law currently on the books in every state but Queensland and Tasmania that allows schools to expel kids if they come out as LGBTQ.

"That is the existing law," Morrison said.  "We are not proposing to change that law to take away the existing arrangement that exists."

Which is about as articulate as Donald Trump's comment that Hurricane Florence "was one of the wettest we've ever had from the standpoint of water." 

As an aside, where the hell are we finding these politicians, anyhow?  Back in the day, it seemed like at least they could put together a grammatical sentence, even if what that sentence contained wasn't necessarily something I agreed with.

Oh, but I'd forgotten about Dan "Mr. Potatoe" Quayle, who once said that we should be optimistic, because "things are more like they are now than they ever have been."

Never mind.

What I honestly don't get about this is how often discrimination rests on religious views, when you hear "mercy" and "charity" and "love" as being some of the cardinal virtues in pretty much any religion you look into.  It's kind of appalling when the people who sing "What A Friend We Have in Jesus" and "The King of Love My Shepherd Is" in church on Sunday are the same ones who are telling gay people to roast in hell the other six days of the week.

So that's today's exercise in anger induction.  You'd think we'd have gotten past all this bigotry as a species by now.  I guess we've come a way -- when I was a kid, hardly anyone would even admit to being LGBTQ, much less make a stink about it if they were discriminated against.  But what this makes clear is that the bigots aren't ready to give up their narrow-mindedness without a fight... and that we still have a long way to go.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is something everyone should read.  Jonathan Haidt is an ethicist who has been studying the connections between morality and politics for twenty-five years, and whose contribution to our understanding of our own motives is second to none.  In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics, he looks at what motivates liberals and conservatives -- and how good, moral people can look at the same issues and come to opposite conclusions.

His extraordinarily deft touch for asking us to reconsider our own ethical foundations, without either being overtly partisan or accepting truly immoral stances and behaviors, is a needed breath of fresh air in these fractious times.  He is somehow able to walk that line of evaluating our own behavior clearly and dispassionately, and holding a mirror up to some of our most deep-seated drives.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Labels, morality, and hookups

There have been some interesting, and all too predictable, responses to a study that appeared in the Archives of Sexual Behavior this week.

The paper, written by Arielle Kuperberg and Alicia M. Walker, is entitled "Heterosexual College Students Who Hookup With Same-Sex Partners," and investigates the skew that can exist between a person's behavior and their self-identification.  Specifically, Kuperberg and Walker sifted through data from 24,000 American college students, asking questions about hookups, long-term relationships, and which demographics they fell into.

The results were unsurprising, at least to me.  Only looking at the individuals' most recent hookup, they found that 12% of the male-male experiences, and 25% of the female-female experiences, were reported by self-labeled heterosexuals.

In an interview with PsyPost, study co-author Kuperberg explained that the (also self-reported) reasons for these hookups by students who consider themselves straight varied all over the map.  Some said they were curious, or experimenting; others, that found themselves in the situation in the heat of the moment (as it were) but had no inclination to repeat the experience.  Most fascinating -- and saddest -- were the 8% of the students who said they were heterosexual but had participated in a same-sex experience, and who described themselves as highly religious and such behavior immoral and sinful.

What is a little disheartening are the responses I saw on social media to this study, a link to which I've now seen on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter.  Some of the comments were positive, but a great many were like the following:

• Another skewed study by liberals trying to ram their immorality down everyone's throats.
• If you're male and like to have sex with women, you're straight.  If you like to have sex with guys, you're gay.  Why is that so hard to understand?
• More license to treat deviancy as normal.
• So trans and pansexual and bisexual and so on isn't enough?  Now we have to have a separate category for guys who want a girlfriend and a boyfriend at the same time?
• Astroturfing to destroy our culture.

(Astroturfing, by the way, is "the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by a grassroots participant(s)."  I'd never heard the term, and had to look it up, so I thought I'd save you the trouble if you also hadn't run across it.)

What baffles me about all of this, and in fact what has baffled me for years, is why anyone cares who's having sex with whom.  As long as there's consent, and no breaking of trust with a significant other, how is any of it immoral?  (And, in the case of opposite-sex hookups, measures are taken to prevent conception.)  Jonathan Haidt, who has extensively studied morality, includes "purity/sanctity" as one of his five moral pillars.  But it seems to me that this one is different from the other four (care, fairness/justice, in-group loyalty, and respect for authority) in that even when it's broken, no one gets hurt.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ludovic Bertron from New York City, Usa, Rainbow flag and blue skies, CC BY 2.0]

Again, let me emphasize that I'm not talking about situations of cheating.  That's not just about the sex, it's also about disloyalty, dishonesty, and lack of respect for a commitment.  But setting that aside, how can two guys trying it out be "immoral," or "deviant," or a move toward "destroying our culture?"

After all, they're not insisting that you have a same-sex hookup.  They're just saying they wanted to.

And as far as the person who objected to all the categories, let me say something I've said before.  Gender and sexual orientation are not binary.  They never have been.  Gender is not just about the physical anatomy -- it also has to do with the chromosomal makeup (XX versus XY) and the fundamental wiring of the brain.  As far as orientation goes, it was known all the way back to the Kinsey studies that there are plenty of people who are not exclusively heterosexual or homosexual in their desires -- irrespective of whether they ever act on them, or how they choose to label themselves.

So the idea of same-sex hookups between people who consider themselves mostly hetero might make you feel squinky, but the fact that you don't like reality deserves only a shrug and a comment of "tough shit."  As I've also said before, the universe is under no particular compulsion to behave in a way that makes you comfortable or conforms to your biases.

I'll end with a quote from study co-author Arielle Kuperberg:

Our research shows that sexual identity and sexual behavior do not always match up.  Same-sex behavior may not necessarily have implications for sexual orientation; not everybody who has hooked up with a same-sex partner but identifies as heterosexual is "secretly gay" or "on the down low." 

Some may be engaging in experimentation because that’s now an expected part of college, and they are curious about same-sex sexuality.  Others may be experiencing conflicts between their sexual orientation and their religious beliefs, which can cause psychological distress.  Although the behavior is the same, motivations for it are diverse, which is important to take into account in future research and in clinical settings.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia is Flim-Flam!, by the grand old man of skepticism and critical thinking, James Randi.  Randi was a stage magician before he devoted his career to unmasking charlatans, so he of all people knows how easy it is to fool the unwary.  His book is a highly entertaining exercise in learning not to believe what you see -- especially when someone is trying to sell you something.

Beastly goings-on

Lately, it's seemed like the leaders of the conservative Christian Right have been going out of their way to make patently ridiculous statements.

As I commented a couple of weeks ago, we've had such pinnacles of clear thought as Pat Robertson babbling about how he hates being dominated by homosexuals, and Mary Colbert telling us that if we don't support Donald Trump, god will curse our grandchildren.  Even British Prime Minister Theresa May got in on the action, saying that Cadbury's decision to call this year's big event "The Great British Egg Hunt" is a deliberate slap in the face to Christians everywhere, because it didn't mention Easter, and we all know how central chocolate eggs are to the story of Jesus's resurrection.

Not to be outdone, today we have another luminary in the fundamentalist world, rabidly anti-gay Pastor Kevin Swanson, ranting on his radio show about the new live-action movie Beauty and the Beast.  But it's probably not about what you're thinking -- that the movie features a gay character.

No, that's small potatoes, and has been the subject of horrified diatribes from damn near every spokesperson for the Religious Right.  Swanson obviously disapproves of the gay character; but even more than that, he hates Beauty and the Beast...

... because it promotes inter-species mating.

Sadly, I'm not making this up.  Here's the direct quote:

Liberals [seem] to be okay with this inter-species breeding, and have been ever since Star Trek was on the air...  Christians, I don’t believe, can allow for this.  Humans are made in the image of God.  Humans are assigned a spouse which happens to be a member of the opposite sex.  Friends, God’s law forbids it…  Christians should not allow for this, man.  We cannot allow for humans to interbreed with other species. It’s just wrong, wrong, wrong.  It’s confusion, it’s unnatural...  We are in some of the most radical, most anti-biblical, the most immoral, the most unethical, the most wicked sexual environment that the world has ever known, right now.

Okay, can we just establish a few facts, here?

1. Beauty and the Beast is fiction.
2. So is Star Trek, although the way things are going down here on Earth, I'm ready for Zefram Cochrane to invent the warp drive so I can warp right the fuck out of here.
3. Inter-species matings on Star Trek produced, to name three, Deanna Troi, Mr. Spock, and B'elanna Torres.  I'd take any of the three over Kevin Swanson in a heartbeat. 
4. The character of the Beast in Beauty and the Beast is human.  In fact, that is sort of the whole point of the movie.  He's under a curse to look beastly, but the idea is that underneath, he's still human.
5. Belle and the Beast don't actually have sex until the curse is broken and they're married, so even if we're accepting Swanson's message at face value, I'm not sure what there is to complain about.  There was beast/human dancing and beast/human singing and lots of beast/human talking in the movie, but no beast/human nookie. 
6. As far as I can see, here in the real world things have not gotten a lot more wicked and immoral in the sex department lately.  People have always enjoyed Doing It, and what kind of Doing It they enjoy has always had substantial variation.  What we're moving towards -- not nearly fast enough, in my opinion -- is a place where no one can tell you how you should Do It, nor with whom, nor what your rights should be based around any such matters.
7. In general, there's very little inter-species breeding in the natural world anyhow, because it doesn't produce offspring.  Actually, that's sort of the biological definition of "species."  A few closely-related species can manage -- horses and donkeys producing mules, for example -- but in general, it just doesn't work, and even in the case of mules, they're usually sterile.  But I wouldn't expect that kind of understanding of biology from a guy who thinks that Noah toddled off to Australia to pick up a pair of wombats while he was taking a break from building an enormous boat in the deserts of the Middle East by hand, then toddled back over to Australia to drop them off when the flood waters magically receded down a big drain in the ocean floor or something.

Of course, I always get a little suspicious when these ministerial types start railing against specific behaviors over and over.  The way things have been going, I wouldn't be surprised if Swanson's demented rant about bestiality in a Disney movie means he'll get arrested next month for having sex with an aardvark or something.

Anyhow, that's our latest salvo from the ultra-Christian wacko fringe.  I probably should simply stop commenting on these people, because they seem to be in some sort of bizarre contest to see which one can make the most completely idiotic statement.

On the other hand, the fact is that a significant fraction of Americans still listen to them.  So maybe it's worthwhile after all.  Although I doubt seriously whether the kind of people who are willing to boycott Beauty and the Beast because of Kevin Swanson are the same ones who'll make their way over here to Skeptophilia.  But you never know.

Strange attractors

You would think that after this many years of writing Skeptophilia, I'd be completely inured to weird ideas, that nothing would shock me.  But I still occasionally run into a claim that leaves me saying, "Um... uh.  Um.  Nope, I got nothin'."

That happened yesterday, when a loyal reader sent me a link to the website of the Spiritual Science Research Foundation.  The website subheader is "Bridging the Known and Unknown Worlds," so I was at least on guard that I was entering the realm of the woo-woo.  But I wasn't ready for the actual details of the claim therein, which turned out to be that gay people are gay...

... because they're being coerced by ghosts.

I bet my LGBT readers had no idea this was what was going on.  I bet they simply thought their brains were wired that way, which is supported by recent studies that showed genetic and epigenetic effects in LGBT individuals that are at least correlated with homosexuality, and may actually be causative.

Nope.  That's not it at all.  The real reason is that you've got a ghost following you around who is making lewd same-sex suggestions, and you're falling for it.

The worst part is that this isn't all they claim, and in fact, isn't even their weirdest claim.  Upon perusing the website, we find out that there are other ways you can tell if you've got a spirit-world hanger-on besides being gay.  Apparently, symptoms are a "foul taste in the mouth," "experience of eyes being pulled inside," "a sticky layer... formed on the face and body of the affected person," and "experience of strangulation."  Then we read the following, which I quote verbatim:

[T]he ghosts (demons, devils, negative energies, etc.) leave the body through any of the nine openings, i.e. two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, mouth, penis/vagina and anus.  The person may experience as if gas is going out of any of these openings or one may experience cough, yawning, burping, sneezing, etc. as per the opening involved.

Allow me to interject here for the good of the order that if any of my readers experience coughing through their eyes, they probably should see a doctor.

And that goes double if your penis burps.

But in the words of the infomercial, "Wait... there's more!"  We also find out that if you have a ghostly groupie, you will "make moaning and weird sounds and not remember anything after," will be "fidgeting and restless," and will be prone to "domestic accidents such as heated oil flying from the frying pan."  Me, I thought the latter was just one of the hazards of cooking, one I first learned about while simultaneously discovering the general rule "Never cook bacon while shirtless."  I don't think I made moaning or weird sounds when it happened, although I do recall using some seriously bad language.

Of course, given that supposedly the affected individual doesn't remember anything afterwards, maybe I've just forgotten about the moaning noises.

But the pièce de résistance is the part about "sexual symptoms," wherein we get to the heart of the matter, which is that if you have a ghostly invisible friend, you'll become gay:

The main reason behind the gay orientation of some men is that they are possessed by female ghosts. It is the female ghost in them that is attracted to other men.  Conversely the attraction to females experienced by some lesbians is due to the presence of male ghosts in them.  The ghost’s consciousness overpowers the person’s normal behaviour to produce the homosexual attraction.  Spiritual research has shown that the cause for homosexual preferences lie predominantly in the spiritual realm.

We're then given some statistics, which is that homosexual orientation is 5% physical causes/hormonal changes, 10% psychological causes, and 85% ghosts.  I have no idea how they derived those numbers, but because it's statistics, it's bound to be correct, right?

Of course right.

So there you have it.  I'm not sure what else to say that the dog didn't cover.  I think the thing that bothers me about this most is that I'm sure there are people who read this website and nodded, saying, "Yup, makes total sense."  Which is kind of terrifying when you think about it.

Although who knows.  Maybe they have their reasons for believing all this.  Maybe someone was startled one day when her vagina sneezed, and was wondering why, and stumbled on this website.  Makes as much sense as any other explanation I can think of.