Mass shooters and broken homes

One of the hardest things to get past is the natural tendency to accept something unquestioningly simply because it sounds like it should be true.

It's a special form of confirmation bias -- which is using scanty or questionable evidence to support a claim we already believed.  Here, it's more that we hear something, and think, "Okay, that sounds reasonable" -- and never stop to ask if the evidence supports it.

Or, actually, that the evidence presented is even correct.  I ran into an example of that a few days ago at the site Dr. Rich Swier.  It's a video by Warren Farrell, social activist and spokesperson for the "men's rights movement," in which he makes the contention that there is a single factor that unites all the school shooters -- growing up in a home without a father.

Farrell says:

The single biggest problem that creates school shootings is fatherlessness.  Either minimal involvement with dads, or no involvement with dads.  This often comes after divorce, and the 51% of women over the age of thirty who are raising children without father involvement.  Sometimes it starts with fathers being involved, but after two years of not being married, 40% of fathers drop out completely.  That combination accounts for 100% of school shooters.  Adam Lanza, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz, Dylan Roof.  They're all dad-deprived boys.  We don't see this among girls; we don't see this among dad-involved boys.  The solution is father involvement.  We can start that in school.  We can start that with fathers being involved in PTAs.  Changing the culture, letting men know that the most important single thing they can do in their life is not to be a warrior, outside in the killing fields, but to be a father-warrior.  Be involved not just in PTAs but in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, coaching, in giving up high-paying jobs to spend more time with your children.  

Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it?  Moreover, it's hard to think of a reason why we wouldn't want fathers to spend more positive interactive time with their children.  So it's easy just to say, "Oh, okay, that makes sense," and not to question the underlying claim.

Because it turns out that what he's saying -- school shooters are created by fatherless homes -- is simply untrue.  The contention seems to have originated with a Fox News story, and the whole thing took off, despite its simply being factually incorrect.

[image is in the Public Domain]

Now, mind you, there are cases of mass shooters who grew up in dysfunctional, fatherless homes.  Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, was the son of a bank robber who spent most of his son's childhood in prison.  The father of Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland school shooter, died when his son was five, and he was left with a mother who apparently was abusive, and eventually he was farmed out to relatives and friends.  Dylann Roof, the Charleston church shooter, was the product of divorce, and his father was allegedly physically abusive not only to his son but to his second wife.

But consider some of the others.  Adam Lanza, the Newtown school shooter, was the child of a couple who divorced when he was in fifth grade, but his father remained involved.  When Lanza's anxiety and apparent obsessive-compulsive disorder made it impossible for him to attend high school, he was taken out and jointly homeschool by his mother and father.  Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2007, was the son of a pair of hard-working Korean immigrants who were "strong Christians" and had sought help for their son, who had shown signs of sociopathy and withdrawal all the way back in first grade.   Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was not the product of divorce, and if anything, his father sounds more stable than his mother.  Neither Eric Harris nor Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School shooters, were the products of broken families, or even dysfunctional ones; nothing I could find (and there are thousands of sites out there dedicated to the tragedy) indicated that either boy grew up in anything but a perfectly ordinary upper middle class home.

So it's not sufficient to say, "Okay, that seems reasonable."  If you have a claim, it better be supported by all the evidence, or it's time to look elsewhere.  I'm certain that the awful home situations of Paddock, Cruz, and Roof contributed to their anger and eventual violent attacks; but clearly this isn't (as Farrell claims) proof that "the cause of mass shootings is fatherlessness," and his contention that 100% of mass shooters were functionally fatherless is simply wrong.

Once again, the situation is that we need to question our own biases.  The cause of mass murders in our society is multifaceted, and admits no easy solution: bullying and the resultant sense of powerlessness that engenders, the difficulty of obtaining consistent mental health services, poverty, child abuse, split families, radicalization/racism/fascist rhetoric, the easy availability of guns, and the culture of glorifying violence undoubtedly all play a role.

Certainly, we should all commit ourselves to doing what we can to remedy any of those problems; but claiming that one of them is responsible for a complex issue is facile thinking.  And as tempting as it is, such oversimplification never leads to a real solution.

Bee all, end all

That a lot of people would prefer it if the world was simple is hardly an earthshattering claim.  You see it all over, especially in political debates -- the single-cause fallacy, attributing complex phenomena to one ultimate origin.  The mess in the Middle East?  George W. Bush, of course.  The loss of jobs to outsourcing?  Thanks, Obama.  Yesterday's unusually hot afternoon?  Has to be climate change.

Oh, but wait.  Climate change doesn't actually exist.  Almost forgot there for a moment.

I suppose it's understandable enough.  Figuring out complicated cause-and-effect relationships is hard work.  Sometimes even with lots of data, the answers are unclear.  We humans don't tend to like uncertainty, especially when we hear that the experts themselves are uncertain.  Much easier to fall back on the simple explanation and stop thinking about it.

Which, I think, explains the reactions I saw to the Washington Post article entitled "Bees Were Just Added to the U.S. Endangered Species List for the First Time."  Most of the comments I saw fell into one of the following categories:

• We're ruining the Earth and we're all gonna die.
• Farms are going to fold for lack of pollinators and we're going to run out of food.
• It's what we deserve for spraying pesticides all over the place.
• Monsanto sucks.

Never mind that when you actually read the article, it turns out that the additions to the ESL were seven rare species of endemic yellow-faced bees native to Hawaii, and the probable reason for their decline is habitat loss and destruction of native wildflowers, not pesticides or the rest of it.  There are actually an estimated 20,000 species of bees worldwide, so assuming that all bees are going extinct because seven uncommon island endemics are endangered is a little like using the near-extinction of the California condor to conclude that pigeons and starlings are about to go the way of the dinosaurs.  (Actually, it's worse; according to the most recent tallies, there are a few more than 10,000 species of birds in the world, so there's actually twice the biodiversity in bee species than in bird species.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

That's not to say that there haven't been problems with declining numbers of more common bee species recently, but as I alluded to in the first paragraphs, it's not as simple as it sounds.  The still-unexplained colony collapse disorder has reduced the populations of western honeybees, the most common bee species in North America -- particularly among captive hives.  But the truth of the matter is, CCD seems to be declining itself, and honeybee numbers are on the rise in most places.

As far as wild bee species, the situation is even less clear.  A study by Insu Koh et al. last year suggested that in some places, wild bee populations had declined by 23%, but if you look at the study itself, you find that there is a huge amount of uncertainty in the data, mostly due to the difficulty of estimating bee populations in the wild.  The numbers Koh et al. used were developed from spatial-habitat models, using subjective information such as the "quality of nesting sites," and generated numbers that sounded alarming.  A review of the study in Science 2.0 was scathing:

How did they count wild bees when no one else has been able to do so? They didn't, which means it adds to the list of PNAS papers that can't possibly have been peer-reviewed.  The team instead identified forty-five land-use types from two federal land databases and asked fourteen hand-picked experts about each type of land and how suitable it was for providing wild bees with nesting and food resources.  They then averaged the experts' input and levels of certainty (no, really) and built a computer model that they think predicts the relative abundance of wild bees for every area of the contiguous United States, based on their quality for nesting and feeding from flowers.  Lastly, they validated their model against bee collections and field observations they also hand-picked.

In other words, they created an academic model that would get them fired from every single company in existence for being wildly suspect and based on too many assumptions. 

The authors then claim the decline they don't know is happening must be due to pesticides, global warming and farmers.

In fact, a study (this one peer-reviewed) in Nature last year suggested that populations of the dominant (and therefore most agriculturally relevant) species of wild bees are actually doing okay:

Across crops, years and biogeographical regions, crop-visiting wild bee communities are dominated by a small number of common species, and threatened species are rarely observed on crops. Dominant crop pollinators persist under agricultural expansion and many are easily enhanced by simple conservation measures, suggesting that cost-effective management strategies to promote crop pollination should target a different set of species than management strategies to promote threatened bees.

So the bottom line is: colony collapse disorder still exists, but seems to be declining in frequency, and we're still not entirely sure what causes it (neonicotinoid pesticides are one possibility, but there are others).  The western honeybee, the most common and important pollinator species in North America, is actually increasing in numbers.  There are a few species (out of the 20,000) of bees that are threatened or endangered, some because of human activities, but the same is true for any taxon you pick.

In short: the situation is complicated, whether you like it or not.  It'd be convenient to have a clearly-outlined problem with a certain culprit and an obvious solution, but the world seldom works that way.  And as far as "Beemageddon" goes; there are a lot of other ways we could self-destruct that are far more likely than the loss of honeybees.

Maybe it's not justified to be an optimist, but at least be a pessimist about the right things.

Single causes and simplistic thinking

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia called me out a couple of days ago for a statement I made in the post "Tribal mentality," regarding the tendency some people have to romanticize (or at least, to avoid criticizing) beliefs of other cultures.  Here's the passage he objected to:

At its extreme, this tendency to take a kid-gloves attitude toward culture is what results in charges of Islamophobia or (worse) racism any time someone criticizes the latest depravity perpetrated by Muslim extremists. Yes, it is their right to adhere to their religion. No, that does not make it right for them to behead non-Muslims, hang gays, subjugate women, and sell children into slavery. And the fact that most of their leaders have refused to take a stand against this horrifying inhumanity makes them, and the ideology they use to justify it, complicit in it.

He responded, in part, as follows:

ISIS is engaged in civil wars, and 99% of their victims are also Muslim.  Surely, Muslims on the whole are not in favor of slaughtering other Muslims...  (P)ointing at Islamic ideology as the culprit, rather than a complex set of political forces, just seems way too "Fox-Newsish" for a sophisticated blog like yours.  If Islam was inherently incompatible with pluralistic democratic values, then countries like Turkey couldn't exist.  The Islamic masses in Egypt rose up in a mass exercise of democratic revolution in 2012... only to be slapped down by a US-backed secular dictatorship.  There's just so much going on, with so many different factors...  I look at the 6 million Muslims living in the US and peacefully contributing... to blame it all on "their ideology," to say their beliefs are to blame for, among other things, the US-backed Saudi regime.... it just seems unfair.

Which certainly made me give some serious thought to what I'd written, and even more so, to what I think about ideology vis-à-vis responsibility for immoral actions.

Of course, in (at the very least) one sense, he is right; by attributing to "Islamic ideology" the atrocities of ISIS, and the lack of human rights in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and many other Muslim countries, I avoided one fallacy by leaping headlong into another.  To wit: the single-cause fallacy, which is considering complex events to have a simple cause.  (Commonly-cited examples are "The American Civil War was caused by slavery" and "World War I was caused by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.")

There's a lot more to the chaos in the Middle East than Islamic ideology; there's tribal factionalism, the history of exploitation and colonialism by western Europe and the United States, and the have/have not distribution of oil wealth, to name three.  It is facile to say, simply, "Those evil Muslims!" and be done with it.

The Islamic recitation of faith [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But still, I have to ask the question: to what extent does ideology bear the blame for some of the evil done in its name?  And by extension, do the peaceful adherents of a religion -- for example, the six million Muslims in the United States that my friend referenced -- also share some of the responsibility?

And it's not Islam alone, of course.  Christianity has much to answer for, as well, and I'm not just talking about events in the distant past such as the Inquisition and the Crusades.  The current upsurge of anti-gay legislation in several countries in Africa, some of which calls for the death penalty, is largely the result of American fundamentalists encouraging and financing such measures.  Do the stay-at-home members of the Christian churches from which these "missionaries" come bear some of the blame, if for no other reason because of their silence?

Does Christian ideology as a whole?

Now, I know that because of the huge variety of beliefs within Christianity (and Islam as well), to talk about a "Christian ideology" is a little ridiculous.  You have to wonder whether, for example, a Pentecostal and a Unitarian Universalist would agree on anything beyond "God exists."  But as my friend also pointed out, there are passages in the Christian Bible that are as horrific as anything the Qu'ran has to offer; stoning to death for minor offenses, men being struck dead right and left for damn near every reason you can think of, not to mention a prophet who called in bears to tear apart 42 children who had teased him about being bald and a man who offered his daughters to be raped by a mob rather than inconvenience a couple of angels (who, presumably, could have taken care of themselves).  It's why I find it wryly amusing when I hear people say that they believe that every biblical passage is word-for-word true, and that they live their lives according to a literal interpretation of the biblical commands.  If they did so, they'd be in jail.

But to return to my original question; does an ideology, or its law-abiding followers, bear some of the blame for what the true believers do?  At the very least, for not speaking out more fervently against the deeds done in the name of their religion?

It's not a question that admits of easy answers.  I'm torn between feeling certain that the most basic truth is that you are only responsible for what you yourself do, and having the nagging thought that remaining silent in the face of depravity is itself an immoral act.  After all, one of the criticisms leveled against Americans by many Muslims in the Middle East is that we stand by silently and allow our leaders to continue pursuing exploitative and unjust actions.  How is their holding America, and all Americans, responsible for what some Americans have done in the Middle East any different from our holding Islam, and all Muslims, responsible for the actions of ISIS and the shari'a judges in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere?

I don't know.  But the moral ambiguity inherent in these sorts of situations should push us all to consider not only our acts, but our refusal to act, as carefully as we know how.  And we should all be less hesitant to repudiate the individuals who would use our religions, ethnicities, and nationalities to perpetrate evil in the world.