Admissions of idiocy

Can I suggest that now, in the midst of the Information Age, there are certain questions you might ask and arguments you might make that are tantamount to shouting, "Hey, everyone, look at me!  I'm extremely stupid!"

The issue comes up, predictably enough, because of Rush Limbaugh, who felt he had to weigh in on last week's incident at the Cincinnati Zoo.  You probably have heard about it; a child got away from his mother and fell into the gorilla enclosure, and when Harambe the gorilla grabbed the child, zoo workers shot and killed the gorilla.  (The child, fortunately, was unharmed.)

Limbaugh approached the issue in his signature bombastic style.  "There’s no way human beings are going to not be interested in animals," Limbaugh told his listeners.  "Gawking at them.  Out on safari, hunting them...  But we have PETA activists who oppose the capture of animals because they obviously have not read Genesis."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And because apparently that wasn't loony enough, Limbaugh went on to say, "Then we have the evolution crowd who are searching for a missing link.  They think we were originally apes, right?  If we were the original apes, then how come Harambe is still an ape?  And how come he didn’t become one of us?"

Okay.  Two things.  First, an individual animal evolving into a member of a different species does not happen in real life.  You're thinking of Pokémon.  Second, "if we came from apes, why are there still apes?" is as sensible as if I said, "My ancestors came from France.  Why are there still French people?"

So I would vote for the "if we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" question as the first on our list of statements that are equivalent to saying, "I am a complete moron who is incapable of reading a Wikipedia article."  Here are a few others:

• Stating that physicists researching the Big Bang believe that "nothing exploded and then made everything."
• Using non-standard definitions of any of the following: frequency, resonance, vibrations, entanglement, vortex, energy, dimension, harmonics, space-time continuum, fractal, relativity.
• Claiming that radioisotope dating is highly inaccurate, so the estimated age of the Earth is off by a factor of a million.
• Saying, "Scientists have been wrong in the past" as an argument for or against anything.
• Asking why, if evolution is true, we don't ever see a dung beetle morph into a baboon.  (Although I have to admit that this would explain Rush Limbaugh's existence.)
• Stating that atheism is a religion.  (Atheism is a religion in precisely the same fashion as "not collecting stamps" is a hobby.)
• Damn near everything ever written about HAARP and "chemtrails."
• Claiming that quantum physics means that anything is possible, and proves (check any that apply): telepathy, precognition, coincidences, interconnectedness, whatever religion you happen to prefer.
• Saying, "Evolution is just a theory."

There.  That's enough for a start.  I mean, I'm not averse to discussing science, or even speculation and scientific misconceptions, but the above-mentioned have been dealt with so many times, in so many places, that anyone saying them is not only very likely to be stupid, but lazy as well.

So thanks to Rush Limbaugh for once again affording me the opportunity to highlight a particularly annoying form of idiocy.  I suppose I should be glad for people like him; at least they keep Skeptophilia in business.

Suppressing reality

Back in the 1950s, scientists were beginning to identify a causal connection between smoking and lung cancer.  Prior to that, there was an extensive advertising campaign to convince the public that smoking was actually good for your health:

Once the connection between tobacco use and a whole host of ailments became clear, tobacco company executives were quick to see what was happening -- and to launch their own disinformation campaign.  Public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, hired to manage the situation, made their approach clear in documents that have only recently come to light:

We have one essential job -- which can be simply said: Stop public panic…  There is only one problem – confidence, and how to establish it; public assurance, and how to create it...  And, most important, how to free millions of Americans from the guilty fear that is going to arise deep in their biological depths – regardless of any pooh-poohing logic -- every time they light a cigarette.

Industry officials made sure that the consumers viewed them as open and transparent, not to mention caring about their customers' health.  A 1953 public statement from the Tobacco Industry Research Committee included the following disingenuous comment:

We will never produce and market a product shown to be the cause of any serious human ailment…  The Committee will undertake to keep the public informed of such facts as may be developed relating to cigarette smoking and health and other pertinent matters.

Except for the fact that they were doing exactly that -- doing everything in their power to cast doubt upon the research, and actively suppressing the research of scientists who were working in the field.  In 1954, TIRC issued a "Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers:"

Distinguished authorities point out:

1. That medical research of recent years indicates many possible causes of lung cancer.
2. That there is no agreement among the authorities regarding what the cause is.
3. That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes.
4. That statistics purporting to link smoking with the disease could apply with equal force to any one of many other aspects of modern life. Indeed the validity of the statistics themselves are questioned by numerous scientists.

Some industry operatives actually thought about trying to turn the crisis into an opportunity.  A researcher at Philip Morris wrote:

Evidence is building up that heavy smoking contributes to lung cancer.  But there could be benefits to any company with the intestinal fortitude to jump on the other side of the fence, admitting that cigarettes are hazardous.  Just look what a wealth of ammunition would be at his disposal to attack the other companies who did not have safe cigarettes.

That three-pronged approach -- discredit the scientists, sow doubt in the minds of ordinary citizens, and portray the industry as caring and concerned -- must be sounding awfully familiar, if you've been reading the news lately.  Because we're seeing the whole scenario play out again, this time with regards to climate change.

The scientists don't agree.  There is no consensus.  Besides, the climate researchers who argue the most vehemently that anthropogenic climate change is happening are probably being paid to say so by eco-wackos like Earth First.  And think about it -- wouldn't it be nice if the world warmed up a little?  Just think, upstate New York would be snow-free.  You could grow palm trees in Maine.  And in any case, doing anything about it would be (choose any that you think apply): (1) economic suicide; (2) disastrous for states that depend on oil, gas, and coal; (3) the cause of massive unemployment; or (4) impossible in any case.

This cynical move by the fossil fuel industry to play on the doubts, fears, and ignorance of the general public is exactly analogous to the strategies of the tobacco industry fifty years ago.  Of course, in the latter case, the facts eventually came out despite their best efforts, along with their role in trying to cover up the correlation.  And now, it's to be hoped that history is once again repeating itself, with the Department of Justice getting involved -- and pursuing an investigation to find out whether industry giants like Exxon-Mobil actively suppressed climate change research, and lied to their investors about the dangers.

Like back in the 1950s, however, the industry has political clout, and there are elected officials whose debt to the corporate world is higher than their ethical standards.  Just last week, five senators -- Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Jeff Sessions, David Vitter, and David Perdue -- signed a letter demanding that the Department of Justice halt their inquiries.  "We write today to demand that the Department of Justice (DoJ) immediately cease its ongoing use of law enforcement resources to stifle private debate on one of the most controversial public issues of our time," the letter states.

The problem is, it's not controversial any more, any more than the connection between tobacco and lung cancer was controversial fifty years ago.  This is a manufactured controversy, with one aim in mind -- providing protection for fossil fuel markets.  The industry, and their mouthpieces in so-called "think tanks" like the Heartland Institute, know full well that what they are doing is affecting global temperatures.  Anyone who can read a scientific paper can no longer claim that the issue is undecided.  What they are doing is denying reality to save their profit margin, damn the cost to the future.

And that future is looking like it's coming awfully soon.  Sea level rise is already taking its toll -- interesting that David Vitter's home state of Louisiana is one of the first places to see the effects, with a coastal island called Isle St. Charles having already lost over 50% of its land area to flooding from rising waters in the Gulf of Mexico.  Its residents have applied for, and received, a $48 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development -- not for levees and flood mitigation, but simply to resettle as eco-refugees.

It's to be hoped that the officials in the Department of Justice will respond appropriately to Cruz, Vitter, et al., to wit, with a phrase that ends with "... and the horse you rode in on."  I'm optimistic that just as with the lung cancer deniers back in the 50s, today's climate change deniers will eventually be steamrolled by facts, evidence, and research.  The dangers of tobacco became public too late to save tens of thousands of lives, however -- perhaps we'll wise up sooner this time.

Doubt, experiment, and reproducibility

Yesterday I got a response on a post I did a little over a year ago about research that suggested fundamental differences in firing patterns in the brains of liberals and conservatives.   The study, headed by Darren Schreiber of the University of Exeter, used fMRI technology to look at functionality in people of different political leanings, and found that liberals have greater responsiveness in parts of the brain associated with risk-seeking, and conservatives in areas connected with anxiety and risk aversion.

The response, however, was as pointed as it was short.  It said, "I'm surprised you weren't more skeptical of this study," and provided a link to a criticism of Schreiber's work by Dan Kahan over at the Cultural Cognition Project.  Kahan is highly doubtful of the partisan-brain study, and says so in no uncertain terms:

Before 2009, many fMRI researchers engaged in analyses equivalent to what Vul [a researcher who is critical of the method Schreiber used] describes.  That is, they searched around within unconstrained regions of the brain for correlations with their outcome measures, formed tight “fitting” regressions to the observations, and then sold the results as proof of the mind-blowingly high “predictive” power of their models—without ever testing the models to see if they could in fact predict anything. 

Schreiber et al. did this, too.  As explained, they selected observations of activating “voxels” in the amygdala of Republican subjects precisely because those voxels—as opposed to others that Schreiber et al. then ignored in “further analysis”—were “activating” in the manner that they were searching for in a large expanse of the brain.  They then reported the resulting high correlation between these observed voxel activations and Republican party self-identification as a test for “predicting” subjects’ party affiliations—one that “significantly out-performs the longstanding parental model, correctly predicting 82.9% of the observed choices of party.” 

This is bogus.  Unless one “use[s] an independent dataset” to validate the predictive power of “the selected . . .voxels” detected in this way, Kriegeskorte et al. explain in their Nature Neuroscience paper, no valid inferences can be drawn.  None.

So it appears that  Schreiber et al. were guilty of what James Burke calls "designing an experiment to find the kind of data you reckon you're going to find."  It would be hard to recognize that from the original paper itself without being a neuroscientist, of course.  I fell for Schreiber's research largely because I'm a generalist, making me unqualified to spot errors in highly specific, technical fields.

Interestingly, this comment came hard on the heels of a paper by Monya Baker that appeared last week in Nature called "1,500 Scientists Lift the Lid on Reproducibility."  Baker writes:

More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.  Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research... 

Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak.  The best-known analyses, from psychology and cancer biology, found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively.  Our survey respondents were more optimistic: 73% said that they think that at least half of the papers in their field can be trusted, with physicists and chemists generally showing the most confidence. 

The results capture a confusing snapshot of attitudes around these issues, says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.  “At the current time there is no consensus on what reproducibility is or should be.”

The causes were many and varied.  According to the respondents, the failure to reproduce results derived from issues such as low statistical power to unavailability of method to poor experimental design; worse still, all too often no one bothers even to try to reproduce results because of the pressure to publish one's own work, not check someone else's.  As as result, slipshod research -- and sometimes, outright fraud -- gets into print.

How dire is this?  Two heartening responses described in Baker's paper include the fact that just about all of the scientists polled want more stringent guidelines for reproducibility, and also that work of high visibility is far more likely to be checked and verified prior to publication.  (Sorry, climate change deniers -- you can't use this paper to support your views.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What it means, of course, is that science bloggers who aren't scientists themselves -- including, obviously, myself -- have to be careful about cross-checking and verifying what they write, lest they end up spreading around bogus information.  I'm still not completely convinced that Schreiber et al. were as careless as Kahan claims; at the moment, all we have is Kahan's criticism that they were guilty of the multitude of failings described in his article.  But it does reinforce our need to think critically and question what we read -- even if it's in a scientific journal.

And despite all of this, science is still by far our best tool for understanding.  It's not free from error, nor from the completely human failings of duplicity and carelessness.  But compared to other ways of moving toward the truth, it's pretty much the only game there is.

Drought of the imagination

The observation that politicians tend to lie is so obvious as to hardly need comment.  As far back as 2,400 years ago, Plato observed, "Those who are too smart and honest to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are stupid and dishonest."

It's disheartening how little has changed in two millennia.  We are still electing liars and crooks, which means that we ourselves are falling for the lies.  After all, we keep voting for them despite the fact that just about everyone knows full well that most politicians will say and do damn near anything to get elected.

Which brings me once again to Donald Trump.

I had told myself I wouldn't do another post on Trump, that I'd said what I had to say.  Honestly, I hate talking politics anyhow.  I'm pretty non-partisan in the sense that I don't vote any party line, and that I can support a wide range of candidates as long as they approach holding office from the position of respecting facts, being open-minded, and telling the truth.

Unfortunately, this narrows the field pretty severely right from the get-go.

But even from my admittedly cynical standpoint, Donald Trump raises dishonest bullshit to unprecedented heights.  He's not the stupidest person in politics; that dubious honor would go either to Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas (who asked if the Mars Pathfinder mission had seen the flag that Neil Armstrong had planted yet) or Republican Louie Gohmert, also of Texas (who said that cutting food stamps was a benefit to poor people because it would keep them from becoming obese).

Trump, however, may well be the biggest liar of the bunch.  And I don't think he lies because he's shooting from the hip; I think he lies with complete forethought and understanding of what he's saying and why.  He is a brilliant strategist -- and, I believe, entirely amoral.

Let's consider his statements last week to a rally in Fresno, California.  It's hard to give a political speech in California in the last couple of years without at least addressing the catastrophic drought they've been facing.  It's first and foremost on many people's minds, given the threat to drinking water and agriculture as the rivers run dry and the aquifers disappear.  And what did Trump say?  I'll give you the direct quote, because you won't believe me otherwise:

We’re going to solve your water problem. You have a water problem that is so insane. It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea.  They [the farmers] don’t understand — nobody understands it.  There is no drought. 

If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive.

I beg your pardon?  There is no drought?  All Trump had to do, all along, is wave his hand and say, "The drought does not exist," and it would just acquiesce and move on to trouble another nation, possibly Mexico, assuming it can cross the wall he's planning to build?

And all we have to do, apparently, is to elect Trump, and he will "open up the water."  Environment be damned.  The water will do what Donald commands.  Otherwise, it will be fired.

To a lot of Trump's naysayers, these are just gaffes, slips of the tongue, speaking without thinking things through first.  I think it's more insidious than that.  Trump knows full well what he's doing, what sort of message plays well with the crowds he's attracting.  He's well-loved among people who distrust science, disbelieve that the climate is changing because of human activities, and think that our leader should be able to bully nature into doing whatever he wants. 

As such, he's wildly popular among the pro-fossil fuel contingent, and his talking points reflect that.  A couple of days ago, he promised that if he is elected, he would "cancel the Paris Climate Plan" that has made some motion toward addressing runaway fossil fuel use and anthropogenic carbon dioxide.   The move was no accident; it was calculated to win support (financial and otherwise) from the fossil fuel industry.  Don't believe me?  Consider his statement to a meeting of oil industry representatives in Bismarck, North Dakota three days ago:

Regulations that shut down hundreds of coal-fired power plants and block the construction of new ones — how stupid is that?... We’re going to deal with real environmental challenges, not the phony ones we’ve been hearing about.

Which reminds me of another quote, this one by George Bernard Shaw: "A government with the policy of robbing Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul."

So it's no surprise that the petroleum industry loves the guy.  But what gets me most is the fact that Trump can lie outright to the crowds who attend his rallies, and they continue to cheer.  At least the other candidates are subtle about it; Trump, evidently, has the approach of "go big or go home:"

And you know I should say this, I’ve received many, many environmental rewards. You know, really.  Rewards and awards. I  have done really well environmentally and I’m all for it.  You know we want jobs.  We have to bring jobs back.  And if we can bring this part of the world water, that we have, that we have, but it’s true, I’ve gotten so many of the awards.

Do you know what "environmental rewards and awards" he's received?  I did some digging and I found...

... one.  In 2007, a golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, owned by Trump, received an award for "environmental stewardship through golf course maintenance, construction, education and research."  And that's it.  One golf course, apparently, constitutes "many, many environmental rewards... so many of the awards."

So Trump keeps bullshitting, and the people keep cheering.  More ironic still, many of the same people loudly complain about the dishonesty of the government -- while this man stands in front of them, uttering outright lies, and none of them bat an eye.

The whole thing is profoundly discouraging, not least because I'm not particularly enamored of the other option I'm likely to be offered in November.  I hate being put in a position of voting not to support a good candidate, but in an attempt to prevent a horrible candidate from winning.  That, however, appears to be what I'm going to have to do.  Unless I can simply wave my hand, unleash my Jedi mind tricks, and say, "These are not the candidates you're looking for," and have the whole lot of them go away.

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 we had a prominent Muslim cleric worrying about, which was: 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 gays 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 two 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, was 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.

A win for sanity

Earlier this year, I did a post lamenting the fact that a woman who is apparently insane was running for a position on the Texas State Board of Education, and (at the time of the post) had the support of 50% of the voters polled.

Her name is Mary Lou Bruner, and she gives every evidence of being a few fries short of a Happy Meal.  She claimed that President Obama was addicted to drugs and financed his college tuition by being a male prostitute.  She blamed the JFK assassination on the Bad Guys "not wanting a conservative president."  She thinks the dinosaurs went extinct because there wasn't enough vegetation for them to eat after the biblical Great Flood.  She said that climate change was dreamed up by Karl Marx.  She thinks that Obamacare is going to mandate forced euthanasia of the unfit.

Last but not least, she said that school shootings are caused by the teaching of evolution.

For the record, I'm not making any of this up, and the actual quotes (should you wish to risk injury from repeated headdesks) are in my original post.  And despite her evidently having a screw loose, she had serious support amongst the voters in Texas.  Unsurprising, given that this is the same state that approved history textbooks that had passages claiming that the Africans brought over in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries weren't slaves, they were "guest workers" who had been "brought in to work on agricultural plantations."

So I was feeling pretty pessimistic about the whole thing.  This is why it was with combined surprise and delight that I learned yesterday that Bruner was resoundingly defeated in the runoff election by Keven M. Ellis, the president of the Lufkin School District school board.

"The voters did their homework," Ellis said in his victory speech, which is a phrase I'd definitely like to hear more often.

A spokesperson for the Texas Freedom Network, which has been vociferous in their criticism of Bruner, was less circumspect.  "Texas escaped an education train wreck tonight."

You have to admit, though, she looks mighty good wrapped in an American flag.

What I find interesting is that even Tea Party stalwart Grassroots America, which had backed Bruner initially, withdrew their support the week before the election.  Grassroots America has typically supported candidates who advocate for bringing religion into public schools, mandating the teaching of creationism and/or intelligent design, and excising any mention of climate change from science curricula.  But apparently, Bruner was too loony even for Grassroots America to support, and they quietly pulled their endorsement.  Spokesperson Jo Ann Fleming said that the move was made because of "inaccurate oral and written statements Ms. Bruner made in a meeting with superintendents."

Because evidently calling the president a gay drug-addicted prostitute isn't sufficiently crazy.

Anyhow, the good news is that children in Texas have been issued a reprieve.  I was certain she was going to win, and I've never been so glad to be wrong.

Now, if only the voters will apply the same kind of careful consideration to the elections this November.

Fact-free zone

It's a theme that has cropped up over and over here at Skeptophilia; the fact that people spend a lot more time reacting from emotion than they do from rational thinking.

But the fact of its being familiar doesn't mean it's not maddening.  Which is why I responded to a recent paper that appeared in Perspectives on Psychological Science a couple of days ago with a wince and a facepalm.

Entitled "Evidence for Absolute Moral Opposition to Genetically Modified Food in the United States," and written by Sydney E. Scott and Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania and Yoel Inbar of the University of Toronto, the paper had the following depressing conclusion:

Public opposition to genetic modification (GM) technology in the food domain is widespread (Frewer et al., 2013).  In a survey of U.S. residents representative of the population on gender, age, and income, 64% opposed GM, and 71% of GM opponents (45% of the entire sample) were “absolutely” opposed—that is, they agreed that GM should be prohibited no matter the risks and benefits.  “Absolutist” opponents were more disgust sensitive in general and more disgusted by the consumption of genetically modified food than were non-absolutist opponents or supporters.  Furthermore, disgust predicted support for legal restrictions on genetically modified foods, even after controlling for explicit risk–benefit assessments.  This research suggests that many opponents are evidence insensitive and will not be influenced by arguments about risks and benefits.

Catch that?  45% of the people surveyed think that GMOs should be illegal regardless of the risks or benefits.  In other words, regardless of the evidence.  Apparently, a little under half of the respondents could be presented with persuasive evidence that GMOs are risk-free and have proven benefits, and they still would be against them.

It's a discouraging finding.  There are a great many issues facing us today that drive an urgent need to make smart decisions.  We need to be making those decisions based on facts and logic, not on knee-jerk gut response and inflammatory rhetoric.  Climate change, policy on vaccines, regulation of alternative medicine, even the oversight of public education -- how can we do what's right if we're making decisions irrespective of the facts?

Of course, part of the problem is that even people with access to the facts often don't know the facts.  Witness the study released last week in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology that showed that 80% of respondents wanted to have laws mandating labeling identifying all foods that contain DNA.

Yes, you read that right.  Not genetically modified DNA; DNA, period.  To make it even worse, 33% of the respondents thought that non-genetically-modified tomatoes "did not contain genes," and 32% thought that "vegetables do not contain DNA."  As Katherine Mangu-Ward put it over at Reason.com, "When it comes to genetically modified food, people don't know much, they don't know what they don't know, and they sure as heck aren't letting that stop them from having strong opinions."

The problem is, the people who shriek the loudest tend to be the ones with the least comprehension of science.  Senator James Inhofe, who for some baffling reason is the chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, thinks that holding up a snowball disproves anthopogenic climate change.  The alt-med/anti-vaccine crowd still believe Andrew Wakefield's discredited study linking vaccinations to autism, despite overwhelming research demonstrating that there is no connection -- and anyone who argues otherwise is said to be "a shill for Big Pharma."  (Makes me wonder when my first Shill Check is going to arrive.  Soon, I hope.  I could use the money.)

Only rarely does anyone look at the evidence and say, "Oh.  Okay.  I guess I was wrong, then."  And the paper by Scott et al. seems to support the contention that if I'm waiting for this to happen, I better not be holding my breath.

Of course, along with resistance to change, another natural human inclination is the whole "Hope Springs Eternal" phenomenon.  So I'm not giving up on blogging, at least not any time soon.  Despite the rather dismal conclusion of the recent research, I'm still hopeful that we can make change, incrementally, by picking away wherever we can.