Unwinding the spell

If there's one thing I understand least about the whole sad spectacle of the Trump administration, it's the fact of his being embraced so warmly (and staunchly) by evangelical Christians.

Okay, I see how they'd have been put off by Hillary Clinton's pro-choice stance.  That, for many of them, is a real non-negotiable.  But most of these people are the same ones who call themselves "values voters" -- who, for example, pitched a fit when Bill Clinton got a blowjob while in office.  And somehow, these same people are able to look past Trump's serial adultery, admissions of sexual harassment if not outright rape, continual lying, and unwavering focus on money (the love of which, I seem to recall, the bible calls "the root of all evil").

In fact, they are able to look past all of this so much that just last week, Trump was the commencement speaker at Liberty University, which shares with Bob Jones University the moniker "The Buckle on the Bible Belt."  Liberty University was founded by Reverend Jerry Falwell, who also founded the Moral Majority back in the late 70s, and it's run today by Falwell's son, Jerry Jr. -- who called Trump "a successful executive and entrepreneur, a wonderful father and a man who I believe can lead our country to greatness again."

So Trump gave a speech that talked up how wonderful and religious he was, and how he'd Make America Great Again, conveniently glossing over the current horrific chaos he's led our government into during the last few weeks.  Here is an excerpt:

Be totally unafraid to challenge entrenched interests and failed power structures.  Does that sound familiar, by the way?  Relish the opportunity to be an outsider.  Embrace that label.  Being an outsider is fine.  Embrace the label, because it’s the outsiders who change the world and who make a real and lasting difference.  The more that a broken system tells you that you’re wrong, the more certain you should be that you must keep pushing ahead...  As long as I am your president, no one is ever going to stop you from practicing your faith or from preaching what is in your heart...  In America, we don’t worship government.  We worship God.

At this point, I'd have leaped up and shouted, "Define we, buster!"  But apparently most of the Liberty University graduates simply smiled and nodded -- in fact, one of them commented afterwards that Trump had given a "kickass speech."

Not everyone was so positive, however.  Twitter erupted in a storm of tweets, many of them from Christians who are outraged by the fact that a man whose most outstanding characteristic is embodying all Seven Deadly Sins in one person has somehow become a spokesperson for the political arm of evangelical Christianity.

Here are a few of the most acerbic comments:

• Funny that Trump is speaking at Liberty University, a religious institute of higher education, since he is neither religious nor educated.
• "Trump’s ‘Christian faith" is the worst of his lies.  There isn’t a shred of Christ in him.  Liberty University should call him out, not welcome him.
• Trump speaking at Liberty University — two words his very existence shits on.
• In Trump's Liberty University commencement speech, he'll explain how to grab 'em by the cat parts and then become president.
• With Trump University and Liberty University degrees, you can be a preacher with a casino and three wives and date your daughter.
• Trump at Liberty University: Lie, lie, lie until you succeed.

Which is it exactly.  The only conclusion I can come to is that people like Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham, Jim Bakker, and Ralph Reed are supporting Trump for one reason and one reason only; they're rich, powerful men, and under a Trump presidency they're convinced they'll become richer and more powerful.  In other words, they don't give a rat's ass for values or morals, and never have.  All they care about is expanding their own empires, and they believe that hitching their wagon to Donald Trump will further that aim.

Which is kind of pathetic, because it means that they share another characteristic with Trump: the capacity for bald-faced lies.  They have their congregations, followers, and listeners hoodwinked into thinking that they are actually committed to moral behavior.  And somehow, they've succeeded in that deception, given the fortunes they've amassed (mostly due to contributions from their flock), and the power they wield in the religious world.

Lie, lie, lie until you succeed.  The same as Trump himself.

I keep hoping that the truly moral Christians -- which, I believe, are the vast majority -- will wake up and recognize the man they're following for the egomaniacal, sociopathic narcissist he actually is.  But there, we have the sunk-cost fallacy working against us; so many of them have put so much time and effort into supporting Trump and seeing that he got elected president, that to backpedal now would be agonizing.  

But I don't see any other way that our nation can get out of the slow-motion train wreck it's currently involved in.

The whole thing puts me in mind of a quote from C. S. Lewis, from his book The Great Divorce:

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.  A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.  Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good.  Time does not heal it.  The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' -- or else not.

A tincture of madness

As a fiction writer, I have an understandable interest in the neuroscience of creativity.  It's a difficult field to study; getting people to be creative while simultaneously scanning their brains can be tricky.

Now, five researchers at Johns Hopkins have been able to do just that.  A recent paper in Nature by
Malinda J. McPherson, Frederick S. Barrett, Monica Lopez-Gonzalez, Patpong Jiradejvong, and Charles J. Limb entitled "Emotional Intent Modulates The Neural Substrates Of Creativity: An fMRI Study of Emotionally Targeted Improvisation in Jazz Musicians" has shown that creativity requires the interaction between several disparate regions of the brain -- including the ones connected with both negative and positive emotions.

What the researchers did is to take twelve jazz pianists and instruct them to improvise a piece based on emotional cues they got from a photograph of a woman with either a happy, neutral, or sad expression.  They then played their piece while in a fMRI machine, thus giving the scientists a view of what was happening in their brains as they created.

The researchers found there was a distinct difference in the patterns of brain activation depending upon the emotional content of the music the pianists were creating.  The authors write:

[T]his study shows that the impulse to create emotionally expressive music may have a basic neural origin: emotion modulates the neural systems involved in creativity, allowing musicians to engage limbic centers of their brain and enter flow states.  The human urge to express emotions through art may derive from these widespread changes in limbic, reward, and prefrontal areas during emotional expression.  Within jazz improvisation, certain emotional states may open musicians to deeper flow states or more robust stimulation of reward centers.  The creative expression of emotion through music may involve more complex mechanisms by which the brain processes emotions, in comparison to perception of emotion alone. 

More darkly, there's long been a supposed connection between being highly creative and being mentally ill.  The list of individuals who were both is a long one. Ernest Hemingway, Georgia O'Keeffe, Hermann Hesse, Maurice Ravel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allen Poe, Jackson Pollock, Cole Porter, Vincent van Gogh, and Robert Schumann all suffered from varying degrees of mental problems, most of them from clinical depression, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder.  More than one of these spent the last years of life in a mental institution, and more than one committed suicide.

"The only difference between myself and a madman," Salvador Dalí famously quipped, "is that I am not mad."  Two thousand years earlier, the Roman writer Seneca said, "There is no genius without a tincture of madness."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This, too, has been studied from a neuroscience perspective. A Swedish researcher has demonstrated that Seneca was right; there is a fundamental connection between creativity and mental illness.   Fredrik Ullén, of the Karolinska Institutet of Stockholm, found a significant connection between creativity and the dopamine (pleasure/reward) system in the brain, which is the same system that is implicated in several forms of mental illness, including schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and tendency to addiction.

Ullén administered a test that was designed to measure a subject's capacity for creative thinking -- for developing more than one solution to the same problem, or using non-linear solution methods to arrive at an answer.  He then analyzed the brain activity of the individuals who scored the highest, and found that across the board, they had lower amounts of dopamine receptors in a part of the brain called the thalamus -- one of the main "switchboards" in the higher brain, and responsible for sorting and processing sensory stimuli.

The implication is that creative people don't have as rigid a sorting mechanism as other, less creative people -- that having a built-in deficiency in your relay system may help you to arrive at solutions to problems that others might not have seen.

The connection between the thalamus, creativity, and sorting issues is supported by a different bit of brain research that found that a miswiring of the thalamus is implicated in another bizarre mental disorder, called synesthesia.  In synesthesia, signals from the sensory organs are misrouted to the incorrect interpretive centers in the cerebrum, and an auditory signal (for example) might be received in the visual cortex.  As a result, you would "see sounds."  Other senses can be crosswired, however -- the seminal study of the disorder is described in Richard Cytowic's book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes.

Synesthsia is apparently also much more common among the creative.  Alexander Scriabin, the early 20th century Russian composer, wrote his music as much from how it looked to him as how it sounded.  He describes a sensation of color being overlaid on what he was actually seeing when he heard specific combinations of notes.  The colors were consistent; C# minor, for example, was always green, Eb major always magenta.  And although Alexander Scriabin's synesthesia was perhaps the most intense, he is not the only composer who was synesthetic; the evidence is strong that Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Olivier Messaien also had this same miswiring.

The study by Ullén seems to point toward connecting these physiological manifestations with the phenomenon of creativity itself.  "Thinking outside the box," Ullén said, "may be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box."

So the whole thing is, as you might expect, quite complex.  Creativity, apparently, involves not only the interaction between emotional and cognitive regions of the brain, but between separate cognitive and perceptual modules.  The next time someone asks me where I get the ideas for my novels, however, I'm not sure I want to go into all of this.  I'll probably just stick with my tried-and-true response, which is to smile and say, "I was dropped on my head as an infant."

Music of the spheres

When I went to graduate school, I think the most surprising thing for me was that we were supposed to think creatively about science.  While I had, for the most part, excelled in my science classes in high school and college, they had mostly required me only to master concepts and then be able to demonstrate my mastery on an exam.  I had never had to synthesize, put ideas together in a novel way, apply concepts from one field in an entirely different one.  Nor had I been expected to critique ideas or arguments; I had merely been expected to understand them.

So my leap into the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Washington was a bit of a rude awakening, and was (on the whole) kind of a failure.  I was not, at that point in my life, prepared intellectually for the challenge of applying scientific ideas in a creative way, largely because I'd never had any practice in doing so.

No wonder, then, that I lasted exactly one semester in the School of Oceanography

I have since come to appreciate the role of creativity, lateral "outside of the box" thinking, and pure cleverness in approaching scientific questions.  I still suspect I wouldn't be very good at it -- on the whole, I think it was a good decision to leave the educational track headed toward research -- but at least I understand now that in science, the capacity for creative synthesis is as important as pure knowledge.

I ran into an especially good example of that yesterday, in a field that has always been a source of fascination for me; the study of exoplanets.  There have thus far been over a thousand exoplanets discovered, with new ones being reported all the time.  The most exciting part is when one is found that is in the "Goldilocks Zone" (not too hot, not too cold, juuuuuussst right), where liquid water can exist, and therefore where life is thought to be far more likely.

One of the most exciting planetary systems so far discovered is called "Trappist-1," and is about forty light years from Earth.  Trappist-1 has no less than seven Earth-sized planets, at least a few of which are thought to be in the habitable zone.  But the coolest thing about the Trappist-1 system is that an astrophysicist has explained the relative rates of revolution of the seven planets...

... using principles of harmony in music.

Artist's conception of the Trappist-1 system [image courtesy of the Spitzer Space Telescope and NASA/JPL]

What's funny about this is that famed astronomer Johannes Kepler nearly drove himself insane trying to show that the orbits of the planets in our Solar System were connected somehow to the "five Platonic solids" -- cube, octahedron, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron -- thereby proving that there was some divine order in the heavens rather than (as it appeared) the planets all orbiting at different distances in a seemingly random fashion.  He wrote a book called the Mysterium Cosmographicum (Secret of the Universe) elaborating on this theory.  (Kepler had evidently never heard that Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit, because the full title of his book is 46 words long, which is why everyone just calls it the Mysterium Cosmographicum.)

In any case, Kepler's attempt at forcing the Solar System into a pattern based on the five Platonic solids was a complete flop, and it was only after he abandoned this idea that he made the discovery for which he became famous -- that planets travel in ellipses, not circles, and that regardless of the distance they are from the Sun, their orbits sweep out equal areas in equal times.

In a discovery that would have warmed the cockles of Kepler's heart, a team of astronomers, led by Daniel Tamayo of the University of Toronto-Scarborough, just published a paper last week in Astrophysical Journal Letters suggesting that while the orbits of planets have nothing to do with the five Platonic solids, they do have something to do with the phenomenon of resonance -- when the oscillation of one body influences the oscillation of another.  Tamayo found that the seven planets around Trappist-1 are in stable orbits because they are in a resonance pattern that resembles the relationships between frequencies of notes in a chord.  For example, the second planet in the system completes five orbits in the time taken for the innermost planet to make eight; the fourth planet makes two revolutions every time the third one makes three; and so on.  The combined effect of this is to make the entire system operate in a regular, predictable fashion.

The coolest part of this is that Tamayo turned the periods of revolution for all seven planets into musical notes, with the relationships between the pitches representing the ratios between the period length.  You can hear his recording of the musical representation of the Trappist-1 system at the link above.

You'll be listening to the actual music of the spheres.

"I think Trappist is the most musical system we'll ever discover," said Matt Russo, who is a member of Tamayo's team as well as being a musician, and who designed computer simulations of planetary systems in musical resonance (and ones that were not) to see if they remained stable over time.

Tamayo compared resonance in a planetary system to musicians in an orchestra.  "It's not enough for members merely to keep time," he said.  "Simulating the formation of a system in its birth disk is analogous to an orchestra tuning itself before playing.  When we create these harmonized systems, we find that the majority survive for as long as we run our supercomputer simulations."

So there you have it; a melding of music and astrophysics.  I find myself in awe of this sort of research, mostly because I can't imagine my coming up with an idea this creative myself.  So maybe it's best I decided on teaching and writing as a career.  I may not have much of a facility for connecting disparate concepts myself, but I certainly love to tell others about the delightful research of people who do.

An anodyne against despair

Yesterday, I was discussing with one of my colleagues how important it is to find things that lift your spirit.  The world has been replete with dismal news lately, and it's all too easy to decide that everything's hopeless -- to become either cynical or despondent.  I know I have to fight that tendency myself, especially considering the topics I frequently address here at Skeptophilia.

It's essential to take a moment, every so often, to step back and recognize that however terrible current events have been, there is still great love, compassion, and wonder in the world.  So I thought I'd take a day off from the continual stream of WTF that the news has become, and consider a few examples of what beauty we humans are capable of.  Think of it as an anodyne against despair, a way to inoculate yourself against losing hope.

Dalai Lama Mandala I, pen/ink/watercolor, by Carol Bloomgarden [image used with permission]

First, take a look at this video by the Dutch artist Thijme Termaat.  He spent two and a half years creating a progressive set of paintings, condensed it into a three-minute video, set it to a piece from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, and named it Timelapse.  Take three minutes and be amazed.

When I was in Boston a while back, I went to the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, and I lucked out and saw some work by the incredibly creative Rachel Perry Welty.  The piece that absolutely captivated me was a twelve-minute video called Karaoke Wrong Number, wherein she took four years' worth of voicemail messages she'd received by accident (i.e., the person had called her number but thought they were leaving a message to someone else entirely), and lip synced to them.  I stood there and watched the entire piece three times in a row -- it's mesmerizing.  The incredible thing about it is that she's able to shift her facial expression and body language to match the voice and message of the person -- it's funny, wry, and at times absolutely uncanny, and illustrates Welty's sheer creative genius.  (You can watch a five-minute clip from it at the link above.)

If you don't mind crying, take a look at Kseniya Simonova's stupendous feat of drawing in sand on a light box that brought the whole audience to tears in Ukraine's Got Talent.  It shows the effect of the German invasion on the people of Ukraine during World War II, and packs an emotional punch like nothing I've ever seen before.

If after that, you want to see something that is pure whimsy to cheer you up, you need to watch the amazing musical marble machine created by Martin Molin of the Swedish band Wintergatan.  Molin created a wild Rube Goldberg machine, powered by a hand crank and 2,000 marbles, that plays a tune he wrote.  It's one of those things that you watch, and you just can't quite believe it's real.

If you want to blow your mind further, have a look at this short little video showing one of the crazy three-dimensional sculptures of Japanese mathematician and artist Kokichi Sugihara.  Sugihara specializes in creating optical illusions out of paper -- in this case, a structure that seems to induce marbles to roll uphill.  The weird thing to me is that even when he shows you how it's done -- which he does, about halfway through -- I still can't see it any other way.  It's so cleverly done that my brain simply can't handle it.

Last, for sheer exuberance -- if you're like me, it'll make you laugh and cry at the same time -- check out the short film "Where in the Hell Is Matt?", made by Matt Harding.  Harding set out to film himself dancing in as many different spots on Earth as he could get to, often joined by children, adults, and dogs, all simply expressing how wonderful it is to be alive.  It's set to the heart-wrenchingly gorgeous song "Praan" by Garry Schyman.  The music and the spirit of Harding's project could not blend together more perfectly.

So there you are.  Even when things are bad, people are still creating beautiful, funny, and whimsical things.  They still care about bringing joy into the world, despite the constant barrage of pain, discouragement, and bad news we're subjected to on a daily basis.  I don't know about you, but when I see things like this, it reminds me that humanity isn't as hopeless as it may seem at times.  It recalls the last lines of the beautiful poem "Desiderata," by Max Ehrmann, which never fails to bring me to tears, and which seems like a good place to conclude:

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.  But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. 

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.  You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. 

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.  Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.  And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.  With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be cheerful.  Strive to be happy.

Weasels in charge

In case you still needed something about the current state of affairs in the United States to be distressed about, two days ago the Trump administration announced the firing of the majority of the members of the Environmental Protection Agency's Scientific Review Board.

This board is exactly what it sounds like; it's made up of actual research scientists who have the academic background to evaluate environmental policy and make sure it's based on reliable research.  But that, apparently, is no longer the focus.  Now, the only thing that matters is whether policy is based on what's best for industry.

Especially the fossil fuels industry.

J. P. Friere, spokesperson for EPA chief Scott Pruitt, was up front about it.  "The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the implication of regulations on the regulated community."

"Deregulation" is, of course, a euphemism for "giving carte blanche to the corporations to do whatever they damn well please."  Don't consider air and water quality; don't consider standards for protecting the ecosystems; don't even consider whether the industry in question is reasonable or sustainable.  Hell, Pruitt himself has made a point of visiting several coal mines and has promised to restore coal mining to its former prominence -- never mind that besides the danger to coal miners and the communities near mines, and the environmental damage, the rising market share of natural gas and renewable energy makes it nearly impossible that coal will ever regain its status as a viable energy commodity.

I.e., Pruitt is lying.  But that's becoming status quo for this administration.  In fact, it's beginning to seem like the best way not to get hired by Trump or his cronies is to tell the truth.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And it should come as no surprise that the person behind the dismissal of the Scientific Review Board is none other than Lamar Smith, who is the odds-on favorite for winning the Congressional Corporate Stooge of the Year award.  This is the same man who is funded by the fossil fuels industry, is hand-in-glove with the climate-change-denying Heartland Institute, and was responsible last year for the harassment of any government employees involved in making sure that legitimate science was used to drive policy.  With no apparent sense of irony, Smith said, "In recent years, Science Advisory Board experts have become nothing more than rubber stamps who approve all of the EPA's regulations.  The EPA routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government.  The conflict of interest here is clear."

How he could accuse someone else of conflicts of interest without being struck by lightning, I have no idea.  But that's what he did.  With a straight face, unless you count the obnoxious smirk he always wears.

Worst of all, they're getting away with it.  Pruitt and Smith are planning on hiring replacements for the fired members who are industry- and deregulation-friendly.  The message is, don't base policy on science, or even on what is good for American citizens; base it on whatever pours the most money into the pockets of corporate interests.

What is happening right now in Washington DC is going to take years to repair, if it's repairable at all.  We are at a tipping point with respect to a lot of things; climate change, biodiversity loss, air quality, collapse of fisheries.  Throwing away the regulations -- which were our last, best hope for mitigating some of the damage our species has caused -- is sure to push us past the point of no return.

Not that Smith and Pruitt care.  In their view, short-term profits and political expediency never take second seat to caring for the environment that is keeping us alive in the long term.  Especially when Donald Trump has put weasels in charge of the hen house.

I honestly don't know how these people can sleep at night.

Subversion, suppression, and dissent

Of all the worrisome trends I'm seeing in the world in general, and the United States in particular -- and there are a lot to choose from -- what has me the most freaked out is the move toward intolerance of dissent and suppression of free speech.

Let's see what we have, just in the past week:

• The Justice Department prosecuted journalist Desiree Fairooz for laughing at a particularly absurd thing Attorney General Jeff Sessions said during his confirmation hearing.  Fairooz was found guilty and is now facing a possible one-year prison term.  For laughing.
• The FCC has launched an investigation of Stephen Colbert for his acerbic comments about President Donald Trump, which included a statement that "the only thing Donald Trump's mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin's cock-holster."  Colbert is likely to be fined for obscenity.
• Across the Atlantic, Stephen Fry is under investigation by Irish authorities on charges of blasphemy -- which yes, is still a punishable offense in Ireland.  Fry was being interviewed, and was asked by the interviewer what he would say to God if he had the chance.  (Fry is a prominent and outspoken atheist.)  Fry responded, "I’d say ‘Bone cancer in children, what’s that about?’  How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault.  It’s not right.  It’s utterly, utterly evil.  Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?"  A complaint was lodged against Fry, and if convicted he could face a fine of €25,000.
• In Saudi Arabia, yet another atheist has been sentenced to death simply for being open about his beliefs.  Unless the courts intervene -- and it is unlikely that they will do so, given that Saudi King Abdullah declared atheists to be terrorists three years ago -- some time in the next few weeks Ahmad Al-Shamri is likely to be taken out into Deera Square in Riyadh, forced to his knees, and publicly beheaded with a sword.  Despite this, the Saudis are still our staunch allies, and (with no apparent awareness of irony) are members of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

And that's just in the last week.  The trend is increasingly toward jailing (or worse) anyone who speaks up, anyone who holds unpopular opinions, and (especially) anyone who ridicules the people in power.  As Voltaire put it, "To learn who is actually in power, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

At the same time, there is a huge push by the people who are on top to consolidate that power -- in part, by giving the impression that because there is dissent, they are the persecuted ones.  Here are a few recent examples of that:

• Ken Ham, the science-denying founder of Answers in Genesis and the driving force behind the "Ark Encounter" theme park, got his knickers in a twist over the demand by American Atheists spokesperson Amanda Knief that a bench with a plaque saying "Men who will not be governed by God will be governed by tyrants" be removed from government property.  But replacing it with a plain old secular bench?  That, to Ham, is a direct slap in the face to Christians everywhere.  "Atheists don't want freedom of religion," Ham snarled.  "They want freedom from Christianity.  They want their religion only in public... Atheists, like many against free speech, are intolerant & bullying people with their religion to remove Christian symbols...  I encourage people to educate the public that atheism is a religion, an anti-God intolerant religion out to impose their religion on culture."
• Lizette Franklin, of Kinross, Scotland, has launched a campaign against UK discount store Poundland for a promotion called "OMG," that puts the acronym on signs for price reductions.  Poundland says it stands for "Oh my goodness," but Franklin isn't buying it, and is trying to get Christians to boycott the store.  "To me it expresses the name of the Lord and can be taken as disrespectful," Franklin said.  "If it was to mean 'Oh My Goodness' they should have written it out...  I am an absolute fan of the store.  But when I saw this I was really in shock.  It was as if the name of the Lord has been made fun of and disrespected all over the store.  It is as if the name of the Lord was being used in vain to promote prices and this is revolting to say the least.  This is disrespectful to us as Christians and should be removed at once."
• State Representative Rick Saccone of Pennsylvania, who recently announced a bid for the U.S. Senate, has said that he was motivated to run for office because "God has set out a plan for us.  He wants godly men and women in all aspects of life.  He wants people who will rule with the fear of God in them to rule over us.  And if they don’t, then the evil side will take over and the government will control and run over the good people and so they have to stand up, that’s just part of it.  If you don’t have good people in government, then you’ll have bad people in government—and when bad people are reigning over us, the people will not be happy."  You may recall Saccone as the fellow who in 2012 sponsored a bill, which was ultimately (and fortunately) unsuccessful, to call that year "The National Year of the Bible" and to have "In God We Trust" posted prominently in all public schools.  Because, apparently, having it on our currency is simply not enough.

And so forth.  The general sense is that just being free to believe what you want is not sufficient; the symbols and slogans of that belief have to be everywhere, both private and public, or "religious freedom" is being trampled on.  Free speech is also great -- as long as that free speech doesn't criticize or ridicule the dominant paradigm.

There can be no challenge to the hegemony of the ones in power.

This, however, is the ideology of fascism.  If you can't criticize the government, if examining ideas is characterized as blasphemy, if (especially) the people in charge are convinced that they are ruling because it's the will of God -- you've taken a dangerous step toward totalitarianism.

We who believe in actual free speech can't let ourselves be cowed.  It's time to take some chances and risk vocal dissent.  We can't let the people running the governments in the world think that just because they can silence someone's voice, they've won.  

I'll end with a quote from George R. R. Martin, who put the words in the mouth of his iconic character Tyrion Lannister.  "If you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him wrong.  You are only showing the world that you fear what he might say."

Study shows readers of Skeptophilia have above-average intelligence!

One rather frustrating tendency, amongst those of us who have a skeptical bent, is that people tend to believe anything they read if it begins with "Study Proves" or "Research Shows."

Even better if it says "Harvard Researchers Show."

Apparently, it doesn't matter much whether the study actually proved the claim, or who the researchers were, or if the "Harvard research" was peer reviewed.  Merely claiming that some scientist, somewhere, of whatever credentials, said something -- well, that's enough.

Especially if what the scientist allegedly said fits in with what you already believed.

I ran across a particularly good example of this in Natural News, which I will not provide a link to because Mike "Health Ranger" Adams definitely doesn't need unsuspecting people generating any more clicks or ad revenue.  Least of all if they come from here, of all places.  The headline was "Study Shows Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier," and referenced a paper at Open Access Text called "Pilot Comparitive Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6- to 12-year-old U.S. Children," by Anthony R. Mawson, Brian D. Ray, Azad R. Bhuiyan, and Binu Jacob.  So I decided to check out the paper itself.  Here's a bit of it, so you can see their basic argument:

Vaccinations have prevented millions of infectious illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths among U.S. children, yet the long-term health outcomes of the vaccination schedule remain uncertain.  Studies have been recommended by the U.S. Institute of Medicine to address this question. This study aimed 1) to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children on a broad range of health outcomes, and 2) to determine whether an association found between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), if any, remained significant after adjustment for other measured factors.  A cross-sectional study of mothers of children educated at home was carried out in collaboration with homeschool organizations in four U.S. states: Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oregon.  Mothers were asked to complete an anonymous online questionnaire on their 6- to 12-year-old biological children with respect to pregnancy-related factors, birth history, vaccinations, physician-diagnosed illnesses, medications used, and health services.  NDD, a derived diagnostic measure, was defined as having one or more of the following three closely-related diagnoses: a learning disability, Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder.  A convenience sample of 666 children was obtained, of which 261 (39%) were unvaccinated.  The vaccinated were less likely than the unvaccinated to have been diagnosed with chickenpox and pertussis, but more likely to have been diagnosed with pneumonia, otitis media, allergies and NDD.  After adjustment, vaccination, male gender, and preterm birth remained significantly associated with NDD.  However, in a final adjusted model with interaction, vaccination but not preterm birth remained associated with NDD, while the interaction of preterm birth and vaccination was associated with a 6.6-fold increased odds of NDD (95% CI: 2.8, 15.5).  In conclusion, vaccinated homeschool children were found to have a higher rate of allergies and NDD than unvaccinated homeschool children.  While vaccination remained significantly associated with NDD after controlling for other factors, preterm birth coupled with vaccination was associated with an apparent synergistic increase in the odds of NDD.  Further research involving larger, independent samples and stronger research designs is needed to verify and understand these unexpected findings in order to optimize the impact of vaccines on children’s health.

Okay.  So, boiled down to its essence, (1) they admit that vaccines save lives, given that hardly anyone dies of diphtheria, polio, or tetanus anymore; (2) they claim that there seems to be an increased risk amongst vaccinated children of learning disability, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, allergies, and asthma.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Here's the problem, though.  Virtually all of the increased risks they describe are for conditions in which there is a huge spectrum of severity.  About 30% of adults and 40% of children are allergic to something, but these vary from sneezing during ragweed season to dying of anaphylactic shock if you consume a crumb of residue from a tree nut.  ADHD, in my experience as a teacher, ranges from kids who are a little fidgety to students who seem to be physiologically incapable of concentrating for more than five minutes on anything.

Hell, I have a learning disability in decoding written material myself; if I were in school today, I'd probably qualify for special services.  But I get along just fine, and in fact love to read even though I'm a bit slow at it and tire quickly.  I've had students, however, whose learning disabilities profoundly impacted their ability to manage most of the tasks they were expected to master in school.

So self-reported (or, in this case, mom-reported) conditions for which there is tremendous variability already makes the study a little questionable, especially given that those data are being compared to ones which are unequivocal -- such as whether the child in question ever got measles.

But there's a deeper problem still, and that is that the authors come into this question with an axe to grind.  As physician and blogger David Gorski points out over at his wonderful blog Respectful Insolence, the lead author of the study, Anthony Mawson, is an anti-vaxxer and had shopped around without success for a home for his paper in peer-reviewed journals, and finally had to post it at an open-access site because it couldn't pass review.  He did get an abstract accepted at Frontiers in Public Health -- but they retracted it only days after it was published, saying it was "under re-review."

Hardly a ringing endorsement.

Another problem is that homeschooled children are not a representative sample, nor are their parents.  There are lots of reasons for homeschooling -- one of my best friends homeschooled her daughter for the best of reasons, and she came out of the experience with a finely-honed mind and a deep passion for learning.  But there's a significant correlation between an homeschooling parent and being an anti-vaxxer, especially given the crackdown in many states on allowing belief-related exemptions for unvaccinated children to enter public school.

So right away there are some questions about the legitimacy of the data.  As I point out to my Critical Thinking students, sample bias doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong, necessarily, but it does cast it in a rather dubious light.

Last, and perhaps most damning, is the fact that Mawson's "study" was funded to the tune of $500,000 -- by an anti-vaxx group.  You'll note that nowhere in the paper cited above was any mention of a conflict of interest vis-à-vis financial support.

Which is a major no-no for a peer-reviewed study.

So mainly what the "Study Shows" is that if you walk in with your conclusion already in hand, you can bend the data whatever way you want to support it.  Especially if your pocketbook is being filled by people who would like very much for you to prove that their pet theory is right.

The bottom line: be careful when you see anything that claims that "Researchers Prove X."  Go to the source, and ask yourself some hard questions about the veracity of the study itself.  (Especially if you're inclined to believe its conclusions; confirmation bias plagues us all, and we're much more likely to accept something unquestioningly if it squares with what we already believed.)

And that goes double if it's Harvard researchers.