Space warp

I honestly don't understand how there are people who don't find science exciting.

Yes, I know that identifies me as a science nerd.  No, I don't care.  I just can't fathom how you wouldn't find it fascinating to comprehend a little more about the way the universe works.

This comes up because of an article by Jake Parks I ran into a couple of days ago over at the site Astronomy, called, "Star is Confirmed Single and Ready to Test Einstein’s Theory."  Despite the sound of the title, this has nothing to do with a nice-looking young Hollywood actor who is ready to go out on the dating circuit.  It's about a confirmation of a corollary of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity -- the idea of gravitational redshift.

The idea here is that the presence of a massive object actually warps the fabric of space -- stretches it in rather the same fashion that a bowling ball would depress the surface of a trampoline.  This, in fact, is what gravity really is; the fact that the Earth travels in an elliptical orbit around the Sun is because the Sun's enormous mass bends space, and the Earth travels along the lines of that curvature. (Picture someone rolling a marble toward the bowling-ball-on-a-trampoline I referenced earlier for a two-dimensional analog.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Where it gets really interesting is that if you have a light-emitting object travel past something that's highly massive, not only would its path change, but it would bend the light being emitted.  Because the space itself is stretched by the presence of the more massive object, the light would be stretched out -- red-shifted -- as it tries to "climb out of the gravity well."

It's never been observed before -- but astronomers have a good chance of observing it in a few months.  A star called S0-2 is going to be making a pass in front of Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center.  As the star moves between us and the black hole, its light should be significantly redshifted -- a finding that would be a major win for Einstein's theory.

"It will be the first measurement of its kind,” said Tuan Do, deputy director of the Galactic Center Group, who co-authored the study.  "Gravity is the least well-tested of the forces of nature.  Einstein’s theory has passed all other tests with flying colors so far, so if there are deviations measured, it would certainly raise lots of questions about the nature of gravity!"

It was recently proven that S0-2 is not a binary (double) star system -- an important bit of information, as if it had been, it would have significantly complicated the possibility of observing the predicted redshift.

"We have been waiting 16 years for this," said Devin Chu, study co-author and graduate student of astronomy at UCLA.  "We are anxious to see how the star will behave under the black hole’s violent pull.  Will S0-2 follow Einstein’s theory?  Or will the star defy our current laws of physics?  We will soon find out!"

Can't you just hear the excitement in his voice?

I can already hear the naysayers as well, though -- how much money is being put into this research?  What useful outcome will it generate?  I don't know the answer to the first question, and I don't much care; but the answer to the second is, "we don't know yet -- and that's the point."

There are hundreds of discoveries that were made by scientists doing basic research -- what might appear to the layperson as simple messing around with something that interested them.  Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Henri Becquerel was investigating the effects of phosphorescent minerals on photographic plates in his lab, and used a rock to weight down some plates wrapped in black paper.  When he developed the plates, they had a smudge in the middle, as if they'd been exposed to light, which was impossible.  Turns out the rock was uranium ore.  The result was that he'd just discovered radioactivity.
2. Roy J. Plunkett was experimenting with some chlorofluorocarbon gases he thought might have a use as coolants.  One of his formulations didn't work so well, but condensed out into a solid film on the inside of the container.  He examined it, and found that it had a very low coefficient of friction, and that water and other substances seemed not to adhere to it.  He named it "Teflon."
3. George Beadle and Edward Tatum were studying something few of us would find interesting -- metabolic pathways in a mold species called Neurospora.  They found that there were varieties of the mold that seemed to be unable to metabolize certain nutrients, a finding that was mystifying until they proposed that these varieties were missing a key enzyme.  They made the guess that those enzymes were missing because there was a defect in a specific gene -- and that's how a study of mold led to the "One Gene, One Protein" model of gene expression.
4. Harry Coover was trying to find a new material to use in making the lenses in plastic gun sights.  He was working with a group of chemicals called cyanoacrylates, but found that they were too sticky to be useful in lens making.  One of them, though, struck him as being useful for something else.  He sold the patent to Kodak.  They named it "SuperGlue."
5. In the early 1990s, some researchers at Pfizer were working with a compound called UK92480, which showed promise for opening up blood vessels in patients with angina pectoris.  It worked okay, but the researchers' ears perked up when male test subjects noted an unusual side effect of taking the compound.  They patented it under the trade name "Viagra," which has brought great happiness, lo unto this very day.

And so on and so forth.  My point is, we need to be doing basic research.  No, the gravitational redshift experiment might not ever amount to anything practical.  But then again, it might.  The point is, we don't know, and if we limit research to things we already expect are going to be useful, it's going to hobble science -- and rob us of the next generation of serendipitous discoveries.

Besides, there's a value simply in knowing.  We are at a point in our civilization where we have the technology and insight to unravel the deep secrets of the universe, and it's worthwhile doing that for its own sake.  The inspiration and joy we get from understanding one more bit of the world we live in is a worthwhile end in and of itself.  As the eminent astronomer Carl Sagan put it:  "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

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.

Extremist think tank

Sometimes, and I say this with all due affection, my fellow humans scare the absolute shit out of me.

This comes up because of a story I ran into a couple of days ago over at Right Wing Watch, which is a place you definitely don't want to hang out if you want to maintain the opinion that the people around you are rational, or necessarily even sane.  This particular piece, by Peter Montgomery, is entitled, "Prophets Gather at Trump's Washington Hotel to Unleash Angel Armies on his Deep State Enemies," and is basically about how those of us who have criticized the president are about to get what we deserve, and boy are we really gonna be sorry.

The host of the event was Dutch Sheets, executive director of Christ for the Nations Institute, which is dedicated to remodeling society in government along biblical lines.  In other words, turning the United States into a Taliban-style theocracy, with all that implies for non-religious people like myself.    When asked about the conference, Sheets said, "There's never been anything on planet Earth like what's about to happen," which is true in that I can't imagine another scenario where self-professed Christians spent hours singing the praises of someone whose major claim to fame is a world speed record in commandment-breaking.

The battle, Sheets said, wasn't just about Trump, but about "whether the devastation caused by fifty years of anti-Christian activity will be reversed or, God forbid, continue...  The antichrist forces are almost rabid in their anger over the potential loss of progress."

By "anti-Christian activity," what he seems to mean is legislation requiring people to treat folks of other ethnic origins, religions, and sexual orientations with dignity.  If you can imagine.  Anyone who stands in their way, Sheets said, needs to be "removed" -- up to and including members of Congress and the Supreme Court (and since the only way Supreme Court members are "removed" is through resignation or death, that comment should definitely give you pause).

Sheets wasn't the only one who spoke at the conference, of course.  One speaker called Trump "the father of this nation" and that his decision to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was "history-making" and "prophecy-making."

What is most frightening about these people is their complete, unadulterated self-righteousness.  One speaker, evangelical activist Cindy Jacobs, said that god had told her personally that it was time to "convene the courts of heaven" and that the conference attendees "are God’s enforcers in the earth for His will to be done."  Another said that their duty was to "destroy all God’s enemies and all the enemies of America, in the name of Jesus Christ."

Sheets himself made a rather frightening prediction. Trump, he said, "would accomplish everything Almighty God sent you into that house to do, regardless of who likes it or who doesn’t... he will receive a visitation from heaven that will give him an intimate knowledge of Jesus Christ."  About anyone who tries to fight against Trump's agenda, he had the following to say:

You will fail!…  The Ekklesia [people who are Christian] will take you out.  The outpouring of Holy Spirit will take you out. Angels will take you out.  You are no match for any of the above.  You are no match for father, son, Holy Ghost, or his family or his angel armies.  You are no match for his word.  You are no match for his prophetic decrees….  So we push you back.  And we say your finest hour has come and gone, and the church now rises to the place that he has called us to walk in ….  We now rise up and I call that new order into the earth.

As long as Sheets and his pals are counting on the angels to come down and do all of this, I'm not particularly concerned, as there's no evidence that angels exist.  My fear is that we'll have a repeat of what always happens when extremists of all stripes don't get their way -- they stop waiting for God or Allah or what-have-you to take care of matters, and pick up a weapon to take care of it themselves.

I mean, really.  Will someone please explain to me how these people are different from ISIS in anything other than the details?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So that's our scary bit of news for the day.  I maintain that most of my fellow humans are really pretty nice people, trying to do what they can to keep themselves and their loved ones safe and happy.  The problem is, a small minority of wingnuts like these can do an incredible amount of damage in a very short period of time.  And given the rhetoric people like Sheets and Jacobs are spewing, it's only a matter of time -- especially given the collision course their Chosen One is currently on with the law.

Stress test

These days, it's pretty critical to find a way to reduce your stress.

It's endemic in our culture.  Between the chaos and noise, the frustrating jobs, and the continuing parade of bad news in the media, it'd be surprising if you weren't stressed.  And ongoing stress is linked to an increase in the hormone cortisol, long-term high levels of which are in turn connected to inflammatory diseases such as atherosclerosis and acid reflux disorder, and according to some studies, to dementia.

So reducing stress is pretty important, not just in the here-and-now to make your life more enjoyable, but to improve your chances at a healthy future.  So that's why I thought the research from Drexel University I read a couple of days ago was so interesting.

The paper "Reduction of Cortisol Levels and Participants' Responses Following Art Making," by Girija Kaimal, Kendra Ray, and Juan Muniz, appeared in the journal Art Therapy, and reports that the researchers found a reduction in cortisol levels in participants after spending only forty-five minutes making art -- a result that was irrespective of whether the participant had any prior experience as an artist.

"It was surprising and it also wasn’t," Kaimal said.  "It wasn’t surprising because that’s the core idea in art therapy: Everyone is creative and can be expressive in the visual arts when working in a supportive setting.  That said, I did expect that perhaps the effects would be stronger for those with prior experience."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Kaimal did report that a quarter of the subjects showed an increase in cortisol after making art.  Of this result, she said, "Some amount of cortisol is essential for functioning.  For example, our cortisol levels vary throughout the day — levels are highest in the morning because that gives us an energy boost to us going at the start of the day.  It could’ve been that the art-making resulted in a state of arousal and/or engagement in the study’s participants."

I would also suggest that it's possible the elevated cortisol may have come from frustration, although Kaimal reports that most of the test subjects reported feeling better and more relaxed after the experience, whatever their cortisol levels said.  I can vouch for the frustrations that making art can engender; some years ago, on the urging of my wife, I signed up for a pottery class, and have kept up the hobby since then despite the fact that I have the artistic ability that God gave gravy.  My first attempts looked like ceramics that were either created by a four-year-old or possibly an unusually intelligent chimp.  After four or five years, I was able to turn out pieces that were marginally better, but still looked like they might have gotten Honorable Mention in the sixth-grade art show.  And along the way, I experienced moments of enjoyment and stress-reduction interspersed with long stretches of wanting to fling the lump of clay at the nearest wall.

But I'm kind of a high-stress person anyhow, so maybe my experience isn't typical.  And it bears mention that I have high standards to live up to.  My wife is a professional artist (check out her work here if you want to be amazed), my dad made jewelry and gorgeous stained-glass windows, my mother was an oil painter and a porcelain artist, my older son is a talented cartoonist and caricaturist, and my younger son works full-time as a glassblower.  Somehow in all that, the Art Gene missed me, although in my own defense I can say with some confidence that I have excellent working copies of the Music Gene and the Fiction Writing Gene.

In any case, it's an interesting study.  As I said earlier, anything we can do to reduce the stress and anxiety in our lives is worthwhile.  And who knows?  Maybe I should give more of a chance to art.  Sign up for a painting class or something.  After ten years' practice, maybe I'd be able to do something more than a lopsided house with a yellow smiley-face as a sun.

Or maybe I should just go play the piano.

Time's up

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about some people who allegedly time traveled back here from as far away as the 95th century, which is pretty impressive until you listen to what they actually say (my post includes links to YouTube videos, if you're interested), at which point you are driven to the conclusion that the whole lot of them are loons.

That assessment, of course, is insufficient to get said loons to shut up and sit down, nor apparently to get people to stop believing them.  So today we have:

A time traveler who says another time traveler is responsible for 9/11.

I ran into the story over at Mysterious Universe, in an article by Paul Seaburn.  Seaburn, fortunately, seems as simultaneously amused and mystified by the claim as I am, which is reassuring.  But the guy in the YouTube video (of course he's also in a YouTube video), who says his name is Michael Phillips (born in 2043), is pretty unequivocal about the foul-ups, potential and otherwise, that have been caused by people leaping into the past and messing about with things.  Phillips says:

Another time traveller from, I think it was 2038, he came back, his name was Titor.  He came back to 2000, I do believe, and he thankfully stopped a civil war in America which was supposed to kick off in 2008…  It was decided that America needed a single unifying event to bring the country together and to revert a civil war – and that event was 9/11…  He did change the timeline so the civil war in 2008 didn’t happen.

The person he's referring to is John Titor, a name that showed up on various online sites in 2000 and 2001, and who claimed to be a US soldier from Tampa, Florida, who had jumped back here from the year 2036.  So at least Phillips is citing a real time travel claim, which is one up from what most of these wingnuts do.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But citing a claim is a far cry from showing that it's the truth.  And in the case of Titor, there were a variety of problems that cropped up, problems that Phillips decided it wasn't prudent to mention, so I will:

• None of Titor's predictions came true.  He, for example, said there was going to be a civil war on US soil in 2004, and I remember 2004 quite clearly and do not recall a war.  I'm pretty sure I would have been aware of it had it happened.
• He was pretty dismissive of the people back then.  "Perhaps I should let you all in on a little secret.  No one likes you in the future.  This time period is looked at as being full of lazy, self-centered, civically ignorant sheep.  Perhaps you should be less concerned about me and more concerned about that."  Of course, I really can't find much to argue with about this statement. 
• Also in his favor, he said, "I did not come back here expecting to be believed."  So at least he had that part taken care of.
• The biggest problem, though, was that research by investigative reporters in 2009 showed pretty conclusively that Titor was a hoax perpetrated by two brothers, Larry and John Haber.  So the fact that Titor seems not to exist kind of punches a hole into the claim that Michael Phillips came back here to protect us from him.

Be that as it may, Phillips has his own dire predictions about our future:

I do want to tell you about North Korea because they do attempt to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States – that happens later on this year in late 2018.  Hopefully we can change the timeline so it doesn’t happen.  That’s a partial reason for creating this video...  North Korea does attempt to attack a US territory – that’s what I’ll call it – in response the US sends two cruise missiles laden with nuclear tips.  Two of those to Pyongyang.  Unfortunately what happens as a result of this nuclear exchange, in 2019 World War Three does happen.  It kicks off.  It wasn’t an unlimited war – nowhere near the scale of World War One or World War Two, however, I have to try and stop it from happening. I don’t want people to die.

So then why doesn't he time-travel back to before Kim Jong-Un was born and give his dad a condom, or something?  Isn't that kind of thing supposed to be what time travelers are good at?

If that wasn't bad enough news, Phillips also said that Donald Trump would be reelected in 2020, and would be succeeded in 2024 by someone named "Michael McIntosh."  Whoever that is.  Oh, in 2022 an earthquake measuring 10.2 on the Richter Scale will hit Los Angeles and level it completely.  Then California will sink into the ocean or something.  Honestly, at that point I kind of stopped listening.

Anyway, there you have it.  Time travelers trying to foil other time travelers.  I probably shouldn't criticize; that's the basic idea of my novel Lock & Key.

Of course, it bears mentioned that there's that little word posted on the spine:

"Fiction."

Vinegar cure

There's a single question that can keep us honest with respect to many aspects of life, and that question is: "How do I know this is true?"

It only works, of course, if you answer it honestly, and are willing to consider the possibility that you could be wrong.  If all you do is say, "Because of _____" (fill in the blank with your favorite combination of: the bible, Fox News, a political commentator, a famous actor or actress, a claim I ran into on the internet), and forthwith cease thinking about it, you haven't gotten very far.

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that was a good illustration of this principle, or more accurately, the kind of nonsense you can fall for if you don't apply it.  The link was to an article over at the site The Limitless Minds, called, "Leave A Glass Of Salt Water And Vinegar To Detect Negative Energies In Your Home."

Starting out with my pet peeve over the way woo-woos use words like "energy" (and frequency, and quantum, and resonance, and vibration, and on and on ad nauseam).  But fortunately for us, the author, Matteo Light, defines what he means right away:

This may seem a little weird at first, but it’s possible to have a reservoir of negative energy trapped in your home.  And by negative energy, I mean emotional energy that comes from humans.  It could be there from past tenants or homeowners, or from a year ago when you and your spouse were fighting a lot.

Once again, the principle applies: how do you know this "negative energy" exists?  Have you detected it on a Negative Energy-o-Meter?

No, apparently not.  In fact, the next thing Light does is criticize the scientists who would even expect such a thing:

Traditionally, science doesn’t like things it can’t touch, measure, or put into a tiny jar on the shelf to examine. 

Eventually, scientists discovered forces that exist in the world that are invisible.  One of those things is energy in its many expressions.  We usually can’t see it, but sometimes we can feel it.

How ridiculous, only believing in things for which you have evidence.  If you can imagine.

But Light says we do have evidence; a "feeling."  All you need, I suppose.

Then we're given the one fleeting nod to any kind of experimental support -- but he pulls out the tired old "nice words -- pretty ice crystals, mean words -- ugly ice crystals" research by Dr. Masaru Emoto, that has become the basis of every Quantum Resonant Vibrations of Love claim ever since.  I won't do a takedown of Emoto's claims here -- Dr. Steven Novella over at NeuroLogica did a thorough job of that in November of last year -- but I will mention two relevant points:

• Emoto could only claim to be a doctor because he got a Ph.D. from the Open International University of Alternative Medicine, a known diploma mill that requires no coursework whatsoever.
• His ice crystals experiments have been replicated dozens, possibly hundreds, of times, and in every case where there were appropriate controls, have generated uniformly negative results.

So we're already on mighty shaky ground, but Light soldiers on ahead to tell us what we can do to combat these invisible, undetectable "negative energies," presumably so that the ice cubes in our freezer don't form ugly shapes or something.

We are, he says, to put two tablespoons of white vinegar and two teaspoons of granulated salt into sixteen ounces of filtered water, mix it together, and put it somewhere that you'll be near.  Leave it for a day.  Once the salt has "stopped rising," it's collected all the negative energy it can, and you should move it to somewhere else in the house to de-negativize that room, too.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And I'm thinking: that's it?  How do you know that?  Did you look at the water, vinegar, and salt mixture after sitting there for a day, and decide that it seemed unhappy?  Did getting near the negative-energy-saturated water give you quantum fluctuations in your chakras or something?  But of course, we're never told why we should believe this works, or even what specifically it supposedly accomplishes.  All we're told is that we should rely on our feelings, and that'll be enough.

Well, I'm sorry, but that isn't enough in science.  Scoffing about how scientists like to be able to measure stuff (or put it in a tiny jar on the shelf, as the mood strikes) ignores the fact that when it comes to establishing the truth of a claim, science is kind of the only game in town.

Of course, the claim also raises some more prosaic questions, such as: does it have to be a particular, dedicated salt-vinegar-water mixture, or will any old salt-vinegar-water mixture do?  If the latter, then why don't our houses get de-negativized by, say, a jar of pickles?  This'd be a little worrisome, though, because the contention is that the negative energies get absorbed by the liquid, so there you'd be, raiding the refrigerator hoping for a nice half-sour, and instead you'd get the Fearsome Negative Pickle Spear of Doom.

So predictably, I'm unimpressed.  I'll just stick with whatever negative energies are hanging around my house.  Thus far, they haven't bothered me any.  Also, I have a container of salt and a bottle of white vinegar in a cabinet in my kitchen, and there's no reason they can't do their thing as is.

A vote for fraud

Yesterday morning when I was reading the news, I saw a story that induced me to use say some very bad words, that for the benefit of my more sensitive readers I will leave to your imagination.

The story that generated that result appeared in The Guardian, and the gist is that disgraced British doctor and anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield is campaigning hard for an anti-vaxxer running for the Republican nomination for a seat in the Texas State House of Representatives.

Wakefield, you may remember, is the man who is virtually solely responsible for the completely unfounded claim that there is a link between vaccines and autism.  The British Medical Journal posted an editorial in 2011 that did not mince words; the title is, "Wakefield’s Article Linking MMR Vaccine and Autism Was Fraudulent."  If that's not unequivocal enough, the editorial begins with the line, "Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare."

That should have been that.  That would have been that if it weren't for the fact that being caught red-handed engaging in scientific fraud didn't induce Wakefield to do what a normal human being would do in that situation, namely to admit what he'd done and retreat in disarray.  No, after the release of the paper calling him out on his fraudulent pseudo-research, Wakefield and his followers denied it -- and claimed that the doctors who wrote the paper were shills being paid by Big Pharma (which is up there with Monsanto as a stand-in for Satan) to shut down his research to protect their profits.

And the anti-vaxxer movement is still growing.  As is recurrence of dangerous and completely preventable diseases, such as the measles outbreak that happened in Wakefield's adopted home state of Texas this January.  But Wakefield evidently decided that this wasn't damage on a sufficiently large scale, so he's trying to ramrod his foolish and discredited ideas into the state legislature, so he can enshrine his false claims into law.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Wakefield is completely up front on what he's trying to do, and how he's trying to do it.  Rather than believe the scientists and the peer-reviewed studies, he says, you should trust social media instead:

Social media has evolved, as a general comment, has evolved beautifully.  It has provided an alternative to the failings of mainstream media...  In this country, it’s become so polarized now… No one knows quite what to believe.  So, people are turning increasingly to social media.

To say this makes me furious is something of an understatement.  Distrust of intellectuals in general and scientists in particular is widespread, and that is reflected in the people we've elected.  We already have a president who is a climate change denier and more than one governor and congressperson who believe that the six-day biblical creation story is supported by science and therefore should be taught in public school classrooms.  The last thing we need is more people in positions of power who deny science in favor of their own biases and/or delusions -- and who rely on getting their information from Facebook and Twitter.

Jinny Suh, an Austin mom and activist who is attempting to counter Wakefield's message, highlights how difficult this approach is to fight.  "The biggest challenge we face is," Suh said, "if you go onto Facebook or Google and you do a search for vaccines – and we can imagine a lot of new moms do this… the anti-vaxx stuff out there outnumbers the pro-vaxx stuff by quite a bit.  It doesn’t matter how you started out thinking about the topic, when a person is inundated with that much misinformation a person can’t help but start to think it’s true."

Which is why it's so important to get the message out there, and speak plainly.  Wakefield is a proven fraud.  He continues to lie about this and to claim that the evidence against him was falsified or cherry-picked or means something other than it does.  There is zero evidence that vaccination causes autism or any of the other horrible side-effects that he and others like him claim.  Admittedly, there have been side-effects from vaccines; no medical treatment is completely risk-free.  But they are extremely infrequent, usually mild, and temporary.

And what you get in exchange is immunity against diseases that as little as 75 years ago, used to kill huge numbers of children and young adults.  I've related before that my paternal grandfather's two eldest sisters -- Aimée-Marie and Anne-Désée -- died at the ages of 21 and 18, respectively, of complications from measles, after being completely healthy up until that time.

Wakefield is not just wrong, he's dangerous.  We do not need more anti-science voices amongst our leaders.  I don't know what the chances are for his candidate to win the nomination, but I fear that this kind of unfounded rhetoric has still not reached its peak.