"In God We Teach" documentary

Now on YouTube, "In God We Teach," a documentary about Matt LaClair's exposure of his U.S. History teacher's proselytization in the public school classroom.

Help Talk Origins bid for "Expelled"?

The assets of Premise Media, including rights to "Expelled," are going up for auction.  The Talk Origins Foundation plans to bid for the film, which includes production materials.  Their stated plan seems to be just to determine what interesting information might be in the production materials or raw footage and make that known, not, as I've suggested, make an "MST3K"-style version, or a version that points out and corrects the errors.

UPDATE (June 28, 2011): The winning bid for "Expelled" was $201,000.  My guess is that the film would only be worth that much to somebody who plans to promote it as-is without any significant re-editing, and thinks they can extract at least that much value out of it--perhaps via charitable deduction by giving it to a creationist organization.  There was a bidding war at the end between two bidders that drove the price up this morning from $43,000 (last night's high bid) to $201,000, which caused the bid to be extended 10 minutes beyond it's scheduled end time in one or two minute extension increments.  It was at $122,000 at the original auction end time, so that last $79,000 increase occurred in the last 10 minutes.

Expelled up for auction

Premise Media Holdings LP is in bankruptcy, and its assets are going up for auction online between June 23 and 28.  Those assets include the film "Expelled."  Perhaps a few of us should get together and buy it, and reissue it in a "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" format?

UPDATE:  As Damian Howard and Bob Vogel pointed out on Facebook, this adds financial bankruptcy to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the film.

Review of CMI's "Voyage That Shook the World"

John Lynch and I have co-authored a review of the Creation Ministries International film on Darwin which will be appearing in vol. 30 of Reports of the National Center for Science Education and which may be found on their website.

My previous blogged review of the film is here.

I gave a little more background on the film here.  John Lynch has said more about it here, here, here, and here, mostly about the deception used to get interviews by prominent historians.

The market for creationism

Todd Wood of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College has gotten around to doing what I haven't done, updating my analysis of the market for creationism that I did in early 2007.  He confirms some of the trends I noted, such as that the market for creationism has been growing and is dominated by Answers in Genesis.  His update goes further, and includes a comparison to the National Center for Science Education, noting that he market for criticism of creationism has grown along with the market for creationism.  He also points out that the groups involved got a boost revenue in 2005 during the Dover trial, that the AiG split from Creation Ministries International doesn't appear to have hurt AiG, and that "Godquest," formerly known as Creation Science Evangelism, the Hovind organization, is the #3 creationist organization for revenue behind AiG and the Institute for Creation Research.

Wood reports the following numbers for recent years:

2003:
$14.6 million market
AIG: 61.6%
ICR: 30.6%
*CEM: 4.2%
*CRS: 1.7%
*CM: 1.6%
*CSC: 0.4%

2004:
$15.8 million market
AIG: 65.7%
ICR: 26.8%
CEM: 3.1%
CRS: 2.0%
CM: 1.9%
CSC: 0.4%

2005: **
$10.8 million market
AIG: 50.4%
ICR: 40.3%
CEM: 5.1%
CRS: 1.0%
CM: 2.5%
CSC: 0.6%

2006:
$21.3 million market
AIG: 64.1%
ICR: 30.9%
CEM: 2.2%
CRS: 1.1%
CM: 1.3%
CSC: 0.3%

2007:
$25.6 million market
AIG: 69.5%
ICR: 27.6%
CEM: no data
CRS: 1.2%
CM: 1.1%
CSC: 0.3%
CMI: 0.3%

2008:
$33.3 million market
AIG: 68.2%
ICR: 26.2%
CEM: no data
Godquest: 2.8%
CRS: 0.7%
CM: 1.0%
CSC: 0.2%
CMI: 0.9%

Check out Todd Wood's post for more details.

Who are the climate change skeptics?

One of the courses I took this semester was a seminar on the human dimensions of climate change, a geography course that briefly looked at the scientific evidence for climate change and then focused primarily on the social science aspects of the problems of mitigation and adaptation. The paper I wrote for the class was about the philosophical problem of how a layman can identify relevant expertise and evaluate the debate without being an expert, by looking at features such as relevance of expertise, consensus within fields, credentials and institutions, track records, logical validity and cogency of arguments, and so forth, and then applying these criteria to the IPCC scientists vs. the climate change skeptics.

What follows is a list of some of the organizations promoting skepticism about anthropogenic climate change and some of the individuals associated with them, with some information about their credentials and activities. It's my impression that those with the best reputations tend to agree that there is a global warming trend and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are a contributing factor to that warming, but the organizations tend to promote a more skeptical view (fairly characterized as "denial"), as exhibited by such evidence as expressions of apparent pleasure at the recent 2009 Pew survey result that showed a decrease in American acceptance of global warming.

Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC)
One comparison I made was between the scientists of the IPCC and the scientists of the NIPCC, a group sponsored by The Heartland Institute. I compared the fourth-most-cited paper of the top 83 scientists of the former to the fourth-most-cited paper of all of the 2008 NIPCC participants, using Jim Prall's excellent website of citation counts for climate scientists. Of the 619 scientists of the AR4 (2007) Working Group 1 on the physical science basis of climate change, the top 83 each have more than 200 citations to their fourth-most-cited paper. There are only thirteen climate skeptics with that level of citation, most of whom received those citations for papers having nothing to do with climate science, and none of whom were involved with the 2008 NIPCC report. (In 2009, William Gray, who is in that category, participated in a second NIPCC meeting, but I didn't review that for my paper.)

The top scientist of the 2008 NIPCC report with publications containing the word "climate," the organizer and editor of the report, S. Fred Singer, has 31 citations to his fourth-most-cited paper. He's a retired physics professor (Ph.D. earned in 1948) who is not only a skeptic about climate change but about the health effects of second-hand smoke, the link between CFCs and the ozone hole, and has received tobacco and oil company funding for his work. His name pops up frequently when it comes to attempts by corporations to block environmental regulation. There were 24 participants listed as authors on the 2008 NIPCC report, six of whom have no academic credentials or affiliations and no published academic work of relevance to the climate change debate (Dennis Avery, Christopher Monckton, Kenneth Haapala, Warren Anderson, Klaus Heiss, and Anton Uriarte). The top-cited scientist, Lubos Motl, has 150 citations for his fourth-most-cited paper, but he's a theoretical physicist with no publications containing the word "climate." The next guy after Singer, George Taylor, has an M.S. in meteorology and 25 citations for his fourth-most-cited paper. There are a few people on the list with relevant credentials, but none are top names in climate science. The majority with scientific credentials have little or no relevant expertise, like Fred Goldberg, with a Ph.D. in welding technology, and Tom Segalstad, a mineralogist with a Ph.D. in geology.

It should be noted that the climate skeptics with the best credentials in climate science tend to be participants in the IPCC process, such as John R. Christy, who was a lead author on the Working Group 1 reports in 2001 and 2007. Robert Balling of ASU has also participated in the IPCC process, and despite being often regarded as a skeptic, agrees that there is global warming and that it has a human component, and told me that the IPCC report is the best place for the layman to find accurate information about climate science (see my summary of his recent talk at ASU).

The Heartland Institute
The Heartland Institute, founded in 1984, was the sponsor of the NIPCC (above) and has its own category at this blog. Between 1998 and 2005, it received $561,500 in funding from ExxonMobil, 40% of which was designated for climate science opposition (see the Union of Concerned Scientists Exxon report (PDF)). In April 2008, it published a list of “500 Scientists With Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares” compiled by Dennis Avery, participant in NIPCC and co-author of a 2007 anti-AGW book with S. Fred Singer which attributes periodic warming to a 1500-year solar cycle. The publication of this list resulted in protests from 45 scientists on the list who stated that they are not AGW opponents and requested that their names be removed. Rather than remove the scientists from the list, The Heartland Institute changed the title of the list to “500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares." The Heartland Institute's list of 138 climate change experts contains many individuals with no relevant expertise or credentials.

Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Singer has another organization devoted to arguing against human-caused climate change, the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), which he founded in 1990. That organization also opposes the ban on CFCs and other EPA regulations. There are nine people listed on SEPP's board of science advisors, of which five are dead (Gerholm, Higatsberger, Mitchell, Nierenberg, and Starr). Ames is a well-known scientist in his field, molecular genetics, which has nothing to do with climate change. The others with the most citations are elderly or dead physicists (Starr, 1935 physics Ph.D.; Böttcher, 1947 physics Ph.D.; and Mitchell, 1951 physics Ph.D.). The rest have only single-digit citations to their fourth-most-cited paper.

George C. Marshall Institute
The George C. Marshall Institute was founded in 1984 to support Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, but since 1989 has been active in opposing AGW. The current board of directors, according to its website, are William Happer (Princeton physics professor), William O’Keefe (former executive VP and COO of the American Petroleum Institute and president of a consulting company), Gregory Canavan (physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory), John H. Moore (former president of Grove City College, former economics professor, and former Deputy Director of the NSF), Rodney W. Nichols (former president of the New York Academy of Sciences), Milan Nikolich (electrical engineering Ph.D., a nuclear weapons program consultant associated with CACI, a defense contractor), and Roy Spencer (climate scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville). Of these, only Spencer, who is also a Bible-believing anti-evolutionist, has a climate science background. (Happer is a highly-cited particle physicist.) The George C. Marshall Institute has published works by some of the more reputable AGW opponents with a high level of citations for their fourth-most-cited publication--e.g., Richard Lindzen of MIT (274), Roger A. Pielke, Sr. (129), Roy Spencer (124), and John R. Christy (88). Others with relevant credentials but not quite the high level of citations include Patrick Michaels (37), Robert Balling (29), and Timothy Ball (8). The George C. Marshall Institute has also published and promoted the work of Stephen McIntyre of the ClimateAudit blog, a former mineral exploration executive with a bachelor's degree in mathematics, and economist Ross McKitrick.

Former George C. Marshall Institute executive director Matthew Crawford left the organization after five months when, he said, he realized it was “more fond of some facts than others” and that his job “consisted of making arguments about global warming that just happened to coincide with the positions taken by the oil companies that funded the think tank” (Carolyn Mooney, "A Hands-On Philosopher Argues for a Fresh Vision of Manual Work" (PDF), The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 15, 2009).

Cato Institute
The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank founded in 1977 by Edward Crane and Charles Koch. Charles and David Koch are co-owners of Koch Industries, which is one of the largest privately owned companies in the U.S. (often #2, but has occasionally been #1). Koch Industries has major holdings in petroleum, natural gas, and coal. Patrick Michaels (already mentioned in connection with the George C. Marshall Institute) is the Cato Institute Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies and their only climate science expert on staff, though Cato has also published articles co-authored by Michaels and Robert Balling.

Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI)
The SPPI was founded in 1994 by chairman George Carlo, former assistant football coach for the Buffalo Bills who subsequently entered the public health field and earned a Ph.D. and law degree. He is an advocate for the view that cell phones cause substantial health risks, including cancer and autism. [That's a different SPPI; see John Mashey's comment below.] The SPPI’s chief science advisor is Willie Soon, a Harvard astrophysicist also associated with the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine (about which more will be said below). Other science advisors include William Kininmonth, Robert M. Carter, David Legates, Craig D. Idso, James J. O’Brien, and Joseph D’Aleo, all of whom except O’Brien and Legates were involved with the 2008 NIPCC report. The chief policy advisor is Sir Christopher Monckton, an AGW opponent from the UK with no relevant science credentials, also involved with the 2008 NIPCC report. Legates, the Delaware State Climatologist, was a commenter on Patrick Michaels' most recent climate change skepticism book at an event at the Cato Institute, and is a climate scientist whose fourth-most-cited paper has received 226 citations. D'Aleo, first director of meteorology for The Weather Channel, has a 1970 M.S. in meteorology and has not published any academic work since. Kininmonth, with an M.Sc. degree (not sure in what) was the former head of the Australian National Climate Center. Craig Idso has a Ph.D. in geography from Arizona State University and is founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change; his fourth-most-cited paper has received 20 citations.

Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
This is a small Phoenix-based nonprofit run by Craig Idso (chairman) and his father Sherwood B. Idso (president) which argues that increasing CO2 levels are beneficial. The organization has received $90,000 in funding from ExxonMobil. Both Idsos and Craig's brother Keith have also been on the payroll of the Western Fuels Association. Sherwood Idso, a 1968 physics Ph.D. who was a research physicist for the USDA's Agricultural Research Service at the U.S. Water Conservation Laboratory starting in 1967, has a fourth-most-cited scientific paper which has received 189 citations.

Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine (OISM)
The Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine (OISM), a private research organization run by Arthur Robinson and his two sons Noah and Zachary Robinson, was founded in 1980. The OISM faculty listed on their website are the three Robinsons, Martin D. Kamen (a deceased chemist), R. Bruce Merrifield (a deceased chemist), Fred Westall (a biochemistry professor), Carl Boehme (who has an M.S. in electrical engineering), and Jane Orient (a medical doctor). The OISM sells DVDs on “nuclear war survival skills” and civil defense, as well as a home schooling curriculum, and has taken over the publication of the late Petr Beckmann’s Access to Energy newsletter which defends nuclear energy and now also criticizes AGW. (Beckmann was a physicist who became an electrical engineering professor at the University of Colorado, and in addition to promoting nuclear energy also challenged Einstein’s relativity and published a journal for that purpose called Galilean Electrodynamics.)

The OISM Petition Project was set up to oppose U.S. ratification of the Kyoto Treaty and currently has over 31,000 signatures of Americans with degrees in a scientific subject. The initial call for signatures was sent out with a letter from Frederick Seitz while he was still president of the National Academies of Science, along with a 12-page “Research Review of Global Warming Evidence” by Arthur and Noah Robinson and Willie Soon which was formatted to look like a publication in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. The petition was originally billed as a “survey,” but it has not been reported how many solicitations were sent out compared to how many were returned, nor how many scientists disagreed with the statements on the petition (as pointed out by Gary Whittenberger in eSkeptic). The signature breakdown by level of education was 29% Ph.D., 22% M.S., 7% M.D. or D.V.M., and 41% B.S. or equivalent. By field, it was 12% earth science, 3% computer science or mathematics, 18% physics and aerospace sciences, 15% chemistry, 9% biology and agriculture, 10% medicine, and 32% engineering and general science. The percentage of Ph.D.s in relevant areas isn’t available, but it’s clear from the breakdown that at least two thirds have less than a Ph.D. and at least 80% do not have education in a relevant field. (Blogger Chris Colose has looked at a subsample of names on the petition, without finding any with climate-related publications.)

One of the other “faculty” at the OISM is Dr. Jane Orient, M.D., of Tucson, Arizona, whom I’ve heard speak in opposition to AGW. She is the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a conservative organization that publishes the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPANDS). This journal published an anti-AGW articles by Arthur Robinson, Noah Robinson, and Willie Soon (2007), and by Arthur Robinson, Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, and Zachary Robinson (1998), as well as articles opposing vaccination of children, claiming that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, that homosexuality causes crime and disease, opposing fluoridation of water, accusing the FDA of fraud for banning DDT, and criticizing the theory of evolution (see evaluations by Kathleen Seidel and Orac). The Robinson et al. (1998) article is apparently a version of the article originally distributed with the Oregon Petition, and another anti-AGW article by the same authors was published in the journal Climate Research (Soon et al. 1998). Arthur Robinson has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech and was an associate of Linus Pauling. Noah Robinson also has a chemistry Ph.D. from Caltech, and Zachary Robinson is a veterinarian with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. None has relevant climate science expertise.

Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (1980 Ph.D., astrophysics) are astrophysicists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who study solar variability, both have also been associated with the George C. Marshall Institute and the Heartland Institute; Soon is the chief science advisor for the Science and Public Policy Institute (above). Baliunas received the Petr Beckmann Award for Scientific Freedom from Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP), a group associated with OISM (Jane Orient is president of DDP). In 2003, Soon and Baliunas published an anti-AGW article (arguing that warming was due to solar variation) in Climate Research that led to protests from 13 of the authors cited that their work had been misrepresented and misused. Subsequently the new editor-in-chief, Hans van Storch, resigned along with two other editors when the publisher refused to print an editorial about improvements in the journal review process. Baliunas' fourth-most-cited paper has 230 citations; Soon’s has 68. Timothy J. Osborn and Keith R. Briffa (2006) repeated Soon and Baliunas’ methodology in a paper published in Science that did not reproduce their results. Osborn and Briffa are both climate scientists associated with the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University; Osborn's (1995 Ph.D., environmental sciences) fourth-most-cited paper has received 152 citations and Briffa's (1984 Ph.D., dendroclimatologist) has received 250.

I've given special attention to OISM and AAPS because of the extent of crankery associated with them.

Three Miscellaneous Items
My last three items are not organizations but are worthy of further note. (1) This year, S. Fred Singer circulated a petition to attempt to get the American Physical Society to revise its statement on global warming from being supportive of AGW to be in opposition to it. He collected 206 signatures from APS members, about 0.45% of its 47,000 members, and the petition was rejected. John Mashey analyzed the social network of the first 121 signers (PDF), and found that the initial signing clustered around the SEPP, the George C. Marshall Institute, the Heartland Institute, and the Cato Institute, along with other interesting demographic information. (2) Ian Plimer, a prominent Australian geologist, published a book in early 2009 opposing AGW, titled Heaven and Earth: Global Warming-The Missing Science. Plimer has in the past been an active public critic of creationism in Australia, and was criticized by me for using inaccurate and misleading claims in his arguments, and by me and Jeff Shallit for plagiarism in a prior book. Plimer’s new book has been similarly found to contain not only inaccurate statements and misrepresentations, but plagiarism. (3) The Center for Inquiry's Credibility Project was a review of the scientific credentials of the signers of global warming denier Sen. James Inhofe's Senate Minority Report on Global Warming, which found, similar to what I report above, that most of them have no relevant expertise or credentials.

Summary
The above doesn't demonstrate that climate skepticism is without merit, but it does demonstrate that there are reasons to be skeptical--and in many cases extremely skeptical--about some of the organizations and individuals promoting climate skepticism, independently of their arguments. In my view, the arguments for climate skepticism in most cases just increase the grounds for skepticism. I recommend the RealClimate blog and Skeptical Science blog as two good sources of information about those arguments.

To really dig into the details, read the IPCC WG-1 Report.

UPDATE: Also worthy of note is Wikipedia's list of scientific organizations which have issued statements on anthropogenic climate change. Noteworthy for its absence is any organization with a statement arguing against anthropogenic climate change; since 2007 only the American Association of Petroleum Geologists has had a noncommittal statement. Wikipedia also has a nice list of scientists who oppose the consensus views and what their actual positions are. (Like JFK assassination conspiracy theorists, they do not have a consensus view of their own.)

I also neglected to mention a paper that I cited in the paper I wrote for my climate change class, a 2008 study that examined 141 “English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005” found that over 92% of them were connected to conservative think tanks, either published by them or authored by persons directly affiliated with them (Peter J. Jacques, Riley E. Dunlap, and Mark Freeman, "The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism," Environmental Politics vol 17, no. 3, June 2008, pp. 349-385). In the above list, is there any organization or individual that does not come from a conservative or libertarian political ideology?

UPDATE (December 17, 2009): Other posts at this blog on climate change include:

"Climate Research Unit email scandal" (November 23, 2009)
"Roger Pielke Jr. on climate change adaptation" (November 7, 2009)
"Roger Pielke Jr. on climate change mitigation" (November 6, 2009)
"Robert Balling on climate change" (October 30, 2009)
"Ian Plimer on climate change" (May 22, 2009)
"Reason to be skeptical about anthropogenic climate change" (April 26, 2008)
"Garbage in on climate change measurement" (October 25, 2007)
"Lomborg, global warming, and opportunity costs" (September 15, 2007)
"The consensus for anthropogenic global warming" (August 19, 2007)
"David Friedman on global warming" (March 15, 2007)
"Taxonomy of questions about global warming" (March 13, 2007)

Among several others. Those who are accusing me of obvious liberal bias might want to take a look at these. I have my share of political biases, but I do my best to defer to the best arguments and evidence over political ideology.

UPDATE (December 19, 2009): Peter Staats, in the comments, suggested that belief in anthropogenic global warming is entrenched among scientists and will disappear as the older generation dies (citing Planck, whose point is also made in Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions). I responded that I thought he has it backwards--that AGW has become more and more supported, and the holdouts tend to be older, as some of the data about the anti-AGW organizations above already suggested. So I tested our respective hypotheses against Jim Prall's data, for IPCC WG1 scientists vs. the signatories of the AGW-skeptical documents. I looked at the average year of the last academic degree awarded, first for those with citation counts for their fourth-most-cited paper >= 200, then, since that was such a small sample for the climate skeptics, for citation counts >= 100, and then for all the 623 IPCC WG1 scientists vs. the 469 signatories of AGW-skeptical documents. Here are the results:

Citation counts of 4th-most-cited >= 200:
IPCC WG1: N=83, 12 w/o year, N=71, average year of last degree = 1981
Skeptics: N=13, 4 w/o year, N=9, average year of last degree = 1965

Citations counts of 4th-most-cited >=100:
IPCC WG1: N=201, 51 w/o year, N=150, average year of last degree = 1983
Skeptics: N=38, 15 w/o year, N=23, average year of last degree = 1968

All IPCC WG1 vs. AGW-skeptical document signers:
IPCC WG1: N=623, 208 w/o year, N=415, average year of last degree = 1989
Skeptics: N=469, 346 w/o year, N=123, average year of last degree = 1973

BTW, for this last group, there's more info on degree breakdowns than year of degree (note that those without degrees are excluded along with the n/a, no web, and no cv categories--there were several of those among the skeptics and one undergrad in the IPCC scientists, not counted here):

IPCC WG1 scientists:
N=504
Ph.D.: 474 (94.0%)
M.Sc.: 13 (2.6%)
Cand.: 5 (1.0%)
D.Sc.: 2 (0.4%)
D.Phil.: 2 (0.4%)
Sc.D.: 2 (0.4%)
C.Phys.: 2 (0.4%)
B.Sc.: 2 (0.4%)
And one each (0.2%) of Nobel laureates and Ph.Lic.

Skeptics:
N=322
Ph.D.: 254 (78.9%)
M.Sc.: 25 (7.8%)
B.Sc.: 13 (4.0%)
B.A.: 4 (1.2%)
M.S.: 3 (0.9%)
B.S.: 3 (0.9%)
M.D. and Ph.D.: 1 (0.3%)
And one each (0.3%) of M.D., D.Eng., Tekn.D., Dipl., M.Eng., M.A., P.E., Dipl.Bio., M.C., D.Env., B.E., R.P., "Doctorandus", B.S.E.E., Dip.ES., and J.D.

UPDATE (December 21, 2009): Theoretical physicist (a string theorist), former Harvard physics professor, and climate skeptic Lubos Motl, referred to above as the most-cited scientist involved with the 2008 NIPCC report, has just demonstrated the quality of his reasoning at his own blog. In a post about James Randi's expression of skepticism about AGW and his temporary (and quickly retracted) suggestion that the Oregon Petition Project seemed legitimate, Motl infers that this must have been the cause for Phil Plait being fired as president of JREF--an event which didn't happen. When Randi himself showed up to point out that Plait is still president of JREF and had already given notice of his departure at the end of the year prior to these events, Motl's response was "If you have been truly violently, physically blackmailed and harassed by the AGW fanatics, I could understand what you just wrote. If you were not, let me just state that in that case, you became a morally worthless human in my eyes." Way to be reasonable, Motl! He continues: "The 'denialist' dictionary you adopted and the attacks against the Oregon Petition are pretty disgusting."

UPDATE (December 25, 2009): I'm reading Steven Epstein's book, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge, 1996, Berkeley: University of California Press, which I had previously read chapter 6 of for one of my classes. In ch. 4, "The Debate That Wouldn't Die," about Peter Duesberg and those who deny that HIV causes AIDS, I just read about Project Inform's "Discussion Paper #5" of 3 June 1992, which was titled "Who Are the HIV Heretics?", which sounds fairly analogous to the this blog post. I've not been able to find a copy online, but I would love to see that document.

Epstein, pp. 156-157:

The seriousness with which Project Inform took the resurgence of interest in the causation controversey was indicated by the publication in early June of a six-page 'Discussion Paper' devoted entirely to the topic. The report began by blasting the media for their irresponsibility and sensationalism. Why do reporters love the HIV dissenters? Why have they confused Montagnier's position with Duesberg's, despite Montagnier's own disavowals? "Apparently because it makes a good story--'Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong! Top Scientists in Error Ten Years! Secrets! Coverup! Big Business, Big Science Collusion!' ... Such is the sorry state of AIDS reporting in some circles today."

Focusing on four groups opposing the HIV hypothesis--the New York Native, Spin magazine, assorted journalists, and certain scientists--Project Inform was at pains to question the credibility of each and to uncover motivations for adopting heretical stances. ... In considering the fourth, crucial group of HIV dissenters--the scientists--Project Inform's report similarly emphasized the issue of credibility. Root-Bernstein "works in a field not directly related to AIDS" and "has not conducted or published any AIDS research other than editorials," yet "Spin calls him 'one of the leading AIDS researchers in the US.'" Kary Mullis, while "obviously a serious scientist," was similarly "an outsider to AIDS research"; furthermore, his PCR test "has, if anything, helped to bolster the case for HIV." Of all the heretical scientists, only Sonnabend "is professionally involved with AIDS," but "primarily as a clinician": "While Dr. Sonnabend has earned respect in many ways, his arguments against HIV are no more valid than the others."
...
In focusing on formal credentials, Project Inform walked a fine line. This, after all, was a grassroots organization staffed by self-educated AIDS experts; its executive director, before the epidemic came along, had been a business consultant. A big part of Project Inform's work involved disseminating highly technical knowledge about AIDS to laypeople in order to create what might be called a mass-based expertise. In its reckoning of the tokens of expertise, Project Inform was not about to argue that academic degrees or journal publications are everything. Lacking the right credentials, Peter Duesberg could still be considered an AIDS expert of sorts--but not in a way that would make him stand out from the crowd: "Perhaps his most relevant work is that he has studied the medical literature on AIDS (as have thousands of patients, physicians, and activists), and this qualifies as a form of expertise." But "Duesberg's supporters and the media spread misinformation when they present him as an 'AIDS researcher' in the sense that phrase is usually meant." His published writings on AIDS were "simply editorials."

Project Inform noted that there was a "legitimate" scientific question that had been "lost in the fog" generated by media fascination with Duesberg and other dissenters: How does HIV cause AIDS? Following the lead of Gallo and others, the report emphasized that pathogenesis was separate from etiology; while part one of the report was entitled "Is HIV the Cause of AIDS?" part two was called "How Does HIV Cause AIDS?"

There are lots of interesting parallels here, including political. Epstein notes (pp. 158-159) HIV dissenters and promoters of their views being libertarian (Charles Thomas) and conservative (Phillip Johnson, Bryan Ellison, Tom Bethell, Patrick Buchanan). Johnson, Bethell, and Buchanan are also anti-evolutionists; Bethell and Buchanan also deny that there's anthropogenic global warming.

UPDATE (December 28, 2009): The Center for Public Integrity's project, "The Climate Change Lobby," identifies who's lobbying the U.S. Congress on climate change.

UPDATE (January 3, 2010): This Republican Party PR firm memo from 2000 about how to "win" the global warming debate by continuing to stress uncertainty as the case for warming become stronger is interesting in its similarity to the Tobacco Institute's PR strategy about the evidence that smoking causes cancer.

UPDATE (January 5, 2010): Donald Gutstein's "This is How You Fuel a Community of Climate Deniers" covers similar ground to the above (with some familiar names), with a Canadian focus.

UPDATE (January 7, 2010): Jeffrey Masters' "The Skeptics vs. the Ozone Hole" shows how a similar debate came out in the 1970s, which included S. Fred Singer arguing that CFCs don't deplete the ozone layer. That article notes that Singer's atmospheric science work has been negligible since 1971.

William Dembski would like to use copyright to quash criticism

Although when it comes to other people's works, William Dembski hasn't seen a problem with taking copyrighted material and using it wholesale, dubbing over a computer animated video from Harvard and XVIVO of the inner workings of a cell with his own intelligent design-based commentary, when it comes to his own work he has a different standard.

Mark Chu-Carroll points out at his Good Math, Bad Math blog that Dembski is talking about using threats of claimed copyright infringement to shut down criticism of a recent paper he published with Robert Marks. That criticism includes pointing out that sources cited by Dembski don't say what he says they do, and providing counterexamples to Dembski's mathematical claims. Rather than respond to the criticism, Dembski would rather shut it down.

There are just a few problems with that--first, the criticism may well be fair use. Although it does quote a great deal of the paper by Dembski and Marks, it does so for the purpose of putting commentary and criticism side-by-side with quotations from the paper. Second, papers published by the IEEE require that copyright be transferred to the IEEE, so Dembski lacks standing even if there were infringement.

Check out the RationalWiki critique of the Dembski and Marks paper.

More apparent plagiarism from Ian Plimer

Eli Rabett and Pieter Tans identified some errors in Ian Plimer's book's claim of selective data reporting from Mauna Loa measurements of atmospheric carbon, which Tim Lambert at the Deltoid ScienceBlog tracks to climate change skeptic Ferdinand Engelbeen. But Plimer doesn't cite Engelbeen, perhaps because Engelbeen also refutes the argument Plimer is trying to make.

This is not the first time Plimer has copied without quoting or citing sources--multiple instances in his book Telling Lies for God have previously been identified by Jeffrey Shallit and me.

(Previously on Plimer at this blog.)

State Press defends Ravi Zacharias

ASU's State Press columnist Catherine Smith authored an op-ed piece promoting last night's appearance of Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias. This was at least her second such op-ed; a prior one was published on September 17.

My letter to the editor, below, didn't get published, but another critic's letter did get published.

Here's mine:

Catherine Smith quotes Ravi Zacharias as stating that "irreligion and atheism have killed infinitely more than all religious wars of any kind cumulatively put together." This statement not only demonstrates Zacharias' innumeracy, it shows that he continues to make the mistake of attributing killing in the name of political ideologies like Stalinism and communism to atheism. I agree that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot killed more than religious wars, but it wasn't their atheism that caused that killing. Those killed by religious wars, the Inquisition, and witch trials, however, were killed in the name of religion. Out of fairness, there were no doubt political issues involved in many wars over religion as well, but if you take claims of religiously motivated killing at face value, the death tolls for those killed in the name of religion far exceed the death tolls for those killed in the name of irreligion.

Zacharias has a history of attacking atheism with misrepresentations in his books, as documented in Jeff Lowder's "An Emotional Tirade Against Atheism" and Doug Krueger's "That Colossal Wreck," both of which may be found on the Internet as part of the Secular Web (http://www.infidels.org/).

I first heard of Zacharias back around 1991, when I sat behind someone on an airplane flight who was reading his book (reviewed by Krueger, linked above), A Shattered Visage. The parts I read were truly awful, about the quality of M. Scott Huse arguments against evolution (a step below Kent Hovind and Ken Ham). I didn't bother to attend, but would be interested in hearing any reports of how it went.

UPDATE (November 24, 2017): Steve Baughman has published an exposure of Zacharias' claims to have credentials he does not possess, and to have had academic appointments that did not exist.

UPDATE (September 26, 2020): Ravi Zacharias died of cancer earlier this year, but not before being caught in an online relationship scandal.

UPDATE (February 11, 2021): Ravi Zacharias International Ministries has publicly released a report on an investigation into abuse charges against Ravi Zacharias, and it found a significant pattern of predatory sexual abuse and a rape allegation.

The woman googled “Ravi Zacharias sex scandal” and found the blog RaviWatch, run by Steve Baughman, an atheist who had been tracking and reporting on Zacharias’s “fishy claims” since 2015. Baughman blogged on Zacharias’s false statements about academic credentials, the sexting allegations, and the subsequent lawsuit. When the woman read about what happened to Lori Anne Thompson, she recognized what had happened to that woman was what had happened to her.

As far as she could tell, this atheist blogger was the only one who cared that Zacharias had sexually abused people and gotten away with it. She reached out to Baughman and then eventually spoke to Christianity Today about Zacharias’s spas, the women who worked there, and the abuse that happened behind closed doors.

Richard Carrier to speak in Phoenix

Richard Carrier will be speaking to the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix on Sunday, November 8 at around 10 a.m.--it will likely be packed, so showing up for breakfast or just to get a seat at 9 a.m. is advised. Richard will be speaking about Christianity and science, ancient and modern, and you can get a bit more information about his talk at his blog.

The Arizona Skeptic online: vol. 6, 1992-1993

Continuing the postings of The Arizona Skeptic; you can find volume 1 (1987-1988) here, volume 2 (1988-1989) here, volume 3 (1989-1990) is here, volume 4 (1990-1991) is here, and volume 5 (1991-1992) is here. Volume 6 was edited by Jim Lippard and has been available online since original publication as ASCII text. An index to all issues by title, author, and subject may be found here. The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 1, July/August 1992 (text version):

• "Science and Dianetics" by Jeff Jacobsen
• "A Healthy Dose of Sarsaparilla" by Jerome L. Cosyn
• "Book Review: Combatting Cult Mind Control by Steven Hassan" reviewed by Chaz Bufe
• "Michael Persinger and Tectonic Strain Theory" by Jim Lippard
• "Rutkowski's Work" and "Other Critical Works" (bibliography of papers critical of TST assembled by Chris Rutkowski)
• "Book Review: Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric by Howard Kahane" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: Sai Baba's Miracles by Dale Beyerstein" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• Media Update
• Newsletter Production Volunteers Needed
• Electronic Version of the Newsletter
• Upcoming Meetings: September speaker Chaz Bufe on Alcoholics Anonymous
• Articles of Note

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 2, September/October 1992 (text version):

• "How Much of Your Brain Do You Use?" by Mickey Rowe
• "Phoenix Skeptics and the Sedona Harmonic Diversion" by Mike Johnson
• "Jehovah's Witnesses and Earthquake Frequency" by John Rand (pseudonym for Alan Feuerbacher)
• "The Institute for Creation Research and Earthquake Frequency" by Jim Lippard
• "QUAKE DAY - Minus 7" by Mike Jittlov
• "New Skeptical Group/Magazine" (Skeptics Society/Skeptic magazine)
• Upcoming Meetings: October speaker Peter Lima on the search for the historical Jesus
• Articles of Note

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 3, November/December 1992 (text version):

• "Report on the 1992 CSICOP Conference: Part One" by Jim Lippard
• "A Visit to Dinosaur Valley State Park" by Richard A. Crowe
• "The End of Crop Circles?" by Chris Rutkowski
• Next Issue
• Upcoming Meetings
• Articles of Note

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 4, January/February 1993 (text version):

• "Predictions for 1993"
• "Jeane Dixon Predicts Bush Victory"
• "Report on the 1992 CSICOP Conference: Part Two" by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: Impure Science: Fraud, Compromise and Political Influence in Scientific Research by Robert Bell" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: Taking Time for Me: How Caregivers Can Effectively Deal with Stress by Katherine L. Karr" reviewed by Michael A. Stackpole
• Upcoming Meetings
• Reader Survey
• Articles of Note
• Magazine/Journal Subscription Information

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 5, March/April 1993 (text version):

• "CSICOP Questions Truth of Movie Based on Travis Walton UFO Abduction"
• "MIS-Fire in the Sky" by Chris Rutkowski
• "Linda Napolitano UFO Abduction Case Criticized" by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: The Retreat to Commitment by William Warren Bartley III" reviewed by David A. Snodgrass
• "Camille Paglia: Astrologer"
• Skeptical News
• Upcoming Meetings
• Books of Note
• Articles of Note

Volume 6 concluded my editorship, and volume 7 returned for one more issue edited by Mike Stackpole.

P.Z. Myers on the Creation Museum

P.Z. Myers has written a review of his trip to the Creation "Museum" with nearly three hundred atheists from the Secular Student Alliance, and it's probably the best summary of what's wrong with the Creation Museum I've read to date. He points out that it's not like a real museum, promoting exploration and discussion, it's more like a theme park ride.

The Arizona Skeptic online: vol. 4, 1990-1991

Continuing the postings of The Arizona Skeptic; you can find volume 1 (1987-1988) here, volume 2 (1988-1989) here, volume 3 (1989-1990) is here. Volume 4 was edited by Mike Stackpole. An index to all issues by title, author, and subject may be found here. The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 4, no. 1, July 1990:

• "Self-Deception and the Paranormal" by Michael A. Stackpole
• "The Curious Case of the Cross of Chaos" by Michael A. Stackpole
• "Book Review: But Is It Science? edited by Michael Ruse" reviewed by Jim Lippard (duplicate)
• Editorial Prattle
• "July Meeting" by Ron Harvey: speaker James McGaha on astronomy
• "The Return of Scapegoats" by Michael A. Stackpole

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 4, no. 2, December 1990/January 1991:

• 1991 Predictions of the Phoenix Skeptics
• "Note of Importance" by Michael A. Stackpole (re the Plimer/Price controversy)
• "Ralph Epperson: Clueless Creationist" by Jim Lippard
• Meeting Announcements: January: G. Harry Stine on the neurophone
• Editorial Prattle
• "December Meeting" by Ron Harvey: speaker Jim Speiser on UFOs

That was it for volume 4--publication got back on a regular schedule again with volume 5, when I took over as editor.

The Arizona Skeptic online: vol. 1, 1987-1988

I've begun putting old issues of The Arizona Skeptic online as PDFs, starting with the old Phoenix Skeptics News, edited by Ron Harvey. Volume 2, 1988-1989, is here. An index to all issues by title, author, and subject may be found here. Phoenix Skeptics News vol. 1, no. 1, July/August 1987:

• Welcome!
• July Meeting
• Resource Library
• "Cold Reading" by Jim Lippard
• Local Radio Talk Show Features Psychics
• Modem Users Take Note
• "Foes Turn Up Heat: Fire walking is not so hot, skeptics of seminars say" by Simon Fisher, Tribune
• Postscript by Jim Lippard
• Book Reviews
• Local Conference on Health Fraud
• Upcoming Phoenix Skeptics Meetings

Phoenix Skeptics News vol. 1, no. 2, September/October 1987:

• August Meeting: Hans Sebald on witchcraft
• September Meeting: Charles Cazeau on prophecies of Nostradamus
• Surveyor Needed
• Randi on Faith Healers (interviewed by Jim Lippard and Mike Norton)
• "Health Fraud isn't 'snake oil' anymore" by Phyllis Gillespie, Arizona Republic
• "Charlatans can be spotted if you know common clues" (Arizona Republic)
• "Proper Criticism" by Ray Hyman
• Upcoming Meetings

Phoenix Skeptics News vol. 1, no. 3, November/December 1987:

• October Meeting: Halloween party at Hans Sebald's
• November Meeting: James Randi psychic surgery video, Randy Jones on psychic surgery
• Papers ignore disclaimer request on astrology columns
• Flyers needed
• Psychic fair
• "Focus on You" by Jim Lippard
• "Channeling: Believe It or Not" by Hans Sebald, Ph.D.
• "Book Review: The Faith Healers by James Randi" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• "On the distinction between nonbelief and disbelief" by Hans Sebald, Ph.D.
• "Book Review: The Psychology of Transcendence by Andrew Neher" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• Editor's Ramblings
• Upcoming Meetings

Phoenix Skeptics News vol. 1, no. 4, January/February 1988:

• December Meeting: Jim Speiser and Marge Christenson of MUFON
• January Meeting: Robert Dietz of ASU on creationism
• Philip Klass Lecture
• Skeptics Reorganized
• Skeptics subcommittees formed
• "Peter Popoff Came to Town" by Jim Lippard
• "Towards a more effective organization" by Bob Guzley
• "Update on the Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin" by Jim Lippard
• New Phone Number
• Editor's Ramblings
• Upcoming Meetings

Phoenix Skeptics News vol. 1, no. 5, March/April 1988:

• Important Announcement!
• February Meeting: Jeff Jacobsen on Scientology
• Philip Klass Lecture
• March Meeting: Mike Stackpole on claimed dangers of D&D
• The Organization Explained!
• "Frank Baranowski: Promoter of the Paranormal" by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: The New Inquisition by Robert Anton Wilson" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• "Robert Anton Wilson and the H.E.A.D. Revolution" by Zak Woodruff
• Editor's Ramblings
• Upcoming Meetings

Phoenix Skeptics News, vol. 1, no. 6, May/June 1988:

• April Meeting: James Lowell on Mexican cancer clinics
• May Meeting: Jim Lippard on psychic detectives
• Press coverage
• "Turin Shroud Update" by Jim Lippard
• "Dr. Stranges Lives Up to His Name" by Mike Stackpole
• "Near-Death Experiences and TV" by Jim Lippard
• "An Artistic 'Phenom'" by Ted Karren
• "Psychic Detectives" by Jim Lippard
• Editor's Ramblings
• "TUSKS Tips" by Ken Morse
• Upcoming Meetings

The last issue of this volume was the first one also distributed to the Tucson Skeptical Society (TUSKS), and prompted a change of name to The Arizona Skeptic beginning with volume 2. This was also about the time I moved to Tucson to attend graduate school at the University of Arizona (August 1988).

The Amazing Meeting 7: Swiss/Randi, Ouellette, anti-anti-vax panel, Nickell

This is part three of my summary of TAM7, still on Friday, July 10. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here, and my coverage of the Science-based Medicine conference begins here.

Jamy Ian Swiss and James Randi
After lunch on Friday was a conversation between Jamy Ian Swiss and James Randi about Randi's early career, beginning with an old BBC live broadcast of Randi making a radio disappear, and an escape he did in Quebec as the "Amazing Randall." They discussed Randi's early appearances on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show," and how Carson, himself a magician, would visit Randi in his dressing room when he appeared on the show, leading show staff to wonder who this guy was, since Carson never visited other guests. Other old footage included an underwater survival stunt on "You Asked for It," in which Randi stayed underwater for an hour and 50 minutes, breaking Houdini's record. Randi was embedded horizontally in a block of ice on Boston Common for the Dick Cavett show, somewhat reminiscent of the more recent stunt by David Blaine. Footage was also shown of Randi's water can escape when he was a closing act after David Copperfield and Shibata, which Randi commented was made more difficult for him by the fact that Copperfield and Shibata were standing on the catwalk above him cracking jokes while he was supposedly drowning in the milk can (but was actually already on top of it trying to look out-of-breath and using a sponge to make his head wet again before the big reveal).

Then was shown a lot of amusing footage from Alice Cooper's "Billion Dollar Babies" tour, for whch Randi played a mad dentist and created various illusions for the stage, culminating with Alice Cooper's head being chopped off by a realistic-looking guillotine. Randi told various stories of the tour and how he came to be involved with it, saying that it paid very well and he knew he was going to get alone well when he visited the offices of Cooper's Alive Enterprise and found it was full of potted plants, all of which were dead. A DVD of the film made during that tour was recently released on DVD, which includes the original version of the film rejected by the studies, which included a bunch of comedy sketches, a few of which feature Randi.

When the tour came to Phoenix, Cooper asked Randi to sit in the audience with his mother, who wasn't aware of the nature of his show. Randi kept reassuring her--the wife of a Mormon minister--that Alice Cooper is just a character being played by her son (Vincent Furnier). Randi said that he saw Mrs. Furnier again a couple of years ago at Alice Cooper's 60th birthday party, and she remembered him and thanked him for the reassurance he provided during that show.

Footage was then shown of two version of Randi's upside-down strait jacket escape, one in Niagara Falls in January. He said it was so cold that he beard became completely frozen and he was unable to speak when he had freed himself and was brought down, until hot water was poured over his beard. He said it took two years to get permission to do that stunt, and they had the whole area blocked off so that only the film crew was present. But while he was hanging upside-down, he saw a Chinese family standing there watching him--they had gone sneaking through the woods to get there and watch the performance up close.

The second version of the escape was for the Japanese show "Supermen" and was performed while hanging upside-down from a helicopter flying around Tokyo. Randi, who does not like heights, said he kept telling himself, "I'm doing it for the money."

Jennifer Ouellette on the Science and Entertainment Exchange
Jennifer Ouellette, executive director of the National Academy of Science's new Science and Entertainment Exchange project and author of the book The Physics of the Buffyverse, spoke about the project. She began with a short film clip from the TV show "Numb3rs" that illustrated a scientific point about geographic profiling by reference to the physics of water drops from a sprinkler head, which she used as an example of the productivity of having scientists and entertainment producers working cooperatively.

She observed that science and Hollywood have had a love/hate relationship. Hollywood sees scientists as nitpickers who don't understand entertainment, which she depicted with a reference to an episode of "The Big Bang Theory" which pointed out that the ending of the film "Superman" was unbelievable not because of the time travel but because if Superman caught Lois Lane while she was falling at 32 feet/second/second she would be cut into three pieces by the arms of the Man of Steel. (This reminded me of Larry Niven's classic analysis of why Superman can't have sex with a human woman, let alone produce a hybrid offspring, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.") Scientists, on the other hand, see Hollywood as promulgators of misinformation, a point she illustrated with reference to an anti-vaccination episode of "Eli Stone" and the fact that DNA results on "CSI" and "Bones" are always returned within hours (also illustrating the nitpicking point).

The Science and Entertainment Exchange provides producers of film, television, comic books, video games, novels, etc. with a free way to obtain accurate scientific information early on in a project, and has already worked with major productions including "Bones," "Tron II" (now "Tron Legacy"), and several that she was contractually forbidden to mention.

She told the story of how she met the showrunner for "Bones," and when she told him she was a scientist, "he instantly cringed, flinched, and apologized." She subsequently worked with him on the "Death by Physics" episode of the show.

She pointed out that this is a great time for science and skepticism, with the popularity of current programs like Numb3rs, Bones, Lie to Me, The Mentalist, House, The Big Bang Theory, and, "a fringe case," Fringe (one of the writers of the show is Glen Whitman of the Agoraphilia blog; and for those interested in the glyph code on that show, here's the solution).

Ouellette argued for the importance of this project by pointing out that a factoid about breast cancer which appeared in a soap opera was found to triple the knowledge of that factoid in its viewing audience (based on testing viewers before and after watching the episode), and that these new shows do a good job of humanizing scientists. When debunking messages come from sympathetic characters, that softens them and makes them more persuasive. She suggested that The Mentalist saying that there are no real psychics, or Lie to Me debunking the polygraph, has huge potential impact.

She closed by saying that the success of these popular programs suggests that critical thinking and science placed in an entertaining context do sell, and asking those with a science background who want to be consultants for her project to contact her--and CSI needs new ideas on how to kill people.

In the Q&A, the first questioner said that they don't like when scientists are depicted not acting like scientists--misusing words like "proof" and "theory," and misrepresenting the process of science. Another asked whether she could say anything about science on "Lost"; she said that scientists consulted and commented on the DVD extras about the temporal anomalies and "chronology projection conjecture," and that it's the best-selling TV show on DVD. One questioner asked whether there is any way to do something like this for the news media, as well as for entertainment; she answered that people in the news media need to be paid better (I presume she was referring to print reporters rather than talking heads on television), and those outlets are in their death throes. Another questioner asked why skeptics have to be depicted as dumb in shows with supernatural or paranormal phenomena, rather than showing them change their minds when presented with overwhelming evidence of these things.

Anti-anti-vaccination Panel
Steven Novella, David Gorski, Joe Albietz, Harriet Hall, Michael Goudeau, and Derek Bartholomaus made up the panel to criticize the anti-vaccination movement. Novella began by recounting the Andrew Wakefield case, a study published in Lancet allegedly connecting measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccination with harmful effects in children, which subsequently turned out to be a thoroughly bogus study ("if I can use that word," he said, referring to the Simon Singh lawsuit). But that study caused a decline in MMR vaccination in the UK, and a corresponding leap in news cases of measles, mumps, and rubella. When Novella blogged about this, journalist David Kirby contacted him and argued that thimerosol (sodium ethylmercurithiosalicylate), was the issue. Novella read Kirby's book arguing that thimerosol causes autism, Evidence of Harm, and did 3-4 months of research. (Novella's Skeptical Inquirer article on the subject is here; a reply to Kirby on Novella's blog is here.) He said Kirby's book was a terrible piece of journalism but a good collection of data sources to start with. By 2005 there was strong evidence of no link between thimerosol and autism. Novella's panel intro is now on YouTube here; Dr. Joe Albietz's talk is on YouTube here.

Back in 2002, thimerosol had already been removed from routine vaccine schedules, and Kirby said that autism rates would subsequently plummet to pre-1990 levels. Novella said no, If I'm right it will continue to increase until it hits some ceiling--and the autism rates have continued to rise for the last four years. Kirby moved the goalposts for his prediction out to 2007 and then to 2008, but there is no more room to move them now, said Novella--thimerosol is demonstrably not the cause of autism.

Novella said that the antivax movement has grown as evidence has accumulated against them, spearheaded by promotion by Jenny McCarthy and Generation Rescue.

David Gorski talked about how "I'm not antivaccine" is the biggest lie of the antivaxers. They will say things like (quoting Jenny McCarthy), "I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm pro-safe vaccine. I'm anti-toxin." Examples of people making such statements include Jenny McCarthy, Dr. Jay Gordon, a frequent visitor to Gorski's blog, and J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue.

He quoted a statement from Jenny McCarthy saying that mercury, the "second worst neurotoxin in history" is injected into children, but noted that she's not so anti-toxin as to avoid injecting the worst neurotoxin, botox, into her face. He also noted that despite claiming not to be anti-vaccine, she has also said, "If I had another child, I wouldn't vaccinate at all. Never, not ever."

Claimed toxins in vaccines include aluminum, ether, and mercury. Generation Rescue claimed in 2005 that autism is a misdiagnosis of mercury poisoning, then they've shifted to being caused by heavy metals, to being caused by toxins, to being caused by too many vaccines, too soon--but it's always about the vaccines.

Gorski suggested the following questions for those who say they are not anti-vaccine, yet are still challenging vaccines in this way:

1. You say you want safer vaccines. By what measure?
2. What toxins would you remove? What's the evidence for toxicity?
3. What evidence would it take to persuade you that vaccinations are safe with respect to the risk of the disease (i.e., using the vaccines saves significantly more lives than not using the vaccines)?

Dr. Joe Albietz then spoke on how every major medical breakthrough and development to save lives pales in comparison to vaccination. This was a powerful talk that I'd like to see turned into a viral vaccination video for YouTube.

Smallpox vaccine has saved over 300 million lives. In 1967, a global eradication campaign was begun, at an estimated cost of $10M-$15M/year over 31 countries. After ten years--in 1979--the disease was officially eradicated at an expense of about $23M/year.

Dr. Albietz presented a list of vaccine-preventable diseases, and noted the number of incidents per year before and after the vaccines. For just the top ten diseases, over 1.1 million lives per year have been saved from disease by vaccination.

He noted that polio and measles are scheduled for eradication. In 2008, the number of cases was 1,652, which amounts to over 5 million cases of paralysis prevented. Measles used to be the second leading cause of infectious disease death, killing 1 million children per year. The goal is to reduce measles cases by 90% by 2010, which will probably be missed.

The anti-vax movement not only affects the lives of children who are not vaccinated, the reduction of the rate of vaccination reduces the herd immunity of the population, making it more likely that even those who are vaccinated will get the disease.

Dr. Harriett Hall spoke on "Two False Alarms," which gave much more detail about Andrew Wakefield and Neil Halsey. She began by talking about Andrew Wakefield's 1998 Lancet paper on MMR vaccines, which used no controls and had an honest conclusion ("we did not prove a link"), but Wakefield called a press conference saying that the MMR vaccine should be stopped and made into separate vaccines--without disclosing that he had just filed a patent for such single vaccines. This resulted in measles again becoming endemic in the UK, Wakefield's study was retracted after problems were found in it, and Wakefield was exposed as unethical. He had been hired by a lawyer to find a link between vaccination and some harm in order to sue drug companies, and was paid 500,000 pounds for the purpose. His study was performed on the children of plaintiffs in the legal case, there was no ethics committee approval, and he didn't disclose his conflicts of interest.

Neal Halsey raised warnings about thimerosol, which contains ethyl mercury. We knew that methyl mercury can cause problems, but not ethyl mrcury. Experiments on adults with amounts 20,000 times higher than in thimerosol in vaccines have caused no symptoms of mercury poisoning. Halsey didn't raise autism as a concern, just mercury poisoning, but two mothers of autistic children who learned of his claims decided, incorrectly, that the symptoms of mercury poisoning were the same as the symptoms of autism. Today 2/3 of the U.S. population incorrectly think that mercury causes autism.

Michael Goudeau, juggler in Lance Burton's Las Vegas show and writer for Penn & Teller's Bullshit!, briefly spoke about his experience as a parent of an autistic child, and pointed out in his closing statement that nobody can hold up a healthy kid and say "Look, my kid got vaccinated and didn't get autism." But maybe, he suggested, the parents of those whose children get measles, mumps, or rubella as a result of the spread of the disease from unvaccinated children can effectively raise that issue. He said that Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy are assholes, and you shouldn't base your opinions on the science of celebrities (or jugglers).

Derek Bartholomaus spoke about how he decided to try to find the "Jenny McCarthy body count"--the number of preventable deaths and illnesses caused by non-vaccination--as a result of hearing Steven Novella make references to such a body count on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast. He announced his website, jennymccarthybodycount.com, on Twitter and Facebook three months ago, and it has received tremendous traffic as a result of links from the Pharyngula, Bad Astronomy, and Respectful Insolence blogs.

In the Q&A, Hal Bidlack said "my wife died of cancer, and I'm still angry at her surgical oncologist. I understand these people--does calling them stupid help?" Dr. Novella said that Jenny McCarthy needs to be called out on her misinformation, but the rank and file are victims and we have nothing but sympathy for them--our interpretation of the evidence is diametrically opposed. Dr. Gorski said that it's human nature to want to blame someone. A child born with a disability is painful, but they shouldn't be allowed to use that as a shield against criticism--but they do it because it's effective.

Another questioner asked whether Oprah can be made aware that there is a Jenny McCarthy body count to try to put a stop to McCarthy's TV show. Dr. Gorski suggested that giving McCarthy her own show might have been "a woo too far" provoking blowback in the form of criticism of Oprah such as appeared in Newsweek.

One questioner whose sister is a pediatrician in L.A. said she sees the most resistance to vaccination from high-income people in Beverly Hills. Dr. Albietz said you're 23 times more likely to get whooping cough if not vaccinated, and that he sees nonreligious vaccine refusal as the top reason for children not being vaccinated, but others are still not being vaccinated due to poverty and lack of access, which was the reason for TAM7's vaccination drive.

Another questioner asked if anyone had heard of an increase of cases of polio in India due to anti-vaccination superstition. Dr. Novella said that there were rumors of polio vaccine being tainted with AIDS in Nigeria, which resulted in an outbreak of polio due to lack of vaccination. Harriet Hall said that there were antivaxers back at the beginning of the smallpox eradication effort, but it was nothing like the current scale of opposition.

Someone asked whether we're just speaking in an echo chamber, or is someone working to craft a media message. Dr. Albietz pointed out the Rethinking Autism videos, and observed that we should bring the fight to every front that the anti-vaccination movement uses.

Anti-vaccination is being pushed by chiropractors and practitioners of alternative medicine, observed another questioner, and it won't stop until we stop them. How can we do that? Dr. Hall said that she reported a homeopath to the Department of Homeland Security, since he claimed to be making homeopathic smallpox vaccine, which requires access to smallpox. Dr. Gorski said that we're also combatting the view that natural is better, that getting a disease naturally is a better outcome than vaccinating and not getting the disease. Dr. Albietz pointed out that you cannot strengthen your immune system any better than by vaccinating, and that the keyelements of vaccines are natural ingredients. Dr. Hall observed that delaying the vaccine schedule is based on the misguided idea that it will lessen negative impact to immune systems, when in fact vaccinations promote immune response.

In closing, Dr. Gorski said that most antivax parents are probably persuadable, but he fears that the return of vaccine-preventable diseases will be what it takes to persuade them. Dr. Novella said that if anything is going to help mitigate the problem, it is probably going to come from the people in the room.

Joe Nickell on Bigfoot and Aliens
Joe Nickell gave a visual travelogue of photos of Bigfoot-related signs and places in the Pacific northwest, which included all sorts of Bigfoot-related oddities. The Bigfoot Highway, the Bigfoot Museum at Willow Creek, Bigfoot Rafting, Bigfoot Ave., Little Foot Ct., Bigfoot Breakfast, Bigfoot Motel, Bigfoot Crossing signs, Bigfoot Burger, Bigfoot Books (with big selection of books on bigfoot, as expected). He showed murals of Bigfoot, Bigfoot chainsaw sculptures, and Bigfoot statues. A lot of it was tongue-in-cheek, but some was serious and some included religious elements--he observed that some think that Bigfoot is supernatural.

He covered aliens and UFOs in a similar manner, starting with photos of Roswell, the Mac Brazel ranch house, and the famous photo of Jesse Marcel and the pieces of foil, sticks, tape, and rubber. He did an experiment with boxkite-like devices (corner reflectors) on a train attached to a weather balloon, that was shot down to see what the wreckage looked like. He also discussed Alien Autopsy "fakelore" and showed a timeline of alien evolution. Hypnagogic experiences that used to be reported as ghosts or demons are now commonly reported as aliens.

In both the cases of aliens and Bigfoot, he sees them as mythical creatures, and remarked that Bigfoot seems to be used as something like an "eco-messiah." Aliens have also been used in the employ of environmental causes.

In the Q&A, the first question was why there seems to be a rise in alien abduction claims, rather than UFO sightings, and whether this might be related to the rise of camera phones. (If I can reconstruct the reasoning, I think the issue is that there are more people out there with cameras at all times, yet fewer UFO sightings, while if there were really alien spacecraft, you'd expect more successful photographs. But if it's more of a psychological or mythical phenomenon, then perhaps it transforms to fit the evidence.) Nickell responded by observing that alien stories have evolved and continue to change. In my notes I commented that there seems to be a shift in the UFO community from "alien spacecraft" to "another reality" as an explanation of UFOs, and even some creationists have gotten in on the latter sort of view with the claim that UFOs are demonic influences. That view was expressed by Norman Geisler's testimony in the McLean v. Arkansas creationism case back in 1981, and has more recently been propounded by Gary Bates of the Australia-based Creation Ministries International.

That concluded the regular conference programming for Friday, July 10.

Saturday continued with a very special Skeptics Guide to the Universe recording session, Michael Shermer, and Adam Savage, summarized in part four.

The Voyage That Shook the World

I finally had a chance today to watch the Creation Ministries International-funded film, "The Voyage That Shook the World." It's a 52-minute, professionally produced docu-drama. The cinematography is excellent, and there are high-quality graphics and effects. There's not a whole lot of acting to judge--most of it appears for visual effect during narration or interview voice-overs--but I saw nothing to criticize in that regard.

The documentary content itself starts off reasonably, with the only initial hint that this might not be a mainstream production being the emphasis put on Darwin "making up stories" as a child. The first experts to appear are professional historians. Apart from H.M.S. Beagle having the wrong number of masts (two instead of three), I didn't notice any obvious mistakes in the history, though I'm no expert.

Where it first veers into creationist territory is when the narration starts talking about Charles Lyell's influence on Darwin, with regard to uniformitarianism and "deep time," and it makes an odd assertion that the great age of the earth was a settled question in Darwin's time, unlike today. That's an odd assertion since the age of the earth is overwhelmingly confirmed by science today, and there is no scientific debate about the earth being about 4.5 billion years old. (Particularly odd was that this remark came from historian Peter Bowler, I believe, which makes me wonder about the original context of his remark.)

Several creationists and intelligent design advocates appear, though they are not identified as such. A CMI web page about the film does show who's who, but this is perhaps the most deceptive aspect of the film--using on-screen credential identification that puts recognized experts with well-established reputations on a par with relative unknowns without established reputations. For example, creationist Rob Carter is identified on-screen by where he earned his Ph.D. and as "marine biologist and geneticist," but he has no academic appointment, a scant publication record, and works for CMI. Stuart Burgess is identified as "Design & Nature, Bristol University" but he's a mechanical engineering professor at Bristol University. (UPDATE: Note that Burgess' title is, in fact, Professor of Design and Nature.) Emil Silvestru is identified by his Ph.D. and as a "geologist and speleologist," but he works full-time for CMI. Cornelius Hunter of the Discovery Institute is identified by his Ph.D. and as "molecular biophysicist and author" when he is an adjunct professor of biophysics at Biola University. That institution was originally known as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, founded in 1908 by Lyman Stewart of Standard Oil, the guy who funded the publication and distribution of The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, from which fundamentalism gets its name. I consider this to be a deceptive equation of expertise, for which the film deserves criticism. (I gave the same criticism to "The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark," which used the same technique to equate creationists with little or no reputation with recognized experts.)

Creationist Emil Silvestru argues for a young earth and for the creation of geological features by catastrophic flood, though I noticed he mentioned "a flood" and not "the flood" at first, and while he mentioned the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington as having been cut rapidly by catastrophic forces (true), he did not make the common grossly mistaken creationist assertion that this is how the Grand Canyon was formed. Silvestru also makes a polystrate tree fossil argument for rapid deposition (which may well be the case in the particular instance, but is not generally the explanation for polystrate tree fossils).

The creationism starts out fairly subtly in the film, with the remarks about the age of the earth, and at one points sets up a novel opposition between two views:

Science	Religion
Gradual change Fixity of species Old earth	Rapid catastrophic change Mutability of species Young earth

The film argues that Darwin was misled by his reliance on Lyell's worldview to initially miss the evidence for natural selection in the Galapagos islands, when he didn't bother labeling the finches he collected, and the film clearly asserts that species change can occur, even across genera (between which hybridization may also be possible), though it avoids addressing the potential implications for humans and other primates. The film suggests that the religious view is that the wide diversity and geographic dispersal of living things emerged in the last few thousand years since the flood of Noah, which entails a rapidity of evolution that evolutionary scientists would reject as implausible. I believe the film's offered cases of rapid morphological changes in finch beak sizes are correct, along with its cases of hybridization that include hybrids between land and marine iguanas in the Galapagos. CMI creationist Robert Carter asserts that this is evidence of a young age of the Galapagos islands, because otherwise all the species would have mixed rather than being distinct, rather than concluding, for example, that some of these species are reproductively isolated and others aren't. I almost had the impression that I was witnessing the evolution of a new form of creationism-as-hyperevolution, that required special creation only because a young earth didn't allow enough time to generate the diversity of current life on earth.

But then more standard creationism begins to emerge, with arguments that there are limits (or "apparent limits") to biological change, "as any pigeon breeder knows," and that it is impossible for evolution to generate new information. Finnish creationist biochemist Matti Leisola asserts that random mutation cannot generate new information or novel structures, and that introducing randomness "causes information to disappear" and we only see new information arise from intelligent sources. He doesn't explain what notion of information he's using, but randomness does generate new information, and new information has been observed to appear in the lab, as well as in computer simulations using genetic algorithms. Leisola goes on to say that genetic engineering originally promised the ability to make arbitrary changes to organisms, but now promises much less--we can create bacteria that produce insulin, but we can't change bacteria into anything but bacteria. I wonder what Leisola would think of this?

The film is right that a role for catastrophes has been found in geology (but not to the exclusion of mostly uniformitarian processes over very long periods of time, such as evidenced in the Grand Canyon), and for bursts of rapid biological change, as well as that biology has been found to be more complex than originally suspected. However, these discoveries, made by evolutionary scientists, have not generated support for the creationist worldview, which has been remarkable for its lack of scientific fruitfulness. This points out another failing of the film, which is its complete omission of the overwhelming evidence in support of the common ancestry of all life on earth, the evidence of the great age of the earth, and the evidence of human evolution.

At one point, the film touches on Darwin's racism, and suggests that this is because of his evolutionary views, as opposed to religion which teaches the common origins of all human beings from Adam and Eve. But both views teach common ancestry of all human beings, and there was no scarcity of racist religious believers in the mid-19th century. The Bible offers no word of condemnation of slavery and both explicitly and implicitly elevates some people over others, with the Hebrews as the "chosen people" and descriptions of God ordering genocide and the taking of slaves. The Southern Baptist Convention in the U.S. owes its existence to a split with the Northern Baptists over the issue of slavery--the Southern Baptists were for it. The dichotomy of evolution-supporting racists vs. religious creationist non-racists is a false one.

Near the end of the film, the film points out that in Darwin's time, science was just beginning to emerge from philosophy, and argues that Darwin's project was philosophical and anti-religious as much as it was scientific. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues onscreen that Bertrand Russell's idea that we should only believe what is established by scientific evidence is a self-undermining thesis, since it is not a scientific statement, but a piece of philosophy or even theology. I think Plantinga is probably right that we can ultimately never avoid the need for philosophical argument, but he probably underestimates the degree to which philosophy can be "naturalized" and scientific evidence brought to bear on historically philosophical problems.

The conclusion of the film states that there are opposing views of evolution and creation, and that "some suggest that they can coexist, but Darwin himself resisted this position." (I guess this is one case where the filmmakers want you to believe Darwin, in his opposition to accomodationism between evolution and religion.) The final statement of the film is that questions about how we came to be here and why we are here refuse to go away.

In all, the film is somewhat better than I expected it would be, and the film itself could be described as trying to hide its own creationism, probably in hopes of working like a Trojan horse. I hope that its effect will be to encourage the children of creationists to become interested in scientific questions, as it does depict scientific research and discovery in a largely positive light. If it does, then some of them will come to discover for themselves the facts about evolution and creationism, perhaps with the assistance of online sites like the TalkOrigins archive.

UPDATE (August 2, 2009): I've received emails from Carl Wieland of CMI and from Steve Murray, the director of the film, offering a bit of additional explanation and rebuttal. First, the remark from Peter Bowler about dispute over the age of the earth was apparently regarding the fact that there was no young-earth creationist movement at the time of Darwin like there is today, and no indication that Bowler intended to suggest that there is a scientific dispute over the age of the earth today--as commenter Physicalist suspected. Second, Steve Murray pointed out that he was aware that the ship used didn't have the same number of masts as the Beagle, but they went with what they could find close to the size of the Beagle in Tasmania, and generally tried to hide the differences in how they shot the film. Third, both disclaimed any attempt to be deceptive in choice of on-screen credentials. Finally, Steve Murray chose the on-screen credit for Cornelius Hunter based on the fact that he learned of his work and selected him to be in the film based on his books.

UPDATE (November 30, 2010): A different version of the above review, co-authored with John Lynch, will appear in vol. 30 of Reports of the National Center for Science Education and is on their website.

UPDATE (June 2, 2011): The film's claim about Darwin taking the idea of natural selection from Edward Blyth is rather decisively and completely refuted by Joel S. Schwartz, "Charles Darwin's Debt to Malthus and Edward Blyth," Journal of the History of Biology vol. 7, no. 2, Autumn 1974, pp. 301-318, online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/4330617.