90% True

.: I read the opinion page of the Waco Tribune-Herald religiously. I’ve written several letters to editor, usually responding to some clueless creationist’s bogus claims, so I’m always on the lookout for my name (should it appear). Today’s letters to the editor contained a response to the following editorial, which I reproduce in its entirety before it disappears from the internet:

Editorial: Specious claims by abortion foes

We wish we could tell motorists to ignore a certain billboard on Franklin Avenue. That’s impossible, so we’ll point out why it should be ignored.

The billboard, purchased by opponents of legal abortion, asserts two specious linkages. First, it links abortion to breast cancer. Though advocates produce studies raising that concern, it is not shared by the American Cancer Society. Indeed, the society calls the claim false.

The billboard also implies that funds raised by the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure go to abortions.

False as well.

The relationship between Komen and Planned Parenthood is about detecting breast cancer through screenings and referrals — among a plethora of services Planned Parenthood offers for women in Central Texas.

Those are the facts for which the billboard has no room.

.: Karen Malec, of Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, could not remain content with such sensible words plaguing the prestigious pages of the Waco Tribune-Herald. Apparently wishing to balance the sense/nonsense ratio with her own contribution, she issued forth a volley of falsehoods and fallacies.

.: Let’s start with her first claim: “Cancer groups admit that childbearing helps protect women against breast cancer.” Okay — that’s reasonable and supported by enough studies that I don’t even have to link to them. It’s a non-controversial point accepted by everybody. But we’re talking about abortion, not childbearing. What does the contentious billboard actually say?

“What? An abortion increases my risk for breast cancer? Why does the Komen Race grant $45,000 to Waco’s Planned Parenthood abortion provider?”

.: Sounds to me like they’re claiming the act of having abortion is what causes breast cancer. That’s a pretty reasonable interpretation of the sign, no? Malec follows her opening salvo with this quote plucked from an American Cancer Society press release:

“Much of the long-term underlying increase in incidence among women is due to historical changes in reproductive patterns, such as delayed childbearing and having fewer children.”

.: Delayed childbearing and having fewer children? That statement applies equally well to childless women who haven’t had an abortion. Take a look at the press release yourself. Hit Ctrl-F, search for “abortion”, and tell me what you find.

.: If the ACS’s quote about differences in reproductive patterns included abortion rates, they would’ve said so. The fact that they don’t is telling, and there’s a reason for that (more on that later). Malec continues her sleight of hand:

Childlessness and late first full-term pregnancy are known to increase breast cancer risk significantly. Nearly all of the childless woman’s breast lobules consist of immature, cancer-susceptible Type 1 and 2 lobules, where 95 percent of all breast cancers originate.

It is only during the last months of a first full-term pregnancy that 85 percent of the lobules mature into fully cancer-resistant Type 4 lobules.

Every subsequent full-term pregnancy results in an additional 10 percent reduction in breast cancer risk.

.: That’s all well and good — it may even be true — but what does that have to do with the physical act of getting an abortion? To say “Women who are childless and have had an abortion are at an increased risk for breast cancer” is just as true as saying “Women who are childless, have had an abortion, and wear red hats are at an increased risk for breast cancer.”

.: So continues Malec: “The American Cancer Society and Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure contradict themselves by denying a link between abortion and breast cancer.”

.: They contradict themselves only if you conflate “childlessness” with “having an abortion”. Luckily, the folks at the American Cancer Society are smarter than that. And it’s not just the ACS who understands the matter. Here’s the letter to the editor I cobbled together and sent a few hours ago (hyperlinks are added for convenience):

Karen Malec concludes her April 13th letter, “the childless woman who aborts her pregnancy has a greater risk than the one who has a baby.” Several studies state otherwise:

“Our results do not support the hypothesis that induced abortion or miscarriage increase the breast cancer risk of young women.” - Mahue-Giangreco M, et al, Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2003 Mar;12(3):209-14.

“It is concluded that there is no evidence linking abortion to the risk of breast cancer.” - Rosenberg L, et al, Am J Epidemiol. 1988 May;127(5):981-9.

“Pregnancies that end as a spontaneous or induced abortion do not increase a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.” - Beral V, et al, Lancet. 2004 Mar 27;363(9414):1007-16.

“Overall, the findings provide further unbiased evidence of the lack of an adverse effect of induced abortion on breast cancer risk.” - Reeves GK, et al, Int J Cancer. 2006 Oct 1;119(7):1741-5.

“This study does not support the hypothesis that spontaneous or induced abortion appreciably influences subsequent breast-cancer risk.” - Parazzini F, et al, Int J Cancer. 1991 Jul 30;48(6):816-20.

“These findings do not support an association between spontaneous abortion and fatal breast cancer.” - Calle EE, et al, Cancer Causes Control. 1995 Sep;6(5):460-8.

“These data do not support the hypothesis that miscarriage or induced abortion represent substantive risk factors for the future development of breast cancer.” - Brewster DH, et al, J Epidemiol Community Health. 2005 Apr;59(4):283-7.

“In conclusion, neither a history of induced nor spontaneous abortions is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer.” - Erlandsson G, et al, Int J Cancer. 2003 Feb 20;103(5):676-9.

No doubt a space-conscious editor will cull several items from my list. For the record, I provided eight articles all stating the same thing: there is no evidence that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer.

.: Here’s Malec’s last line again: “If it’s true that childbearing protects women from breast cancer, then it’s self-evident that the childless woman who aborts her pregnancy has a greater risk than the one who has a baby.”

.: And here’s the same truth with all the extraneous, unsupported bits removed: “If it’s true that childbearing protects women from breast cancer, then it’s self-evident that the childless woman has a greater risk than the one who has a baby.”

.: Remember what the billboard said? “What? An abortion increases my risk for breast cancer?” I’m pleased to tell you, Anonymous Billboard Lady, that, no, an abortion does not increase your risk for breast cancer.

.: Unless you’re wearing a red hat.

.: Reason #54 why you should major in chemistry: you can use your safety goggles for other purposes.

.: Ben Goldacre over at Bad Science hit off on an excellent idea I hope the rest of the internet will adopt: when posting a video of some pseudo- scientific douchebag, follow it with a inspiring clip of Richard Feynman.

.: You can see a Feynman Chaser in action at Ben’s site where it follows an egregiously misinformed homeopathic lecture. (How stupid do you have to be to think E = m*c² means “light is energy”? Watch the whole video if you dare. It’s full of howlers.) The chaser Ben chose was Feynman’s fantastic 1981 interview for Horizon, a wonderful way to spend the next 50 minutes.

.: I’d like to make my own modest contribution, starting with this boring, clumsy, soporific clip by Jonathan Wells. Watch it. I defy you to stay interested.
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.: Last week a professor emailed me about the upcoming Central Texas Science and Engineering Fair and its need for volunteer judges. Those of us participating were asked to choose which subjects we’d like to judge. As someone who loves molecular biology, I asked to be placed in the Cellular physiology/Biochemistry sections. As someone who clearly doesn’t matter, they assigned me to physics.

.: Physics is the only class I’ve had to retake. It’s a shameful blight on my collegiate career. It’s a subject of which the difficulty is matched only by the intensity of my disinterest. (I’m not sure if one can be actively disinterested in something, but the correlation is there.)

.: Luckily, the science fair projects I judged all belonged to 6th and 8th grade students, so for the most part I was safe. Another safety net was my co-judge, Jay. If we ran across a student whose project dealt with physics beyond my caliber, he was to play the role of the person who knew what he was talking about.

.: My fear of physics was assuaged when we approached the first poster. She was a 6th grader, and her question was a simple one: “Does the number of megapixels on a camera affect picture quality?” I realized at that point I wasn’t going to be dealing with physics. My role was to ask leading questions that might lead to sudden epiphanies in basic experimental design and scientific thought.

“These two cameras have built-in flash, but this camera does not. How do you think that might have affected your results?”

.: When we were satisfied that the student had grasped the concept of controls, my co-judge Jay followed with an equally important question I had not thought to ask.

“Did you have fun?”

.: Jay had a gift for making the students excited. I’m sure most of them were nervous when we started, so he already had some form of energy to work with. Still, when we went to the next poster (”Is one pole of a magnet stronger than the other?”), he enchanted the student with a description of the magnet in his lab.

“It has a coil that goes about this high” — his hand came above his head — “and it has over a million loops. Isn’t that cool?”

.: To a kid, a million of anything is cool. That this particular million can, with several thousand amps running through it, pull a wrench from your hand is, to a 6th grader, about as cool as having Superman show up at your birthday party.

.: As with every science fair, however, there were some fairly obvious incidents of too much parental involvement. Last year I mentioned the case of the knockout muffins presented by a student who just happened to be the son of my molecular genetics professor. That kind of parental involvement is fine, because the student understood the relevance of the test. However, when a student had a beautifully constructed poster, an interesting problem, a well-written presentation, and no understanding of the basics of their project, we got suspicious.

.: Then there were cases where a complete lack of parental involvement was evident (or so we hoped). One student’s question was, “Do different types of lights produce different numbers of shadows?” As in, if you take a flashlight and shine it on an erect pencil, will you see more shadows than if you used, say, an LED microlight? She took pictures to document the different shadows. I questioned her about the use of flash in her pictures, and whether the multiple shadows might have been created by more than one light source. She did not understand the purpose of either question.

.: There was also at least one instance of adult input being completely wrong. We asked one student if she thought three trials was enough data. She said yes, because her science teacher told her it’s always best to have an odd number of trials so you don’t have symmetrical bias. I’m not sure what that means, but for all you people out there doing experiments with exactly 100 trials, you’re doing it wrong.

.: The first project we saw in the 8th grade section was simply amazing. This student wrote a program in Java to simulate the Ising model of ferromagnetism. If you are a physics major and even you do not know what that means, do not worry: you have simply not gone to grad school yet. Now think how a lowly biochemistry major might react to such a display. What could I say? I had to retake Physics I, I barely passed Physics II, and I have no familiarity with a coding language of any kind. Even Jay took a while to say anything. All our questions for the other kids were designed for their benefit; we already knew the answers in those cases. But any question we had for this student would be a genuine search for knowledge — how did he do that?

.: He told us exactly what he did and how he did it, but I didn’t have to take his word for it. “Everything he said was accurate,” said Jay, the experimental particle physicist. True, I just took someone else’s word for it, but I figured someone like Jay wouldn’t be a professor of physics if he had a habit of making statements that didn’t accord with reality.

.: Two students had projects that involved trips to the Meyer observatory. One of the students clearly knew a great deal about astronomy, but her hypothesis was a bit weak. It was basically, “I bet I can find Polaris with my sextant.” It wasn’t the kind of hypothesis which generates any knew knowledge when falsified, but how do you explain that to a middle-schooler — especially one who was kind enough to show how you can make a own homemade sextant with a straw, a protractor, and a fishing lure?

.: The other kid, however, made full use of his telescope time. I can’t remember the exact details of his hypothesis (it involved absorption of different wavelengths, I’m sure), but I did learn how to determine whether a star has an exoplanet orbiting around it. [FYI: a star dims slightly whenever a planet passes between it and an observer.] He also explained the importance of a check star and the effect our atmosphere and rotation has on the perceived brightness of stars — both topics which I, a mere manipulator of DNA sequences, did not know a thing about beforehand.

.: There were six projects each for both 6th and 8th grade physics. Awards were to be given to each subject for every grade. We were allowed to assign 1st and 2nd place, as well as up to three honorable mentions. The other judges wanted to give as many honorable mentions as possible to encourage the students, but I petitioned to limit them to two. My reasoning was that two people could shoulder failure a lot easier than one person, even is one student’s project failed spectacularly more than the other’s.

.: I guess I can end this post by explaining my one and only science fair project from the 6th grade. My problem was a simple one: “Which candy bar is the tastiest?” My hypothesis followed directly from my preferences: “I think butterfingers are the tastiest.” My methods were as simple as they were sound: “Several volunteers were asked to sample candy bars and note whichever one they thought was the tastiest.” My conclusion was controversial: “The data indicates that Reese’s peanut butter cups are the tastiest.” My proposal for further research was denied.

.: Sam Chen said something again. Read this post over at Overwhelming Evidence. I don’t know for sure if the poster is a parodist or a real creationist (Russell’s Law, remember?), but that hardly matters. I want to focus on what Chen, a bona fide creationist, said in the comments section.

.: First, some background: hblavastky wrote a post about the latest free energy hoax where s/he claims it’s the real deal and, moreover, a challenge to those dogmatic materialists. I can’t exactly summarize his/her reasoning because there is none, but the gist of the post involves the so-called inviolable second law of thermodynamics being violated, so there! About the only sane voice in the entire thread is nagrom, who wrote: “This is not science yet. The findings have not been made public. Just because they say it is “peer reviewed” does not mean it is real.”

.: That’s all the background you need. Here is what Chen said that I find so amusing:

So after hearing all this shouting about how IDers aren’t peer reviewed we now find out that peer-review doesn’t mean it is real? So what is the point of peer review? And for something to be science it has to be made public?? So everything scientists are doing in their labs today isn’t science because it hasn’t been made public yet? What standards are you following?

Here is another classic example of evolutionists back tracking (this time on peer-review) because they are losing ground to intelligent design. Because IDers are being peer reviewed (more and more now), evolutionists are now claiming that peer-review doesn’t matter.

I wonder who is making a fool of themselves here.

.: I don’t want to challenge any of his points here (do I even have to?). I just want to ask Chen a simple question:

What do you think scientists do in a laboratory?

.: Or how about a more poetic question:

If a scientist publishes a paper in the forest, and there’s nobody around to read it, is it still science?

.: By the way, this post on 90% True has been certified peer-reviewed™ by anonymous experts, who have themselves been peer-reviewed certifiably. What, you don’t believe me? Well, who’s Mr. Anti-Science now?

*You hear me, Google?

.: It’s been awhile since I picked on our dear friend Sam Chen, of Overwhelming Evidence fame. Two reasons for this: 1) I’ve been doing other things (as evidenced by the general lack of posts) and 2) it’s too easy. How easy? Well, for starters, there are at least three posts up on the Overwhelming Evidence main page that are blatant parodies of intelligent design/creationist writings. (I don’t want to give the exact number, because then they might figure out which posts are parodies — although by not doing so I’m giving them a little bit of credit, which rest assured is not my intention.)

.: However, there are some items which are just too good not to ridicule. Here’s the latest:

The Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center (IDURC) is proud to present the 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award, presented annually to a deserving college graduate for excellence in student advocacy of intelligent design.

The recipient of the 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award will remain anonymous for the protection of the recipient. The many students, professors, and scientists who have been denied degrees or tenure, and removed from positions and jobs for no other reason than acceptance of—or even sympathy to—intelligent design theory is very telling of the importance of keeping these bright young minds out of the crosshairs of those opposed to open-minded investigation and critical thought. . . . - IDURC Announces 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award

.: A few questions will surely come to the casual reader, namely: What the hell is the Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center, who the hell is Casey Luskin, and what does one have to accomplish to deserve such a prestigious award? I will try my best to answer these questions.

What the hell is the Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center?
.: Good question! According to their About Us page, IDURC “is a student organization dedicated to”:

1) investigating intelligent design as a viable scientific theory
2) promoting education and critical thinking about neo-Darwinism
3) supporting efforts of those trying to revise school standards to include discussion of the controversy surrounding evolutionary theory
4) providing a forum for high school and college students to present, debate, and discuss their ideas about intelligent design and neo-Darwinism
5) clarifying the debate concerning neo-Darwinism, intelligent design, and creationism
6) encouraging creative exploration of the aesthetic dimensions of design.

.: Would you be surprised if I told you they’ve accomplished none of these things? A cursory examination of their archives will find no original research pertaining to any scientific principles developed or discovered under an intelligent design framework. Nor will you find critical thinking or actual education of neo-Darwinian theory. However, you will find plenty muddled criticisms, like this one:

Think about it. No matter what evidence is presented, no matter how convincing our arguments are, can we really convince die-hard Darwinists that they’re wrong? It’s just like a religion. Now, I’m not saying religious devotion isn’t a good thing. Refusing to conform to the current popular trend reflects a deep-seated commitment to one’s principles and beliefs. At the same time, however, an ideological doctrine such as this should not be taught as fact in public schools. There will probably always be a naturalistic explanation for something. Just because evolutionists believe fervently that they’re right does not, in the words of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, “make it so.” - Tristan Abbey

.: If I can get this straight, evolution is an unfalsifiable religion — not that religion is bad — and so it shouldn’t be taught in school as a fact, even though there is probably a naturalistic explanation for everything, but I support a theory that suggests otherwise . . . what? This is a one-step-forward-two-stumbles-back defense of intelligent design if I’ve ever seen one. Maybe he means “science can always give a plausible naturalistic explanation for anything, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t caused by [totally counter-intuitive non-explanation X]!”

.: That said, they have provided a forum for “high school and college students to present, debate, and discuss their ideas,” but it’s a yahoo group, and I unfortunately was denied access when I tried to join. I don’t understand why; I’m a college student, which means I meet all the criteria their group requires.

.: Other than that, IDURC really hasn’t done anything since Samuel Chen succeeded Tristan Abbey as director (in January 2006!). Well, except for their Casey Luskin Award, which leads us to our next question:

Who the hell is Casey Luskin?
.: From the announcement:

Luskin, for whom the award is named, was the first student truly to step out of his comfort zone as an undergrad and take a stand for intelligent design—a stand that would be seen across the nation. His founding of the Intelligent Design Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Center has been a great step forward for the intelligent design movement and, more importantly, for academic freedom everywhere. Today, Luskin continues his work with the ID movement as a lawyer and legal analyst for the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle, Washington.

.: Most scientific revolutions are the result of hard-working scientists working years to accumulate evidence to support their hypothesis and challenge orthodoxy (see Transposons). Luskin, wanting to challenge “Darwinian” orthodoxy with intelligent design, became . . . a lawyer? He might as well; he could never make it as a geneticist.

Miller started off his “prediction” by simply observing that humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and apes have 24 pairs; therefore two ape chromosomes were fused into one human chromosome. Miller claims that this simple chromosome-counting requires a fusion event if common ancestry is true. But is that really the case?

. . .

(Note: If Miller had added the argument that Darwinists try to maximize parsimony, i.e. minimize the number of evolutionary steps, he could have made this prediction that humans should have a fused chromosome. But in my understanding, that is not the line of argumentation Miller used in his testimony.) - Casey Luskin [emphasis added]

.: The ellipsis represents a single paragraph, which evidently is the minimum length of text required before Luskin can utterly contradict what he has just written (this is only a hypothesis; if you have examples of Luskin contradicting himself within a paragraph, please let me know).

What does one have to accomplish to deserve such a prestigious award?
.: Keeping in tradition with most ID awards, it helps if the award is named after yourself:

We are proud to name the IDURC’s graduate award after Mr. Casey Luskin and delighted to name him an honorary recipient. Casey will receive a certificate of achievement and be listed as a recipient of the award which now bears his name.

.: Other than that, all you need to do to win this award is demonstrate “excellence and courage in research and promotion of intelligent design.” Since no such research was highlighted in the announcement, owing to the anonymity of the recipient, I can only speculate as to what that entails.

.: I’m really clueless here, folks. What could he have done to deserve this award? I hope the certificate winds up on eBay; I’d love to hang it on my wall. It’d go well next to my other certificate: