Planned Parenthood Launches Counter Attack With Ersatz Apology

Fork Tongue

In this video Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, “personally apologizes for the tone and statements” of “one of our staff members.” That “staff member” happens to be Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services and those “statements” happen to be about the on-going practice of killing babies before they have a chance to see the light of day, turning the mother’s womb into the most dangerous place in America. But Richards is not apologizing for the mass murder she presides over. After all, she promotes it. In fact, the video is not really an apology at all. It is an attack that is full of lies. Richards states that Planned Parenthood “follows all laws and ethical guidelines,” has as a top priority “the compassionate care that we provide,” and is committed  “to life-saving research.”

Ethical guidelines? Compassionate care? Life-saving research? In fact, Planned Parenthood has failed in its ethics and care. Its work is to end, not save, lives.

The Day the Music Died

We Are Now Without Excuse

In the age of on-line entertainment and instant information it was, perhaps, possible to live without knowing about the carnage going on around us, but the video of evolutionist Deborah Nucatola casually and callously explaining the crushing of innocent babies and harvesting their young bodies leaves us forever without excuse. Between gulps of red wine and bites of salad we learn that “a lot of people want liver” and that “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver …” We are also told how to play games with the law so the harvesting of human body parts can proceed efficiently:

The Federal Abortion Ban is a law, and laws are up to interpretation. So if I say on day One, I do not intend to do this, what ultimately happens doesn’t matter. … If you maintain enough of a dialogue with the person who’s actually doing the procedures, so they understand what the end-game is, there are little things, changes they can make in their technique to increase your success. … For example, so I had eight cases yesterday. And I knew exactly what we needed, and I kind of looked at the list and I said alright, this 17-weeker has eight lams, and this one—so I knew which were the cases that were probably more likely to yield what we needed, and I made my decisions according to that too, so it’s worth having a huddle at the beginning of the day, and that’s what I do.

That 17-weeker never had a chance—she never even saw the light of day. We now know the unthinkable and our response is telling.

Did we look at each other in horror? Did we stop everything? Were we angry? Were we sad? Did we cry?

No, we shot the messenger.

Surely this is all a false manipulation of the facts by those with nefarious and ulterior motives. After all, as the nightly news points out, the good doctor made it clear that this was not about the profit.

So it’s all good, right?

To avoid the obvious we strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. We celebrate that thirty pieces of silver was not excessive while innocent babies are murdered in cold blood.

We can try to look the other way but we are a deeply sick society. And now we know it.

Lunch with Dr. Nucatola Fallout—Here Come the Attacks

How Do You Justify Murder?

As predicted, evolutionists are desperately attempting to dismiss and delegitimize a several-hour long video of an evolutionist discussing the routine practice of crushing live babies to murder them in cold blood. Business Insider, for example, leads with an absurd headline labelling the video as “false.” No the video is not false. What is false is the evolutionist’s claims that humanity, and everything else for that matter, arose from a series of random chance events—what their Epicurean forefathers referred to as swerving atoms. And, as William Jennings Bryan foresaw, if the world is nothing but a happenstance accident, then what does it matter if we kill? And kill they do. In our country alone evolutionists have murdered more than 50 million babies. It is Bryan’s worst nightmare come true. Evolutionists have brought us this nightmare, and they will insist that it continues. What we are now seeing is how evolutionists conduct business—lies, more lies, and blackballing and delegitimization of anyone who points it out.

Lunch with Dr. Nucatola

The Killing Fields

Evolutionary thought’s insistence that the world arose spontaneously is our modern-day version of Epicureanism. The idea was then, and continues to be today, motivated by metaphysics, not science. From a scientific perspective the idea is clearly false. That was understood by philosophers of antiquity, but it is understood all the more clearly today. Simply put, modern science has demolished Epicureanism. But ideas die hard, especially ideas that are driven by metaphysical ideas we believe must be true. Overturning Epicureanism and modern day evolutionary thought requires overturning the foundational metaphysics—and that is much more difficult than solving a scientific problem. And so in spite of the science, evolution continues to be a very popular and influential idea. In fact evolution has been tremendously influential in a broad range of political, public policy and social issues. These include wars, holocausts, and abortion. The above video is a good example. It shows evolutionist Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical research, explaining how they murder unborn babies and harvest the tissue. Nucatola describes crushing techniques they use to preserve valuable body parts while murdering the baby in cold blood:

We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.

The level of cruelty is astonishing, yet most likely will go ignored or dismissed by evolutionists. Already the Washington Post has made the absurd suggestion that the almost three hour video may have been doctored in some way. The article concludes:

It’s hard to assess exactly what happened at the lunch with Nucatola.

Hard to assess? Do they also question the holocaust? Do journalists have difficulty determining just exactly what happened in Nazi Germany?

It would be difficult to imagine a more misleading conclusion. An abortionist discussed techniques for murdering babies. How can that possibly be “Hard to assess”?

But this is how evolutionists will frame this event.

Pluto Flyby

Berkeley’s “Understanding Evolution” Website Explains Natural Selection

Secrets Of The Trade

With a small army of evolutionists working on it, and several National Science Foundation grants funding it, the University of California at Berkeley’s “Understanding Evolution” website has a surprising number of errors. One of the more egregious ones is on a page that is intended to clarify the concept of natural selection. It is entitled “Misconceptions about natural selection,” but it begins with what is perhaps the worst of all: “natural selection can produce amazing adaptations.”

While it is true that the species display a wide assortment of amazing adaptations, they have nothing to do with natural selection. Remember the chameleon that changes color? A recent study discovered the incredible mechanism responsible behind it:

Many chameleons, and panther chameleons in particular, have the remarkable ability to exhibit complex and rapid colour changes during social interactions such as male contests or courtship. It is generally interpreted that these changes are due to dispersion/aggregation of pigment-containing organelles within dermal chromatophores. Here, combining microscopy, photometric videography and photonic band-gap modelling, we show that chameleons shift colour through active tuning of a lattice of guanine nanocrystals within a superficial thick layer of dermal iridophores.

Wow—active tuning of a lattice of guanine nanocrystals. Biology students will recognize guanine as one of the four main bases used to form the chemical letters in our DNA. The chameleon forms crystals of guanine to control the reflected light. In an outer layer of skin, the chameleon has guanine nanocrystals in a triangular shape in special light-reflecting cells called chromatophores. Then, in a deeper layer the chromatophores contain brick-shaped guanine nanocrystals. The active control occurs in the outer skin layer. Using some sort of cell signaling, such as hormones, the triangular guanine nanocrystals are excited, altering the crystal spacing and with it the wavelength of the reflected light and so changing color.

It is a fantastic mechanism and, needless to say, natural selection plays no role in it.

What about the origin of this mechanism? Did it evolve via random mutations and natural selection? According to the paper it did. In fact the authors write that they have demonstrated such an incredible feat:

Combining histology, electron microscopy and photometric videography techniques with numerical band-gap modelling, here we show that chameleons have evolved two superimposed populations of iridophores [chromatophores] with different morphologies and functions

Is that true? Does the paper “show that” this incredible active color control mechanism evolved?

No.

In fact this claim is utterly false. The paper shows nothing of the sort. In fact the authors admit they cannot even settle on an “evolutionary scenario.”

They also admit that the mechanism is an evolutionary novelty:

This combination of two functionally different layers of iridophores [chromatophores] constitutes an evolutionary novelty that allows some species of chameleons to combine efficient camouflage and dramatic display, while potentially moderating the thermal consequences of intense solar radiations.

But it gets worse.

Not only do the authors lack a convincing evolutionary scenario for what must be an evolutionary novelty, but they fail to present an explanation for how this fantastic active color control mechanism evolved.

I’m not saying their explanation is weak. I’m not saying it lacks credibility. I’m not saying it is yet another “just-so” story. I’m not saying it is improbable. I’m not saying any of those things for the simple reason that there is no explanation given. Nothing. Nada. What the research does show is some of the details of how this fantastic mechanism works.

Believe it or not, for evolutionists, elucidating structure, mechanism and function equates with demonstrating that it evolved.

Newcomers to evolutionary literature might be nonplussed. How can a research paper unequivocally state that it “shows” X, and then do nothing of the sort? Nothing at all.

In fact this rather strange literary device runs throughout the evolutionary genre. Researchers make utterly unfounded claims of discovering, demonstrating, confirming and proving evolutionary events, and then journalists follow along with popular articles rehearsing the refrain. Evolution is demonstrated yet again.

And not just evolution.

Evolutionists also say that examples such as this are demonstrations of natural selection—demonstrations of natural selection producing amazing adaptations.

This brings us back to the UC Berkeley “Understanding Evolution” website. It abuses science in its utterly unfounded claim that “natural selection can produce amazing adaptations.”

In fact natural selection, even at its best, does not “produce” anything. Natural selection does not and cannot influence the construction of any adaptations, amazing or not. If a mutation occurs which improves differential reproduction, then it propagates into future generations. Natural selection is simply the name given to that process. It selects for survival that which already exists. Natural selection has no role in the mutation event. It does not induce mutations, helpful or otherwise, to occur. According to evolutionary theory every single mutation, leading to every single species, is a random event with respect to need.

NIH Director: Each Neuron is Different

“Men Loved Darkness Rather Than Light”

In his blog post this week on the neuroscience research of Columbia’s Sean Escola, NIH Director Francis Collins makes the obvious, yet too often overlooked point that each of the hundred billion or so neurons in the human brain is different. In our profound ignorance it is easy to view the brain like a pile of pudding, achieving its fantastic abilities through a lucky mixture of the right chemicals. But of course, nothing could be farther from the truth and Collins’ observations helps to disabuse us of such folly. If you have ever wired up a machine you will understand. It is not just a pile of wires that somehow happen to get it right. Each wire has its own, unique function, attaching to two specific connectors. Things are astronomically more complicated in the brain, as its “wires” are not merely a conduit of electrical charge but an incredibly complex cell called a neuron. And each neuron does not merely attach to two distant connectors, but rather to hundreds or thousands of connectors. And each connection is nothing like a simple soldering attachment. In the brain they are called synapses and with thousands of molecular-scale switches researchers compare them to microprocessors.

But on top of all that, each neuron is different. A hundred billion different, unique neurons, each having a different, unique function. Each forming a different, unique set of synapses. We have not even begun to understand all of this neural circuitry, let alone how to design or build anything like it. And yet we insist it all must have arisen spontaneously, as a result of random mutations. That is not science, that is absurdity.

h/t: Paul Asay

Study: The Human Brain Has an Almost Ideal Network of Connections

The Brain Was Evolutionarily Designed?

Perhaps the most unlikely part, of all the many unlikely parts, of evolutionary theory is the evolution of the brain, with all that that entails, including 200 billion nerve cells, one quadrillion synapses, and the thousand or more molecular-scale switches in each synapse. Not surprisingly researchers sometimes can hardly find the words to express what they are studying. The brain is “truly awesome” beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief. (You can read more here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

And so far we’re only talking about the brain’s physical wonders. On top of all that there is consciousness, will and all those feelings and emotions we have. There is, not surprisingly, no evolutionary explanation for how the brain evolved. And a new study on how information is transferred within the brain now adds yet another intriguing aspect to the problem.

The researchers used a network analysis approach, and considered the tradeoff between the number of connections made and the number of information routing pathways connecting disparate locations. In this simple model, the transfer of information is optimized by minimizing the number of connections while maximizing the direct routings.

Of course the human brain undoubtedly has many more functions and requirements to fulfill, but interestingly their data showed a striking fit. According to their findings the structure of the human brain has an almost ideal network of connections. As the lead researcher explained, “That means the brain was evolutionarily designed to be very, very close to what our algorithm shows.” As usual, the infinitive form reveals the underlying teleological thinking. Aristotle is dead, long live Aristotle.

But that is the least of evolution’s problems. What is striking, and a dead giveaway, is the high confidence of evolutionists. There is no question that evolutionary theory has its challenges. This study of the brain’s information transfer is yet another example of this. The researchers of this study, in spite of statements about evolution, have no scientific theory for how the brain could have evolved. Nothing.

This paper provides yet another example that it is not exactly obvious that the world arose spontaneously (and that is putting it gently). In fact, science tells us the exact opposite. And yet evolutionists insist that evolution is a fact—no question about it. It would be, evolutionists like to say, perverse to say anything less. Those over-the-top claims by evolutionists tell all. This isn’t about science.

Jeffrey Taylor Sympathetically Reviews Jerry Coyne’s Book Against Religion

Ball Don't Lie

Jerry Coyne, having supplied the world with yet another tome proving that evolution is true—and by true Coyne and the evolutionists mean as true as the existence of gravity or the computer screen sitting in front of you, in other words there is not much nuance there—has now moved on to the next target: religion. In his new book Faith Versus Fact, Coyne rides the mythical Warfare Thesis (which holds that religion, except for in its anti realism form where it merely is the keeper of some vague set of values we might want to think about, opposes science and the two are incompatible) to take the battle to the believers. You can read a polite review in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Taylor. Taylor’s review is polite because, like Coyne, he also is an evolutionist and atheist. Unfortunately, that means that Taylor misses the key point that readers must understand if they are to make sense of Coyne’s new book, and evolutionary thought in general.

Coyne’s earlier book on why evolution is true did not add any new arguments or evidences to the evolution apologetic. The book was an excellent contribution to the genre, with its unique arrangement of the evidence and Coyne’s good writing style. And it gathered more evidence in one place than most treatments. But conceptually, it pounded the same themes that date back to Darwin, Hume, Wolfe, Malebranche, Lucretius, and many more.

And those themes are deeply metaphysical. The most obvious of them is the problem of evil and how evolutionists view it as requiring a distant god. The world must have arisen spontaneously, on its own, so to speak, because their god never would have intended for this gritty world. (You can read more about how Coyne handles the POE here, here, here and here, for example).

The key point to understand when reading the evolution genre is that it is motivated by, and relies on, this sort of religious belief. I call it a key point not only because the religious assumptions are fundamental and essential to evolutionary thought, but because they often are misunderstood. After all, isn’t the argument against an active Creator motivated by science, not religion?

No, science makes no such mandate, or provides no such evidence.

But what about evolution?

Evolution is founded on theological and philosophical claims about God and creation. From a scientific perspective it is not plausible. But from a religious perspective it is a fact.

So when Coyne rails on those of faith, and argues that religious beliefs are no longer tenable, he is making a hypocritical argument. He is a religious person, no less so than any high priest ever was, driven by deeply held metaphysical convictions.

Like evolution, atheism is also grounded in metaphysics. A typical example comes from atheist PZ Myers’ opinion piece in the LA Times where he made the case for atheism from the problem of evil:

We go right to the central issue of whether there is a god or not. We're pretty certain that if there were an all-powerful being pulling the strings and shaping history for the benefit of human beings, the universe would look rather different than it does.

That is a religious argument. Myers, who comes from a Lutheran background, draws a conclusion that depends on what he believes about God. God wouldn’t create this world, so there must be no God.

Aside from the hypocrisy, atheism is founded on a fallacy. For its conclusion, that matter and motion are all that exist, does not support religious beliefs about God. If materialism is all there is, then Myers cannot know anything about God. Myers could not know what God would or wouldn’t do. Atheism is vacuous and collapses on itself. Nor is this problem anything new for atheism. Historian Alan Charles Kors, for example, found that eighteenth century French atheism had come from the church and its culture. Kors wrote:

[My] inquiry led not to a prior history of free thought ... but to the orthodox culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in France. It was, above all, within the deeply Christian learned culture of those years that there occurred inquiries and debates that generated the components of atheistic thought. It was, to say the least, not what I had expected; it indeed was what I found. … Before one can understand the heterodoxy of early-modern atheism, one first must understand the orthodox sources of disbelief.

Atheism is a referendum on religious belief and specifically, in most cases, a referendum on Christian religious belief. That referendum is based not on some logical fallacy or historical failure of Scripture, but rather on our rejection of the Creator. God wouldn’t do it that way.

Elsewhere Taylor makes this point repeatedly. He is concerned there is a lack of understanding about atheism. Taylor argues that people need to understand and appreciate the reasoning behind atheism rather than cast atheists simply as failed theists. We must understand the underlying rationale:

Nowhere does Taunton posit the most obvious conclusion one may reach about the growing prevalence of atheism today: namely, that the tenets in which the Christian tradition demands faith may have ultimately appeared to young people to be untenable. Christianity requires that we, in the twenty-first century, after having mapped the human genome, sent probes to Mars, and discovered the Higgs Boson, believe in human parthenogenesis and tales of a man turning water into wine, calming raging seas, curing lepers, and raising the dead. It requires that we believe that God chose to redeem humankind by means of a human sacrifice.

This monumental failure called atheism is all the more striking when it appeals to scientific findings, as though somehow those findings mandate the atheist’s religious convictions. As per the quote above, Taylor somehow sees molecular biology and other advances of science as mitigating against the virgin birth, crucifixion, and atonement of Christ? We’ve discovered genetics and space travel, so therefore miracles aren’t possible? You’re kidding, right?

Unfortunately, no. The atheists are quite serious in their sophism.

As they say in science, this isn’t even wrong. Such a critique would be too generous. These atheist arguments are the stuff of late-night dorm room sessions where freshman argue strenuously about that which they do not understand. The heat of the argument is exceeded only by the ignorance.

Most people eventually grow up. Not so with the atheists and evolutionists.

It’s not that Coyne, Myers, Dawkins, Taylor and the rest are not smart people. They certainly are. But their religious convictions have them stuck in a fool’s game. After two thousand years, they continue to repeat the absurdities of their Epicurean forefathers.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

It Begins: Polygamy Makes First Move

The Floodgates are Open

This week a man filed for a license to marry two women.

It’s Official: Lamarckism has Now Joined the Narrative

Our Menu Items Have Changed

It is often said that all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Yesterday with the publishing of a new paper out of Israel, and two centuries later, Lamarck’s pre Darwinian theory of evolution, sometimes referred to as the inheritance of acquired characteristics, completed the cycle.

Darwin joined in the early nineteenth century ridicule of Lamarck but Darwin also quietly admired the Frenchman’s genius and at one point made considerable use of Lamarckian ideas, particularly toward the end of his first and into his second Transmutation Notebook where Darwin found Lamarck’s ideas on habits fruitful in dealing with William Kirby’s challenge on instincts. (For a good treatment of the Darwin-Lamarck relationship see George James Grinnell’s 1985 paper, The Rise and Fall of Darwin’s Second Theory).

It is often the case that Darwin’s personal journey presages evolutionary thought in general, and Darwin’s relationship with Lamarck, in many ways, is no exception. Darwin’s ridicule at times turned into harsh opposition. In an 1844 letter to friend J. D. Hooker, Darwin castigated Lamarckism as absurd and “veritable rubbish.” In later years Darwin deplored comments, even by supporters of his theory, that linked his new theory of evolution with Lamarckism in any way.

And yet, in the end, Darwin had no idea how biological variation occurred, and how it could provide the necessary material for natural selection. For such thorny problems the Sage of Kent could refer to Lamarck’s ideas as a rear guard. Ultimately, Lamarck was needed by Darwin, as he is today, a century and a half later, by evolutionists.

But in making that journey, evolutionists first went through the ridicule and violent opposition stages that Darwin had traversed. Darwin would have been delighted to see the early twentieth century’s merger of Mendelian genetics with Darwinian evolution, bringing with it the death knell for Lamarckism. This new form of Darwinism (neoDarwinism) or Modern Synthesis, required that Lamarck’s inheritance of acquired characteristics be false. Evolutionists spent that century in unbridled opposition to Lamarck (see here, here and here for just a few examples).

Vestiges of that hatred remain quite evident today even though the science has overwhelmingly proved them wrong (by the way, all the other major tenets of neoDarwinism have also turned out to be false). Inheritance of acquired characteristics has been observed for most of a century and in recent years progressive evolutionists changed direction and began acknowledging those Lamarckian ideas.

This brings us to yesterday’s new paper entitled “The Lamarckian chicken and the Darwinian egg” which now suggests the inheritance of acquired characteristics as a legitimate mechanism of evolution. First, the authors explained what went wrong:

Evolution according to Lamarck, as described 50 years before the publication of Darwin’s work, is driven by the inheritance of acquired characteristics. According to Lamarck, organisms adapt by developing new variations in response to changing environments, and these new adaptive traits become heritable. Because of the apparent teleological nature of his theory, since it appears to clash with Mendelian genetics, and because no mechanism that enables inheritance of acquired traits was known, Lamarck’s theory was considered, for 200 years, to be completely wrong.

And not just considered completely wrong, but vilified as well. But now evolutionists begin to consider Lamarck’s ideas as legitimate:

We suggest that the original “Chicken or Egg” dilemma (how did chicken come to be?) is not a paradox, it is explained by evolution, and that each evolutionary change could map to either a pure Darwinian world (or “Weissmanian” really), in which the metaphorical “Egg” must have preceded the “Chicken,” or to a “Lamarckian” world in which the metaphorical chicken “comes first.”

Soon Lamarckian mechanisms will be self-evident. Evolutionists have already begun to prepare the way for this tectonic shift in their thinking. First, their venerable prophet must be rescued and protected from the fallout. The founders of neoDarwinism will have to take the hit—Darwin must be protected at all costs. Here is how Denis Noble laid out the strategy two years ago:

I will use the term ‘Modern Synthesis’ rather than ‘Neo-Darwinism’. Darwin was far from being a Neo-Darwinist (Dover, 2000; Midgley, 2010), so I think it would be better to drop his name for that idea. As Mayr (1964) points out, there are as many as 12 references to the inheritance of acquired characteristics in The Origin of Species (Darwin, 1859) and in the first edition he explicitly states ‘I am convinced that natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive means of modification’, a statement he reiterated with increased force in the 1872, 6th edition.

This is, of course, a classic example of whig history. Darwin’s statement about natural selection comes at the end of his introduction to Origins and has nothing to do with Lamarckism. Darwin was softly promoting his theory to a skeptical reader and leaving himself wiggle room, not referring to the inheritance of acquired characteristics. For instance, Darwin would refer to sexual selection, as an addendum to natural selection. Darwin would have liked nothing more than rid his theory of anything linking it to Lamarck. He expressed that many times in no uncertain terms. Darwin’s rare employment of Lamarck’s ideas was strictly a rear guard action.

And for good reason. As with today, Darwin employed Lamarck only because he had to. Darwin needed at least some idea for how the plethora of biological variation would come about. Otherwise Lamarck was not welcome for, as yesterday’s paper explains above, Lamarckism smacked too much of teleology. Biological change arising in response to the needs of the organism? That was biology’s answer to Aristotelian, not Newtonian physics.

What Darwin needed, and what he posthumously got in neo Darwinism, was blind change. As Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod put it in 1971:

chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition—or the hope—that on this score our position is likely ever to be revised.

To suggest that Darwin would have been opposed to this neo Darwinism is, like the Warfare Thesis, more photoshopping of history. The problem, then and now, is that the inheritance of acquired characteristics demolishes evolutionary thinking. That is why evolutionists have resisted and opposed Lamarckism so strenuously. But like it or not, that is the scientific evidence. So evolutionary theory will become even more ridiculous, if that were possible, as evolutionists spin tall tales of how the inheritance of acquired characteristics is, after all, simply another wonder of evolution. The abuse of science will continue. Rather than dealing with the evidence evolutionists will engage in yet more fairy tales.

Vaccine Study Finds No Harmful Association, But Wait …

A Foregone Conclusion

A recent large vaccine study found no evidence of harmful association between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). That good news was celebrated everywhere from the health care trade journals to the mainstream media. “The vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella,” reported CNN, “doesn't bring an increased risk of autism, according to a new study of more than 95,000 children.” In a related interview on the same webpage, CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta argued that while “We don’t know what causes autism, but we know that vaccines do not.” Gupta went on even to suggest that “vaccines have been protective against autism.” That was, amazingly, precisely the most statistically-significant finding in the new study. That’s right, for one of the groups studied, receipt of the MMR vaccine was strongly associated with reduced autism risk. There is only one problem: it was yet another example of bogus Warfare Thesis science.

Historians have tried for years to disabuse us of the Warfare Thesis mythology. But their efforts have largely been in vain. The Warfare Thesis myth has always served as a powerful context for evolutionary theory and, false or not, evolutionists show no signs of forfeiting this powerful narrative.

Similarly, statisticians have tried for years to bring discipline to their field which too often uses statistics to “discover” a desired conclusion. One journal, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, recently even went so far as to ban altogether null hypothesis significance testing. But biostatisticians at Johns Hopkins rightly point out that ridding science of shoddy statistics will require scrutiny of every step, not merely the last one.

I point out the Warfare Thesis and statistical inference not as disparate examples of scholarship gone wrong, but rather as two very related problems. You might say statistical inference is one of the Warfare Thesis’ preferred tools, and this new vaccine study is a good example.

The study’s most significant finding was that the MMR vaccine is associated with reduced autism risk. The authors were right to seek some sort of confounding variables to explain this unlikely result. But this result, even if explained away, hints at the underlying challenges and problems in such a research study.

One problem is that the we are dealing with people. Different parents have different levels of concern. And diagnoses may be influenced by various factors. Second, autism spectrum disorders include a variety of symptoms and conditions. Statistical comparisons may be complicated by such factors.

Nonetheless, the authors concluded that “receipt of the MMR vaccine was not associated with increased risk of ASD.” While that is technically true, the opposite is also true. That is, receipt of the MMR vaccine was not associated with an absence of increased risk either. In other words, the uncertainty of their results is such that they are consistent with both no increased risk, or some increased risk. Either could be true, within reasonable levels of statistical confidence.

What the results do show is that the MMR vaccine is not associated with a dramatic increased risk of ASD. Receipt of the vaccine was not likely associated with a doubling of the risk, for example. But again, those results are subject to the caveats discussed above (which may be overriding factors).

The bottom line is that the study’s conclusions are false and irresponsible. And they led to yet more false and irresponsible proclamations in the media, with commentators such as Sanjay Gupta making demeaning comments about parents struggling with this difficult decision.

One might ask how papers such as this survive peer review? The answer is that the paper said exactly what the peer reviewers were looking for. You see, like all literature, the scientific literature comes in a genre, and today that genre is the Warfare Thesis. This is made clear at the very beginning of the paper, long before the data are considered:

Two doses of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine are currently recommended for children in the United States: the first at age 12 to 15 months and the second at age 4 to 6 years. Although a substantial body of research over the last 15 years has found no link between the MMR vaccine and autism spectrum disorders (ASD), parents and others continue to associate the vaccine with ASD. Parents cite vaccinations, especially MMR, as a cause of ASD and have deferred or refused vaccinations for their children as a result. Lower vaccination levels threaten public health by reducing both individual and herd immunity and have been associated with several recent outbreaks of measles, with most cases occurring among unvaccinated individuals.

There you have it. Science has revealed the truth yet resistance to the undeniable facts continues, posing threats to us all. There was no question where the paper was headed—the results were a foregone conclusion. There is no way the researchers were going to discover anything wrong with vaccines. Those were the ground rules that readers must understand.

And once the beachhead is established the media’s heavy artillery can be brought to bear, proclaiming how the science had once again debunked the recurrent myths of the ignorant, as commentators such as CNN’s Jake Tapper shake their head in disgust.

These new truths then, in turn, lead to laws such as the California law mandating vaccines for all public school students which Governor Jerry Brown signed into law today. The law forces parents to violate their conscience or lose their tax monies to a public school system they are not allowed to use. Brown is a good leader but this new law is unfair and a mistake.

Does any of this mean that vaccines are not a great public health success, or that they should be avoided at all costs? No, of course not. Vaccines hold great promise and have conferred great health benefits. But the choice of whether or not to vaccinate is not simply a scientific question.

The problem is not that this is a difficult decision for some. That’s life. The problem is that evolution’s Warfare Thesis has resulted in both faulty science and an environment of discrimination against and vilification of parents struggling with legitimate decisions.

h/t; Little John

Antinomian Fervor: The Ten Commandments Must Go

“Do not think that I came to destroy the Law”

In yet another in-your-face ruling, another high court, the Oklahoma Supreme Court in this case, has ruled that a Ten Commandments statue must be removed from outside of the state capitol because, after all, it is religious. Rulings such as this have much broader implications. The sixth commandment is, for example, “You shall not murder,” and is a good example of how our entire judicial system is, in fact, “religious.” Of course we are not going to do away with the entire canon, but nine tenths of the law is not so much the laws that are in place but how those laws are interpreted and respected. Unfortunately, ours is a world where laws are treated like items on a cafeteria menu. We select what we like and ignore the rest. That’s antinomianism.

Tania Lombrozo on Evolutionary Belief and Cultural Factors

Here I Triumph

When an article begins with the statement that “The theory of evolution by natural selection is among the best established in science,” you know the author won’t be defending that claim but rather will be assuming it as a given. You also know the author, in this case psychology professor Tania Lombrozo at the University of California, Berkeley, is sufficiently distant from evolutionary theory such that facts won’t confuse the message. Even committed evolutionists have long since admitted that natural selection, at best, can only be one of several modes of evolutionary change. In fact biological adaptations we can observe are dominated by rapid, directed change in response to environmental challenges, not slow, random change accumulated via natural selection as evolutionary dogma had insisted.

Lombrozo’s article discusses ideas and theories about why some people accept evolution while others do not. Cultural factors and religious beliefs are at play, but there is something more:

But in the last 20 years or so, research in psychology and the cognitive science of religion has increasingly focused on another factor that contributes to evolutionary disbelief: the very cognitive mechanisms underlying human cognition.

So there are cognitive mechanisms underlying human cognition that influence our failure to accept evolution. While that seems to make sense it reminds us of that thorny problem, of which Lombrozo is happily oblivious, that these cognitive mechanisms (as well as everything else for that matter) must have been created by evolution.

In other words, Lombrozo’s belief in evolution is, according to her own account, simply a consequence of mechanistic actions in her head and the resulting molecular states, all of which just happened to arise spontaneously by the blind interplay of chance events and natural law.

How can Lombrozo be confident of any of her Epicurean assertions? Nonetheless she forges ahead:

Researchers have argued that a variety of basic human tendencies conspire to make natural selection especially aversive and difficult to understand, and to make creationism a compelling alternative. For instance, people tend to prefer explanations that offer certainty

Preferences for certainty? Is the Berkeley professor familiar with Rene Descartes and his need for certainty? Is she aware that Thomas Huxley acknowledged the great rationalist as foundational to evolutionary thought because, if not, she should know she’s soaking in it or, in this case, him (please click on video above to understand the full extent of Lombrozo’s predicament).

Lombrozo speaks of cultural factors as though she transcends them. In fact her belief that the world spontaneously arose is drenched in such cultural factors.

In fact, there's evidence that individuals vary in the extent to which they favor purpose and exhibit other relevant cognitive tendencies, and that this variation is related to religious belief — itself a strong predictor of evolutionary belief.

Indeed, evolutionary belief is a religious belief. There is no science behind spontaneous origins, rather it is mandated by our convictions about what a good god would and would not do. From a scientific perspective evolution is absurd. From a religious perspective it is a fact.

Lombrozo is hardly alone in her confusion over evolution’s epistemology, or lack thereof. Darwin himself made the same blunder in his famous July 3rd, 1881 letter to philosopher and political economist, William Graham. With less than a year left to promote his message, the elderly Darwin admitted that Graham made good points against chance but, in classic Petitio Principii style, Darwin turned the obvious evidence on its head:

Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

In other words, while evolution’s chance construction (yes, it is chance, the supposed natural selection merely kills off the bad designs, it does not coax good designs to arise—every mutation must have occurred by chance according to evolution) calls Graham's scientific judgments into question, thus protecting Darwin's modern-day Epicureanism, evolution’s chance construction by no means harms our theological convictions that God never would have created this world. Therefore evolution must be true.

It was a century after Hume and the perfect replay of Philo’s response to Cleanthes’s powerful design argument. Philo admitted the argument was a great challenge for him, but it was neutralized by the evil in the world. “I needed all my skeptical and metaphysical subtlety to elude your grasp,” admitted Philo, but “Here I triumph.”

So there you have it. The theory of evolution by natural selection is among the best established in science.

Jeff Sachs Goes There: Anti-Vaxxers Go To Jail

Don’t Pass Go, And Don’t Collect $200

Given the dominance and confluence of the Warfare Thesis, its resulting scientism, and evolution’s apparently unceasing thirst for control over people, I kick myself for not predicting Jeff Sachs’ latest we-would-laugh-except-this-is-real threat that parents who do not vaccinate their children are committing a crime [1:50]. It is not enough that this past week the California legislature passed a new law that prohibits parents, who avoid the risk of vaccination, from sending their children to the public schools while nonetheless taxing those same parents to pay for the public school system which they are not allowed to use. These parents are a small minority and so are an easy target. But if Sachs has his way, unfair taxation will be the least of these parents’ concerns as they will be convicted as criminals for their choice to protect their children. Undoubtedly the state would also take their children from them.

Given the strong language from global warming (AGW) advocates about how those who don’t agree with them should be incarcerated, Sachs’ move is not too surprising. Please see this post , where I concluded that this vigilante justice could jump to other issues:

What we are seeing are classic defamation tactics. Evolution’s Warfare Thesis has lit all kinds of fires and emotions are running high. With evolution there is no law, just narrative. Today it focuses on climate, but it could jump to any number of issues.

According to Sachs, vaccination should be one of those issues. That fits nicely into the nineteenth century, mythical Warfare Thesis which was erected by evolutionists to protect their theory. One of the many targets of the Warfare Thesis were those anti-vaccination rascals. To this day evolutionists rally around vaccinations as another support for their scientism.

The fact is that vaccinations have done a world of good and there are plenty of reasons to vaccinate, but they also carry low-probability risk. Those are generalizations and the details are different for each vaccine and each patient.

The bottom line is that vaccinations often present a classic risk-reward tradeoff. They provide helpful protections, but they can present a very low risk of both short-term and long-term illness and death. Recently more than two dozen children in Mexico were hospitalized and two died after receiving vaccines. Authorities halted vaccinations temporarily. Tragedy has also struck in this country, such as in the case of Lorrin Kain, popularized in a recent book, who eventually died from her vaccination injuries. Even the official vaccine court acknowledged the vaccine injury, though the reparations were not nearly adequate.

For most people the risks are tolerably low, and the tradeoff favors the vaccination. But this isn’t a scientific analysis. Not only are the exact probabilities unknown (mostly because the Warfare Thesis has served to cloud and corrupt the science of properly evaluating the vaccine risk), but even if they were known, the risk-reward tradeoff cannot be set to a formula. It is a choice each parent must make for each vaccine, in consultation with their doctor.

None of this is controversial, yet evolutionary thinking demands a very different approach. It demands that while parents must have the choice to kill their unborn child, they ought not have the choice to make the vaccine risk-reward decision. What about the risk? Evolutionists deny the risk because, after all, correlation does not imply causation.

When I explained this evolutionists attacked me with their usual demagoguery. One evolutionist explained the problem is that I don’t accept the basic principles of science because, after all, unlike him I am skeptical that the species arose naturalistically:

The fact that the author of this post is a dedicated anti-evolutionist for whom no amount of evidence is enough to make him even question his convictions, and who has now apparently become an anti-vaxer is not surprising: if you don't accept the basic principles of science, then any application of science to human welfare is, by foregone conclusion, definitely negative

Note the dismissive language. Doubting that the species arose naturalistically makes me a “dedicated anti-evolutionist for whom no amount of evidence is enough” who does not “accept the basic principles of science.” And pointing out that the benefits of vaccines are accompanied by risks makes me “an anti-vaxer.” It’s all Warfare Thesis.

Another evolutionist attacked my post, making the absurd suggestion that the Lorrin Kain’s injuries may have been a mere coincidence, and threatening that he had “Saved and tweeted [the post] for posterity.”

It is disappointing that rational discussion is not possible, but this is the environment that the Warfare Thesis has created. The above Jeff Sachs video in which he calls for the criminalization of parents choosing not to vaccinate, for example, appears at Business Insider under the heading: “Watch Jeff Sachs destroy the anti-vaccine movement in under two minutes.” It is all about attacking the “deniers.” Meanwhile unlikely hypotheses are insisted to be fact, and anyone who doesn’t go along will incur their wrath, and maybe their indictments.