Vaccines do not cause autism

“The evidence is in. The scientific community has reached a clear consensus that vaccines don’t cause autism. There is no controversy.” So begins an in-depth discussion of the vaccines-cause-autism nonsense penned by “SkepDoc” Harriet Hall in a recent issue of eSkeptic. It is a must read for any thinking person who has been baffled by the likes of Jenny McCarthy and her unconscionable sponsors, boyfriend Jim Carrey (who bankrolls McCarthy’s dangerous ignorance) and Oprah Winfrey (who provides McCarthy with television time so that she can endanger the lives of even more children).

The SkepDoc helpfully traces the history of this pseudoscientific tale, dividing it into three acts. The original claim came from a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 published an article in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, proposing that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine may cause autism because 8 of 10 autistic children he had examined seemed to have developed their autistic symptoms immediately after having been vaccinated, according to their parents. If this sounds like pretty flimsy evidence, it is: the paper was eventually retracted by the journal and by most of Wakefield’s co-authors. It turned out that the doctor did not use any controls at all, ignored negative virological studies that had disproved his thesis even before the publication of the paper, had undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in the matter (he was paid by the lawyers of some of the families whose children he used in his research), and had violated ethical rules of conduct (he bought blood by bribing the children at a birthday party). Moreover, Wakefield’s findings could not be replicated by other studies, so you’d think that would be the end of the story. Nope: the bastard — once charged by the British General Medical Council with professional misconduct — simply moved to the United States, where he is happily making money by working in an autism clinic. As a result of Wakefield’s unconscionable “study”, vaccination rates in the UK dropped, cases of measles went up, and children died. Pseudoscience can kill.

Phase two of the craze, according to Dr. Hall, can be traced back to legislation passed (also in 1998) with the aim of reducing the total amount of mercury that children get through the thimerosal that was used in vaccinations. The intention was good, though it turns out that the dangerous form of mercury is methylmercury, not the ethylmercury found in vaccines. Accordingly, the law was not prompted by any published research or serious assessment conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency. Instead, two mothers (!!) conducted their own “research” and claimed that the symptoms of autism are identical to those induced by mercury poisoning. As Hall points out, this is simply false, period. At any rate, thimerosal was eliminated from vaccines in 1999. You would therefore expect the rate of autism to have gone significantly down as a result, if the hypothesis of a causal link were somehow correct. It didn’t, in fact, it went up. Moreover, a dangerous cottage industry of people selling crackpot remedies against mercury poisoning has emerged, with quacks like Mark and David Geier selling a method that amounts to a very painful process of chemical castration for the hefty sum of $5000-6000 a month. Pseudoscience can hurt, badly.

The third phase of this saga identified by Hall is the one that has seen the above-mentioned McCarthy and Winfrey involved, among others, and it is the even broader (and even less substantiated) claim that all vaccines produced by “Big Pharma” are harmful and are causing an epidemic of autism. McCarthy has an autistic child, and of course she is absolutely convinced that her motherly instincts trump science. She apparently realizes the dire consequences of what she is doing, if somewhat dimly. Here is a quote by McCarthy from the eSkeptic article: “I do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it’s their fucking fault that the diseases are coming back. They’re making a product that’s shit.” The problem is, of course, that current vaccines are in fact as safe as vaccines are going to be, and the dangers are only in Miss McCarthy’s deranged mind. (Incidentally, there seems to be a reliable claim that McCarthy’s son developed autistic symptoms before he was vaccinated, thereby putting in question either the mother’s “instincts” or her good faith.) Pseudoscience can make you a celebrity, the health of the children be damned.

Dr. Hall very appropriately quotes Jonathan Swift in the context of this discussion: “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after.” That, of course, is true for the lies of pseudoscience as much as for those of politics (which was Swift’s main concern). What is astounding and deeply disturbing to me is that America seems to be enthralled with this manufactured controversy about science: a substantial portion of the public is convinced that vaccines are bad, while scientists agree that they are as safe as they can be; half of the public thinks that global warming is a myth, while the overwhelming majority of competent scientists keep telling us that we are in dire straits that are getting more and more dire; and of course more than half of Americans reject evolution, despite the fact that the theory has been accepted in science since the end of the 19th century.

There is no simple solution to this problem, though these “controversies” are making the American population more ignorant (evolution), sick (vaccines) and environmentally unconscionable (global warming) than ever. Scientists and science educators need to do their part to counter this nonsense, of course. But celebrities like Carey and Winfrey ought to stop promoting bullshit because they are sleeping with a nutcase or out of a misplaced sense of wanting to help others from the dangerous depths of sheer ignorance. And of course the public at large has a duty to society to be informed and attempt to make the best decisions based on the most reliable sources of evidence. The information is out there, people, just use your brains.

Massimo's picks

* Bill Maher on how the Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into a mental hospital...

* Newskeek's article on evolutionary psychology, featuring an interview with yours truly.

* Paul Krugman on why the so-called "centrist" Democratic senators who are trying to kill health care reform are anything but centrists...

* Tony Judt on why we should not allow Israel to get away with making a (fictional) distinction between legal and illegal settlements in Palestine.

* Thoughtful editorial by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss on why atheism is still (likely) the best bet for scientists.

* What happens when real paleontologists do a field trip at the creation museum in Kentucky...

* Our early ancestors relied more on smell than sight, and the implications for human evolution.

* Did Neanderthals go extinct because we ate them? A food tale from our distant past.

Three fixations of fundamentalist Christians

I’ve been reading Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University, which makes for both irritating and fascinating reading. It’s the story of a semester the author spent at ultra-conservative Liberty University as a (temporary) transfer student from ultra-liberal Brown, with the aim of getting the insider’s view of what fundamentalist Christianity is all about. You can check out my Amazon review of the book if you are interested in my broad assessment of it (the short version: enjoyable read, good attempt by the author at bridging the cultural divide, unfortunate tendency by Roose to overplay the likable side of his Liberty University buddies and even of Jerry Falwell and to downplay their homophobia and bigotry).

What I’d like to focus on here is Roose’s observation, while taking various courses at Liberty, that three themes repeatedly emerged from his interactions with his professors (and I use the word in a very charitable fashion here, for the sake of argument): evolution didn’t happen, abortion is murder, and absolute truth exists. Given my interest in understanding the fundamentalist mind and fighting its pernicious effects on society, it seems to me obligatory to ponder on these three points, which I have also observed form a recurring pattern in my own more than decade-long interactions with Christian fundamentalists (though it should be added that the same themes are strong also in other fundamentalist versions of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious mythology).

Roose maintains that there are three ways in which Liberty professors attack evolution: by equating acceptance of evolution to faith in God, by questioning one or another of its scientific tenets (an all-time favorite is, of course, criticism of radio dating of rocks), or by sheer sarcasm (as in “can you believe scientists actually think the human eye is the result of chance? — They don’t, by the way). These are all very telling. The sarcasm is a form of anti-intellectualism that strongly suggests to the faithful that we simple minded folks are in fact much smarter than them PhD-sporting scientists, an anti-expert attitude that of course few fundies actually carry through in any other area of their lives (most of them go to car mechanics, doctors, lawyers, financial consultants and other such experts). The other two tacks are even more fascinating because they are mutually contradictory, and in fact represent two distinct tactics adopted by the creationist movement in the United States during the 20th century. It is simply not coherent to criticize a position on (alleged) scientific grounds (even attempting to present a scientifically acceptable alternative in the form of the oxymoronic “creation science”) while at the same time charging the other side with simply engaging in a religious belief. The content of religious beliefs is not subject to scientific inquiry by its very nature, so one cannot reasonably use science and rationality to criticize an idea, only to switch when convenient to the position that that same idea is held by faith, meaning in spite of the evidence. Then again, there never was much reasonableness in the fundamentalist mind.

Abortion, of course, would take several posts in and of itself, as it is a complex matter even for progressives. I certainly do not subscribe to the idea that abortion should be as easily available as aspirin, or that women have an absolute and unquestionable right to do what they will with the fetuses they carry. To contemplate having an abortion is to engage in an incredibly complex and painful exercise in ethical judgment, and there simply is no easy way out. That said, the fundamentalist insistence on the “sanctity of life” strikes me as hypocritical and ill-founded. First off, most of the same people who scream “baby murder” are also in favor of the death penalty, for instance, or have no trouble sending thousands or even millions of innocents to their death by declaring holy wars of one kind or another. But more to the point, these people seem to be completely incapable of understanding that “personhood” is a continuous process that is only potential at the moment of conception. Is the zygote a human life form? Yes, though it won’t become a human being for months. Is it a human person? At that moment most certainly not. This is important because we recognize rights to persons not to cells (well, we unfortunately recognize rights to corporations too, but that’s a whole different story). If it were biological material that had rights, then sperms and eggs shouldn’t be wasted either (if your mind wandered to Monty Python’s Every Sperm is Sacred you are in good company). Moreover, and rather counterintuitively, fundamentalists should be in favor of human cloning, and should defend the right to existence of every single human cell, since they are all potential human beings that could become actual if they were to go through a cloning process. This position is absurd, of course, but it highlights the idea that there is no simple solution to the issue, no clear black and white, us vs. them approach that is tenable.

And that brings me to the last tenet on Roose’s list: absolute truth (to be found, of course, in the Bible). This is really what fundamentalists of all stripes have a problem with. They simply cannot accept that Truth with a capital T is essentially inaccessible to humans (except when we are talking about logic and mathematics), and that moreover in many real cases of interest to human affairs there is no absolute truth. This doesn’t mean that anything goes (the dreaded extreme postmodernist position), but rather that truth comes in degrees, or that there may be more than one reasonable assessment of a given situation, leading to pluralism on whatever issue one may be considering.

Indeed, it is this obsession with absolute truth, this epistemological hubris if you will, that also explains the other two recurrent themes: fundamentalists wouldn’t have a problem with evolution if they didn’t insist on taking the Bible as the definitive word in matters of history and science (as many moderate Christians in fact don’t). And they would be able to tolerate a range of positions on abortion if they didn’t think that there is an absolute distinction between human and non-human, and an absolute way to determine right and wrong.

There is, of course, no simple solution to the problem of fundamentalism. However, I must admit that — as irritating as Roose’s book becomes at times — he has hit on a good point in his Epilogue: “Humans have always quarreled [I’d say murdered each other, but whatever] over their beliefs, and I suppose they always will. But judging from my post-Liberty experience, this particular religious conflict isn’t built around a hundred-foot brick wall. If anything, it’s built around a flimsy piece of cardboard, held in place on both sides by paranoia and lack of exposure. It’s there, no doubt, but it’s hardly forbidding. And more important, it’s hardly soundproof. Religious conflict might be a basic human instinct, but I have faith [a rather unfortunate choice of word], now more than ever before, that we can subvert that instinct for long enough to listen to each other.”

In other words, start wearing a suitable “Your Friendly Atheist Neighbor” t-shirt. If you really are friendly, the other side might see you as someone to respectfully disagree with, not as a demon to send to hell as expeditiously as possible. That would be progress indeed.

Massimo's picks

* Bill Maher talks to Keith Obermann about health care and why the Dems should ignore Republican opposition.

* Interview with Bertrand Russell, always a pleasure.

* Massimo's interview on Minnesota Atheists Radio, on atheism and politics (not quite the level of Russell, alas).

* What neuroscience can tell us about teaching.

* The philosophy of quantum physics.

* Could demographic trends put the GOP in the minority for a long time? Let's hope so.

* From brain scanning to mind reading?

* How is it that psychics can't tell when their are being swindled?

* Yet another important step toward understanding the origin of life. I wonder what creationists will say...

* Gay behavior is common among animal species. Will conservatives keep extolling the family values of penguins?

* Why zoning out may be good for your examined life.

* A delightful essay by philosopher Simon Blackburn on why David Hume is so much better than Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

* And speaking of Hitchens, as much as I don't particularly care for either some of his political views or his writing style, I must admit he's right on the mark at Slate on the so-called "elections" in Iran.

Bertrand Russell

Now that I am officially a philosopher (i.e., my salary is going to be paid by a philosophy, instead of a biology, department), I can indulge full time in reading philosophy without feeling guilty. I haven’t mastered the skill (of not feeling guilty) yet, but I’m working on it. This is also why I’m starting an occasional series of blog posts devoted to individual philosophers, picked among those that strike my fancy for one reason or another. Obviously, a blog post is not the appropriate venue for even a superficial look at the entire body of work of a major philosopher, so what I’ll do instead is to briefly comment on a number of major themes relevant to each particular case, and hope to stimulate people to read more about that philosopher. We begin with the 20th century British logician and moral theorist Bertrand Russell.

Russell was the first philosopher I ever read, beginning when I was in high school, and arguably the guy that got first got me into philosophy. It was one of those long and boring Sunday afternoons in my father’s house in Rome, which we spent listening to a radio broadcast of the soccer games of the day. I was scanning one of my father’s collections of books with the same cover, one of those things that people who don’t read, for some reason (guilt? shame?), like to have on their shelves so that they can pretend to have some interest in Culture, even though said books lie virgin on the bookcase and their owner couldn’t tell you the difference between Homer and Shakespeare if he heard a few lines of The Odyssey contrasted with excerpts from Hamlet.

At any rate, I picked up Russell’s autobiography, having vaguely heard the name before. I couldn’t put the damn thing down, and kept reading it as if it were a ravishing novel (which in a non-fictional sense, it is). After that I moved to Why I am Not a Christian, another hugely influential book in my youth, and so on with several others by Russell. I was hooked, and thirty years later I am about to become a real philosopher in the same department where the Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly is produced. But enough about me, let’s talk about Bertie.

Russell’s life was packed with the kind of events that fill several other people’s lifetimes, partly because he lived a very long existence (he died at age 98), but mostly because the man had an incredible amount of physical and mental energy. He married four times, wrote an astounding number of influential books and articles about philosophy, got in trouble with the law several times for his anti-war sentiments, and was denied an appointment at the City University of New York (where I am going in the Fall) because a judge thought that Russell’s opinions as expressed in his Marriage and Morals made him “morally unfit” to teach in American universities.

Russell’s chief interest in philosophy was in logic and the philosophy of mathematics, and his primary achievement in that field is the monumental Principia Mathematica, co-written with Alfred North Withehead. His project was to establish mathematics on entirely self-sufficient logical foundations, a project that eventually failed and was later demonstrated by people like Kurt Godel (he of “incompleteness theorem” fame) to be impossible in principle. Russell’s work was foundational and highly influential nonetheless. Russell is also commonly acknowledged as the father of what today is known as “analytic” philosophy (as opposed to the other major contemporary branch, so-called “continental” philosophy). The idea is that philosophy should be concerned with clarifying the use of language, eliminate confusion and get rid of incoherent or meaningless propositions (particularly abundant in certain writings on metaphysics).

Frankly, however, the aspects of Russell’s thought that I consider most relevant still to people today concern his politics and his writings on morality. Unlike many progressives during his lifetime, Russell recognized early on that the communist regime of the Soviet Union was a disaster for its citizens and for humanity at large, and was accordingly publicly very critical of it. In a typical fashion, here is how he managed to attack the Soviet revolution and the Catholic Church in one paragraph:

“One who believes as I do, that free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism as much as to the Church of Rome. The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.”

Russell also clearly saw the threat of Nazism ahead of many others, and accordingly thought that World War II (unlike WWI) was necessary and justified. For a time he had high hopes about the role of the United States as a positive force in international governance, but those hopes were dashed by Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis first and by the Vietnam war later. He co-signed a document with Einstein in 1955 that led to the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs a couple of years later. Shortly thereafter he also became the first president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (from which he eventually resigned because the organization did not support the sort of civil disobedience for which Russell was arrested in 1961).

The man had guts, and had no qualms in fighting for, not just writing about, his ideas on a just and peaceful society. Accordingly, Russell wrote forcefully on a variety of other ethical issues, favoring women’s right to vote, access to birth control, and rights for homosexuals, to mention a few. In other words, he was (and still is) the conservative bigot’s ultimate nightmare. You’ve got to love the man.

Let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Bertie, concerning the issue of death and the zest for life:

“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.”

Massimo's Picks

* An interesting article by Harriet Hall in eSkeptic about the placebo effect and how it works.

* Some good food for thought on Iraq and the Middle East from New York Times' Thomas Friedman.

* Defending a science writer who is being sued for libels by pseudoscientific chiropractors.

* I bet you didn't foresee the new trend on TV: psychic shows!

* Keith Olbermann catches Newt Gingrich directly (and presumably unwittingly) contradicting "he who must not be contradicted," Ronald Reagan.

* Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything... except your intelligence (and their blog is pretty good too!).

* Paul Krugman on how right-wind media and politicians are fanning conspiracy theorists and other lunatics.

* The Federal government has spent $2.5 billion of your money to test "alternative" medicine for the past ten years. The results are rather disappointing...

* Journalist Carl Zimmer on how wiki tools help research on swine flu, and a new model for how science might work in the future.

Deepak Chopra defends Oprah while committing endless logical fallacies

I regularly read the Huffington Post, for the good reason that it often sports intelligent articles written from a progressive standpoint, and because I believe in open access and open contribution to the socio-political discourse (otherwise, I wouldn’t bother writing this blog). Then again, one of the drawbacks of openness is that you get crap together with the good stuff. This isn’t altogether bad, since reading crap is a necessary component of developing one’s own sense of critical thinking, sharpening the baloney detector, so to speak. But crap needs to be responded to, especially when it comes from influential sources. Hence this column on good old Deepak Chopra (he of quantum mysticism fame) defending Oprah Winfrey from the attacks of a “struggling news magazine” (Newsweek) which recently dared criticizing Oprah for endorsing and promoting pseudomedicine — most famously by lending ample tv time to Jenny McCarthy, the former Playboy model who maintains against all evidence that vaccines cause autism.

Ok, Deepak, here we go. Chopra complains that Newsweek adopts “the same tiresome blend of gotcha journalism and selective fact-reporting that fills tabloid coffers,” which is a stunning case of the pot calling the kettle black if you go on and read the remainder of Chopra’s own piece in the Post. Be that as it may, we then find out that “[Oprah’s] intention to improve women's lives on all fronts is so obvious as to be almost above criticism.” Really? I have no reason to doubt Ms. Winfrey’s intentions, but surely Deepak has heard that the road to hell is often paved with good intentions, no? But you see, “the fact that she has celebrity guests who have causes and crusades in the area of health, such as Jenny McCarthy or Suzanne Somers, is not the same as Oprah herself endorsing what they say.” Well, if you actually watch Oprah (which I sometimes do while working out at the gym) she is strongly endorsing McCarthy and Somers, as it is made clear by the continuous nodding and words of encouragement that Winfrey utters every time these quacks are on her show, or by her sometimes vehement dismissal of their critics.

A major argument deployed by Chopra is that “[Oprah] brings up creative solutions to problems that medical science is baffled by, such as the healing response itself and the role of subjectivity in patient response. ... Do subjective changes affect healing? Obviously they do, or we wouldn't have the placebo effect, which comes into play at least 30% of the time in illness.” He then goes on to show proof of what he is saying by citing a study (conducted by mainstream medical researchers, incidentally), showing that “on average, acupuncture patients received twice as much benefit as those on standard treatment [anti-inflammatory drugs or a massage]. The kicker is that some of the patients received fake acupuncture — they were pricked superficially with toothpicks — and received the same relief.”

Now let us stop for a moment and analyze the above. First off, Chopra does not seem to understand the placebo effect. As Harriet Hall explained in a recent issue of eSkeptic, the 30% figure (which is actually 35%) derives from a 1955 study published in the (decidedly non “alternative”) Journal of the American Medical Association, and authored by Henry Beecher (a non-alternative MD). But the figure of 35% refers to the cumulative effect of everything that is not treatment, which includes not just the actual placebo effect, but more importantly a large component deriving from the body’s natural (evolved, not mystical) ability to heal itself. Indeed, a more recent study by Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Peter Gotzsche published in 2001 in the New England Journal of Medicine properly compared the improvement achieved with no treatment to the improvement due to the placebo effect, and found little measurable effect of the placebo. This doesn’t mean that the placebo effect doesn’t occur, just that it is much more limited than the “30%” figure mentioned by Chopra, who apparently doesn’t bother reading the medical literature before making his spectacularly misinformed pronouncements.

Moreover, a rational person would conclude from the study of “real” and “fake” acupuncture that there is no such thing as real acupuncture! If pricking patients with toothpicks has the same effect as inserting needles, wouldn’t you surmise that the whole thing is in fact the result of placebo and natural healing, no acupuncture required thank you very much?

Chopra criticizes the “medical establishment” for being slow to explore new treatments, and cites the case of American doctors who have finally begun considering lumpectomies in place of the much more drastic mastectomies in cases of breast cancer. I am no fan of the health industry, and particularly of the pharmaceutical industry, especially as they are run in this country. But, please notice that the increase in interest in lumpectomies was the result of rigorous studies published by European researchers in peer reviewed journals. Nothing whatsoever to do with “alternative” medicine, whatever that means.

One more example, which perfectly embodies Chopra’s “logic,” such as it is. The mysticism that he promotes (and handsomely profits from) needs “mystery,” as in things that official science doesn’t understand. Otherwise he couldn’t sell his quackery as an “alternative.” So he cites, predictably, the mind-body connection, as in the following stunning passage: “So let me offer a typical finding that comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other official sources. It concerns the effect of child abuse and other adverse circumstances on later health. Is it ‘soul talk’ to believe that a child raised around parents who abuse substances, who suffer from mental illness, or who outright abuse the child will suffer health risks later in life? According to the CDC study, covering 15,000 HMO members in San Diego between 1995-97, the risk of contracting an autoimmune disease as an adult is increased from 70% to 100% if you happened to be abused as a child or grow up with adverse home conditions. ... This study suggests a human connection rather than a biological one.”

A human rather than biological connection? What does Chopra think human beings are, if not biological organisms? And notice, again, that the source of the study is a perfectly mainstream organization, the federally funded CDC. And no, no scientist in his right mind would dismiss this as crazy ‘soul talk,’ because the idea of a connection between stress and health has been accepted and explored experimentally by biologists in both humans and other animals for decades. Indeed, if you are a dualist (as in “mind-body”) like Chopra you actually have a hard time explaining exactly how is it possible that the mind and the body are thus connected (a much bigger mind, Rene Descartes, tried and miserably failed). But if you are an old-fashioned materialist scientist you actually expect a connection between “mind” and “body” because they are both the results of biological functions.

I’m sorry, Mr. Chopra, but that little “struggling news magazine” actually did something that takes gall these days: they questioned the nonsense sputtered by a celebrity with no medical training whatsoever in the name of protecting the public’s health and welfare. It may be tiresome journalism, but it is the only kind of journalism worth reading.

Blasphemy laws in the 21st century

Blasphemy is a strange concept, according to my dictionary it refers to “the act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously of God or sacred things.” By that definition, every religious believer constantly engages in blasphemy — of all the other gods she doesn’t believe in. You would think that this simple observation would put an end to any silly talk of legislating blasphemy, but you would be spectacularly wrong. A recent checklist of blasphemy laws worldwide makes it clear that they are found not only in the obvious places — Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other similarly unenlightened nations — but in most European countries, Canada and several states in the US.

To add irony to tragedy, of course, Saudi Arabia — that beacon of tolerance — has recently mounted a campaign at the United Nations to pass an anti-blasphemy resolution, sponsored (surprise surprise!) by the 56 member countries of the Organization of Islamic Conference. Because nothing speaks more loudly in favor of religious tolerance than the Islamic world. In Saudi Arabia, to pick on most obviously the motor behind this effort, an inter-faith conference on religious blasphemy simply could not be held, because Jews, Christians, and even representatives of non-Saudi versions of Islam would not be allowed into the country if they openly professed their respective creeds.

Proponents of anti-blasphemy laws within international bodies like the UN or the European community seem oblivious to the obvious legal (not to mention moral) contradictions that such laws immediately raise. As far as the United Nations is concerned, for instance, blasphemy laws are in stark opposition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which constitutes an essential part of the UN’s raison d'être. In Europe, as recently as May 2009 the Venice Commission, which is the EU’s advisory body on constitutional issues, clearly stated that blasphemy comes under freedom of expression, which is protected in the EU charter.

Fortunately, most western countries simply do not use their blasphemy laws, though attempts to eliminate them altogether have failed in recent years in Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands, for instance. The UK is a glaring and positive exception: in March of last year the House of Lords finally abolished anti-blasphemy statutes with a 148-87 vote. It is instructive, however, to read how conservative member of the house Detta O’Cathain attempted to defend the indefensible:

“The essential question is: Should we abolish Christian beliefs and replace them with secular beliefs? As long as there has been a country called England, it has been a Christian country, publicly acknowledging the one true God.” Ah yes, the one true god. Except of course for all those other religious people who are legal British citizens and happen to believe in other gods. And of course that is precisely not the essential question: O’Cathain is making the same (possibly willful) mistake that is common among Christian fundamentalists in the United States, the confusion between freedom of speech (including of course for non-theists) and the persecution of one’s own faith. Could it be that this persecution paranoia comes from the actual legacy of intolerance and violence that has characterized Christian churches throughout their history?

But the UK's positive step is about to be countered by an unusual move in a nearby part of Europe: Ireland is considering putting a new blasphemy law on its books! The proposed statute says in part “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000” and defines blasphemy as speech that is “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion.” I’m not sure what the difference is between “grossly abusive” and simply abusive, or where ithe threshold is that defines a “substantial” number of offended, but the concept of “insult” is so tenuous that I seriously wonder how such a law — God forbid it should be passed — would allow the preservation of any free speech at all in Ireland. Suppose I start a religion that has only one commandment: there are no gods other than the Big Green Blob in the sky.” (You will appreciate that this isn’t that far fetched, considering that a similar clause represents the first commandment of all three Abrahamic religions.) Even at the onset, with a membership of one, my new religion will both have to be protected against blasphemy and simultaneously manage to be blasphemous to all other religions in one fell swoop. Talk about logical contradictions! The example might seem outrageous, but it is simply a very obvious version of what is already out there: as my atheists friends often tell their religious counterparts, I disbelieve just one more god than you do, so everyone is by definition blasphemous.

But of course the real argument against blasphemy laws is not a matter of logical contradictions or legal consistency, it’s a matter of simple decency. This was stated most clearly by the US Supreme Court in Joseph Burstyn, Inc v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495 (1952): “It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine, whether they appear in publications, speeches or motion pictures.” That’s because an open society can only thrive by being, well, open. I understand that this doesn’t go down well in theocratic countries like Saudi Arabia, but it really ought to be a no-brainer in western democracies. And this principle ought to apply to non-religious speech as well: Canada and several European countries, for instance, have “hate speech” laws that make it illegal (e.g. in Germany) to deny historical facts like the Holocaust. Denying the Holocaust is stupid, bigoted and ignorant, but we should not be getting into the business of legislating against people’s stupidity, bigotry or ignorance (it would be a truly Sysyphean task anyway). Instead, we should combat them with education and critical thinking.

What needs protection is not hate speech, of course, but hate action: burning down churches, killing abortion doctors, or attacking the embassies of countries whose citizens publish satirical cartoons ought to be strongly condemned by all and swiftly prosecuted on legal grounds. There is only one reasonable exception to an uncompromising protection of speech: when someone directly incites hate crimes. But on that count, it is religions across the world that have a really bad record. Should we not cleanse our own house from actual violence and hatred, before rallying against the imaginary ones that our paranoia attributes to other people?

New occasional series: Massimo's Picks

Especially now that Rationally Speaking is available on a variety of platforms (Amazon, Kindle, FaceBook, Psychology Today blogs, and Scientific Blogging), I feel I should provide more posts for the readership. The problem is, of course, that the number of hours in my days has sadly not gone up, so I will keep producing one or two entries a week of original material.

However, I also read widely across the 'net, in part for my own curiosity and in part to get inspiration to write new columns. So, I thought, why not take the most interesting finds and post them on the blog for people to go and check them out?

Welcome to the first installment of the new occasional "Massimo's Picks" series! I hope people will find it useful and that it will generate more open and thoughtful discussion, which has been the hallmark of this blog's community (well, with a few exceptions here and there) for now close to three years and a whopping 444 posts (this being n. 445).

Ok, then, here we go:

* A book I recommend for critical thinkers the world over is Normand Baillargeon's A short course in intellectual self-defense. You can read by review of it at Amazon.

* Watch this commentary by Keith Olbermann on Dick Cheney contradicting Dick Cheney about the proved/non-existent link between Iraq and 9/11.

* From the social sciences: is phone texting going to cause health problems for the new generation of teenagers? Or is this another cooked up crisis from nowhere? Read about it in the New York Times.

* Here is an NPR piece provocatively entitled "Are spiritual encounters all in your head?" (Hint: yup!)

* Newsweek maintains, rightly, that health advice on Oprah can make you sick.

* Evolving Thoughts comments on the variety of logical fallacies.

* Michael Shermer writes on Scientific American about why people believe in invisible agents.

* Here is a CNN entry on why science hasn't delivered on (all) the promises of sci-phi novels. (Did we except it to?)

* A terrifying piece by Ralph Nader on corporate liability (or lack thereof...).

* And finally, a defense of libraries at Don't Know Much About.

By the way, don't always expect (or dread) a long list like this one, I had some older files sitting on my computer...

On miracles

As I’ve often mentioned in this blog, philosopher David Hume famously said that “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish,” setting the bar for believing in miracles properly high.

Unfortunately, many people blatantly ignore Hume’s advice, moving that bar so low that banal coincidences suddenly count as “miracles,” reinforcing their preexisting supernaturalist view of the world. One such instance took place in the q&a session after a nice talk I attended a few days ago at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture. The talk was by Lawrence Bush, author of Waiting for God: The Spiritual Reflections of a Reluctant Atheist.

Bush gave an eminently sensible talk, starting out with the common observation of coincidences to which human beings attribute special meaning (a secular version of Carl Jung’s discredited idea of “syncronicity”). As Bush wryly commented at one point, while it is a good idea to pause and reflect on what happens to us in life, it is rather egomaniacal to imagine that the universe is sending us messages (often through catastrophes, personal or affecting others) just so that we can learn from our experiences.

Perhaps not unexpectedly, given the somewhat new-agey flavor of some (but by all means not all!) chapters of the Society for Ethical Culture, the q&a was as irritating as Bush’s talk had been level headed. One questioner in particular related a touching story of his adoptive grandmother being diagnosed with cancer and given six months life expectancy. The grandson reacted constructively to that abysmal prediction, using the remaining time to travel with his grandma to places where she had always wanted to go. Turns out the woman lived three years, which allowed for more travel and what I’m sure are indelibly good memories.

But then the grandson went back to the doctor and pointedly asked: “You said six months, she lived three years. What are the chances of that?” To which the doctor apparently replied with a no-nonsense (if a bit insensitive, assuming things really went that way) “One in seven hundred.” The conclusion of the story is that the questioner asked “What is the difference between 1/700 and a miracle?” strongly implying that his grandmother had of course been the beneficiary of a miracle.

Besides the obvious question of why god (or the universal life force, or whatever) couldn’t be bothered to perform a bit more substantial miracle, say by curing the woman instead of simply prolonging her life by a few weeks, the question highlights how easily we are impressed by occurrences that are in fact perfectly ordinary. One in seven hundred, the odds indicated by the doctor, are the known probability of someone affected by that particular tumor to survive three years instead of the six months of the original diagnosis. Medical research arrives at these numbers by statistical studies of large populations of patients, and surviving beyond average simply means that — for a variety of complex reasons, including age, general health, genetic makeup, and sheer luck — one’s position on the bell curve describing the mortality for that disease happens to be somewhat to the right of the population’s mean.

A miracle, on the other hand, is a suspension of the laws of nature, presumably actuated by a supernatural being. The odds of a miracle, as Hume hinted, are infinitesimally small (and cannot actually be calculated), because we see the laws of nature working just fine every minute of every day, and we have never reliably observed a suspension of such laws. Hume was careful enough not to say that miracles are impossible, just stating that if you want to claim one, the burden of proof is high indeed. Much higher than 1/700, I should think.

People find meaning in coincidences, as Bush pointed out in the lecture at Ethical Culture, because we are pattern-seeking animals. The discovery of patterns in nature is very important, because it can make the difference between life and death. Skeptical writer Michael Shermer recently wrote in Scientific American: “So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error).”

The second reason for people’s penchant for interpreting coincidences as personally significant messages emanating from the forces of the universe is what philosopher Daniel Dennett called “the intentional stance,” the tendency of projecting agency on phenomena, even though they may be the result of mindless forces. As Dennett put it: “Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.”

Just like pattern-seeking, adopting an intentional stance is useful: this is how we make educated guesses about what other human beings will do, an absolutely necessary skill for navigating complex social spaces. But again, like pattern-seeking, the intentional stance is often applied indiscriminately, and the combination of these two natural attributes of the human mind is probably chiefly responsible for superstition, mysticism and eventually the roots of organized religion.

If you or a loved one is diagnosed with a terminal disease, it is sensible and indeed a positive thing to reflect on how this affects your view of life and how you wish to spend your remaining days. But it is a sad random occurrence of existence, not a message in a bottle sent to you by a strangely interested and yet largely uncaring (or even callous) cosmic entity. Life is what it is, not what we would like it to be, and it is the ethical duty of a reasonable person to accept things for what they are, trying to change what can be changed and enjoying the rest of the ride while it lasts.