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During my time on Twitter, I have dealt with quite an assortment of individuals, ranging from COVID-19 and global warming deniers, 2020 election skeptics, and antivaxxers, to proponents of the 911 and chemtrail conspiracies, creationists, Flat Earthers, and QAnon. Apart from these people, I have also had to deal with a group of people whom I had not expected to cross paths with: militant atheists! But here I am not talking about people merely claiming that God does not exist or people pushing for freedom from religion. When I say “militant atheists”, I mean people who claim that a belief in God is incompatible with rational thinking. These people often insult believers calling them stupid or other monikers, while claiming that the belief in God has no place in a mind devoted to rationality and science. I find this claim surprising because the concept of God is beyond the realm of science. It cannot be proven or disproven by science. Viewed from this vantage point, in fact, atheism is not a rigorous intellectual position rationally grounded in evidence and facts, but rather just another belief. In any case, the claim that believers are somehow stupid or irrational is simply not true. For example, when it comes to scientists, some of the greatest scientific minds in the history of science as well as good number of contemporary scientists of renown (including Nobel Prize winners) have been or are believers. Several examples are Nicolaus Copernicus, Blaise Pascal, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Antonie Lavoisier, Louis Pasteur, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, John Dalton, Max Planck, Robert Millikan, Werner Heisenberg, Arthur Compton, Albert Einstein, John Eccles, Gerty Cori, Joseph Murray, Freeman Dyson, Antony Hewish, and Peter Grunberg.  A Pew Research Center poll of scientists in 2009 found that, while the proportion of scientists that believe in God is lower than that of the general population, about 33% of scientists believe in God while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. The point is that rational thinking is not necessarily hindered by belief in a God, spirit, or a higher power. Having said that, everything depends, of course, on what you believe, how you believe it, and your circumstances. Take for example the belief in creationism. If you are a scientist who believes that the world is 10,000 years old, you will have problems if you work in fields such as geology or astronomy. If you don’t accept evolution, you will have problems if you work in fields such as biology, genetics, or molecular biology. On the other hand, if you are a scientist in the field of metallurgy, belief in creationism may not affect your work at all. I believe in God (although not the God depicted by traditional religions), and I don’t believe myself to be irrational or stupid. I also I do not find my belief to be in contradiction with science, as I subscribe to the proposal by the late Harvard paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion have “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA). This means that science and religion have different areas of expertise, and rather than be in conflict with each other they should complement each other because science lacks what religion has and vice versa. Things such as values, morals, ethics, right and wrong, good and bad are the realm of religion. On the other hand, the behavior of matter and energy in the world around us is the realm of science. Religion and related disciplines should guide us in navigating the tricky maze of moral choices that we make throughout our lives. But science should guide us in choosing which beliefs to accept, modify, or discard when aspects of these beliefs clash with reality. Of course, there are some areas of friction between science and religion, but the goal is to deal with these cases in a way that endeavors to maximize the separation between the areas of competence of the two disciplines. When it comes to the belief in a God, spirit, or a higher power, I distinguish two modalities. The first modality occurs when individuals come to accept the existence of God through a process where they examine their lives and values against the world, its people, and its history within the framework of evidence, facts, and reason. I consider this a healthy belief in God because there is an intellectual element involved in the process. The second modality is one that occurs when the process described in the first modality is deficient or absent. This occurs, for example, when individuals believe in God because they were taught to believe in God, or because they grew up surrounded by people who believed in God. In these cases, the belief in God is just a form of social inertia. Another way of believing in God within this second modality is through a highly emotional event that may have involved a conversion from living a wicked life, or at least a life a person felt bad about, into being a better person. For these people the mere fact that they changed their lives is proof that God exists and made this happen and no further analysis is necessary. This second modality of belief in God is unhealthy, because it is unexamined and therefore prone to the uncritical acceptance of the beliefs of groups or churches that may hold views of the world that are contrary to science and reason. Most scientists who believe in God, a spirit, or a higher power, believe in them in a reasonable way, because they allow their beliefs to be tempered by evidence, facts, and reason. For example, evangelical protestants tend to have creationists views that deny the age of the Earth and evolution while accepting that there was a universal flood (although there are subtleties to this claim). In the Pew Research Center poll mentioned above, while 28% of the general public claimed an evangelical protestant affiliation, only 4% of scientists did. To recap, I don’t consider the belief in God to be anathema to rational thinking, but I do consider that the unexamined belief in God is unhealthy, as it may lead to the denial of the reality around us as discovered by science. Image by Van Ericsen was taken from flickr and is used here under an Attribution 4.0 International Deed. The image was not modified and the licensor does not endorse my use of this image.
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8/24/2024 What is a Woman? The Boxing Brouhaha at the Paris Olympics and the Y Chromosome DebateRead NowIn the recent Paris Olympics, two boxers, an Algerian woman, Imane Khelif, and a Taiwanese woman, Lin Yu-ting (who both won gold medals), were accused of being men igniting a worldwide firestorm during which celebrities such as Donnald Trump and JK Rowling weighed in. Of the two boxers, Khelif received the bulk of the vitriol when she defeated Italian boxer Angela Carini in 46 seconds. Carini forfeited the match due to experiencing intense pain in her face and nose. She said she had never been hit with such a powerful punch, and she refused to shake her opponent’s hand (although she apologized later).  Imane Khelif Even though Khelif and Yu-ting had been competing in boxing for years and had been beaten in several bouts by other women, they improved their boxing and competed in the 2023 International Boxing Association (IBA) Championship, where they were disqualified due to test results which have not been officially released. The nature of the tests employed, and their rationale and methodology, remains confusing. For the Paris Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suspended the IBA from overseeing Olympic boxing due to governance issues and took over the organization of the Olympic boxing bouts allowing Khelif and Yu-ting to participate.
On social media, people labelled the decision to allow Khelif and Yu-ying to participate as women boxers: inexcusable, shameful, unacceptable, and an injustice. They wrote that men who compete as women are mediocre, and that rewarding them with gold medals for beating up women is an abuse that betrays hatred and discrimination against real women. People shared photos of folds in Khelif’s shorts or videos of Khelif tucking in her shirt to imply she had male genitals. Some individuals claimed that they were transgender, which is not true. Although most critics mentioned the appearance of the boxers and made comments about high testosterone levels being unfair, what most of them seemed to agree on is the notion that that having a Y chromosome made its bearer a man and therefore unqualified to compete as a woman. In order to address this notion, we need to understand what men and women are. Designating members of our species “men” and “women” or of any species “male” and “female” is a classification. Classifications often address aspects of the physical world and, when applicable, its social structures by grouping individuals that are similar in the same categories. Human beings classify things in order to deal with the complexity of our environment and make it more predictable and manageable. But what has to be remembered about classifications, is that most of the time they don’t cover all the individuals being classified. What I mean by this is that, for example, in a binary classification such as male or female, or men or women, there are in between cases. There is a certain number of individuals that share similarities with both groups and do not fit neatly in one group or the other. These individuals are referred to as intersex cases. Now let’s deal with the Y chromosome. During embryonic development, the genes in the Y chromosome trigger a masculinization program through the production of testosterone that results in a fetus developing into a male. But sometimes there are problems where the genes in the Y chromosomes do not function well or get transferred to an X chromosome or when there is resistance by the body to the masculinizing program. All in all, there are about 40 different recognized medical conditions that can produce individuals with anatomical structures from both sexes. Many of these individuals are assigned their sex at birth based on their external genitalia and they grow up with their assigned gender, only to discover years later that they don’t have the “right” chromosomes. A few of these chromosomal males or females have abilities of the other sex. For example, some people born with the XY chromosomal makeup develop into anatomical females with a uterus (Swyer syndrome). Although these individuals lack ovaries, with a donated egg and medical help they can get pregnant and have children. So if you think anyone with a Y chromosome is a man, you have to explain how some of these “men” can get pregnant and have children. What is the point of declaring someone who has a Y chromosome to be a man, if the Y chromosome is not working as it should? Some people born with the XX chromosomal makeup can have high levels of testosterone (hyperandrogenism) due to several genetic conditions. Should these high-testosterone XX women be allowed to compete without any restrictions? After all they don’t have a Y chromosome. Clearly whether a person should be included in the category “women” goes beyond merely not having a Y chromosome. These intersex cases are human beings that deserve to be respected and not bullied or discriminated against. Just consider the crucible that South African athlete Caster Semenya went though back in 2009 when she won a medal at the Berlin Olympics, and her status as a woman was questioned. She endured invasive and humiliating tests and the results were leaked to the press. Everyone chimed in with an opinion about her body. She had to go into hiding and endure trauma counseling. After an 11-month investigation (during which she was banned from competition) she was cleared to compete again and her record allowed to stand. Now Khelif and Yu-ting are being subjected to the same ordeal. Considering all athletic differences, women’s records are on the average 9 to 12% lower than men. Thus we have decided that men and women’s sports should be separate because men have what we perceive to be an unfair advantage over women. As a large part of this advantage is due to the effects of testosterone on the tissues related to athletic performance (bones, muscles, lungs, etc.), many people advocate lowering testosterone levels in women with high testosterone levels (regardless of chromosomal makeup) to “even” the playing field. But not all differences in athletic performance are due to motivation, discipline, and hard work within the background of an even playing field. Among the population of men and women athletes, there are individuals whose genetics give them an advantage over their peers in areas such as height, strength, oxygenation capacity, etc. So, is it OK for these people with a genetic advantage over their same sex peers to compete, but not women who have naturally high testosterone levels? Which genetic advantages are acceptable and which aren’t? Science won’t give us the answer to this question because a decision one way or the other depends on our beliefs, values, and notions of what is or isn’t fair play. But what is not fair is to insult, denigrate, and humiliate women who have been assigned this gender since birth and who have lived their lives as such. The image of Imane Khelif by the Algeria Press Service is used under an Attribution 3.0 Unported license. I read some quotes about propaganda from a book. The quotes were translated to English from the original language in which the book was published. Below are some of these quotes: “The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision. The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in itself, since its function. . . consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated or who are striving after education and knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect. . . The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out. The function of propaganda is . . . not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth…and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.”  I read these lines, and I felt a chill running through my body. I was shocked by the blatant disregard for the truth in these words, and the Machiavellian approach the writer has towards people (the masses) which the writer feels can be manipulated like sheep by appealing to their emotions and not their intellect. And this was not some sort of “secret manual” circulated within the confines of a shadowy cabal of individuals. This was a book that was available publicly and became a bestseller in its time. Now, granted, the quotes I presented are specifically about war propaganda, but the writer of the book used its precepts to gain a lot of popularity and rise to a position of preeminence in society. Some people reading this would probably say, “Well, duh, it’s propaganda, what do you expect?” Propaganda is the sort of thing associated with a country, state, organization, or group. However, I find some disquieting parallels between what is written in these quotes and the dynamics regarding the spread of information in our society at the level of the individual. I have seen social media accounts from QAnon proponents, antivaxxers, climate change deniers, and others that seem to have incorporated several of the precepts espoused in these quotes into their strategies. The individuals behind these accounts manipulate the emotions of others pressing all the right buttons. For example, Q Anon proponents post about child abuse (a very emotional subject) and then combine this with far-fetched conspiracy theories. Antivaxxers post about healthy people they claim to have been hurt by vaccines (another emotional subject) and then mix this with exaggeration, innuendo, and lies about vaccines. Climate change deniers will turn any initiative to curb greenhouse emissions into a conspiracy to restrict personal freedom and control people, which is, again, a highly emotional issue. They all do this ignoring valid and at times obvious criticisms. In fact, the majority of these accounts do not engage in debates. Their goal is not to “weigh and ponder” or “educate”. They use their platforms to promote, as the author of the quoted text wrote, their “own right, always and unflinchingly”. And it works. Many of these social media accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers. This is an audience that spreads their message, buys their merchandise, and generates them income. It is my opinion that applying the maxims embodied in the quotes I presented at the beginning of this post cannot be healthy for society. When large groups of people with the capacity to vote, petition their government, and make a difference are manipulated to become disengaged from reality by accepting innuendo, exaggerations, lies, and conspiracies as truth, we face the real danger that their fictions will end up being imposed on others at the county, state, or even national level. As I stated at the beginning of this post, I felt a chill running through my body when I read the quotes from the book. Of course, the fact that I find parallels between what the quoted author states and what people on social media are doing is bad enough. But the real reason I felt the chill was because I knew the identity of the author of the quotes. The book from which these quotes are taken and translated was published in Germany in 1925. Its tittle was Mein Kampf (My Struggle), and its author was Adolf Hitler. It is not my intention to imply that the individuals doing what Hitler suggested have read his book and are knowingly applying his propaganda methods. I just think that Hitler’s ideas have permeated the broader cultural landscape of our societies where they have been applied and perpetuated over time by various entities. The methods used to manipulate people by one of the most successful tyrants and mass murderers in the history of humanity are alive and well with us today. The image from Deviant Art by peterock72 is used here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives Works 3.0 License.  It’s time to lighten up my blog, so I again present you with a selection of bad science jokes and puns along with an explanation of why they are funny. Q: What type of fish is made up of two sodium atoms? A: 2Na The chemical symbol for sodium is “Na” (its Latin name is “natrium”). The joke is a play on words on how the first two letters of the name for the fish, tuna, (“tu”) sounds like the word “two”, and is followed by the chemical symbol of sodium. If you feel irrelevant, remember, YOU MATTER! Unless, of course, you are accelerated to the square of the speed of light, in which case, YOU ENERGY! The joke makes a reference to Einstein’s famous equation which states that energy is equal to mass times the square of the speed of light, and exploits the ambiguity in the meaning of the word matter as in “that which occupies space” vs “someone being significant”. A psychologist shows a patient several inkblots, and the patient replies that they all look like a couple making love. The psychologist tells the patient, “Based on the results of the test, I conclude that you seem to be obsessed with sex.” The patient retorts, “What do you mean I’m obsessed with sex? You are the one who is showing me all the dirty pictures!”
The joke is based on an actual test called the Rorschach Test, which uses inkblots. It is used by psychologists to test for thought disorders such as schizophrenia and, more controversially, to evaluate a person’s personality. Q: Why is it dangerous to make fun of a paleontologist? A: Because you will get Jurasskicked. It’s a play on words on the time period called “Jurassic”, corresponding to 200 to 150 million years ago (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth), and the slang term for being attacked and getting severely injured. A few time travel jokes. “One beer please.” A time traveler walks into a bar. I would tell you a time-travel joke, but you didn’t get it. The seminar on Time Travel will be held two weeks ago. The best thing about time travel jokes is that they never get old! A philosophy horse enters a bar and orders a beer. The bartender serves him, but notices that the horse seems sad, so he asks, “Hey, are you depressed or something?” The horse says, “I don’t think I am.” and disappears! This joke is based on the famous statement by the French philosopher, Rene Descartes, “I think, therefore I am” (in Latin: cogito, ergo sum). I should have probably mentioned this at the beginning of the joke, but I felt that would have been like putting Descartes in front of the horse. The joke is based on the play on words with the phrase “putting the cart in front of the horse” (note: Descartes is pronounced: “daykaart”). Q: What do you call places in your house that accumulate a lot of dirt and dust? A: LaGrunge Points. A play on words on “Lagrange Points”, which are areas in space around the Sun-Earth system where gravitational forces are balanced, and objects tend to remain stationary with respect to the Sun and the Earth. These points tend to accumulate a lot of space dust. A black hole is the tunnel at the end of the light. Math puns are the first sine of madness. “Sine” is a mathematical function used here as a pun for “sign”. Today in math we learned that 10 is smaller than 5! There is a mathematical function called a “factorial” which is the product of the multiplication of all the integers of a positive number. The factorial sign is denoted by the symbol “!” So the factorial of 5 (5!) is 5x4x3x2x1 which equals 120. Note: the period at the end of the sentence of the joke was left out on purpose for comic effect. Scientists have been studying the effect of cannabis on sea birds. They’ve left no tern unstoned. A play of words on “no stone unturned” and “tern” the seabird. Stoned, of course, is the slang term for being under the influence of drugs. The naïve student registered for the computer programing class using Python and Java because he thought he would look cool drinking coffee with a snake wrapped around his body. Python and Java are computer programing languages. My friend the geologist saw that I was depressed, so she said she would cheer me up with ten geology puns. She asked, “Are you having a gneiss day?”. I closed my eyes and groaned. My friend stated, “Well, anyone can have a bad day - schist happens.” I placed my hands on my head and said, “Aaaahhh.” She continued, “Come on, cheer up, let’s watch a movie. We can see Pyrites of the Caribbean.” I rolled my eyes, and said, “Look, I don’t particularly like geology.” My friend replied, “Of quartz you like geology. It’s just that you don’t take it for granite.” I shook my head and buried my face in my hands. My friend said, “I could also just cook a meal for you. Or have you lost your apatite?” I said, “Please stop it.” She added, “Or I could take you shopping for one of those marble-ous pendants made out of volcanic rock. They are guaranteed to cheer you up you know, because igneous is bliss, and they are on shale.” “Look.” I yelled raising my hands. “This is not working.” She retorted, “Oh, so if my puns are not working, what then? Do you expect me to gravel at your feet?”. I said, “I appreciate your effort to try to cheer me up with your ten geology puns but…” My friend interrupted me and said, “You mean no pun in ten did?” Me: Ha, ha, ha… To my knowledge these jokes and puns are not copyrighted. If you hold the copyright to any of these jokes or puns, please let me know and I will acknowledge it. Image by Perlenmuschel from Pixabay is free for commercial use and was modified. I have dealt with antivaxxers several times in my blog, and I have made my position clear. All the evidence we have indicates that vaccines work and have saved many lives, including the COVID-19 vaccines. I consider that by promoting vaccine hesitancy or avoidance, antivaxxers are harming and even killing people who delay or forfeit potentially life-saving vaccines. Some of the antivaxxers I’ve butted heads with in social media seem to be individuals that, no matter how misguided, are convinced of their position. These individuals respond to my criticism and engage in debates. However, others are nothing but opportunists who are not interested in countering rebuttals of their position. These characters just traffic in likes and shares of what they post, and in the number of comments they receive regardless of their nature. They don’t necessarily believe in antivaxxer arguments, they just use them to grow their accounts, which have tens to hundreds of thousands of followers. In between these two types of antivaxxers is a third kind who is halfway between the previous two. The accounts of these characters have a few hundreds to thousands of followers, and they are very active posting, liking, and sharing vaccine misinformation. They will occasionally respond to criticism, but they will seldom carry on an argument for more than one or two posts. Most importantly, I’ve noticed that they coordinate to like and share each other’s posts, and what they write at times seems to have an odd grammatical structure and choice of words, as though their first language were not English. I have been told that these accounts belong to foreign operatives who are promoting antivaxxer sentiment in the United States and other things to disrupt our society. The concept is not so farfetched as we know for a fact that Russian operatives posted on social media to influence our elections and create chaos. But without specific proof, this is just another conspiracy theory. As many of those who follow my posts know, I have also criticized those who spread conspiracy theories, but what is often lost in the heat of the arguments is that I am talking about unfounded conspiracy theories. I accept the fact that there have been conspiracies promoted by the government or other organizations, and I accept that there may be such activities currently going on, but I have always stressed that you need to have evidence to correctly identify them as such before claiming that there is a conspiracy. Acting otherwise is irresponsible. It is with this in mind that I was surprised to learn about a conspiracy by the US government to spread antivaxxer messages!  At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, China engaged in the spreading of propaganda claiming that the COVID-19 virus came from the United States. Then, in order to increase their influence in other countries, China supplied the COVID-19 vaccine they developed and other things to the Philippines and nations in central Asia and the Middle East that still did not have access to the vaccines made in the United States (a move known as “vaccine diplomacy”). To retaliate for this and counter Chinese influence, the Trump administration authorized a clandestine psychological operation to be carried out by the military in which, using hundreds of fake social media accounts that ended up accumulating altogether tens of thousands of followers, they fanned antivaxxer sentiment in those countries and spread misinformation about the Chinese vaccine. The accounts posted suggestive things such as that the virus came from China and the vaccine too, that the vaccine from China was fake, that it might be a rat killer, and that it contained pork gelatin (this was targeted to Muslim countries). This was at the time that tens of thousands of people were dying each day as a result of COVID-19. After the Biden administration came into power, this particular disinformation program was shut down. The above is not an unfounded conspiracy. We know it is true because the news organization Reuters which broke the story conducted interviews with contractors working for the US army, retired and active US officials, academic researchers and social media analysts, and reviewed data regarding fake social media accounts used by the U.S. military. I have been actively countering antivaxxers and promoting vaccines for years, so I am appalled that our own government participated in spreading these messages. Now, let me make it clear that I am not ignorant about the cutthroat environment of international politics. China is a dictatorship where there is no freedom of the press. People in China who try to investigate any alleged foreign psychological operations carried out by Chinese military operatives will end up in jail. The reason why Reuters was able to discover what the U.S. military was doing, and the reason we learned about it, is because of the freedoms we enjoy in this country. I could not have written this post if it were not for those freedoms. Therefore, I understand that the United States has to fight against governments such as the Chinese in several fronts, including the psychological realm, to counter its influence. However, I don’t think the way to do it is to spread antivaxxer messages or misinformation about a vaccine. And in thinking like this I am not alone. Top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia strongly objected to the anti-vax campaign, but they were overruled. Reuters quotes one American military official saying, “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” In the end, China’s vaccine diplomacy was not as successful as they expected, although probably not due to the psychological operation carried out by the U.S. government, but rather due to hard power tactics that China employed in many countries where they came across as an aggressor. Whether the U.S. caused damage due to its antivaxxer campaign is difficult to discern. The evidence we have indicates that the Chinese vaccine worked reasonably well against the initial variants of the COVID-19 virus. In places where only the Chinese vaccine was available, it saved lives. Therefore, anyone foregoing receiving the Chinese vaccine could have placed themselves in danger. I am not a military operative specialized in conducting psychological operations. But I would venture that any way of countering the influence of China or other countries or organizations has to take into account the well-being of foreign nationals. Instead of conducting this antivaxxer campaign, the US government could have, for example, been more proactive in sharing the COVID-19 vaccines developed in the United States with other countries from the beginning to build up goodwill towards the United States. That’s just my two cents. The unmodified image by Christian Emmer is used under an Attribution Noncomercial 4.0 international Deed (CC BY-NC 4.0). In a hearing about the coronavirus pandemic, congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene hounded (no pun intended) Dr. Fauci about experiments conducted with beagles which were approved by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during his tenure as its director. She called these experiments disgusting and evil, stated that Americans don’t pay their taxes for animals to be tortured like this, and she refused to call Dr. Fauci a doctor. This hearing was about the coronavirus pandemic, so at one-point Fauci asked puzzled, “What do dogs have to do with anything we are talking about today?”. To be fair, some of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s other questions did address matters related to the coronavirus issue, although she did not give Fauci a chance to answer them, at one point even saying “Nah, I don’t need your answer”. Nevertheless, what I want to address in this post is the issue of the beagle experiments (which has been termed “Beaglegate”) because it often receives a superficial treatment every time it is brought up.  The experiments in question involved beagle dogs which were anesthetized and then placed in contact with sand flies carrying a protozoan parasite called leishmania. There are about 700 thousand to one million cases of leishmania infection worldwide each year, and in many countries where this happens, dogs are the main animal reservoir for the parasite in urban areas. How severe a leishmania infection is depends on the strain of the parasite. The most common variety of the parasite will produce a cutaneous form of the disease, which will just produce scarring at the site of infection. However, more pathogenic varieties of the parasite can produce visceral leishmaniasis, which can be lethal if left untreated in 90% of the cases among children under 5 years of age, adults over 50 years of age, or people with comorbidities or compromised immune systems. While leishmaniasis is a disease associated with developing countries, it has already made its way to Texas. Therefore, this disease if of interest to scientists and medical doctors from a public health perspective, and because dogs are often involved in the transmission of the parasite in urban environments, they have been used extensively as experimental models to study the disease (for example click on these links: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). So yes, dogs are used in experiments where they have to be infected with the parasite by various means, and yes, the dogs will face a certain amount of discomfort and pain, and yes, they will be euthanized at the end to obtain biological samples and to evaluate the changes the disease produces to their bodies. My question then is: what is the problem? Here many people get emotional. They would say, “The poor dogs were being “eaten” by sandflies in these experiments! This is torture! This is cruel! This is immoral! This is…etc.”. These, of course, are value judgements. As a society, we have to decide what our values are with respect to issues involving dogs. For example, in some countries it is legal to breed dogs commercially to eat them, but in the United States the Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Law of 2018 ended commercial dog meat businesses. So, if people want to ban experimentation with dogs, they should petition their elected representatives. However, as of now, it is perfectly legal to conduct experiments with dogs. Between 2007 and 2019, more than 8,000 publications in scientific journals have involved dogs, and of these, more than 5,000 have involved beagles. Experimentation with dogs has led to many discoveries and medical treatments. Dogs were employed in the experiments that led to the discovery of insulin. Research on dogs in the field of cardiology led to the first electrical defibrillator. Dogs were also used in the development of artificial heart valves. Because dogs can be bred to develop muscular dystrophy like humans, they have been used for researching this condition leading to a better genetic tests and treatments. Dogs were used in the first demonstration that cigarette smoke causes cancer, and to show that second hand smoke causes cancer too. A lot of what we know about the effects of radiation on health comes from experiments with dogs. Many new drugs are also tested on dogs before beginning clinical trials with humans. And research on dogs has also benefited dogs. Vaccines against rabies, parvovirus, and canine hepatitis were developed using dogs in the research. Research on dogs has also led to canine improved nutritional guidelines and medicines to treat dogs. Insofar as science is concerned, scientists working with dogs and other animals as experimental subjects are required to follow guidelines to ensure good animal welfare both by the institutions where they work and by the institutions which provide their funding. If they don’t, they should be sanctioned, but nobody is arguing that the experimental guidelines were not followed in the Beaglegate experiments. As to Dr. Fauci, he did not specifically and individually approve the grants for the beagle experiments. The grant review process first involves a review by a group called the Scientific Review Group made up primarily of non-federal scientists with expertise in the relevant areas of research. The grants are then reviewed by another group called the Advisory Council, which is made up of scientific and public representatives chosen for their expertise, interest, and activity in areas of public health. The only grant applications funded are those recommended by both groups. At the end of this process, Dr. Fauci, as director of the institute, formally approved bundles of thousands of grants at a time, which he did not read or review on an individual basis. My opinion on this whole matter is that the outrage over “Beaglegate” is just another way that Fauci haters have tried to slander him. Dr. Fauci has saved or improved the lives of tens of millions of people with his research and his public service. After not being able to tarnish his impeccable reputation, they have resorted to exploiting the fondness of people for cute animals to smear Dr. Fauci over perfectly legal experiments that are critical for public health. The image, designed by Wannapik, is used under a non-commercial license. Today I will address a question/meme that has been around for decades, and resurfaces every now and then to create controversy.  So the question/meme is: if an airplane is on top of a conveyor belt as wide and long as a runway, with such belt being designed to match the speed of the wheels of the airplane moving in the opposite direction, will it be able to take off? This question has generated multiple debates in the communities of both science and laypeople for many years. The question even inspired an attempt to test it in the television program series Mythbusters where its hosts, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, found that the airplane was able to take off from a tarp that was being pulled by a vehicle in the opposite direction. However, many people claimed that this was a bogus test because the vehicle pulling the tarp did not precisely match the speed of the wheels of the airplane moving in the opposite direction. As to the original question, initially I thought the airplane would not be able to take off. I reasoned that if the conveyor belt can exactly match the speed of the wheels, the airplane would not be able to move forward to generate the wind speed necessary for the air flowing around the wings to generate lift. However, I realized that I was thinking about the wheels of an airplane much in the same way I think about the wheels of a car, and this is a mistake. Let’s compare a car vs. an airplane on a conveyor belt that moves in the direction opposite to the movement of the car/airplane matching the speed of the wheels. In order to advance, the car needs friction between the tires and the ground (traction). A car on a very slippery surface will just spin its wheels hopelessly. So by moving in the opposite direction, you can imagine that the conveyor belt essentially nullifies traction for the car. In the case of the airplane, friction between the wheels and the ground is not needed for the airplane to advance. This is why airplanes on skis can take off on runaways made out of ice and snow. The motor of the car pushes against the ground via the wheels. Its forward movement depends on the wheels and their friction with the ground. On the other hand, the engines of the airplane push against the surrounding air. Its forward movement does not depend on the wheels. The airplane’s wheels are passive – they spin freely. The conveyor belt will not slow down the plane. Although this made sense to me, I still had problems visualizing the situation, because in my mind every turn of the wheel is matched by the conveyor belt moving in the opposite direction, so how can the airplane possibly move forward? Then I realized that the conveyor belt will also make the wheels of the airplane spin due to the friction between the wheels and the belt. In which direction does the conveyor belt make the airplane’s wheels spin? If you look at the airplane from the side, say with the nose facing your left and the tail your right (wheels down, of course), the airplane will be trying to move from right to left, the conveyor belt surface will be moving from left to right, and the wheels will be spinning…counterclockwise. In other words, in the direction of the airplane’s movement! But here is the problem: when the airplane moves forward, it will also make the wheels spin in that direction. Therefore, the speed of the wheels will be a result of that caused by the airplane plus that caused by the conveyor belt. This creates a problem in the basic premise of the problem. For example, if the airplane accelerates, making the wheels spin forward at say 100 revolutions per minute (rpm), and the conveyor belt accelerates in the opposite direction to match the spin of the wheels at 100 rpm, then the combined (total) forward spin of the wheels will be 200 rpm (100 + 100). And if the conveyor belt accelerates to match that total speed (200 rpm), then the final speed of the wheels will be 300 rpm (200 + 100). So we have an impossibility. Even if the conveyor belt accelerates to infinity, it will never be able to match the total speed of the wheels because it will always add an extra amount of spin to them! Of course, if the conveyor belt moves instead in the direction of the airplane’s movement, which will make the wheels spin backwards (against the movement of the plane), it will be able to counter the spin of the wheels, which will remain stationary. But then the conveyor belt will just keep accelerating and dragging the airplane along until it takes off. Finally, if you are curious about applying my reasoning above to the case of the car, consider that the car’s wheels are not freely moving. Only the motor of the car can move the wheels. The conveyor belt moving in the opposite direction will not make the car’s wheels spin forward. It will not add an additional spin to the wheels. So in the case of the car, the conveyor belt can match the speed of the wheels. Of course, if you put the car in neutral (disengaging the wheels from the motor) and attach a jet engine to its roof, you will end up with a situation similar to that of the airplane. Although thinking this way made sense to me, I went online and found that communities of scientists had tackled this question before and conducted computer simulations. The long and short of it is that, yes, the airplane indeed will take off. Nevertheless, there would be insurmountable problems in trying to test the question in a real-world situation where a conveyor belt tries to exactly match the speed of the wheels. The conveyor belt and the wheels of the airplane would accelerate to speeds so great that it would destroy them, and the conveyor belt would move so fast that it would begin to generate a wind current against the airplane that could provide a certain amount of lift. This concludes my foray into the Airplane on a Conveyor Belt conundrum. What do you think? The drawing of the plane on the conveyor belt belongs to the author and can only be used with permission. 5/17/2024 The Emotional Perils of Child Testimonies and the Potential for Descent into MadnessRead NowBack in 1691 in the town of Salem in Massachusetts, a group of girls started exhibiting strange behaviors including altered speech, convulsions, and trance-like states. The local physician examined the girls and concluded that they were victims of witchcraft. The town’s government accepted this diagnosis and asked the girls to name their tormentors, whom they proceeded to jail and try in court for witchcraft. Salem spiraled into madness as the girls’ accusations placed hundreds of innocent people in jail with twenty of them being led to the gallows. One could look upon this case as an incident from a long-gone era when people still operated based on superstition, as science had not yet studied mental illness in its many facets. However, there are some leftovers from these times that still linger in our societies.  I saw a remarkable documentary on Netflix called “The Outreau Case: A French Nightmare”. It all began in 2001 when social workers raised concerns about the behavior of the children of a family that lived in the town of Outreau in France. The children were questioned, and evidence of sexual abuse by their parents emerged. When the children were examined by phycologists, they were deemed to be credible witnesses. The prosecution of the case was carried out by a young and inexperienced magistrate who was eager to make a name for himself. After the parents were arrested, they confessed to the charges, but then the mother implicated other people in the abuse, which was in turn supported by additional testimony from the children. This was followed by more accusations and more confirmatory statements from the children, which escalated into a vicious feed-forward cycle that implicated more than 40 adults and identified dozens of more children as potential victims of abuse. Of the adults named in the testimony of the mother and the children, a dozen were arrested and held in jail for periods of one to three years. The whole affair was chronicled by French newspapers with sensationalist headlines about a vast pedophile ring which sparked outrage. In a bizarre twist, one of the persons implicated testified that he had witnessed the murder of a little girl, which fanned the flames of the scandal, but the alleged girl’s body was never found. After five years and two trials, where the mother ultimately admitted to lying when she implicated others, and where some of the children also admitted to lying or their testimonies were found to be rife with inaccuracies, all the extraneous people implicated in the crime were found not guilty. One of the defendants died while in jail, and the lives of the others were wrecked with some people being ostracized by family members, friends, and acquaintances, and losing their jobs and their businesses. At the same time, the outcome of the case sparked claims of a coverup and related conspiracies. The United States had gone through something similar during the 1980s and early 1990s with the day-care child abuse hysteria during which many day-care providers were accused and some were convicted of child abuse based on the testimonies of children. The children in these cases were taken away from their parents and repeatedly and aggressively questioned by overzealous police and social workers in ways that ended up manipulating their memories. Some children ended up testifying that they were forced to participate in orgies, and that they witnessed people partaking in satanic rituals where they killed babies and drank their blood. This led to fear-inducing headlines in newspapers across the nation that just fueled the panic. In the vast majority of the cases, the people arrested were not convicted, and those convicted had their convictions overturned, all due to lack of any evidence that corroborated the testimony of the children. The aftermath of the case left a trail of broken lives and lingering social distrust. Whether children’s testimony is more reliable than that of adults has been a very controversial topic in the psychological and legal fields. The early view that children’s testimonies are inherently more unreliable compared to those of adults has been revised in recent years. However, there is ample experimental evidence that children can be induced to recall things that did not happen or even lie when repeatedly questioned in a biased manner under coercive situations by parents or authority figures. For this reason, it is important that those questioning children follow specific forensic interviewing protocols which take into account the age and language capabilities of the children. This is also important because real pedophiles in their defense will poke holes in the testimony of children if it was obtained inappropriately, which could allow them to go free. The Outreau case involved an overzealous magistrate who was willing to accept the accusations made by the mother of the children, who in turn was willing to keep telling him what he wanted to hear. The day-care sex abuse hysteria in the United States involved prosecutors and other individuals determined to find what they were looking for even if they had to coerce it out of the children. However, one of the greatest problems I see in these cases, at least in the initial phases where arrest warrants are issued and suspects are indicted and jailed awaiting trial, is the uncritical acceptance of the testimony of children. In our societies child abuse is a very emotional topic, and children are often viewed as paragons of innocence. When a child upon being questioned seems to provide evidence that implicates an adult in wrongful conduct, the visceral emotional reaction of many people favors the uncritical acceptance of the child’s testimony regardless of its context, how it was obtained, or whether additional corroborating evidence is present. A recent resurgence of the emotionalism characteristic of this mindset was the QAnon phenomenon of a few years ago when millions of people ended up believing that there is a worldwide cabal of satanic cannibalistic pedophiles that includes prominent political and entertainment celebrities. I debunked all of the QAnon claims and even engaged several of these individuals through social media, but it was pointless. As soon as you questioned their claims, they would accuse you of being part of the conspiracy! Now imagine if QAnon adherents had been in a position to fully wield the power of the judicial branch of our government. From Salem to Outreau, the day-care child abuse hysteria, and QAnon, the potential for descent into madness over the emotional issue of child abuse is still ever present in our societies, and now it can be easily amplified many times by the far-reaching power of the media. Thankfully, we have past experience and scientific studies to guide us in implementing the proper methods to deal with child witnesses and to identify testimony that has been wrongfully obtained or which is unsupported by evidence. The child abuse image by Nick Youngson from Pix4free is used here under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. My family and I drove to the house of some relatives in in the town of Nashville, located in Brown County, Indiana, to watch this year’s solar eclipse. The town was humming with preparations for the event, and local vendors had eclipse-themed sales and promotions which they were offering to locals and visitors, along with eclipse-related humor.  We planned to watch the eclipse from our relative’s house, and we brought our eclipse glasses along with eclipse filters for our iPhones.  At the expected time, the disk of the sun began to be covered by the moon to a progressively greater extent. There were some clouds, but they were thankfully very high in the atmosphere and did not obstruct our view of the sun significantly.  At one point we tried the pinhole camera trick to see an image of the sun using a colander.  As the moon covered an increasing area of the sun, it got cooler, and there was a noticeable decrease in the amount of sunlight around us.  We noticed a reduction in the amount of bird songs coming from the woods, but we heard a new bird singing, the mourning dove. These birds only sing towards dawn and dusk. However, it didn’t feel like dusk. Even with most of the sun covered, it still shone brightly.  And then it suddenly happened: totality! We were able to take off our eclipse glasses and look directly at the sun which looked like an annulus with a black center and a bright circumference.  The horizon all around us bore an orange and yellowish tinge like a sunset or a sunrise. My relatives, who were sitting out closer to the trees (I was up on the deck), reported that they saw insects that normally only come out at night. In the distance, we heard some loud explosions. Somebody had the original idea of taking advantage of the eclipse to set off fireworks!  We saw what appeared like a bright star visible close to the tip of the tree branches to our right. One of my relatives checked with the astronomical app and confirmed it was the planet Venus, which, if it were not for the eclipse, would not have been visible.  And then, just as abruptly as it had arrived, the darkness went away. The insects disappeared, and the birds resumed singing.  In the next hour the moon moved across the sun in the opposite direction.  The 2024 eclipse was a festive event where millions of people marveled at the natural phenomenon. With a few exceptions, no one thought the eclipse was an bad omen or a an warning from God. But the reaction of people towards eclipses has not always been like this. The explanations that ancient cultures had for eclipses were rooted in superstition. Many such explanations involved the notion that some entities ranging from dragons or demons to actual animals were obscuring or biting the sun, while others equated the event with the antics of some mythological characters or with the actual sun exhibiting this behavior for one reason or another. Not surprisingly, eclipses often inspired fear in both the populace and their rulers with both engaging in rituals to ward off any dire consequences. In the most extreme cases, people were actually killed during or as a result of eclipses. And all this happened because of fear. In my book, The Gift of Science, I quoted the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft who wrote that one of the strongest emotions of humankind is fear, and that one of the strongest fears is the fear of the unknown. This type of fear is the begetter of some of the most barbaric behaviors that humanity has exhibited through history. But today we have science, and science allows us to know. We now know that an eclipse is just the moon moving across the sun and projecting a shadow on the Earth. If someone argues that the eclipse is a sign from God telling us to change our behavior, we can reply that we can predict when and where the eclipse will happen to the nearest minute and to the nearest mile. What kind of sign is that? The eclipse will happen even if we do change our behavior. And if we all change our behavior before the eclipse, after the eclipse happens another person can argue that it was a sign of God telling us that we should change our behavior to the way it was before the eclipse! Unfortunately, there are millions of people who accept the science behind eclipses but deny the science behind things such as climate change, vaccines, evolution, and even the roundness of the Earth! And while the scientific disciplines that deal with these things are different, they all use the same method (the scientific method) to discover the truth about the behavior of matter and energy in the world around us. Observations, experiments, measurements, testing of hypotheses, elaboration of theories, making predictions and testing them, refining theories, putting together an increasingly complete description of reality – this is what ALL science is about. The scientific method has allowed us to understand eclipses, climate, the immune system, the origin of species, and the curvature of the Earth. You can’t accept what one group of scientists has discovered using this method while denigrating and delegitimizing what other scientists have discovered using the same method! When we planned our trip to see the eclipse and marveled at its occurrence, we benefited from hundreds of years of research carried out by thousands of scientists. Let’s not allow ourselves to be swayed by ignorance, misinformation, and conspiracies. Let’s benefit from the work that ALL scientists have performed. The photos belong to the author and cannot be used without permission. I visited the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville, West Virgnia. The prison was built in 1866 and decommissioned in 1995, and now it is used as a museum. During its 129 years of existence the prison executed 94 inmates (85 by hanging and 9 by electrocution), but close to 1,000 other inmates died due to disease and violence. The guide that took us on the tour of the penitentiary regaled us with horrific stomach-churning tales of life in prison. From a mess hall and kitchen awash with maggots, roaches, and rats, and two and sometimes three inmates housed in 5 by 7-foot cells, to corruption, riots, escapes, beatings, stabbings, shootings, suicides, torture, dismemberments, rapes, and grisly botched executions. As we walked the hallways of the penitentiary and our footsteps echoed off its walls, we could vividly imagine the suffering that its denizens experienced for many years. The West Virginia Penitentiary was once listed in the Department of Justice’s “top ten most violent correctional facilities”. One of its nicknames was “Blood Alley”. Tourism of the West Virginia Penitentiary can serve as a reminder of the history of incarceration in our country and how it is still transitioning to avoid cruel and unusual punishments and to focus on rehabilitation of inmates. But apart from that, this prison has become a hub for a different kind of interest: paranormal tourism and investigations! Due to its violent past, the prison is said to be a place where paranormal phenomena are common. It has a rich lore of both inmates and guards hearing “voices” in empty rooms or seeing “shadows” or other apparitions walking the halls. Besides its regular tours, the West Virginia Penitentiary offers guided and unguided paranormal tours such as “Public Ghost Hunt”, “North Walk”, and “Thriller Thursdays”. There also are events with actors such as “The Dungeon”, and an escape room experience: “Escape the Pen: The Execution”. Paranormal investigators with their gear can also pay to stay overnight in the most haunted areas of the prison, and the prison hosts paranormal conferences with guests, speakers, vendors, music, and concessions. The prison has been featured in many programs and documentaries. When we asked our guide if he had seen any ghosts during his walks through the prison, he replied in a very matter of fact way that he has been occasionally prodded, poked, and scratched, or has had his cap swatted from his head when there was no one around, but that he has learned to ignore these events. He figured out that these are the things ghost do, so he doesn’t mind them. So what’s a scientist (that would me me) to make of this? Well, the question is whether you regard the paranormal as a belief or as a physical phenomenon. If it is a belief, then you accept the paranormal as a matter of faith, and that’s the end of that. But if you claim it’s a real physical phenomenon, you have to produce reproducible evidence of high quality if you expect others to accept it. For example, when you eat and the glucose level in your blood goes up, your pancreas produces the hormone insulin, which increases glucose uptake and metabolism by your organs, which brings the levels of the sugar in the blood back down. You can measure insulin and glucose concentrations in the blood. You can measure insulin release by the pancreas in response to glucose. You can show that insulin triggers glucose uptake and metabolism. You can work with isolated cells, or organs, or whole lab animals, or quantify the process in human beings. Many scientists from different cultures, ethnic backgrounds, and political and social persuasions, using different sources of funding and methodology, have obtained this result. This is a real physical phenomenon. It is considered settled science. The problem with the paranormal is that evidence of such quality is lacking. The discipline of the investigation of paranormal events has not unified behind a leading theory or even a set of hypotheses to explain paranormal phenomena within the framework of modern science, and despite decades of “research” by thousands of individuals, paranormal investigation has yet to produce one battle-tested reproducible result that we can all accept as real. The reasons for this are many, and include a multiplicity of criteria regarding what constitutes a paranormal event, and how and when to detect it. Paranormal investigators who keep churning out testimonials, photos, videos, and sound recordings obtained in uncontrolled environments and in a fashion which does not rule out alternative explanations, will never convince any scientists. This is even more true today when there are many sophisticated methods of altering photographs, videos, and recordings. But there is an even bigger problem with the whole paranormal research field. The West Virginia Penitentiary has over 100,000 paying visitors a year, which represents a sizeable source of income, and many of these visitors are drawn there not merely by the history of the prison, but by its ghostly reputation. The truth is that ghosts, or the possibility that they exist, sells. Paranormal investigators who produce videos or programs must provide their viewers what they want to see if they wish to earn any income. If they produce a string of videos or programs where they come up empty handed, their viewers will get bored and leave. If people are paying to see ghosts, you have to entertain them, you have to give them ghosts, or at least the impression that they may have felt, or seen, or heard something resembling the evidence for one. With the commercial pressures to sell the existence of ghosts and the potential for self-delusion, dishonesty, and hoaxes, I am afraid that nothing short of capturing an actual ghost or finding one that appears or at least performs its antics regularly in the same place at the time and/or date (and can thus be studied reliably) will convince scientists that ghosts are real. Paranormal investigators may balk at these requirements calling them unfair, but I think that this is the high bar they need to clear to have their findings regarded as real. The photographs belong to the author and can only be used with permission. Part of the information presented here was obtained from the book: Images of America West Virginia Penitentiary by Jonathan D. Clemins published in 2010 by Arcadia Publishing. |
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