Category: skepticism

A defense of the sex binary against Steven Novella’s “multidimensional” definition of sex

November 24, 2024 • 9:30 am

At the CSICon meetings in Las Vegas this November, I gave a half-hour talk on the two aspects of evolutionary biology that have been most deeply misrepresented by ideologues: sex and race. “Progressives” maintain that sex is not binary but a spectrum, and also that “race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning” (that last bit is a quote from the Journal of the American Medical Association‘s guidelines for reporting race and ethnicity in medical and science journals).  Below is the title slide of my talk, much of which was based on my paper with Luana Maroja on the ideological subversion of biology, but I talked only about the two most controversial claims in evolutionary biology that have been attacked by ideologues (the paper discusses six claims):

On the day before my talk, Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale and editor of  Science-Based Medicine, gave a talk about “When Skeptics Disagree,” but, as he said in a later post on his Neurologica blog,

I spent most of the talk, however, discussing the issue of biological sex in humans, which I perceive as the currently most controversial topic within skepticism. My goal was to explore where it is we actually disagree.

He strongly attacked the notion of a sex binary, saying that sex is multidimensional and that in the end, is “biological” in the sense that some people’s brains are wired up in such a way that their self-image doesn’t comport with either their natal sex or with the “gender role” typical of their natal sex.  In other words, he sees sex in humans (he said nothing about other animals or plants) as something that’s complex, but largely comes down to how an individual feels about their sex. Presumably if you’re born a male with typical male primary and secondary sex traits, but think you’re a woman, then you are a woman. (This of course plays into the gender-activist notion that “a transwoman is a woman” and “a transman is a man”.)

The audience ate it up, giving Novella a standing ovation. [UPDATE:  A reader says that she was in the back of the room during CSICON and while there were some who gave Novella’s talk a standing ovation, it was a relatively small group of conferees who did so. Most people stayed seated and offered polite applause as they would for any speaker. I would note that I was seated in front and people around me were standing up, but I didn’t survey the room.]

That is when I realized that, in fact, many skeptics at the conference, as well as Novella himself, have gotten it wrong, and have surrendered to the misguided gender-activist notions that, I think, make their bearers feel empathic towards those with gender dysphoria. But the gametic definition of sex wasn’t constructed to placate emotions (after all, it was devised about 100 years ago based on observation), and a scientific definition adopted because it’s universal, has great utility, aids in our understanding of nature (sexual selection, to give one example), and is maximally parsimonious. The gamete-based biological definition has no bearing on the treatment of or moral and legal rights of non-binary of transsexual people.  To think otherwise is to engage in what I call the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”—that nature must conform to what we consider ideologically and morally proper. Increasingly, people are trying to force biological reality into the Procrustean bed of their ideology.

I realized that I had to revise my bit on sex for the next day’s talk, and so I did, adding some bits to refute Novella’s “multidimensional/brain-centered” view of sex. I then wrote a post on this site about it, and Novella responded on his own blog (both are linked in the second paragraph below the headline).  At that point I didn’t want to engage any further, and ignored a few emails saying that I must respond to Novella. But both of our talks with eventually be posted on YouTube, and you can read our takes (mine is short) at the links below.

However, reader Jon Guy decided to write his own take on our conflicting talks, and put it on his own website: The Curious Case of Science. You can read it by clicking on the headline below, and I direct you towards his response, which was too long to publish on this site.  If you’re interested in the definition of biological sex, by all means read it:

Two quotes that I’ve indented:

This year, I attended the annual CSICon conference, hosted by the wonderful skeptical organization Center for Inquiry. Among the star-filled lineup of amazing speakers were Professor Jerry Coyne and Dr Steven Novella, who both gave talks about the science of biological sex.

Following CSICon, both Novella and Coyne wrote blogposts about the others’ talk, and I decided to make a short Facebook post giving my own brief opinion about the matter. It didn’t take long before Dr Novella appeared on my post to argue the issue, and what followed was a cascade of scientific blunders, logical fallacies, and a critical thinking deficit that one wouldn’t normally expect to see from such an esteemed member of the skeptical community.

Why the “binary” position is derived: it’s ideology, Jake!:

. . . . Another interesting (and telling) component here is the number of biologists who are silent on the topic. That alone rings my skeptical alarm bells. Why would biologists be afraid to say sex is NOT binary in the current social climate? Well, obviously they wouldn’t be on account of the current culture wars on sex and gender. So why aren’t there more of them? Why aren’t ALL of them saying that? Can we assume it’s because they’re too scared of being canceled or labeled a transphobe, like teachers, academics, clinicians, social workers, civil servants, managers in organizations, many journalists, people in the arts, media, and publishing companies are? Even philosophers are afraid to publicly take the binary position, despite that that’s what they believe. It seems pretty obvious to me that if sex weren’t binary, we’d have a consensus statement saying as much. Instead, we have to search the primary literature to see how biologists actually define biological sex, which is something we saw Dr Novella avoided like the plague.

Guy’s post is a long one, but written clearly, and is devoted to sorting out the differences between my talk and Novella’s as well as examining scientific claims about the binary nature of sex. There are a few places where I would have written it a bit differently from Guy, but overall it corresponds not only with what I said, but also with biological reality. You can define sex any way you want, but the gamete-based definition, like the biological species definition, is the one most universal and most useful. And it happens to lead to the sex binary in all species of animals and vascular plants.

HorganGate: The troll pretends to answer his critics

May 20, 2016 • 11:30 am

Well, I’m trying not to get too deeply sucked into the fracas about John Horgan’s Admonition to Skeptics, so I’ll just note that there are two good critiques, one by Orac on Respectful Insolence and the other by Steve Novella on Neurologica.  They’re similar, but both worth reading, and both make the point that Horgan’s complaints about skeptics’ neglect of “hard targets” like medicine and physics (and war!), while concentrating on “soft targets” like religion, homeopathy, and opposition to GMOs, are completely misguided. As I noted before I read these two critiques, skeptics have been dealing with those hard targets for years, but only informed people have the chops to analyze stuff like string theory or the multiverse notion (which they have criticized). I’ll let Orac’s peroration stand for all the pushback Horgan has gotten:

Of course ending war is important, but so what? As Loxton puts it, almost everything skeptics do is less important than ending war, which is “obvious to the point of silliness.” That includes Horgan as a “small-s skeptic.” In fact, I’d go beyond Loxton. Why isn’t Horgan out there curing cancer? A half a million people die of cancer every year in the US alone, after all! Or what about malaria? Over 200 million people a year suffer from malaria, and 415,000 die. Or what about environmental pollution? Or racism? Or sexism? Or ending totalitarian regimes? Why is Horgan wasting his precious time bashing skeptics when he should be bashing the “hard targets” like cancer screening, multiverses, psychiatric drugs, and war? Inquiring minds want to know!

Obviously—painfully so—there will always be issues more important or more impactful than what any of us does, with rare exceptions. Pointing to them and using them to denigrate someone’s efforts as pointless, which, make no mistake, is what Hogan comes across as doing, is not constructive. Rather, it is a very old strategy to denigrate that which you consider unimportant. A much better question is this: Is what one is doing worthwhile? Coming back to the episode of homeopathy, I say yes: Getting rid of homeopathy, if skeptics could accomplish it, would be worthwhile. Pushing for the FDA to regulate homeopathy the way it regulates real drugs would be worthwhile. Getting the FTC to regulate claims about homeopathy would be worthwhile. Keeping people from being defrauded by psychics is worthwhile. Countering antivaccine misinformation is worthwhile and saves lives. It’s also a direct outgrowth of skeptical activism against alternative medicine, as many antivaccine views derive from pseudoscientific health beliefs.

The bottom line is that, contrary to what Horgan implies, the skeptic movement, be it big-S or little-S, does not dogmatically worship at the altars of Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, James Randi, or anyone else, and it can walk and chew gum at the same time. Horgan would know that if he weren’t so clueless about just what skepticism is and what skeptics do. Yes, we can be tribal at times. We’re human beings, after all. However, I haven’t seen any evidence that skeptics are detectably more prone to “tribalism” than any other large group of humans, and it’s not as though we haven’t discussed this tendency ourselves. Basically, after all this time, the kids are all right. Horgan’s talk illustrates a very important principal. Honest criticism can be a very good thing (and I do think Horgan was sincere). However, even the most honest criticism can rapidly devolve into a string of self-righteous, distorted, and downright wrong characterizations like the ones in Horgan’s speech if the critic doesn’t take the time to understand his audience and learn about just what the heck he is talking about. Skeptics can take criticism just fine, but you’ll excuse us if we don’t react that well to uninformed criticism that betrays a lack of understanding about just what it is we are and do.

Shermer responds to Horgan

May 19, 2016 • 1:15 pm

 This is the second of three responses to John Horgan’s piece of hauteur in Scientific American. In his blog post, he explained why he’s become “nuts”:

The biological theory that really drives me nuts is the deep-roots theory of war. According to the theory, lethal group violence is in our genes. Its roots reach back millions of years, all the way to our common ancestor with chimpanzees.

The deep-roots theory is promoted by scientific heavy hitters like Harvard’s Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham and Edward Wilson. Skeptic Michael Shermer tirelessly touts the theory, and the media love it, because it involves lurid stories about bloodthirsty chimps and Stone Age humans.

But the evidence is overwhelming that war was a cultural innovation–like agriculture, religion, or slavery–that emerged less than 12,000 years ago.

I hate the deep-roots theory not only because it’s wrong, but also becauseit encourages fatalism toward war. War is our most urgent problem, more urgent than global warming, poverty, disease or political oppression. War makes these and other problems worse, directly or indirectly, by diverting resources away from their solution.

In response, Michael Shermer had this to say about war, which I quote with permission:

John Horgan has an understanding of war on par with a beauty pageant winner who declares her dream of “world peace.” He doesn’t understand the nature/nurture issue and he’s stuck in a 1950’s model of human behavior as either genetic and inevitable or cultural and malleable. Since he’s against war (how original) he can’t accept any genetic explanation for human conflict because he thinks this means war is inevitable. In brief, he makes three errors:

  1. Horgan doesn’t understand behavioral game theory and the evolutionary logic behind human conflict of all kinds, from murder to war. In The Moral Arc (p. 39) I begin with Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene:

“To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own child or another close relative) is part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food,” says Dawkins. But there’s a difference between a survival machine and a rock. A survival machine “is inclined to hit back” if exploited. “This is because it too is a machine that holds its immortal genes in trust for the future, and it too will stop at nothing to preserve them.” Thus, Dawkins concludes, “Natural selection favors genes that control their survival machines in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species.” (p. 66) Survival machines could evolve to be completely selfish and self-centered, but there is something that keeps their pure selfishness in check, and that is the fact that other survival machines are inclined ‘to hit back’ if attacked, to retaliate if exploited, or to attempt to use or abuse other survival machines first.”

This leads to moral emotions and behaviors that include altruism, pro sociality, and cooperativeness along with selfishness, competitiveness, and revenge when exploited. Conflicts are inevitable between survival machines competing for limited resources, reproductive opportunities, etc. Thinking of conflicts as either inherited or learned misses the point entirely. Such conflicts, from murder to war, often result from the logic of such competition. Horgan seems to think that if violence is genetic then it builds up like steam in a pipe that has to be released before it blows, but that’s completely wrong. And as a hockey player he should know better: when he gets slammed into the boards by the opposition, if he doesn’t slam back, and cultivate a reputation as someone who “inclined to hit back” if hit first, he’s going to lose status, reputation, and resources.

  1. Horgan is trapped in binary thinking that clouds his thinking about how frequent war was (or wasn’t) in the past. Here is what I wrote on pp. 97-98 of The Moral Arc:

“Forcing a continuum of violence into a category of “prevalent” or “pervasive” misses the point of what we’re interested in knowing here: whatever the rate of violence in the past—by whatever the means and whatever the cause—was it enough to affect human evolution? If you insist that the rate must be high enough to be called “prevalent” or “pervasive” then you have to operationally define these terms with a quantity, including the term “war” that by today’s definition has no meaning for the type of intergroup conflicts that happened during the Late Pleistocene epoch in which our species came of age. As [Samuel] Bowles explains: “In my models of the evolution of human behaviour, the appropriate usage of the term [war] is ‘events in which coalitions of members of a group seek to inflict bodily harm on one or more members of another group;’ and I have included ‘ambushes, revenge murders and other kinds of hostilities’ analogizing human intergroup conflict during the Late Pleistocene to ‘boundary conflicts among chimpanzees’ rather than ‘pitched battles of modern warfare’.”

In The Arc of War the political scientists Jack Levy and William Thompson begin by adopting a continuum rather than categorical style of reasoning:

“War is a persistent feature of world politics, but it is not a constant. It varies over time and space in frequency, duration, severity, causes, consequences, and other dimensions. War is a social practice adopted to achieve specific purposes, but those practices vary with changing political, economic, and social environments and with the goals and constraints induced by those environments.” (pp. 51-53). When nuanced in this continuous rather than categorical manner, we can see both how and when rates of warfare change. By defining war as “sustained, coordinated violence between political organizations,” however, Levy and Thompson have defined away prehistoric group conflicts that don’t at all resemble political organizations of today. As such, “war” cannot even begin until there are political organizations of a substantive size, which necessarily means that what we think of as war, by definition, was impossible before civilization began.”

Nevertheless, Levy and Thompson acknowledge that the rudimentary foundations for war as they define it were already there in our earliest ancestors—even suggesting that “border skirmishes” with Neanderthals in Northern Europe may account for the latter’s extinction some 35,000 years ago—including “the observation that hunting and homicide skills made suitable weaponry, tactics, and rudimentary military organization available,” and that “group segmentation helped define group identities and enemies, thereby also facilitating the potential for organizing politically and militarily.” (p. 1) Thus, they endorse “an early if infrequent start for warfare among hunter-gatherers,” which then increased over time in lethality with improved weapons and increased population sizes, and this continued throughout the history of civilization as states increased in size until nations fought nations, leading to an increase in the total number of deaths, but a decrease in the total number of conflicts.

  1. Horgan is wrong that there are no “deep roots” to war. I cite dozens of studies showing both the antiquity and frequency of group conflicts in both our Pleistocene ancestors and in modern hunter-gatherer bands and tribes. Here are a few:

Bowles, S. 2009. “Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors?” Science, 324, 1293-98.

Gat, A. 2006. War in Human Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press.

Glowacki, Luke and Richard W. Wrangham. 2013. “The Role of Rewards in Motivating Participation in Simple Warfare.” Human Nature, Sept. 6.

Keeley, L. H. 1996. War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lebow, Richard Ned. 2010. Why Nations Fight: Past and Future Motives for War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking.

Wrangham, Richard and Dale Peterson. 1996. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

In conclusion, I think Samuel Bowles said it best in an email to me on this subject:   “It seems to be a highly ideologically charged debate, which is unfortunate, because finding that war was frequent in the past, or that out-group hostility might have a genetic basis says something about our legacy, not our destiny.” (Personal correspondence, February 1, 2014.)

Krauss on Horgan

May 19, 2016 • 12:15 pm
Lawrence Krauss, Michael Shermer, and Steve Pinker have written responses to John Horgan’s splenetic Scientific American blog post arguing that skeptics are criticizing the Wrong Things. Lay off Bigfoot, homeopathy, global warming, and GMOs, he says; we should be going after physics, medicine, and—war! (Horgan seems to have overlooked pervasive skepticism of physics and medicine.)
One of Horgan’s targets was Lawrence Krauss. Here, Krauss responds; quoted with permission:

John Horgan was a respected science writer years ago up until he wrote a book entitled The End of Science, which essentially argued that much of physics had departed from its noble traditions and now had ventured off into esoterica which had no relevance to the real world, and would result in no new important discoveries—of course, this was before the discovery of an accelerating universe, the Higgs Boson, and the recent exciting discovery of gravitational waves!.   Since then I and most of my colleagues have ignored his writing, but I’m violating that rule because Jerry asked if I wanted to add something about physics in a response to Horgan’s attacks on the work of other respected colleagues in different fields.

In his tract Horgan alludes to past criticisms he has echoed of some physics ideas in my recent book.  I was amused when he admitted that he hadn’t actually read it when he met with me for dinner last year after a dialogue I had on stage with his partner Robert Wright in NY.  I spent much of that dinner explaining to him that the claim that I merely equate nothing with quantum fields in empty space was wrong—a criticism that a number of people who also hadn’t read the book, including the Archbishop of Sydney, have repeated with the same lack of understanding.   In particular, near the end of a book primarily devoted to discussing 40 years of revolutionary empirical discoveries in cosmology, I explored the idea of how quantum gravitational fluctuations might allow spacetimes themselves to spontaneously appear, and in so doing could produce universes that resemble our own.  In this case space, time, and everything that now comprises our universe simply wouldn’t have existed in advance—and in this case the use of  ‘in advance’ is colloquial because time itself might not have existed in our universe before such a fluctuation. This fascinating possibility might occur independent of whatever else might or might not exist in other spaces.  I explained the details to Horgan, but the next day he just repeated the old claims in writing, apeing Robert Wright’s confusions and not even mentioning our discussion.  Empirical data doesn’t seem to get in the way of his writing.

In this regard—and happily having nothing to do with my own work—Horgan egregiously repeats in his piece an ignorant comparison of string theory and multiverses to astrology.  He correctly notes that these ideas can’t be experimentally probed at present, but incorrectly claims they are not falsifiable.  It is of course true that at the present time these ideas cannot be directly probed, but the same was true of the Higgs Boson in 1964 when it was proposed, or of dark energy when we first argued it might actually dominate the energy of the universe, or of gravitational waves when Einstein proposed their existence in 1916.  String theorists, whatever one might say about the hyperbole that has been associated with their work, have been working very hard for several decades to find ways to connect their work to the real world.  The fact that they have not yet been successful does not diminish the significance of the effort, nor the fact that, unlike astrologers, they are attempting to extend very successful and beautiful theories that do work into new domains.  Moreover the phenomenon of inflationary production of multiverses, as I recently wrote about at length and explained to Horgan at dinner, might actually be empirically testable if we can detect gravitational waves from Inflation.  Horgan’s sensational claims demean the efforts of hundreds of  scientists who are doing good science—which may not succeed. But science is never guaranteed in advance to succeed!  This, it seems to me, is the nobility of the effort. Horgan’s mind, however does seem to be made up in advance—not the sign of a credible journalist but rather a blogger with an axe to grind.

Criticizing skeptics, John Horgan officially becomes an Internet troll

May 19, 2016 • 11:09 am

I’ve had my contretemps with science writer John Horgan on this site, but, except for what’s in the title above, I’ll try to refrain from ad hominems. But I will characterize Horgan’s latest post on his Scientific American blog, “Dear ‘Skeptics’, Bash homeopathy and Bigfoot less, mammograms and war more,” as contrarian, ill-informed, and misguided. (This is a précis of what he said last Sunday at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism Conference [NECSS].) The post is also redolent of arrogance—the attitude that because Horgan’s a contrarian, he’s automatically superior to everyone else, and that includes virtually everyone who’s become famous for skepticism. When he accuses many well known skeptics of arrogance, I see that as projection.

Here are Horgan’s main points and my responses. I also note that Steve Novella has criticized Horgan’s talk at Neurologica Blog, but I haven’t read it yet, for I want to write independently, uninfluenced by what Novella said. Having read Horgan, I am sure that he will respond by not admitting that he may have been wrong anywhere,  and then arguing, à la Chris Mooney, that any outrage he’s provoked just shows that he was right, and has “hit a nerve”. And of course he loves the attention, which he can’t get by saying something constructive.  So my comments below directed at those observing the kerfuffle. Here are Horgan’s points.

Horgan is a REAL skeptic, free from the taint of “capital-S” skeptics. Here’s how he begins his article (note that his “references” throughout the piece usually go to his previous articles rather than primary sources):

“I hate preaching to the converted. If you were Buddhists, I’d bash Buddhism. But you’re skeptics, so I have to bash skepticism.

I’m a science journalist. I don’t celebrate science, I criticize it, because science needs critics more than cheerleaders. I point out gaps between scientific hype and reality. That keeps me busy, because, as you know,most peer-reviewed scientific claims are wrong.

So I’m a skeptic, but with a small S, not capital S. I don’t belong to skeptical societies. I don’t hang out with people who self-identify as capital-S Skeptics. Or Atheists. Or Rationalists.”

Well aren’t you special, Mr. Horgan? I’m not sure what he means by “capital A” atheists or “capital R” rationalists, unless he’s referring to people who constantly flaunt their superiority for holding those views. But I know few people—and none of the ones he names—who fit that description. Yes, people like Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, and Steve Pinker may promulgate the notions of rationalism, or decry the malfeasance of religion, but their actions are constructive. They push arguments, not arrogance. To be sure, I’d rather hang out with those guys any day than with Horgan, who is truly a “capital C” contrarian.

This is a man who, in his attempt to criticize rather than celebrate science, proclaimed, in his 1996 book The End of Science, that science has no more Big Questions to answer. Since then, just to mention physics, we have discovered the accelerating universe, the Higgs Boson, gravitational waves, and dark energy. All this shows that the contrarian view that big scientific discoveries are at an end (not a new thesis, of course—it’s been made repeatedly throughout history) is bogus. If this is science criticism, it’s not very good criticism.

Skeptics pick the low-hanging fruit, preaching to the choir. As Horgan says:

“’The Science Delusion’” is common among Capital-S Skeptics. You don’t apply your skepticism equally. You are extremely critical of belief in God, ghosts, heaven, ESP, astrology, homeopathy and Bigfoot. You also attack disbelief in global warming, vaccines and genetically modified food.

These beliefs and disbeliefs deserve criticism, but they are what I call “soft targets.” That’s because, for the most part, you’re bashing people outside your tribe, who ignore you. You end up preaching to the converted. [I suppose he’d say the same for those who attack creationism.]

Meanwhile, you neglect what I call hard targets. These are dubious and even harmful claims promoted by major scientists and institutions. In the rest of this talk, I’ll give you examples of hard targets from physics, medicine and biology. I’ll wrap up with a rant about war, the hardest target of all.”

I’m incredulous. Yes, Bigfoot and Nessie have been pretty thoroughly debunked, but they can still serve as lessons for students learning how to be critical. I believe Greg Mayer, in his class on cryptozoology at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, uses just these examples to teach students critical thinking. The same goes for Holocaust denialism. Of course it’s low-hanging fruit, but there’s still stuff to learn by criticizing the denialists. I, for one, have learned a lot about the evidence for the Holocaust precisely from reading both the denialists and their skeptical debunkers.

As for homeopathy, global warming, vaccines, and GMOs, Horgan’s simply dumb to say that we’re waste our time attacking the denialists. Homeopathy is a serious problem: people get sick and die from using homeopathic remedies, and many people believe in them. Even the National Health Service pays for them, so the taxpayer funds fraudulent remedies. Global warming is perhaps the most serious problem we face: one that endangers not just humanity, but many other species. Yet many people, and that includes Republican lawmakers, don’t accept it and won’t do anything about it.  When we promulgate it, we are by no means “preaching to the choir.” The same goes for GMOs, with some, like golden rice, having the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives. And we’ve made progress. Teaching creationism is no longer legal in public schools, and vaccinations are required everywhere. Homeopathy is on the way out. So much for our ineffective criticism of those “outside the tribe”!

As for religion, well, we’ve discussed its harms here. Horgan is soft on faith and prefers not to discuss them. Here’s what he thinks we should be skeptical about:

Physics. A quote from Horgan:

“First, physics. [What we should be skeptical about and aren’t.] For decades, physicists like Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene and Leonard Susskind have touted string and multiverse theories as our deepest descriptions of reality.

Here’s the problem: strings and multiverses can’t be experimentally detected. The theories aren’t falsifiable, which makes them pseudo-scientific, like astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis.

Some string and multiverse true believers, like Sean Carroll, have argued that falsifiability should be discarded as a method for distinguishing science from pseudo-science. You’re losing the game, so you try to change the rules.

. . . When high-status scientists promote flaky ideas like the Singularity and multiverse, they hurt science. They undermine its credibility on issues like global warming.”

Is Horgan ignorant of the fact that there are constant debates about issues like the multiverse and string theory in physics? Seriously, there are no skeptics about such stuff? String-theory critics are a dime a dozen. Sure, people like me simply don’t understand string theory enough to criticize it, but I’m perfectly aware that there is no empirical evidence supporting it, and I’ve said so many times on this sit. As for advocates of things like singularity and multiverses “hurting science”, Horgan is talking out of his nether orifice. Does anybody really question global warming as a result of the promulgation of string theory? That’s ludicrous.

Medicine. Horgan bangs on about the problems of expensive healthcare in the U.S., and the dangers of mammograms, PSA tests, and colonoscopies. Do skeptics ignore these? No way, but you have to know your medicine to be a good critic. Among these are Orac, Steve Novella, and Harriet Hall, who I saw discuss exactly these issues at a TAM talk several years ago. These issues are also chewed over endlessly on sites like Science-Based Medicine and Respectful Insolence. In the UK, people like Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh, as well as the group Sense About Science, have been extremely vocal about a range of medical issues from Big Pharma to quackery to science reporting. (By the way, Mr. Horgan, I’ve been plenty skeptical about that, too.) Goldacre and Singh’s outreach has also gone way beyond the so-called choir, and in fact launched the some of the subjects they were criticising—AIDS quackery and reflexology to name only two—into a very public sphere of debate.

And there are plenty of skeptics about psychotropic drugs, which Horgan also mentions as an appropriate subject for skepticism. In fact, I’ve discussed some of the issues here and have read a slew of books about the dangers of psychiatric medication. There are plenty of people out there worried about antidepressants and similar drugs. The “skeptics” may not be people like Krauss or Sean Carroll, but they’re present aplenty. We may not encounter them often, for you need expertise to properly criticize some subjects.

Horgan is in fact such a contrarian that he claims the so-called “neglect” of medical issues by skeptics has endangered people, and offers the following over-the-top statement:

Given the flaws of mainstream medicine, can you blame people for turning to alternative medicine?

Umm. . . I don’t think a major reason people oppose vaccination and turn to homeopathic cures is because of our failure to properly criticize medicine. How many skeptics, for instance, have gone after homeopathy and the anti-vaxers, as well as “alternative medicine” itself? Answer: plenty.

Genetic determinism. Horgan argues that nobody criticizes the “gene for this and that” school: those people who argue that there’s are single genes of large effect for things like smoking, thrill-seeking, believing in God, being gay, and so on. He’s wrong: plenty of people have criticized those studies, including me. Most of the studies showing such genes have not been repeatable.

War.  Here Horgan mistakes a failure of skeptics to criticize things like mammograms with their failure to adopt certain political views: just those political views that are Horgan’s favorites. Being critical of some wars (I presume Horgan would say that World War II was okay) is a political view, and differs from being skeptical about God or homeopathy.  Horgan also decries the “deep roots” theory of war supposedly promulgated by E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker—that bellicosity is in our genes, and that war must therefore be inevitable—but I doubt that any of these people think that we shouldn’t try to eliminate useless wars. If you read Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, you’ll see that that is not Steve’s thesis at all: he’s optimistic about ending wars, and gives a variety of cultural reasons for th decline of violence, which, needless to say, he approves of. But I’ll let Pinker and Shermer respond to this allegation, which they’ll do on this site.

What causes wars? Here Horgan has gone full Noam Chomsky, asserting that the U.S. is the greatest threat to peace in the world and, in fact, calling for people to support Chomsky:

“But war is a really hard target. Most people—most of you, probably–dismiss world peace as a pipe dream. Perhaps you believe the deep-roots theory. If war is ancient and innate, it must also be inevitable, right?

You might also think that religious fanaticism—and especially Muslim fanaticism–is the greatest threat to peace. That’s the claim of religion-bashers like Dawkins, Krauss, Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne and the late, great warmonger Christopher Hitchens.

The United States, I submit, is the greatest threat to peace. Since 9/11, U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan have killed 370,000 people. That includes more than 210,000 civilians, many of them children. These are conservative estimates.

Far from solving the problem of Muslim militancy, U.S. actions have made it worse. ISIS is a reaction to the anti-Muslim violence of the U.S. and its allies.

. . . The antiwar movement is terribly weak. Not a single genuine antiwar candidate ran in this Presidential race, and that includes Bernie Sanders. Many Americans have embraced their nation’s militarism. They flocked to see American Sniper, a film that celebrates a killer of women and children.

In the last century, prominent scientists spoke out against U.S. militarism and called for the end of war. Scientists like Einstein, Linus Pauling, and the great skeptic Carl Sagan. Where are their successors? Noam Chomsky is still bashing U.S. imperialism, but he’s almost 90. He needs help!”

Check out the references: most are to Horgan’s other blog articles. As for religion as a cause of war (and, I’d submit, of the oppression of many people), I think there’s sufficient evidence that it’s a major contributor to conflict. As for the U.S. being a greater threat to peace than Islam, Horgan’s evidence for that is our past incursions in the Middle East, some of which have already been amply criticized by atheists and skeptics. But at the moment, would Horgan claim that Islamic nations are less a threat to peace than the U.S.? That is an untestable statement, for it depends on the unpredictable future.

And that is the problem. Criticizing how we deal with ISIS is not the same as criticizing homeopathy. How we deal with ISIS now, for instance, is a judgement call, and will always have a down side. We know that homeopathy is ineffective, and we know what course of action will help people by eliminating quackery.

When Horgan says this at the end:

So, just to recap. I’m asking you skeptics to spend less time bashing soft targets like homeopathy and Bigfoot and more time bashing hard targets like multiverses, cancer tests, psychiatric drugs and war, the hardest target of all.

What he’s saying is this:

So, just to recap, I’m asking you skeptics to spend less time dealing with issues where the answer is clear, and where we can really improve the well being of society, and deal instead with things that are MY pet issues.

As for ending war, who doesn’t want that? But right now we have to deal with ISIS and the Middle East, and not all wars can or should be prevented anyway. Skeptics certainly have opinions and contribute to the national conversation on war. However, unlike subjects where, for example, skeptics can point at evidence for the harm that poor quality clinical trials do, and advocate changes required to remedy the situation, “bashing war” is a more nebulous subject entrenched in a wide-ranging nexus of issues including history, politics and geography.

Are those issues in the purview of skepticism? Yes, we should be skeptical of all claims, especially by governments with an interest in particular outcomes, but there are already plenty of organizations engaged in political activism, and many of us belong to them. If we were to turn skeptics’ meetings (which I don’t much attend anyway) into what Horgan wants, they’d become political meetings. There is a place for discussing homeopathy, the false claims of religion, anti-vaxers, and GMOs, and there’s a place for discussing politics, war, racism, and economics. But they’re not necessarily the same place.

Finally, regarding war, aren’t antiwar activities exactly like those that Horgan criticizes in skeptics: “. . . for the most part, you’re bashing people outside your tribe, who ignore you. You end up preaching to the converted.” When, as a conscientious objector, I went to many anti-war rallies in the Sixties, they weren’t full of Nixon Republicans. But just like a group of like-minded people can stop wars and segregation, so they can stop harmful medicine and the evils of faith.

In the end, Horgan’s claim that skeptics neglect things like physics, multiverses, cancer tests, and psychiatric drugs is just flat wrong. If he had any familiarity with skepticism, he’d know that. As for war, those of us who feel strongly about it do our best. But, unlike Horgan and Chomsky, I will not argue that America is the Source of All Evil in the world.

*****

In an hour I’ll put up Krauss’s response to Horgan’s screed, and then an hour thereafter I’ll post Shermer’s.

 

RationalWiki guts a reader’s attempt to correct its article on female genital mutilation

February 13, 2016 • 12:00 pm

JAC: I haven’t used RationalWiki very much, as its articles are not only not as thorough as those in Wikipedia (though some day Greg will produce his long-awaited post, “What’s the matter with Wikipedia?), but also appear slanted toward the Authoritarian Left. Although created to counter the odious Conservapedia site, it seems to have swung too far in the opposite direction—towards censorship of Incorrect Thought. Wikipedia says this about the site:

RationalWiki is a wiki written from a skeptical, secular, and progressivist perspective. It was created in 2007 as a counter to Conservapedia after an incident in which contributors attempting to edit Conservapedia were banned. Since then, it has developed into a wiki that criticizes “crank” ideas, pseudoscience, and fundamentalism. Ideologically, RationalWiki typically argues in favour of freedom of religion, atheism, feminism, and LGBT rights, and it criticises conservatism and right-libertarianism. RationalWiki frequently uses sarcasm and humor in its articles. Unlike many wikis, RationalWiki has no formal system for electing sysops, and most users who are thought to have good intentions are given the tools.

But the skepticism has been tainted by authoritarian leftism, something amply documented by reader Aneris, who attempted to fix RationalWiki‘s article on female genital mutilation (FGM). Its original article (the one that’s still there) did everything it can to dissociate the practice of FGM from Islam, even though, as reader Heather Hastie documents on her website, at least four schools of Islam either recommend the practice or deem its obligatory. There have also been fatwas saying that the practice is Islamic, and the vast majority of women mutilated in this way are Muslims whose families follow the practice. Only the blinkered, or those who excuse Islam of all malfeasance, could deny the close association of the practice with Muslim belief.

Below Aneris’s recounts his/her unsuccessful attempt to get RationalWiki to give the fact about FGM instead of an Islam-exculpating ideological take. He rewrote their article, only to discover that his additions were quickly and completely expunged. Why? Because they associated FGM with Islam. I doubt there would have been the same reaction had FGM been a habitual practice of evangelical Christianity.

by Aneris

Some wikis document fictional universes like that of Harry Potter, Star Wars or Creationism. The “RationalWiki” documents the beliefs of what is perhaps imperfectly called (authoritarian) “Regressive Left” or “Social Justice Warriors”. Jerry’s recent post about Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) motivated me to look into the matter and also see where those “Regressive Leftists” are coming from, and perhaps suggest improvements to their RationalWiki article. I wound up writing a section for them.

I try to make a difference, but typically find that what is deemed “true” is not determined by sources and evidence, but by a spontaneous majority that merely wins the “edit war”. Alas, FGM was just such a case. I sacrificed style for direct quotations in the belief that this would provide a solid evidential basis; however, I found everything I wrote was deleted quickly – including about a third of all sources of the article, down from 39 to 24 (this doesn’t mean much in itself, but gives a rough idea).

Before I touched it, the article already contained a small section on FGM and Islam, but that has now been purged as well. The reason given, and they’re serious, is this: “terribly written section with random unsourced statements […]”. But the icing on the icing on the cake is that such Regressive Leftists deny what they are doing. The RationalWiki is adamant that neither Social Justice Warriors nor Regressive Leftists really exist. The current article, one that would please even Reza Asla, can be viewed here.

Something new to read

April 19, 2015 • 12:59 pm

by Grania Spingies

There are some interesting-looking books in the Sunday Book Review in the New York Times which are going onto to my Wish List.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

I’ve long come to think of the Internet as the thing that has turned our planet into a village. With all the benefits that it brings, it also has turned the lives of some ordinary people into living nightmares once their sometimes small and sometimes imagined transgressions go viral on social media. I’m interested to see what Ronson has to say on the subject, and what solutions he suggests; although I fear that once the damage is done it is not easily undone.

Galileo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger

This book looks like it has a bit of everything in it, but is essentially about empiricism vs activism, based on among other things, her own experiences on both sides of activism: an activist herself as well as a target of activists. It is a somewhat sobering thought; that something could be suppressed for social or political reasons. I remember Dan Dennett thoughtfully talking about this himself in the Four Horseman chat, about whether he could ever see himself deliberately suppressing knowledge that he thought would be harmful if it became public knowledge. He said he hoped not. Indeed. (The discussion is here if you want to see it).

However, as the reviewer notes:

When a motivated group with a playbook of ugly tactics spots a ­scientific finding they don’t like, they can often dominate public discussion in a way that replaces a factual story with a false one. Only scientists of Galilean character can weather the storm. And even they, like Galileo, might be effectively exiled. 

That is pretty disconcerting. I’m definitely looking forward to reading this one.

Please feel free to add your own reading recommendations as well.