Conjoined whale calves found dead

January 7, 2014 • 1:57 am

by Matthew Cobb

Some rather sad pictures posted yesterday of a pair conjoined grey whale calves, found dead in a lagoon in Baja California. Grey whales give birth around this time of year. There’s a rather gruesome video, too. Grindtv.com has this:

Unfortunately, the twins discovered in Scammon’s Lagoon did not survive and most likely were miscarried. The the carcass is only about seven feet long, versus the normal 12 to 16 feet for newborn gray whales.

Alisa Schulman-Janiger, an American Cetacean Society researcher, pointed out that the twins were severely underdeveloped and wondered whether the birth or stillbirth might also have killed the mother.

 

Conjoined gray whale calves

Conjoined gray whale calves

Photos by Jesus Gomez, Farah Castillo and Gabriela Rodriguez.

More about the Pew poll on evolution acceptance

January 7, 2014 • 1:30 am

NOTE BY JAC:  I still am baffled by the Pew’s finding that Republicans seem to have become more creationist between 2009 and 2013, for the Gallup Poll shows the 20% disparity already in 2008.  In that poll, the percentage of young-earth creationists was 60% among Republicans, 38% among Democrats, and 40% among Independents. The gap that Pew says is widening, then, appears in the Gallup data to have been that wide already five years ago.  Since the issue is the same, human evolution, I can only attribute it to different sampling techniques or, as Greg suggests below, to the order in which questions were asked.

______

by Greg Mayer

I’ve already posted twice on the Pew poll on evolution acceptance, first to bring it to WEIT readers’ attention while noting the disparity between the Pew poll and Gallup’s results on the same issue, and then to note an erroneous criticism of the poll by Dan Kahan. I’d like to note three further developments.

The most interesting is a further report from Pew written by Cary Funk (if you look at nothing else mentioned here, look at this report), I’ll mention two other items first.

First, Charles Blow at the New York Times, in a piece entitled  “Indoctrinating Religious Warriors“, considers what the poll says about the political and religious landscape of America. He’s saddened by the fact that more Republicans now accept creationism than evolution:

In fact, this isn’t only sad; it’s embarrassing.

I don’t personally have a problem with religious faith, even in the extreme, as long as it doesn’t supersede science and it’s not used to impose outdated mores on others.

But as Blow well knows, the only religious extremists that make the news are precisely the ones who want their faith to supercede science and to impose their mores on the rest of society. He attributes its recrudescence to the strategy of the Republican party:

But I believe that something else is also at play here, something more cynical. I believe this is a natural result of a long-running ploy by Republican party leaders to play on the most base convictions of conservative voters in order to solidify their support. Convince people that they’re fighting a religious war for religious freedom, a war in which passion and devotion are one’s weapons against doubt and confusion, and you make loyal soldiers.

There has been anti-science propagandizing running unchecked on the right for years, from anti-gay-equality misinformation to climate change denials.

Second, Andrew Sullivan, in “Converting to Belief in Evolution“, has looked at the poll again, and points to Karl Giberson (whom Jerry also commented on) asking whether evangelical Christianity’s antagonism to science will push young people away from evangelical Christianity. Giberson found this prospect “alarming”, but evidently Andrew doesn’t. (As a gay Catholic who accepts at least theistic evolution, Andrew has longstanding political and theological differences with evangelicalism.)

Finally, Dan Kahan has accepted that his chief argument against the Pew poll—that its reported numbers must be incorrect—is wrong. He did so in response to a commenter on his site, who provided a hypothetical numerical example refuting Kahan’s assertion. I showed that Kahan was in error with a general argument about the statistics of sums, but a concrete counterexample is also a satisfying form of refutation. But most importantly, Pew, without mentioning Kahan, has released a detailed answer to the question that Kahan thought indicated numerical hanky-panky: “If the views of the overall public have remained steady, and there has been little change among people of other political affiliations, how does one account for the Republican numbers? Shouldn’t the marked drop in Republican believers cause a decline in the 60% of all adults who say humans have evolved over time?” The answer is of course ‘not necessarily, and, in fact, not in this case’.

Kudos to Kahan for accepting the invalidity of his mathematical argument, but, oddly, he continues unchanged in his animus toward the Pew poll and one of its striking findings (see the updates and a further post here). As I said, his reactions to the poll seem to be “merely expressions of his own prejudices”, and not terribly dependent on the actual poll results, since he continues to hold them although though his conclusions on the poll have been shown to be in error. The whole sequence of what he writes about the poll is a wonderful example of the type of reasoning which, in another context, Sam Wang of Princeton has called “motivated reasoning“.

The new Pew report (which, as I said, is the thing really worth looking at here), clearly answers Kahan’s doubts. Here’s their table nicely illustrating, neither generally nor hypothetically, that there’s nothing wrong with their numbers (note that the last column shows, as stated in my first post, that the overall result is a weighted sum that includes all political response classes):

Pew 2nd evolution 2013-1

But what was the cause of the shift in Republican opinion? It’s not obviously due to changes in the demographic, religious, or ideological profiles of the Republican party, as they changed little between the two surveys:

Pew 2nd evolution 2013-2

Pew 2nd evolution 2013-3 To my mind, the most interesting new nugget in this report is that the biggest shift of Republicans toward creationism has occurred among the least religious Republicans. From the report:

In fact, however, the surveys suggest that the change in views on evolution occurred especially among the less religious segments of the GOP. Among Republicans who attend worship services monthly or less often, the share who say humans have evolved over time is down 14 percentage points, from 71% in 2009 to 57% today. Among Republicans who attend services at least weekly the share who believe in evolution has gone from 36% in 2009 to 31% today, a difference that is not statistically significant.

This may support the suggestion of, among others, Zack Beauchamp and Paul Krugman that accepting creationism has become part of Republicans’ “team” or “tribal” identity: very religious Republicans were already mostly creationist for religious reasons, and now less religious Republicans are following for reasons of party solidarity. (Oddly, Kahan, who called Krugman’s response to the poll “absurd” and “devoid of reflection”, seems to agree with this as well.)

The new Pew report also considers the possibility of wording issues affecting the response. In this case, it was not the wording of the questions on evolution (which were unchanged), but the words of the preceding questions. The 2009 survey was full of questions on science, which may have “primed” respondents to give more ‘scientific’ answers, while in the 2013 survey the evolution questions were preceded by religious questions. I would not be surprised if such differences have an effect; such wording effects may account for some of the disparities between Pew and Gallup results on the same issues.

Now that’s cold!

January 6, 2014 • 11:59 pm

How cold was it in Chicago yesterday? With the wind chill, it was  -40, which happens to be the one temperature at which Farenheit and Celsius measures coincide.

It was so cold, in fact, that they had to bring the polar bears inside at the Lincoln Park Zoo. As Rebecca Boyle notes on Eek Squad:

“In Chicago we’re accustomed to weather extremes, with very cold winters and very hot summers, so the animals that are part of our zoo are chosen for their hardiness for winter or summer,” [public relations director Sharon] Dewar says. “But this is obviously an excessive extreme. So even animals that are pretty hardy, and would be able to stay outside for normal winters — like the Mongolian camels and polar bear — even those animals we’re keeping indoors.”

I’ll just repeat that: It’s so cold in Chicago, the polar bear is inside.

Thank Ceiling Cat that it’s been balmy in Poland. I got out at just the right time.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Monday: Dobrzyn

January 6, 2014 • 2:25 pm

Today is a holiday in Poland (“Three Kings” day, honoring the visitors to Baby Jesus), so all is quiet. It was quite warm, and after having stayed outside a while, Hili demanded to be let in.  But when I went to fetch her from the windowsill, she scrambled up the trellis to the roof by the second floor, where her nemesis lives: the black tomcat named Fitness:

Hili wants in

Hili likes to taunt Fitness through the window, knowing that she’s safe, for when they’re outside together, Fitness takes out after her. Here he is, about 8 years old:

Fitness

After some obligatory Fitness-taunting, Hili sat on the roof and proudly surveyed her domain:

Hili on roof 1

Then she took a nap in the sun (if you’re a Bergman fan, you’ll recognize the name of the house):

Hili on roof 2

After lunch it was time to take THE PICTURE. I had brought a mug on which I’d had put a picture of Hili (taken on my last visit) drinking from a cup on which Kitten Hili was pictured. My job was to capture Hili drinking out of that two-Hili mug, creating a Three-Hili-Regress mug. This is the successful result. If you enlarge the photo you can see Kitten Hili, like the smallest figure inside a group of Russian nesting dolls:

Hili X 3 (1)

Next time I’ll try for four.

After lunch, walkies along the Vistula, with the local kids playing soccer:

Football

The river was lovely today, with the brown branches of winter nicely offset by the blue Vistula (you can see the far bank):

Browns

As always, the sun hangs low on the horizon. This was taken at about 2 pm:

Sunset

For dinner we all felt like reverting to childhood, and decided to have Andrzej’s special Polish dish, apple fritters. It consists simply of homegrown apples from the front yard, battered with milk, flour, and eggs, and lightly fried. They’re served hot with powdered sugar and a glass of milk. We also tried some with a bit of maple syrup that I brought: something that Andrzej and Malgorzata had never tasted. (They like it.)

Peeling and slicing:

Malgorzata apples

Batter up!Andrzej battering

Noms!!!Fritters

The End Times for the humanities?

January 6, 2014 • 1:20 pm

NOTE:  A post by David Silbey on his website gives data showing that the decline in humanities enrollment (as percentage of all majors) really declined precipitiously in the from 1970-1985 (when I was in school) and hasn’t dropped much since then. He also claims that the 1970s were a peak, and modern enrollment, while lower than before then, is not that profound (from about 12% to about 7% now.   But that’s still nearly a 50% decline.  And I still maintain that there is a striking and insidious trend to politicize the humanities, especially literature.

__________

The humanities are dying in American universities, with enrollment and interest dropping like a stone. I’m not sure exactly why that is, and I mourn the loss, for I had some wonderful humanities courses in college. Without my courses in English literature, fine arts, philosophy, and Greek drama, I’d be a much poorer person. It’s not so much that I took aboard a lasting body of knowledge from those courses, but that the professors where I went to school —the College of William & Mary—were enthusiastic, often charismatic, and knew how to awaken interest in their subjects, so that for the rest of one’s life you’d want to seek out art, literature, and the “higher” forms of human thought.

I suppose one reason for the thin stream of today’s humanities majors is the difficulty in getting jobs with such degrees, but the thought of “jobs” after college was not in our minds in the late Sixties.

But surely another reason for the demise of humanities is that they’re committing slow seppuku by pandering to trends like postmodernism and, lately, political pressures. That makes them rigid, ideological, and, frankly, no fun.  A diversity of views cannot bloom, for there are now approved ways of thinking.

Or so argues Heather MacDonald at the conservative Wall Street Journal in her January 3 piece, “The humanities have forgotten their humanity.”

Her article begins with a frightening scenario:

In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles wrecked its English major. Such a development may seem insignificant, compared with, say, the federal takeover of health care. It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift that bears on our relationship to the past—and to civilization itself.

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.
 
In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”
Well, MacDonald has somewhat misrepresented the situation at UCLA. A bit of digging revealed that English majors there must also take a three-quarter survey course in British and American literature as sophomores, as well as a course each in British medieval literature, Renaissance literature, 17th-18th century British literature, and two courses in American literature.  It would behoove Ms. MacDonald to correct her piece, since those courses surely include Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, and many others.
 
Indeed, the old canons did neglect important literature by non-Anglophones, women, and minorities. I can’t imagine, for example, not reading Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, or for that matter A House for Mr. Biswas. Call me a curmudgeon, but the concentration on the Literature of Victimhood is designed to foster political points of view, and I think this is bad, even if I adhere to those points of view. College, after all, is a time to argue and have your viewpoints challenged, not simply reinforced. MacDonald continues:
. . . The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.
 
Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA’s undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean; Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and Feminist and Queer Theory.
Where in here is the sheer love of reading, an appreciation that goes beyond identity politics to embrace the sheer diversity of the human ideas and emotions found within any group? You can’t immerse yourself in the stream of human thought if you’re dammed within your own little tributary. In the end, this trend is doomed if for no other reasons that those getting degrees in Identity Humanities will be so narrowly educated that they’ll find it hard to get jobs.
 
Underlining the problem, MacDonald gets in a lick at one of the Problems, Homi Bhabha at Harvard, one of the worst and most opaque writers to inhabit an American Department of Literature (Judith Butler is up there with him):
 A recent Harvard report from a committee co-chaired by the school’s premier postcolonial studies theorist, Homi Bhabha, lamented that 57% of incoming Harvard students who initially declare interest in a humanities major eventually change concentrations. Why may that be? Imagine an intending lit major who is assigned something by Professor Bhabha: “If the problematic ‘closure’ of textuality questions the totalization of national culture. . . .” How soon before that student concludes that a psychology major is more up his alley?
Indeed, Bhabha was a close second to Butler in the 1998 edition of the “Bad Writing Contest” held by the journal Philosophy and Literature. Sadly, the contest, which awarded prizes for atrociously-written sentences, ran from only 1995-1998. Bhabhi’s runner-up prize went for a sentence he penned while at the University of Chicago:
If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.
Ah, the “enunciatory modality” of it all!
 
And I may as well include the winning sentence by Butler:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
People get paid to write like that! But is no excuse—none—for writing so badly, and these are terrible role models for college students—or any intellectual.  When you see stuff like that, ask yourself, “WWOD?”*
 
*What would Orwell do?
 
 
 
 
 

 

Ancient flowering plants found in amber, suggests insect pollination 100 million years ago

January 6, 2014 • 8:46 am

This piece, from ZME Science, doesn’t contain a reference to an article, but the Oregon State University press announcement notes that the paper is in the Journal of the Botanical Institute of Texas. I don’t have access to that journal electronically, so I’ll just summarize the results briefly. (Note to science bloggers: please give the reference to a published paper when summarizing its contents. Note to press offices: please cite the full paper instead of just the name of the journal!)

At any rate the announcement from the OSU press office reveals the discovery of a group of 18 flowering plants (all of a single species) preserved in amber from the Cretaceous, about 100 million years ago. The plants have sticky pollen, indicative of an insect pollinator, and the amber preservation allow us to see pollen tubes growing down into the style as well as incipient seed formation, both indications of sexual reproduction—the earliest sexual reproduction seen in flowering plants.

Here are the flowers:

image_1660_1-Micropetasos-burmensis
This flower preserved in 100-million-year old amber is one of the most complete ever found. (Photo courtesy of Oregon State University)

And the pollen tubes, with the captions from the press release:

Screen shot 2014-01-06 at 9.24.11 AM
The pollen tubes penetrating the stigma on this ancient flower are the only known fossil of this type, showing the process of sexual reproduction in a flowering plant. (Photo courtesy of Oregon State University)

As the OSU press release note, “The fossils were discovered from amber mines in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar, previously known as Burma. The newly-described genus and species of flower was named Micropetasos burmensis.”

Now if this pollen really is fertilizing the ovule, then it truly is sexual reproduction. It’s another question entirely whether this is cross-fertilization (pollen from another individual) or self-fertilization (pollen from the same individual).  Selfing doesn’t require insects, and cross-pollination can occur by other mechanisms, such as wind.  But since the “selfing” condition is invariably evolved from outcrossing ancestors, this does at least provide the earliest date for known cross-pollination in flowering plants.  And since we know that “thrips” (small insects) were pollinating gymnosperms (“naked seed” plants like gingkos and confers) in the early Cretaceous, there were already insects around whose descendants or relatives could pollinate flowering plants.

Finally, do remember that flowering plants arrived relatively late on the evolutionary scene: probably about 160 million years ago.  That is roughly 400 million years after the Cambrian explosion, and shows that not all “major groups” of organisms or their “Baupläne” (“body plans”) appeared suddenly in the Cambrian. If Jesus made the Cambrian explosion in one big party, as Stephen Meyer maintains, then the Savior forget to bring flowers.

h/t: Ant

Eben Alexander’s bogus trip to heaven

January 6, 2014 • 5:42 am

You must be living on another planet if you haven’t heard of neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s 2012 book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife, which recounts his goddy experience while in a coma after a bout of bacterial meningitis.  It’s sold over two million copies, has been translated into dozens of languages, and has topped the New York Times bestseller list for over a year (here’s today’s listing):

Screen shot 2014-01-06 at 2.21.13 AM

This post will, I hope, show that Alexander’s book doesn’t belong in the “nonfiction” category.

Why is the book so popular? The answer is obvious: it gives people confidence that there really is a heaven. For during Alexander’s “coma,” he claims he visited that heaven: a place of angels, lost relatives, beautiful music, butterflies, and eternal happiness. And he is a neurosurgeon who argued that his “near death experience” (NDE) could not have been a dream or hallucination since his coma made his cortex nonfunctional; that is, his brain wasn’t working. His credentials thus give the book special cachet.

Perhaps this is old news, but Alexander’s claims have not only been seriously questioned in the past year (how, for example, does he know that his NDE didn’t occur during the period when his brain was rebooting while he was waking up?), but an article in the August Esquire by Luke Dittrich,”The Prophet,” suggests that Alexander has been duplicitous about his story, and in fact made much of it up.

The article is long (10,000 words) but is well worth reading as an example of investigative journalism at its best: it manages to shred Alexander’s story not in a vindictive way, but by simply quoting the facts. Here are some of those facts:

  • Alexander was let go from at least two of his jobs as a neurosurgeon after repeated malpractice lawsuits. For example, Dittrich notes that “In August 2003, UMass Memorial suspended Alexander’s surgical privileges ‘on the basis or allegation of improper performance of surgery.'”
  • In two of those lawsuits, Alexander appears to have altered or falsified medical records to cover his incompetence. He settled those suits, and still retains his medical license, but no longer practices as a doctor.
  • Alexander appears to have made up the story that begins the book: how he managed to avoid a collision while parachute-jumping by some mechanism that was too quick to have been activated by his brain. This was, in effect, his first NDE: his first “proof of heaven.” As Alexander notes:

“This book is about the events that changed my mind on the matter. They convinced me that, as marvelous a mechanism as the brain is, it was not my brain that saved my life that day at all. What sprang into action the second Chuck’s chute started to open was another, much deeper part of me. A part that could move so fast because it was not stuck in time at all, the way the brain and body are.”

Dittrich could find no record of this happening, and the only “Chuck” in Alexander’s parachute club denies that this happened. In response, Alexander says he changed “Chuck’s” name for legal reasons, though there are no legal reasons to change the name.

  • Alexander appears to have falsified even the weather that occurred at the time of his coma.  Dittrich notes:

“As he [Alexander] nears the end of his tale, every part of his story seems to be connected to every other part in mysterious ways. For instance, his coma began on Monday, November 10, and by Saturday, ‘it had been raining for five days straight, ever since the afternoon of my entrance into the ICU.’ Then, on Sunday, after six days of torrents, just before he woke up, the rain stopped:

To the east, the sun was shooting its rays through a chink in the cloud cover, lighting up the lovely ancient mountains to the west and the layer of cloud above as well, giving the gray clouds a golden tinge.

Then, looking toward the distant peaks, opposite to where the mid-November sun was starting its ascent, there it was.

A perfect rainbow.”

But a meteorologist consulted by Dittrich asserts vehemently that there was no rain on the 10th or 11th of November, and there could have been no rainbow on the 16th, the day Alexander “woke up.”

  • The coma that Alexander experienced was not caused by bacterial meningitis, but, according to Alexander’s doctors (whom he unwisely gave permission to talk!), was medically induced. That undermines his key claim that his brain was not working during his coma. Alexander does not mention this in his book. Here is a passage from Dittrich’s article:

“In Proof of Heaven, Alexander writes that he spent seven days in ‘a coma caused by a rare case of E. coli bacterial meningitis.’ There is no indication in the book that it was Laura Potter, and not bacterial meningitis, that induced his coma, or that the physicians in the ICU maintained his coma in the days that followed through the use of anesthetics. Alexander also writes that during his week in the ICU he was present ‘in body alone,’ that the bacterial assault had left him with an ‘all-but-destroyed brain.’ He notes that by conventional scientific understanding, ‘if you don’t have a working brain, you can’t be conscious,’ and a key point of his argument for the reality of the realms he claims to have visited is that his memories could not have been hallucinations, since he didn’t possess a brain capable of creating even a hallucinatory conscious experience.

I ask Potter whether the manic, agitated state that Alexander exhibited whenever they weaned him off his anesthetics during his first days of coma would meet her definition of conscious.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Conscious but delirious.'”

  • Finally, Alexander appears to have made up an important part in his tale, one in which he calls upon God for help before he goes under. As Dittrich reports:

“One of the book’s most dramatic scenes takes place just before she sends him from the ER to the ICU:

In the final moments before leaving the emergency room, and after two straight hours of guttural animal wails and groaning, I became quiet. Then, out of nowhere, I shouted three words. They were crystal clear, and heard by all the doctors and nurses present, as well as by Holley, who stood a few paces away, just on the other side of the curtain.

‘God, help me!’

Everyone rushed over to the stretcher. By the time they got to me, I was completely unresponsive.

Potter [Alexander’s physician] has no recollection of this incident, or of that shouted plea. What she does remember is that she had intubated Alexander more than an hour prior to his departure from the emergency room, snaking a plastic tube down his throat, through his vocal cords, and into his trachea. Could she imagine her intubated patient being able to speak at all, let alone in a crystal-clear way?

‘No,’ she says.”

In sum, the story looks like a sham, confected by a once-brilliant but now failed neurosurgeon who reclaims his time in the spotlight by pretending that he saw heaven. He may indeed have had such visions, but the story around them—about his parachute episode, the weather, his call to God, and the fact that his brain wasn’t working—are crucial to his story, and they don’t stand up to Dittrich’s examination.

When Dittrich confronted Alexander with what he found, and why the neurosurgeon omitted his professional mistakes and vagaries, Alexander waffles and then begs the journalist for mercy:

We talk about rainstorms and intubations and chemically induced comas, and I can see it in his face, the moment he knows for sure that the story I’ve been working on is not the one he wanted me to tell.

“What I’m worried about,” he says, “is that you’re going to be so busy trying to smash out these little tiny fires that you’re going to miss the big point of the book.”

I ask whether an account of his professional struggles should have been included in a book that rests its authority on his professional credentials.

He says no, because medical boards in various states investigated the malpractice allegations and concluded he could retain his license. And besides, that’s all in the past. “The fact of the matter,” he says of the suits, “is they don’t matter at all to me…. You cannot imagine how minuscule they appear in comparison to what I saw, where I went, and the message that I bring back.”

. . . By focusing on the inconsistencies in his story, on recollections that don’t seem to add up, on a court-documented history of revising facts, on the distinctions between natural and medically induced comas, he says, is to miss the forest for the trees. That’s all misleading stuff, irrelevant to his journey and story.

Toward the end, there’s a note of pleading in his voice.

“I just think that you’re doing a grave disservice to your readers to lead them down a pathway of thinking that any of that is, is relevant. And I just, I really ask, as a friend, don’t…”

That’s pathetic. For one thing, never assume that a journalist is your “friend.” Their job is to tell a story, not to be your pal.

Now Dittrich’s piece was published last August, but I think it’s been behind a paywall until recently, and, even so, it’s important to highlight the inconsistencies of Alexander’s story, for people have been buying this book in droves as “proof of heaven.” (You can see other criticisms of Alexander’s tale on his Wikipedia page.) It is no such thing, for the “proof of heaven” depends critically not only on Alexander’s probity, which is not high, and especially on his contention that his brain was “shut down” when he had his NDE, for which there’s no proof at all.

But of course none of that matters.  If the public were thinking critically and scientifically about his story, and were aware of its problems, the book would be just another fairy tale. But so eager are people to get confirmation of God and heaven that they’ll believe anything, no matter how dubious.  Alexander may no longer be practicing as a doctor, but he’s raking it in on the lecture circuit, and his book has made him a millionaire.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s being made into a major motion picture? Do you suppose the producers might halt production given all the questions about Alexander’s story? Not a chance.