(via Calamities of Nature)

Not gonna help. (Image via shutterstock)

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, the small branch of NIH responsible for this atrocious waste of money, was created by an amendment pushed by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). The Tribune reports that in advocating for the department, the Senator related a tragic personal story, for which I would extend my sincere sympathies:

In a 1998 speech, Harkin described watching acupuncture and acupressure ease the pain and violent hiccups of a brother dying of thyroid cancer.

Just like any other bereaved person, Senator Harkin deserves our sympathy and empathy. That does not, however, justify the program. He explains his advocacy:

“These are things I have seen with my own eyes,” said Harkin, who also lost three other siblings to cancer. “When I see things like this I ask, ‘Why? Why aren’t these things being researched?’”

Why, Senator? Because we only have so many resources to devote to medical research. Those resources should be allocated to plausible, evidence-based theories about the world we live in.

This sort of allocation is unconscionable in a world where there are so many good, skeptical scientists who go without funding. The Tribune points out that acupuncture, like so many other alternative remedies, purports to manipulate unseen, untestable forces.

This should make funding its research absolutely repugnant to any decent skeptic, or any person with a sense of appropriate allocation of public funds. Even worse, instead of abandoning research of treatments that perform no better than placebos, the NCCAM is “throwing good money after bad” by continuing to research them.

Legally speaking, the program is probably (and unfortunately) constitutional. As mentioned before, in order for a governmental action to be unconstitutional, it must fail one of the three prongs of the Lemon test.

Here, NCCAM’s purpose is arguably secular: The government wants healthy citizens. (At least that’s what they’d say.) Sounds pretty good.

NCCAM could be argued to be promoting religion with it’s study of prayer’s effectiveness on AIDS patients, but not necessarily. After all, they’re just studying it. Totally different.

The third prong, excessive entanglement, has usually related to whether the government is giving funding to a religious organization. That’s not the case here.

Note that no one has sued over this, and I’m not sure who would have standing to do so. That’s because taxpayers generally cannot assert that their rights are violated by this kind of broad allocation of funding.

That’s not to say we have to be happy about it. What research would you have funded with NCCAM’s $128 million annual budget?

(via Cyanide and Happiness)

Jason Rosenhouse wrote one back in November:

In the mid-nineties it was possible to wonder seriously if ID was a serious intellectual movement, or just another fad that would die out on its own. That verdict is now in. ID is dead. As a doornail. Even as YEC [Young Earth Creationism] shows renewed life with the success of the Creation Museum and the fracas over their planned Noah’s Ark theme park, the ID corpse isn’t even twitching anymore.

Wallace agrees:

Rosenhouse is right. ID has no future. His arguments — that over the last few years ID proponents have given us nothing new, that it is mired in the past, that it has merely been recycling its arguments — are all convincing.

…

But there are other perspectives from which the folly of ID is evident. One of them takes us back to a Christian astronomer who worked at the dawn of the scientific revolution.

Wallace shames ID activists from a new angle by pointing back 400 years to the astronomer Johannes Kepler, a devout Christian. In 1604, Kepler was baffled by a newly discovered star. Unable to explain it with current knowledge he was tempted to write it off as the work of God, outside of any natural explanation. But he rejected the impulse, writing that ”before we come to [special] creation, which puts an end to all discussion, I think we should try everything else.”

For Wallace, the “try everything else” mentality does not diminish the role of God, but shows a heightened respect, coming “from [Kepler's] conviction that God’s creation is not founded in obscurity, darkness, and confusion.” He contrasts this view with that of Michael Behe, who argued in 1996 “that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed.”

It’s nice to see a Christian arguing that curiosity and inquiry are allies of religion, rather than enemies. But I don’t hold out high hopes for this becoming a majority view.

Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote a brilliant essay in 2005 called “The Perimeter of Ignorance,” arguing that those who took the Behe route include some of the greatest of minds (working with much less knowledge). Tyson points to a passage from Isaac Newton‘s Principia.

The six primary Planets are revolv’d about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun,

Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

It was a long time before Newton’s divine explanation of planetary motion was properly debunked.

A century later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton’s dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece,Mécanique Céleste, the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces.

Tyson demonstrates, through plentiful examples, that scientists of past centuries invoked God almost exclusively when confronted with their own ignorance. Those who crossed the “frontiers of ignorance,” did so by rejecting God as the final explanation for a particular mystery.

Wallace puts forth an axiom that he feels describes Kepler’s view: “The universe has been designed; therefore it must be comprehensible.” If more devout scientists had taken this view in centuries past, it is likely that knowledge would have developed at a faster pace.

But I can understand why many of Wallace’s co-religionists take the lazy way out. The attempt to comprehend the universe will inevitably call into question the assumption of design. If the value placed on believing that “the universe has been designed” is high (and I wish it weren’t), than it is necessary to be cautious with secular explanations of Creation. A religious person with a cherished personal idea of who the designer is will invariably find their ideas challenged by the hard work of comprehending what we already know of about the universe.

Only those with a flexible or vague view of God have the luxury of inquiring freely and holding onto their understanding of the divine. “God is responsible for everything,” such a person might say. “Now tell me what everything consists of.” But take a specific definition of God (say, a prayer-answering God who sent his only son to die for our sins so we can join him in Heaven when our earthly lives come to an end) and hold it against the onslaught of knowledge available now available, and you might come back with much less than you started with.

So while the contemporary ID movement is much diminished, the assumptions and patterns of thinking that caused it are likely to be around for some time to come.

John Trumbo of the Tri-City Herald in Washington state wrote an article about Greg Morgan, a local man who recently found an unusual sandstone formation. And there’s only one conclusion he can draw from it:

Morgan, who is a mechanical engineer and worked in the aviation industry before coming to Hanford, said he was shocked when he first saw a picture of The Wave because it contradicted his original thinking about an ancient Earth and evolution.

Morgan, who became a Christian as an adult and takes the Bible literally, said the convoluted formations at Paria Canyon forced him to consider there must be another explanation.

…

“This is excellent evidence for Noah’s flood. It is far better than what anyone believes for an ancient Earth,” Morgan said.

Paul T. Erickson/Tri-City Herald

Before you dismiss him offhand, Trumbo writes that Morgan has been published in a journal!

Morgan’s photographs of The Wave and his article, “Flood Currents Frozen in Stone,” are in the latest issue of Answers magazine, a quarterly publication of Answers in Genesis, a Christian creation research organization based in Petersburg, Ky. The nonprofit organization’s 70,000-square-foot facility also houses the Creation Museum

Surely, there’s a credible scientist cited somewhere in the piece who can offer a more accurate perspective on what Morgan found:

Andrew Snelling, who has a doctorate in geology and is a content editor for Answers magazine, said two items of evidence at Paria Canyon point to a massive flood event.

One concerns analysis of grinds in the sandstone at Paria, which match mineral sources in the Appalachians. It would take a lot of wave action to move sand that far, he said.

No, I said credible scientist, not a lackey for the Creation Museum.

…

Nothing.

Not a single non-Creationist is quoted in the piece. It’s just a long article masquerading as news without a shred of scientific evidence to support Morgan’s claim. And it’s not like Washington lacks any universities where Trumbo could’ve spoken to a professor of this stuff.

I know newspapers are desperate to sell copies, but finding the craziest person in town and claiming his nutball theory is valid isn’t the way to do it.

Find a real scientist. Get a qualified perspective on this story. Then print an apology for your own incompetence as a reporter and print a proper version of this story. I’ll even suggest a headline: “Local Man’s Geological Ignorance Dupes Gullible Reporter.”

(Thanks to Claudia for the link)

Larry King admitted on “CNN Presents: A Larry King Special: Dinner with the Kings” that he would like to be frozen after death, in hopes that he can be revived later on.

Brrr! Larry King is hoping for a cold afterlife. The former CNN host told his guests on “CNN Presents: A Larry King Special: Dinner with the Kings” (which aired Dec. 4th) that he wants to be frozen after death “on the hope that they’ll find whatever I died of and they’ll bring me back.”
 

Click here to view the embedded video.

 
King shared the news with his wife Shawn and a camera crew, with celebrity buddies Conan O’Brien, Tyra Banks, Seth MacFarlane, Shaquille O’Neal, Quincy Jones, Russell Brand and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey beside him, chowing down a dinner from Wolfgang Puck.

The talkshow-style banter turned serious (and to cryogenics) when MacFarlane, who created “Family Guy” asked King if he was “a little obsessed with his own mortality, like I am?” King replied:

“Oh, I fear death. My biggest fear is death, because I don’t think I’m going anywhere… And since I don’t think that, I don’t have a belief. I’m married to someone who has the belief, so she knows she’s going somewhere. And I wanna be frozen… in the hope that they’ll find whatever I died of and bring me back. And she [Shawn King] said to me, ‘If you come back in two hundred years, you won’t know anybody.’ Okay, I’ll meet new people.”

O’Brien said King’s desire to be frozen and then revived was “big news.” “You would like to be frozen? This is news to me,” O’Brien said incredulously. Cue Brand chewing loudly and MacFarlane quoting Mark Twain. O’Brien was still incredulous but later admitted he didn’t really know what was going to happen after death either. MacFarlane asked King if he wanted to live forever. King replied, deadpan, “Yeah, you bet your ass.”

Tom Chivers, the Telegraph‘s assistant comment editor, blogged about King’s quotes, admitting that he, too, is afraid of death:

There will come a time when not only do you and I not exist, but no-one exists, no life exists, and nothing of any kind remains that could, even hypothetically, suggest that it ever did. Then we, and all our loves, works and ambitions, quite literally might as well never have been.

Which is pretty depressing.

What do you think of King’s and Chivers’ views?

Personally, I don’t think atheists need to feel bad about an absence of pearly gates in our future. I also don’t think we need to make plans to have our dead bodies frozen. Hey, it’s kind of nice not to worry about a jealous, hateful god or good people suffering for all eternity. Focusing on the here and now can be rewarding enough, no human-sized freezer required.

…

If you were looking to pick up awesome science-based gifts for friends or family members, Edmund Scientifics seems like a great site to visit. They have all the gifts you would expect to see in a science store — telescopes, crystal growing kits, a plethora of magnets, etc.

But they also sell a lot of pseudoscience.

Like a “Kirlian Imaging Device” that’s supposed to let you known as a device used to “photograph your aura”:

Paranormal investigator Joe Nickell explored and debunked that whole idea over a decade ago:

Although the Kirlian aura was claimed to present information about the “bioplasma” or “life-energy” of the object, actually it is only “a visual or photographic image of a corona discharge in a gas, in most cases the ambient air.” Moreover, experiments have failed to yield any evidence that the coronal pattern is related “to the physiological, psychological, or psychic condition of the sample,” but instead only to finger pressure, moisture, and other mechanical, environmental, and photographic factors (some twenty-two in all). Skeptics observed that even mechanical objects, such as coins or paper clips, could yield a Kirlian “aura” (Watkins and Bickel 1986).

There’s also a CD of Astral Sounds:

Imagine a safe, natural high inducing pleasurable feelings and emotions that in turn eliminates depression and pain. Astral Sounds professes to do just that.

Citations needed.

You would hope that a store that wants to support “science hobbyists and engineering enthusiasts” would do a better job of making sure the products they sell are legitimate examples of science at work.

They need to remove their pseudoscientific products from the site.

You can express your concerns to them directly at scientifics@edsci.com or on Twitter at @edmundsci.

(Thanks to Danni for the link!)

The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) brought a small horde of costumed ‘zombies,’ carrying signs reading “Van Praaaaaaagh” and “talk to us, we won’t bite.” The zombies shambled up to the building where Van Praagh’s “Spirit Circle” was set to begin, and asked to speak with him. Led by JREF President D.J. Grothe, the groups asks why Van Praagh is dodging questions about whether he’ll accept the Foundation’s million-dollar challenge to prove his claimed abilities.

Of course, van Praagh has everything to lose by putting his “powers” to the test since the people who visit him care little for “evidence.” These are people who are clinging to any possible hope there’s some way to communicate with their deceased loved ones and van Praagh thinks the best response to them is to take their money instead of being honest with them. It’s despicable.

But it’s good to see the James Randi Educational Foundation going after him directly in an open letter:

It seems odd that you won’t return our messages. After all, if you can really do what you claim, we’re offering you one million dollars and a chance to prove wrong everyone who doubts you, including those of us at the James Randi Educational Foundation. If your ‘psychic powers’ are real, hiding from our offer makes as much sense as throwing away a winning lottery ticket.

So, we can only guess at why you haven’t answered.

Perhaps it’s because what you do is not “psychic” at all, but a stale and repetitive performance of cold-reading techniques, in which you throw out vague guesses and then repeat back to your audience things they’ve already told you or things that are simply obvious, all while claiming their dead relatives are speaking to you.

This isn’t about getting Van Praagh to answer them, because he won’t.

This is about getting the media to take notice and do the work of delegitimizing him for the public good.

JREF needs to keep up with these kinds of letters — calling out specific people and challenging their self-proclaimed powers. Let’s see some good journalists take the bait and expose him for what he is.

An excerpt is below:

One area of substantial challenge, and our final source for sample dialogues, is when the New Age relative creates a family financial crisis due to their New Age beliefs. This is almost always a direct result of a New Age relative’s conviction that the abundant universe is specifically interested in his or her well-being. Many New Age relatives are almost congenitally credulous, and easily deceived by charlatans. Online scams, pyramid schemes, “friends and family” sales strategies, magical invocations — there is little that escapes the New Age relative’s ambit. If it makes them feel special, and promises abundance, then they’re interested. As a result, they are often being taken advantage of, and sometimes want their family members to help with new ventures. In short, if it sounds too good to be true, it may be just the thing for your New Age relative.

Below is an example of a conversation between Donna and her new age cousin Winona. Tom is Winona’s college-age son.

Winona (New Age cousin). Donna! How have you been?

Donna. I’ve been well — thanks for asking. What have you been up to?

Winona. I have just come across this amazing opportunity. A psychic named Gunther Maeterlich has discovered healing stones in northern Iceland. They are only a hundred dollars each. If you buy five, they are only $399!

Donna. Tom told me about this. Haven’t you already spent a few thousand dollars on seminars and materials?

Winona. You have to invest to enter the third sales tier. I’m almost there — all I need is to sell eight more stones.

Donna. How many have you sold so far?

Winona. Two.

Donna. Really? Who bought them?

Winona. I bought them myself!

Donna. Wouldn’t that money be better spent helping Tom at school?

Winona. I’m not spending money — I’m investing. The potential profit in this is amazing. If you’re smart you’ll get in on the ground floor.

Donna. I’m concerned that you’ll lose money. Remember a few years ago when you bought dozens of spirit animators? Remember that chakra ointment, and how you lost thousands of dollars and were left with the inventory? Remember when you went to that convention in Chicago, and spent all that money training to be a psychic so that you could predict the stock market?

Winona. Most businesses and entrepreneurs fail the first few times out. The thing about these stones is that they work!

Donna. Well, I can’t buy any from you, and I don’t think anyone else should.

Winona. You are so negative.

Donna. I’m just looking out for you and Tom. Imagine, soon he’ll be done college and will have a good job. That’s the right investment.

Winona. Well, I just want to see how it goes.

Donna. Ok, but remember — the best investment is in Tom, and getting a good job. Education and work is always the best route to riches, in my opinion.

Winona. It certainly helps.

Donna. Have you seen any good movies lately?

The example provided above shows the unique challenge of talking to a New Age relative who has made a financial commitment to a scam. Because some money has already been spent, it is harder for the New Age relative to “unbelieve” in the get-rich-quick scheme. This is why financial hucksters work so hard to get financial buy-in early on, even if it is for relatively small amounts. Once the gullible New Age investor is in, it is more difficult to get out. Even more problematic is the New Age relative’s belief that the scam artist is cleverer than the average person, and that the promised pay-off is only a natural by-product of an absurdly abundant universe. In these instances there are two crucial approaches and they are, admittedly, a struggle.

Have any of you been involved in conversations like this? How do you handle it? Let us know in the comments, and one random reader will win a copy of Hoagy’s book! All you have to do to enter is leave the word “psychic” at the end of your comment.