At Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, though, one doctor — an atheist — is determined to help JWs suffering from advanced leukemia live, even though a blood transfusion is a common way to treat the problem.

Dr. Michael Lill, head of the blood and marrow transplant program at Cedars-Sinai’s Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute, is a last recourse for Jehovah’s Witnesses with advanced leukemia.

They arrive at Lill’s door out of desperation and a desire to live. Many specialists decline to treat them because of their biblically centered refusal to accept blood transfusions, a mainstay of conventional care for the cancer.

Lill thinks their refusal is risky and illogical but nevertheless has devised a way to treat them that accommodates their religious convictions.

Despite his belief that God doesn’t exist, he has become a hero to many devout believers.

…

To avoid transfusions, Lill first builds up patients’ blood counts with medications. Then he limits blood loss during a regimen of chemotherapy and stem-cell transplants.

When he draws blood from patients to check their cell counts and organ function during treatment, he uses tiny pediatric tubes. He gives women a drug to suppress their periods and prescribes a hormone to boost red blood cells.

He has trained his staff in how to treat Jehovah’s Witnesses, and “No Blood” signs are posted in their hospital rooms.

As much as I don’t really want Dr. Lill caving in to irrational demands, I think this article speaks to his ingenuity. He’s found a way to give JWs hope where none existed before — though if the JWs would just accept the blood rather than act like God doesn’t want them to receive it, none of this would really even be an issue in the first place…

Side note for anyone interested: A few years ago, I wrote about the time I spent in medical school, where some of the case studies we discussed involved hypothetical scenarios featuring JWs not wanting blood transfusions.

They have Joe Nickell (skeptical investigator of the paranormal), Jamila Bey (secular activist), Clint Kelly (biology professor) and Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist) speaking at their school, and those are just the keynotes.

What are all of you planning?

…

Incidentally, ~GeneticMishap created a publicity poster anyone can use:

To personalize it, just go here.

The Senate Education Committee voted 8-2 in favor of the bill despite experts and some senators saying teaching creationism likely would be ruled unconstitutional if challenged in court.

According to an article from the Associated Press, Purdue University science education professor John Staver told the committee that teaching Creationism could lead to a lawsuit since it’s a violation of church-state separation — and federal courts have agreed in the past.

Staver said he believed any school district that started teaching creationism would face lawsuits they would likely lose.

“All that the citizens of Indiana are going to get from this bill are wasted legal efforts, lawyer fees and penalties,” Staver said.

Sen. Scott Schneider (R-Indianapolis) didn’t care for that logic, though:

“What are we afraid of? Allowing an option for students including creation science as opposed to limiting their exposure?”

No, we aren’t afraid to expose children to other ideologies (false as they may be). We are worried — outside of the inherent falsehood — that by teaching a religious ideology as scientific fact, we run the risk of teaching our children that by simply pretending hard enough, any magical apparition can become the truth.

Creation Science is NOT science.

When looking for answers to scientific questions, there are scads of information detailing experiments, observations, conclusions, hypothesis, peer-reviews, successes, and failures. When looking for answers to a religious (read: Christian) based “theory,” you have one collection of books; with spurious authorship; each part written dozens to hundreds of years after any of the supposed characters were supposed to have lived; giving conflicting accounts of events, lineage, history, and people; later edited, redacted, and recompiled by groups of people with several political agendas; has no universally agreed-upon translation; and is not interpreted the same way by any two people.

If Creationism is to be taught as science, then what is preventing these beliefs from also being taught the same way?

1. Astrology
2. Pyramid power
3. Divining rod technology
4. The toxemia theory and Christian Science “negative thinking” theory of disease
5. The flat earth theory

If Creationism is to be taught as science, can we allow ALL Creation Stories? For example:

1. In China, the story of of P’an Ku, hatched from a cosmic egg. Half the shell is above him as the sky, the other half below him as the earth. Growing taller each day for 18,000 years, he gradually pushes them apart until they reach their appointed places. Then P’an Ku falls to pieces. His limbs become mountains, his blood the rivers, his breath the wind and his voice the thunder. His two eyes are the sun and the moon. And the parasites on his body are mankind.
2. Greece, begins with a gaping emptiness, Chaos. Within this there emerges Gaea, the earth. Gaea gives birth to a son, Uranus, who is the sky. Gaea and Uranus populate the earth with their children.
3. Japan, the story of creation leads not to the first man but to the first emperor. Beginning with a floating amorphous mass, emerges a reed-like object, which produces eight generations of brother-and-sister gods.
4. Mesopotamia, the creation story survives on clay tablets found in Ashurbanipal’s library, in the saga known as Enuma elish(named from its first two words, meaning ‘When on high’). It begins with two watery beings, one male, Apsu (sweet water), and one female, Tiamat (salt water). They create a variety of sea monsters and gods. Marduk, the god of Babylon, kills Tiamat and her accomplice, Kingu. Marduk splits the corpse of Tiamat into two parts. He creates the heaven with half of her, and the earth with the other. In heaven he constructs a dwelling place for his colleagues, the gods. Needing a race of servants, he uses the blood of Kingu to create the first man, followed by the creation of rivers, plants and animals.*

If and when Creationism (any creation story) can be tested, verified, put through the rigors of the scientific method, peer-reviewed, and accepted by rational thinking scientists and people everywhere as a legitimate explanation for the creation of the universe — when Creationism can be placed next to Evolution and the Big Bang without looking like a two-year-old’s marker scribbles hanging on the gallery wall next to a Da Vinci masterpiece — then we can start teaching it in schools. When this ancient campfire story becomes more than the sum of its flawed and mutable parts, I will be among the first in line to sign a petition to get it taught as science.

Until that day (and I won’t be holding my breath), in any states that are considering breaking science, I hope that reason — and the future of education in our country — wins out over the teaching of just-so stories.**

*Thank you, interwebs, and apologies to any details that might have been glossed over

**Not that I have any problem with just-so stories. They’re fun… like Dr. Suess books.

Yep. If it looks like that, then Jesus must have come back to life. Concrete proof. Obviously.

Reminds me of the time Dale McGowan saw an image like this in his daughter’s classroom:

Anyway, don’t you love how some Christians will praise science when they (wrongly) think it justifies their faith and bash it when they don’t like its conclusions?

(Thanks to Amanda for the link!)

What would that entail?

Course textbooks contain approximately an equal number of pages of relevant material teaching each viewpoint. Textbook materials include text, pictures, illustrations, graphs, tables, questions, discussion items, student exercises, teacher support material and other material supplied with the textbook, with freedom allowed the textbook publishers to arrange, substitute, or size material to provide an approximately equal teaching of each viewpoint for a specific textbook…

In the absence of course textbooks which provide equal treatment, written interim material may provide alternate viewpoints, with interim textbook material developed pursuant to subsection 6 of this section as a recommended source

So I guess Brattin wants to break out a Bible since there’s no credible scientific literature that opposes the idea of evolution…?

There’s a bright side, though. The bill includes some Pastafarian Bait:

If scientific theory concerning biological origin is taught in a textbook, the textbook shall give equal treatment to biological evolution and biological intelligent design. Other scientific theory or theories of origin may be taught

Oh, good. Because I have a huge list of Creation Myths and I can’t wait for them all to get equal time in the classroom thanks to the Guy Who Has No Science Background.

Brattin’s own Facebook posting just reinforces the idea that he has has no idea what he’s talking about:

Seriously, everyone. Stop being obsurd. The 90% of Americans who know the least about science should totally be in charge of controlling the curriculum for everyone else. That’s how science works!

For what it’s worth, this bill has a long way to go before being enacted (or even discussed on the House floor), but the fact that a politician would even introduce it suggests that voters in Missouri elected a man who cares more about promoting his faith than making sure students in Missouri are well-educated.

Nearly identical bills to this one (HB 911 and HB 1722) were introduced in 2004, but the National Center for Science Education points out that “both bills died when the legislative session ended.”

***Edit***: Jon Voisey has a detailed explanation and thorough takedown of the bill.

(Thanks to Shane for the link)

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?

A short excerpt:

For most of the people huddling on the ground, tonight is the first time they’ve spent such an extended period looking up at the sky. For three hours, Tyson keeps his audience staring so hard at the heavens he cramps their necks. He speaks of galaxies and the delusions of astrology, how to calculate latitude, the fate of the universe. It is not a lecture. He delivers something more akin to a solo concert. Although he is a card-carrying astrophysicist with a long list of scientific papers in publications like Astrophysical Journal, Tyson has turned himself into a rock-star scientist. He plays to sold-out houses. He appears on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, on the New York Times bestseller list, on Twitter (@neiltyson, with 242,400 followers as I write this). He is now shooting a remake of Carl Sagan’s classic Cosmos series, which will air on Fox in 2013.

Tyson spreads himself so wide for two reasons. One is that there’s so much in the sky to talk about. The other reason is down here on earth. For all the spectacular advances American science has made over the past century — not just in astrophysics but in biology, engineering, and other disciplines — the best days of American science may be behind us. And as American science declines, so does America. So here, in the dark, under the stars, Tyson is going to try to save the future, one neck cramp at a time.

In case you missed it, my interview with Dr. Tyson from last summer can be seen here.

Rep. Jerry Bergevin is serving his first (and hopefully last) term and introduced the first bill, which would require schools to teach evolution as a theory, and would include “the theorists’ political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of atheism.” I’m not sure why this would be relevant or anyone’s business, but I’m sure he’ll clarify and explain his reasoning coherently…

“I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It’s a worldview and it’s godless. Atheism has been tried in various societies, and they’ve been pretty criminal domestically and internationally. The Soviet Union, Cuba, the Nazis, China today: they don’t respect human rights.”

*Phew* For a minute there, I thought he might say something asinine, offensive, and totally false.

There are so many things wrong with that quote and it begs me to wonder how, yet again, the most ignorant among us continue to infiltrate government positions. Bergevin also made this statement:

“As a general court we should be concerned with criminal ideas like this and how we are teaching it… Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That’s evidence right there.”

Are we really going to do a head count for who has done more harm based on their religious or non-religious ideations. Some bad people might be atheists, but they aren’t bad because they are atheists and most bad people who are atheists aren’t doing bad things in the name of atheism.

Reps. Gary Hopper and John Burt introduced the second bill, which has a slightly higher probability of actually being passed but is equally as obnoxious. Basically, they are challenging science as a field altogether, even going so far as to say:

“I want the problems with the current theories to be presented so that kids understand that science doesn’t really have all the answers. They are just guessing.”…

Currently, science class “is like having a creative writing class where the students are told what to create,” [Hopper] said. “Science is a creative process, not an absolute thing.”

Hopper wants Intelligent Design taught in classrooms, but hasn’t yet been able to find an example of it being successfully legislated into schools…

Um, maybe that’s because there isn’t a shred of real evidence to support such a theory and one might even make the claim that Intelligent Design is one step short of a guess.

He then attempts to tug on the heartstrings by claiming to care about the students’ sense of purpose in life.

“But more and more scientists are coming to the conclusion that it was not even remotely possible that it happened by accident. I want to introduce children to the idea that they have a purpose for being here.”

Thank goodness there is at least one voice of reason out there. Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, speaks out:

“Yes, it is the case that scientific explanations change with new data, but at some point you reach the stage where there is an agreement among scientists… You’re not improving science education for young people by pretending that well-established ideas are up for grabs. The idea of evolution, that living things have common ancestors, is not being challenged in science today,” she said.

She added that Bergevin’s bill “should be obviously unacceptable to legislators on its face. They ought to be able to see pretty quickly that this bill is just silly.”

Oh, how I hope Scott is right.

This topic goes round and round, with a different ringleader each time and usually — hopefully — the same results. Intelligent design has no place being taught in public schools and is, at best, a farfetched and highly implausible theory that counters everything that science represents (and not in an “intelligent” and challenging kind of way). Let’s hope common sense and reason are plentiful in New Hampshire on voting day.

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)