That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘catholics’

The BBC is currently running articles about the stillbirth rate in the UK and how as many as 6500 children die each year before they are 4 weeks old. I understand that losing a child in this way must be truely horrific but with child mortality rates dropping, life expectancy increasing and a global population of around seven billion I have to ask: do we need another 6500 kids every year?

From the ASA code:

3.4 Obvious untruths or exaggerations that are unlikely to mislead and incidental minor errors and unorthodox spellings are all allowed provided they do not affect the accuracy or perception of the marketing communication in any material way.

Well i guess that’s how they are going to justify this:

New Scientist has published an excellent article concerning research by Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California that suggests that “activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group”. The article discusses proposals by psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville that “this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause”.

The article very carefully skirts around the similarity between the chanting and singing, encouraged by facist leaders, and the hymns and prayers which form the bedrock of religious observance.

Continuing the current theme of expanding on the misconceptions of the ignorant I thought I would share this wonderful comment which was made on another site related to the MMR debate:

Why are we made to give this artificial drug to our kids? Drugs like this are known to create superbugs that kill more people.

I totally love that shit. Mutant superbugs are at your door waiting to rape your daughters and kill your sons! Clearly it’s all because of the drugs that these superbugs exist and kill our grannies when they go into hospital for some completely unrelated reason.

Hysteria aside there does appear to be a common misconception that antibiotics cause germs to mutate into strains that are either more virulent or are resistant to those antibiotics. This is a variation of the classic correlation/causality fallacy where it is assumed (by idiots) that if two things are related then it follows that one thing causes the other (which is *sometimes* the case but not *always* the case and even when it is the case it’s hard to prove which one causes the other). Viruses mutate, that’s a given, but it’s not assumed by rational thinking people that the mutation is caused directly by the antibiotics because mutations have been observed in controlled environments where no antibiotics are present. What *has* been observed is that when antibiotics are used to remove the population of a particular bug, what remains is likely to be resistant to the antibiotics; otherwise it too would have been wiped out.

This is a crass analogy but if I were to engineer a method of killing everyone who has brown, black or blonde hair (but not ginger) and leave it on earth for a great many years while observing from a secret space station I would return to earth to find a lot of ginger folk. I would not have *turned them all ginger*, I would have merely selectively removed the dark haired and blonde haired people and allowed the gingers to thrive and pass on their ginger genes. It follows that if I wipe out the population of a virus that is not resistant to my antibiotics, whatever is left (if there is anything left) will be resistant to the antibiotics.

So how did they get resistant in the first place? Pretty much the same way we have ginger people, albino people, white people, black people, hairy people, bald people or any of the other myriad of variations in our own population; pure chance. When the genetic information is passed from one generation to another there is often a little bit of scrambling along the way, this is what introduces variations in organisms that reproduce asexually. It’s actually a little more complex in organisms like us that reproduce sexually, our genetic information is a milkshake of our parents’ genetic information along with the odd random mutation, but essentially there is randomness in all living things.

For those with a few cells of grey matter, you might be thinking:

“Oh, shit, that sounds an awful lot like that theory of evolution thingumy!”

Yes. Yes it does, doesn’t it. It’s another observable example of the theory in action. If you can find a better explanation using the scientifically observed information (and can prove it to a point where peers in the scientific community can’t fault your theory) then you should let everyone know by sending your answers to:

I.want.one.of.those@nobelprize.org

When I was a kid studying biology I was introduced to the charming story of the peppered moth. Kids nowadays may not have heard about it because it has been challenged by the witch hunters as flawed science. It’s laughable that the intelligent design crew are criticising the methods of science when their own evidence based practice consists of citing a bad translation of book which is mostly 2500 -3000 years old.

The peppered moth is still the poster child for explaining evolution to the great unwashed and it is a popular choice because the events described all happened in the last century and were observed by reliable recent sources.

For those who don’t know the story of the peppered moth, here’s the synopsis as I remember it:

White peppered moths used to be common across the British Isles and their wings made effective camoflage against the lichens on tree trunks. During the industrial revolution the lichens died out and the tree trunks were darkened by soot in some parts of the country and so the white moths were more easily spotted by predatory birds. At the same time the darkened form of the moth (occasional genetic freaks) were better camoflaged so thrived in numbers. Since the Clean Air Act was passed in 1956 the lichen has returned and the tree trunks have whitened; this has caused a resurgence in the white moth population.

My last encounter with doorstep creationists included their rebuttal of the peppered moth, the creationists told me that it had been dropped because the science behind it was flawed and so it was not to be considered as evidence of evolution. I asked why it had been dropped and for what reason but creationists rarely cite sources, they just recite what their handlers have told them to preach. They were incredulous at the thought that the moths had changed colour and seemed to be unable to grasp the very basics of the evolution theory that they were seeking to disprove.

The science behind the peppered moth has been done again with better methodology and it evidenced what reasonable people already knew, that light moths on dark trees are eaten by predators in greater numbers than dark moths on dark trees. The experiments were conducted with greater controls for other environmental factors and from my reading of the paper it seems a sound assumption that this was the cause of the changes in moth population (of course I don’t expect you to take my word for it, look at the paper by Majerus in 2005 on his Cambridge experiment).

The peppered moth is the chosen favourite explanation of evolution because it cuts through all the clouds of disinformation that the creationists preach and answers the simplest of questions: how do things evolve? The answer is this: as one species is more adapted to surroundings it has an advantage and numbers of that variation will increase. The moths did not change colour any more than we changed from being monkeys to humans in a lifetime, we evolved because genetic mutations and variations produced offspring who where more suited to their environment and they succeeded and passed on their traits to offspring in greater and greater numbers.