Texas is becoming a recurring spectacle of the triumph of anti-intellectualism and ignorance over science and reason. The substance of this spectacle is the Texas Board of Education (BoE) and the standards for public school textbooks. This is a local triumph, but it has widespread implications, as Texas is a major purchaser of textbooks, and so the industry generally caters to the Texas standards.

Last year our attention was drawn to the Texas BoE over the science standards, with particular attention to evolution. One member in particular, Don McLeroy (who was chairman but was removed) entertained (by which I mean frightened) us with phrases such as “someone has to stand up to those experts.” The particular controversy was over whether or not to insert language into the standards that opens the door for teachers to “question evolution,” meaning to insert creationist propaganda as science.

The new language that was put in includes that students must “analyze, evaluate, and critique scientific explanations” based in part on “examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific experiments.” Language was also put in to specifically question the age of the universe, the nature of stasis and change in the fossil record, and the complexity of the cell and information in DNA.

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Today is the last day of the first decade of the 21st century and third millenium. Please don’t get pedantic on me about there not being a year zero and therefore the decades begin with years ending in 1 and not 0. I know the whole story – I choose to count my decades (like most people) from 0-9. The 70s does not include 1980.

It does not seem like we have yet reached a consensus on what to call this past decade – the “aughts”, the “naughties” or what. In any case I would like to muse about science and skepticism over the last 10 years as I did about 2009 earlier this week.

Rather than consider single news items, since we are covering an entire decade I want to write about those big issues that skeptics have dealt with over the last 10 years, and sum up how I think it went. My goal is to offend as many people as possible (not really, but I often feel as if it might as well be).

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In an interview for the SGU Christopher Hitchens told me that typically, after publishing a story, only then do people contact him that he should have spoken to in the first place. My humble blog has nothing of the reach of Hitchens’ writing, but it is still occasionally the case that after posting a blog I am contacted by people I really wish I had spoken to before I finished writing it.

For example, on Friday I discussed the case of Desiree Jennings, the 25 year old woman who claims to have developed dystonia 10 days after receiving the seasonal flu vaccine. I reported that all of the neurological experts who viewed the videos of Jennings that were made public (including me) are of the opinion that she does not have dystonia. Rather, the signs she displays are more typical of a psychogenic movement disorder, and therefore not due to the vaccine.

There is another angle to this story, however, that I was not aware of. I was mostly interested in the vaccine angle, as the Jennings story has been exploited by the anti-vaccine movement to further scare-monger about the flu vaccine. There is also a dystonia community, and they were not happy about the Jennings affair either. In particular, a woman by the name of Rogers Hartmann, who suffers from dystonia, and who has been one of the main faces of dystonia activism to the media, contacted me.

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Robert E. Bartholomew is a social scientist who specializes in mass delusions. He describes them here, in an article he wrote for the NESS, but also in a longer article here for the Skeptical Inquirer and in his several books. About mass delusions he writes:

A collective delusion is the term most commonly used by social scientists to describe the relatively spontaneous spread of false beliefs that do not occur in an organized, institutionalized or ritualistic fashion.

Today, we live in a connected virtual community, and YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, in addition to traditional media, are the medium through which community panic and delusions spread.

At this time there are two slow panics spreading through the community – fear of the H1N1 “swine” flu pandemic, and fear of the vaccine to prevent H1N1 flu. Regarding the pandemic itself  – this is a real threat, it is just not known at this time how severe it will turn out to be. So far it is looking like another seasonal flu in severity, but with some different features, such as a greater tendency to severely affect otherwise healthy individuals.

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Dr. Jay Gordon is a pediatrician to a particular subculture of pseudoscientific celebrities, such as Jenny McCarthy. He lends his MD cred to this community. He also appears, in my opinion, to be a shameless self-promoter – one of those pop professionals (Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil) who has sold his soul for some easy celebrity.

Regardless of his motivations, he has been spouting arrogant nonsense about vaccines for years, essentially arguing that his clinical gut feeling and anecdotal experience trump the actual science. This is exactly the wrong approach to science-based medicine.

In a recent open letter on his website, he adds to the anti-vax chorus advising not to get the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine. It’s almost as if this crowd wants to maximize the morbidity and suffering from this somewhat preventable disease. I know this is not literally true, but their ideologically motivated and confused actions will have the same effect.

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Orac thinks Jake Crosby is just a “crazy mixed up kid.” I am not inclined to be so generous. I have no personal knowledge of Crosby, so all I have to go by is his blogging over at Age of Autism. He recently wrote a two part blog that is nothing more than a malicious conspiracy-mongering grab-bag of logical fallacies, sloppy reasoning, and sloppy journalism – all in the name of anti-vaccine pseudoscience. Maybe he is just an innocent tool, but it really doesn’t matter – he’s responsible for the absurd vitriol he had dumped onto the blogosphere.

Orac has nicely deconstructed the nonsense in Part I of Crosby’s rant. But there is a Part II, and Crosby threw into his follow up a regurgitation of the personal attacks that J.B. Handley had previously made against me.

In the words of the immortal Bugs Bunny, “Of course you know this means war.”

Weaving a Conspiracy

The entire two-part blog is based upon the naive premise that finding tenuous connections among science bloggers, skeptics, and skeptical outlets means that they are all involved in a deep dark conspiracy. Further, that any connection, no matter how tenuous, to any other organization or corporation means that the science blogger is in fact a shill for such organizations. This is conspiracy-mongering at its most childish and uninformed.

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I applaud the recent attempts by the American Academy of Pediatrics to fight back against the anti-vaccine misinformation scare-mongering machine. As part of that goal August is Vaccine Awareness Month. However, this just brought home for me how much better the PR machine is on the anti-vax side than on the side of science. Here we are half way through August and I am just learning it is Vaccine Awareness Month. This is a topic I track quite closely, and blog about frequently. Where was the media blitz? Where was the rallying of troops?

The Good

OK – it’s not all bad. They did put out an open letter with a fair number of authoritative signature. Here is a brief excerpt:

We, the undersigned, support immunizations as the safest, most effective way to control and eradicate infectious diseases. This August, as another National Immunization Awareness Month comes to a close, we are reminded that diseases such as smallpox and polio were once commonplace in the United States. Thanks to vaccinations, we have not seen or experienced many of the infectious diseases that gripped past generations, but other countries have not been so fortunate and outbreaks continue in the United States.

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I have been critical of the Huffington Post’s anti-scientific editorial stance. Since the beginning of this online news source it has been a home to the anti-vaccination movement, featuring articles and blogs by David Kirby, Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carey, and RFK Jr. The health section of the the HuffPo is largely composed of credulous promotion of unscientific health claims and gross misinformation. In fact, this has led me to criticize the HuffPo’s de facto  “war on science.”

Recently Dr. Rahul K. Parikh has written an excellent criticism of the Huffington Post for Salon.com. The full article is worth a read, but here are his main points.

He convincingly demonstrates that the anti-scientific editorial stance of the HuffPo comes directly from its founder, Arianna Huffington. She is hostile toward scientific medicine and enamored of so-called “alternative medicine.” Further, she has recruited health bloggers and editors in a scattered fashion, mostly on her personal whim, and has not taken care to provide even a balanced approach to health reporting, let alone a scientific or responsible one.

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Like many others, I am just returning from The Amazing Meeting 7 – TAM has evolved over the last few years into the premiere meeting of the skeptical movement. I know there are many people who wanted to attend but could not, so for you I will point out that this year the JREF experimented with Ustreaming part of the conference. So you can get a dose of TAM skeptical goodness from the comfort of your computer screen.

But, I must say, for me the best part of these meetings is just being in a room with a thousand skeptics, some of whom are friends that I only get to see once or twice a year, including my fellow Skeptologists. There is also an energy to live meetings that, in my opinion, cannot be matched online.

It also struck me this year that many attendees approached me to ask what they can do to contribute to our efforts and the skeptical movement as a whole. They feel the energy of this growing movement and want to be part of it.

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This is one of those stories that science writers, educators, and journalists will have to write about forever – free energy claims. The story is always the same, only the names and details change. The allure of free energy, it seems, is just too great. There will always be someone to get snared in its beguiling charms, or to exploit it to ensnare others.

This time around the name of the company is Steorn, an Irish company that announced in 2006 that it had created “a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy.” The typical news cycle ensued. The company touted its innovative technology, with a promised demonstration. The press covered the story with a mixture of wonder and skepticism, depending upon the savvy of their journalists and editors. The free energy community starting buzzing – sure that this time the Great Pumpkin would finally makes its appearance.  The scientific and skeptical community scoffed and used the episode as an opportunity to remind the public of the conservation laws, thermodynamics and all that – you cannot get energy from nothing. Period.

It’s one of those few actual laws in science that cannot be violated. It’s just the way nature works. In order to overturn this law something new and fundamental would have to be discovered about the universe, and the burden of proof would be enormous. History is now littered with the stories of those who believed they had found a loop hole in physics (or pretended to) only to crash and burn, or simply fade into obscurity.

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