So it looks like the Montreal authorities are finally taking Dennis Markuze, AKA David Mabus, seriously enough to act.  (Thanks, Greg Laden.)

Markuze has spent the last several years spamming the inboxes and comment threads of various and sundry scientists and bloggers.  He tends to target skeptical, scientific, and atheist folks, although he's not above assuming guilt by association and firing off some of his well-written and insightful prose verbal effluvia to anyone he finds interacting with his usual targets.

A typical Mabus missive might contain death threats, links to sites he thinks are somehow relevant, healthy doses of vulgarity and profanity, and possibly some random sprinkles of batshit crazy raving.  He generally confines himself to cyber-threats, but on at least one occasion he's turned up at a skeptical conference in person.  There's quite a bit of concern that he might eventually act on one of his threats.

One of his more >ahem< interesting threats was that he was going to crawl out of the TV and kill my associate Skippy, rather like the evil ghost girl from Ringu.

I'd have paid good coin to see David Mabus crawl out of a TV...

As it is, that didn't happen.

Mabus is often characterized as a crazy extreme Christian, but I think it's probably more accurate to say that he's a guy with some serious issues who happens to be a Christian.

I hope that the authorities in Montreal are able to build a solid case against DM.  He clearly needs some help before he harms someone.  There should be no shortage of evidence against him, as many folks have forwarded his messages to the police.  (ObDisclosure - my comment and email filters don't let much of his material through.  I kept a couple of emails for a while, but deleted them a while ago.)

I'm sure there will be more news to follow as the folks up north conduct their investigation.

-Jay

Sandra Dutton offers a look at this situation through the eyes of Mary Mae Krebs in her book Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth.

Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth

We meet Mary Mae at a church service in Ohio, circa 1988, where she's singing with her visiting grandmother.   It seems that Mary Mae isn't content to simply accept everything she's told, and she manages to attract some attention to herself by asking uncomfortable questions about the Genesis creation stories.

"The world is six thousand years old.  You look in your Bible."

"Where?"

"Well, Genesis.  Where else?  You got the whole Creation, right there."

Soon as we get home, I get my Bible out and run my finger down every line of Genesis.  I'm looking for six thousand, whether it's in numbers or spelled out in letters.  I go through it twice.  Second time I'm reading with a flashlight in bed.  Only six I find is on the "sixth day," what God created, and in different folks' ages, like Enoch living three hundred and sixty-five  years.

I tell Mama Sunday morning I can't find no six thousand, and she says she don't have time to look, she's got too much work to do. (pg. 12)

Mary Mae's questions and her refusal to let other people think for her provide sources of tension between her and her mother, her pastor, her Sunday school teacher, and her friends.  At various points, she questions a number of issues that she spots in Genesis:

• Light and dark existing before light sources like the sun.
• Varying lengths of generations.
• How all the animals could possibly have fit on the ark, and the logistics associated with their care.

The answers and explanations given to her tend to be in the vein of  "you just have to have faith" or "if the Bible says it, it must be true", but these don't deter her.  I think that's admirable, and anyone who has ever had a child respond to every answer with "why?" should be able to understand Mary Mae's persistence.

At school, Mary Mae's teacher, Miss Sizemore, is teaching her students about fossils, and the ancient age of the Earth, and how the rock layers visible where the local highways are cut through the mountains represent different geological periods.  She finds herself fascinated by the trilobite fossils that she finds in the rocks exposed by an excavation at the school yard and in other places, and she comes to realize that explanations like "God put them there to test us" just don't wash.

A large measure of my interest in this book flows from the fact that I have no life experiences to compare with Mary Mae's.  I grew up as a liberal Catholic, and (try as I might) I cannot recall any time in my school-age years where I learned something in (public) school that caused tensions at home or at church.  I was, of course, familiar with the Genesis creation stories (although it was much later before I realized there were two stories instead of just one), and the story of Noah's flood (again, the actual text suggests two versions of the story), but my Sunday school classes never tackled them in any detail (which I now consider to be a failing...).  For me, the science-vs-religion question is really a no-brainer:  we learn about the observable world by observing it, and science is the framework for making sense of those observations.

As I consider Mary Mae's conundrum, I have to cast it in terms of what I expect the people around her to say and do.  Through this preconceptual lens, Dutton's characters serve their purposes quite well - Miss Sizemore as the voice of secular science for example, or Mary Mae's mother presenting the extremely conservative religious perspective - although the only supporting character with much complexity is Granny (who really serves as an older and wiser version of Mary Mae's own conscience).  While there might be a small risk that a reader could be trapped by stereotypes, Dutton made a smart choice to avoid overdeveloping the ancillary characters beyond Mary Mae's perspective.

The book touches on a number of related topics, and Dutton exposes several important ones just enough to spark some discussion:

• Kids in public schools being given alternative work when the curriculum conflicts with religious beliefs.
• Parents pulling their kids out of school for homeschooling and realizing that it's not as easy as they expected.¹
• Parents of different religious backgrounds deciding how to raise their children.
• People believing whatever their pastor happens to tell them on any given day.

In the end, Mary Mae and her family come to a compromise position that, from the perspective of a ten-year-old is probably sufficient.  In many real-life situations similar to Mary Mae's, some sort of compromise may be the best anyone can hope for, and I think Dutton realizes that.

But it's also a little troubling, in my view, for a couple of reasons.

The first has to do with the audience of the book.  A few obvious candidates are:

• Kids who are in the same situation as Mary Mae - they're learning things at school that contradict what they've been taught at home or in church, and they're trying to figure out a way to reconcile these views.
• Parents of such kids who are trying to deal with challenges to their belief system.
• Pastors/clergy or teachers of such kids who are looking for ways to help the kids work through the issues.

The compromise position that the book takes means that a lot of parents (who want their kids to believe the same way as they do) and clergy (whose livelihood depends on people believing certain things) won't find the book useful - they may want books that reinforce their beliefs.  The kids who are in situations most like Mary Mae's are also likely to be kids from families and churches with very conservative religious beliefs for whom compromises simply aren't acceptable.

Teachers of such kids may be justifiably reluctant to suggest that children challenge the beliefs of their parents.  Teachers that do so may well find themselves looking for work.

That leaves the kids themselves, and I'm honestly not sure how many kids would find this book on their own.  That's a shame, because a clever child reading about Mary Mae's journey could come away much  better prepared to engage with their parents about questions of belief.

There is one other audience for the book, and I think it's probably a large one (though difficult to count):  close friends or relatives of families with Mary Maes who might find themselves involved in the situation.

So, in effect, Dutton's compromise solution to the problem at hand might have the unintended consequence of keeping the book out of the hands of many of the people who would benefit the most from it.  I think that's just a reflection of the nature of the subject and not any fault of hers.

The other reason I find the compromise troubling is that I don't think that it is a stable equilibrium.  This is beyond the scope of the book, but I think it's relevant to mention.

We leave Mary Mae at a point where she's been told that there are some gaps in the Biblical narratives, and science can step in to fill those gaps.  If her interests never went beyond trilobite fossils, that might be sufficient.  But is that likely?  I'm not at all sure that it is.

At some point, she'd learn some world history and find out that Egypt had a well-documented culture and civilization that continued moving right along during the time when, according to the Bible, the world was under water and Noah's family was all that was left of humanity.  She might learn of solid evidence of human habitation in the Americas dating back well over 11,000 years - older than the Earth by some Biblical reckoning.

Maintaining a claim of Biblical truth vis-a-vis science and history becomes an increasingly untenable goal, unless "science" and "history" are redefined to bend around the Bible.

At the end of the day, Dutton has put together a sensitive, gentle story that validates the message that it's OK for kids to ask questions and look outside of the beliefs they've been raised in.  That's the first step of many.  I would hope that the book can find its way into the hands of families facing circumstances like Mary Mae's, and that it might help nurture the spark of curiosity that all children seem to have.

-Jay

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¹I am of two minds about homeschooling.  I can see how, if it's done properly, it could be rewarding for both parents and children, but I've seen far more instances of it being done poorly than of it being done well.  That's all I'll say about it now.  It's a topic for another time, perhaps.

With that out of the way, I'll provide some background.

The book in question is about a fundamentalist Christian¹ girl trying to sort out her love of science (specifically her interest in evolution) and her religious background.

This is a topic of personal significance to me for several reasons, but the one I'll focus on here is that nobody ever approaches the evolution/creationism issue from the perspective of the kids.

Pretty much every forum or blog out there that routinely covers the topic deals with it from an adult perspective.  When kids enter into the discussion at all, it's most often (these days) in the context of discussion about the Dover trial or of creationist school board candidates and textbook selections in Texas², or somehow in connection with Ken Ham's Creation Museum.

While the adult-side discussions of evolution and creationism (and the broader discussions of science, religion, and whether or not they can coexist) are certainly important, even crucial, it's all too easy to forget that on the other side of the court cases and the school board elections and the museum exhibits are tens or hundreds of thousands (or more)  of kids who are directly impacted by the outcomes of those events.  In the U.S., most of those children will be from religious backgrounds that are at best ambivalent towards evolution and at worst outright hostile to the concept³.

Some of these kids may respond to material about evolution by simply ignoring it, or learning enough to pass a test, or challenging it with what they may believe are strong, well-reasoned objections that they read in a book or on a website somewhere⁴, but some of them will start to engage with the material, and that engagement will lead to some questions that may well fly headlong into the face of religious doctrine and foundational beliefs.

This is a difficult enough situation for adults to work through, and it's easy to suppose that it's much harder for kids, since the parents and family members that they would normally go to for answers might not be receptive to discussing the subject - few topics are more capable of dividing people than religious disagreements - but it's a situation that I suspect is more common than people might think, particularly as increasingly unfettered access to the internet means that more children will be exposed to different points of view than they have been in the past.

So, all that being said, I was intrigued by the opportunity to review a book that deals with the evolution/creationism issue from the perspective of a child trying to sort things out.  It should be interesting.

-Jay

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¹Still wishing there was a word that was equally descriptive but less pejoratively loaded...

²Why Texas, you ask? It seems that Texas is a huge influence on textbook publishers because of the number of students in the state. Texas buys a lot of textbooks. Textbook publishers want to sell textbooks to Texas. Therefore curriculum decisions in Texas can influence the textbooks that are used in many other states.

³I'm operating on the assumption that parents teach their kids according to their own beliefs, and based on the numbers shown here.

⁴When I was active on some of the E/C forums, it wasn't uncommon to see the same arguments pop up nearly word-for-word in many different threads. Once you're familiar with them, it's even possible to tell where they originally came from.

The article and video hit a number of frequent objections to evolution.  Actually, it would be more correct to say that the article and video address a number of objections to a strawman caricature of evolution.

The distinction is important because more often than not, the vocal evolution deniers out there will start their sales pitch by claiming that "evolution says <something>", and typically that <something> is either something that evolution doesn't "say" at all, or else "says" quite a bit differently than the denier suggests.  Some examples:

• Have you ever seen a dog give birth to a cat?
• Evolution says that man came from monkeys, so why are there still monkeys?
• DNA evidence proves that all humans came from one woman!
• Most mutations are harmful and would kill an organism!

The first two, of course, are the same concept phrased slightly differently, and reflect at least three misunderstandings - that individual organisms evolve directly into other individual organisms like some sort of Pokémon,  that one species will cease to exist once it gives rise to a new species, and that humans are descended from monkeys.  (There's a part in the video starting at 5:33 that covers these with a nice little graphic.)

The third one is a distortion of the concept of the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA). We commonly see the term applied to the unfortunately named idea of a Mitochondrial Eve - the most recent common female ancestor of all living humans.¹

The reason that it's a distortion is that the MRCA depends on what group you're looking at.  The MRCA of all living humans is not required to be the MRCA of all humans that have ever lived:

(From Wikipedia)

The MRCA of everyone alive today could thus have co-existed with a large human population, most of whom either have no living descendants today or else are ancestors of a subset of people alive today. The existence of an MRCA does therefore not imply the existence of a population bottleneck or first couple.

At this point, some alert individual might assert that even if you expand the pool to all humans that have ever lived, you still necessarily end up back at a first couple, but you'd be wrong because there isn't a requirement that the female MRCA and the male MRCA live at the same time.  Think about it.  If our notional female MRCA had children by two different men, and descendants of all of those children survived to the present day, then neither of her partners would be the male MRCA - her father would be.  (There's also the little matter of identifying exactly where you draw the line between human and non-human.  For a very relevant graphical demonstration, see here.)

The last point is simply untrue.  Most mutations aren't fatal.  Most are neutral.  The fatal ones tend to get removed from the population pretty quickly for obvious reasons.  Neutral ones can just sort of drift around in the gene pool without any particular consequences.  Beneficial ones tend to increase in frequency.²

We could go on with this, and we'd see the same thing over and over again.  That suggests to me that the evolution deniers out there aren't at all interested in addressing the subject on the basis of facts and evidence, but rather seek to turn it into an exercise in emotional manipulation.³

The lesson here, as always, is to do some fact checking when you run across references to cats birthing dogs and such.  If nothing else, ask yourself  "if this is such a simple and obvious flaw in evolution, then why on Earth does anyone still accept it?"   Your answer should be "maybe this supposed flaw has already been addressed, or maybe whoever proposed it doesn't understand evolution very well."

-Jay

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¹So named because mitochondria within cells come from the mother - sperm lack mitochondria. Similarly, we can talk about a Y-chromosomal Adam.

²But remember that beneficial depends on the environment, and may be a tradeoff.  Conspicuous physical displays may increase the chances of finding a mate, but may also increase the chances of getting eaten.

³Ken Ham is perhaps the current master of this approach. What the man actually knows about evolution is unlikely to fill a thimble, so he takes the fear-mongering approach of linking evolution to everything that is bad in the world. Ham also attracts attention for his horribly distorted theology. James McGrath recently had a post up summarizing some of the criticism Ham has been receiving from within the evangelical community of late.

I'm looking forward to this show - I haven't been terribly impressed with the Discovery Channel for several years now, but I've read enough of Phil's work to know that he"ll do this right, and it will be fun.

If, by some chance, you're not familiar with Phil, click over to his blog at the link above and browse around. 

-Jay

The main idea here is that ideas interact with each other to produce new ideas, and those new ideas drive progress. 

Enjoy.

-Jay

That didn't take long, and only involved what? Half a dozen or so long-time SB bloggers quitting in disgust and taking steps to move elsewhere?

Some of those folks may come back, some won't.  It probably doesn't matter, really.  Blogs move around on the internet with great regularity, and people with interesting things to say at SEED will still be people with interesting things to say somewhere else, whether it be under a different collective or at an independent location.  (As an aside, I realize that SEED pays their bloggers.  I have no idea what the particulars of those arrangements might be, but it's reasonable to say that writers that leave would be losing some income.)

Now to see what happens next...

(UPDATE: Carl Zimmer has an excellent post up at The Loom discussing this.  I've found the comments to be particularly interesting, since a number of the major ScienceBlogs names have shown up and weighed in.)

-Jay

ScienceBlogs (owned by SEED Media) has done a strange thing indeed. 

They have launched a new blog called Food Frontiers.   New blogs in and of themselves are not particularly unusual, but this one is. 

It's produced by PepsiCo.  Content is provided by PepsiCo.  Comments are moderated by a PepsiCo PR rep. 

This move has, predictably, resulted in much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of long-time SB writers and commenters, and with good reason.

SB is a collection of independent writers who exercise editorial control over their articles.  SEED owns (and can advertise on) the top of the page and the right side, but the authors control everything else.  The writers also benefit (or suffer, as the case may be) from the association with the other writers under the SB umbrella. 

Food Frontiers causes problems with both of those.

First, PepsiCo now has what is effectively running ad-space on a site that is not only indexed by Google as news, but is a destination site for people looking for information on a variety of current science-related topics.  Including nutrition.  PepsiCo is not an impartial player in the arena of nutrition.  Even if they take great pains to present balanced and relevant information, there will always be a nigh-unavoidable veneer of a conflict of interest covering everything they post. 

Second, the above veneer bleeds over onto other writers.  A heavily commented post at Food Frontiers will turn up in SEEDs popular/current post feeds, which show up on every blog.  I can understand why a number of the SB writers are very concerned about guilt-by-association issues.

PepsiCo and SEED could take some steps to address concerns - Food Frontiers could embed additional disclaimers within articles and on their page, much like MSNBC does when it presents articles dealing with Microsoft or NBC. 

They also need to be very clear on their comment policy.  The policy stated by the PepsiCo editor is:

I’ll be moderating the comments that come through here on a daily basis and wanted to let everyone know that PepsiCo is happy to be joining the conversation about the food industry’s role in addressing global health changes. We want to hear from you, even those of you who might disagree with our positions. The only comments I’ll reject are ones that are defamatory or profane. Everything else will be fair game, so keep it clean and I look forward to spirited discussions here on this site.

Not bad, although I'm a little concerned about the word defamatory.  That seems a little too broad at first blush, and there are plenty of examples in the blogosphere where authors routinely quash comments that disagree with their positions.  If PepsiCo does that, they'll find any credibility or good will they cultivate at SB in the dumpster faster than yesterday's leftover sushi.

I'm not going to abandon the ScienceBlogs that I read (and I'll follow those that jump ship to where ever they happen to land).  I'll occasionally read Food Frontier to see how PepsiCo managing the place.  I'll also be watching for increased corporate influence there. 

We'll see what happens.

-Jay

It's almost impossible these days to avoid encountering conspiracy theories.  They're everywhere.  President Obama isn't an American citizen!  (Or maybe he's the antichrist...)  Vaccines cause autism and Big Pharma is covering it up!  9/11 was an inside job! The moon landing was faked!

It doesn't take much to start a conspiracy theory.  The required ingredients are few:

1. A fairly complex situation
2. Details that are outside of the expertise of most people
3. Distrust of the authorities involved in the situation
4. Creativity

Let's look at the question of President Obama's birth.  He was born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father.  His birth certificate tells us all we need to know to settle the question. He's as much a natural born U.S. citizen as I am.  The question takes about five minutes to resolve.

Only it isn't resolved for some.  Details vary, but the common elements of the Obama "birther" conspiracies are that he isn't a natural born citizen of the U.S. and is therefore unqualified to be President.

That's crazy talk.

Let's think about what would have to be true if there were a conspiracy to shim a foreign national into the office of the U.S. President, which is, after all, what we're really talking about.

1. Sometime before 1961 when Obama was born, some person or group of people would have had to come up with the idea of getting an agent elected President. Richard Condon published The Manchurian Candidate in 1959, which has a somewhat similar plot, so I'll concede this point.¹
2. Obama would have had to have been identified as a potential candidate.  It's important to start building the cover story early in order to minimize the risk of blowing the story.  Everyone that knew his parents before he was born would have to be in on the plot at least to the extent that they knew to keep their mouths shut.  The likelihood of a large number of people effectively keeping a secret like that for close to 50 years is, well, vanishingly small.
3. He'd have had to have been aimed towards a political career from the very start.  Having your potential Presidential shill decide that he wants to be  a lumberjack would never do.  Ensuring that his family, teachers, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances all steered him towards a political career would again require that a huge number of people be complicit in the effort.
4. Ensuring that he got elected would be a major task, particularly since he'd need previous political experience.  Elections would have to be rigged (in his case) at the state level so that he could being to gain national recognition.  Getting someone elected is hard work.  Ensuring that the someone in question gets elected while not calling attention to the effort is harder, and again requires that a lot of people keep quiet.

The bottom line is that to run a conspiracy like this, you've got to ensure that an amazingly large number of people keep quiet.  If you've ever heard someone at a bar trying to pick up anyone, you'll appreciate the difficulty of keeping one person - let alone maybe thousands - quiet.

You also need a reason for undertaking this effort in the first place.   This could get a little tricky.  In the years around Obama's birth, the main Snorklewhacker in the U.S. bedroom closet was Communism.

A Giant Purple Snorkelwhacker

It is difficult to imagine that anyone could have foreseen the sorts of issues facing the U.S. today clearly enough to tailor a candidate to manipulate those issues (in either direction).  Yet, if Obama wasn't tailored to address contemporary issues, then it doesn't make much sense to go ahead and get him elected.   You could posit that perhaps there were many different potential candidates being cultivated over the last several decades, each carefully molded with a worldview and priorities that would make them useful in a variety of different world climates, but then you've taken an already implausible conspiracy and multiplied it.  My head hurts just trying to sort this out for a simple blog post example.

This is generally the way conspiracies like this go - they require a lot of highly implausible, fairly convoluted things to take place, the failure of any one of which would doom the whole enterprise.  Perhaps more importantly, they require the assumption that a large number of people can keep quiet, which is, well, not bloody likely.

Now, conspiracy theories like this have some general appeal in that they usually aren't personal, and for the most part don't impact individuals on a day-to-day.  There's no immediately obvious personal consequence to me if Obama's birth certificate is bogus.  A conspiracy theory like this can, in principle, be debunked, because the salient facts of the matter can be explained and clarified.

There are, of course, conspiracy theories that hit closer to home.  The example I'll use comes from a post I put up a while back in which a local political candidate was making claims that the government was attempting to control her mind with satellites, drones, and her television.  Theories like this involve everything that the others do, plus they add in the requirement of some degree of paranoia.

Thus, in addition to some seriously flawed logic and ignorance being involve, we now have the issue of psychological disorders to consider.  Conspiracies like this are much more difficult.  While the facts of the situation can be addressed - for example the extreme implausibility of controlling someone through drones hovering over their home - the real challenge in this situation is in encouraging the people harboring delusions of this ilk to get help.

That said, the general sort of questions one must ask when evaluating the likelihood of any conspiracy theory are very similar to the sort of questions one must ask when evaluating the likelihood of any extraordinary claim:

• What alternative explanations are there for the given observed facts?
• How likely are those alternatives in comparison to the extraordinary explanation?
• What other things would need to be true (or false) if the extraordinary explanation is true?

You get the idea.

Now if you'll excuse me, there are a couple of gentlemen in black suits and sunglasses at the door...

-Jay
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¹Two direct film adaptations have been made from Condon's book - the first in 1962, the second in 2004.

Blum, who describes herself as a lapsed chemist, has put together a fascinating book that is equal parts crime drama, chemistry lesson, and history book.

Blum follows the development of forensics as a legitimate discipline in New York City during the Prohibition Era by Charles Morris and Andrew Gettler.

Much of the work of Morris and Gettler involved developing new or more reliable techniques to detect the numerous poisons that tended to turn up in people of the era.  Apart from the various adulterants in Prohibition booze (kerosene, mercury, and Lysol were known to turn up, and as Prohibition dragged on, the Government actively developed new formulas to ensure that industrial alcohol couldn't be used to make booze), such delightful poisons such as cyanides, carbon monoxide, radium, and thallium were used to put spouses, lovers, business associates, and random people into the ground.   An interesting observation that I hadn't made before but should have is that a lot of poisons are deadly because they chemically resemble things that are supposed to be in our bodies but are more reactive.  This allows the poisons to interfere with normal physiological processes - for example carbon monoxide binds to hemoglobin in the blood more tightly than oxygen - with predictably deadly results.

Blum's research into the details of each substance allows her to give detailed descriptions of the effects of each poison, and her blunt narration of the techniques necessary to isolate those poisons from cadavers would make for interesting dinner conversation (apparently the first step is often to mince brain tissue into a paste...).

Her account of the political obstacles Norris and Gettler had to deal with just to obtain and maintain funding for their department make it seem all the more remarkable that they were able to accomplish the groundbreaking work that they did.  Norris used many of his personal resources to provision and operate his laboratory.

To give much more detail would be to ruin the fun of the book.  I highly recommend The Poisoner's Handbook to anyone with an interest in medical detective work or in the details of early 20^th Century American history.  For those who might want a rating, I give this book five skulls and crossbones out of five.

-Jay