Would You Buy A Product That Tells You It Doesn't Work? Of Course You Would!

Whenever I go to a drug store, I feel a renewed sense of amazement. Consider the following two propositions:

1. You go to a drug store because you either have a health problem, or you want to prevent a health problem. (For our purposes, we're ignoring convenience needs like greeting cards, beauty products, food, etc.)

2. You want to buy a product that will fix or prevent your problem.

Those seem like reasonable assumptions to me. And yet, many of the products say right on the label, "This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease."

But wait, I thought you wanted something that treats, cures, or prevents a disease. Then why would you buy something that tells you it doesn't?

And it's not like it's just you. The sheer number of them testifies that lots of people buy them! Anecdotal experience bears this out, like when it's flu season and your neighbor says it's time to start taking a product that you know says it's not intended to prevent disease. I guess people just want to feel like they are doing something--anything--and are willing to pay for it.

We humans are weird.

By the way, I just want to let you know that I'll be starting up a new retirement investment fund. It's not intended to provide you any retirement income, but it will make you feel like you are preparing for retirement. I look forward to your business.

Notes:

For more, see FDA 101: Dietary Supplements

See also my previous post with a literally true title, There is More Regulation of Your Dog's Medicine than Your Dietary Supplements

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The Creationification of America

In this strange era of 'fake news,' where truth is discounted as lies, and lies are accepted as truth [1], I've found myself wondering how we got to this point. There are many factors, to be sure. However, my mind has been drawn to the long history of creationism. Perhaps a quick review is in order.

Although belief in a creator God extends back millenia, creationism in the modern context refers to a reactive movement within conservative religions to scientific fields dealing with the origin of the earth and life on it. It is historically rooted in fundamentalist Christianity, and in the U.S. the two are usually associated together [2]. A century ago, the Seventh-day Adventist, George McCready Price, pioneered creationist arguments against evolution and geology and published widely. Coming from a somewhat marginalized Christian tradition, his influence was less than it might otherwise have been. (It was enough, however, that Joseph Fielding Smith cited him in his own writings [3].)

John Whitcomb and Henry Morris are credited with successfully injecting modern creationism into Christianity with the publication of their book, The Genesis Flood in 1961. Whitcomb and Morris built on the foundation that Price had laid to argue that, not only is the Bible inerrant and accurate in its description of Creation and the Flood, but that science itself supports the Bible and that scientific arguments to the contrary are based on false and biased presuppositions. This basic thesis has been the dominant theme of creationist arguments ever since, and their writings have labored to show the scientific legitimacy of creationism. And while most of the court battles over the role of creationism in public education were settled decades ago, support for creationism remains strong, as evidenced by two creationist-themed parks in Kentucky.

As a result of this history, generations of conservative Christians have been trained to believe that mainstream scientists hold to ideas that are transparently stupid and are therefore either themselves evil, or dupes of the forces of evil. Adding insult to injury, the purveyors of these ridiculous ideas are upheld by public institutions and even the State. This training has put these Christians at odds with an increasingly secular culture--not just (or even primarily) in terms of how one should act in the world, but in understanding how the world works. Arguments over the age of the earth may seem quaint and unimportant, but they quickly impact decisions of which authorities we should trust and with whom we identify. (That, to me, explains why so many conservative Christians are also hostile to the concept of anthropogenic global warming, where virtually no theological beliefs are at stake.)

We may worry about the way in which media outlets, reinforced by social media, have divided us into bubbles of alternative facts and realities. And we may wonder how Evangelical Christians (and some of their fellow travelers) can have such strong support for a President from whom falsehoods so freely flow. However, if the history of creationism has shown anything it is that the very categories of truth and falsehood are contestable because they exist within a context of assumptions and prior beliefs [4]. Moreover, the resilient creationist bubble has existed for a long time. Perhaps we should not be that surprised that the insurgent bubble has expanded to other areas of science, economics, and any other subject where prevailing authority runs counter to group identity. Facts, especially complicated facts, are often no match for a simple story [5], and persecution narratives and conspiracy theories spread easily.

When it comes to your cause, accuracy and consistency is of less importance than utility. That's one of the lessons of creationism, and a lot of people seem to have learned that lesson.


Notes:
1. Actually, this problem is as old as humanity. I think it's just more noticeable right now.
2. Christian creationism has been imported and adapted into the Islamic world as well.
3. James E. Talmage tried in vain to warn him against accepting Price as an authority on geology.
4. If that sounds like the kind of relativism that conservative Christians hate so much, welcome to one of the ironies of creationism.
5. Creationism is but one manifestation of this very human problem.

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Mules: On Confusing Outcomes with Inputs

While surfing the Internet I came across a new scientific article describing progress in characterizing the donkey genome. This reminded me of a brief conversation I had last year at church where someone asserted that the fact that mules (the product of mating horses and donkeys) are sterile is evidence that, in contrast to evolution, God created various kinds of animals that reproduce after their own kind [1].

I don't know where the notion that mules represent evidence against evolution came from, but it has been around for a long time. For example, Joseph Fielding Smith wrote in Man, His Origin and Destiny (1954):

There are various breeds of dogs, but they do not breed with cats. The cat family, composed of the domestic animal and the wild varieties, may mix. The horse and the ass are not of the same family and while man has been able to obtain from them the mule, the mule is rudely and humorously spoken of as being "without pride of ancestry and hope of posterity." The Lord decreed that they should not mix. This determining factor is a sufficient answer to organic evolution [2].

What's strange about this is that reproductive isolation is the expected and required outcome of evolution, not a barrier to it. It's a confusion of the outcome with the input [3]. Reproductive isolation occurs through a variety of mechanisms and sends the genetics of two proto-species on their own trajectory. Once separated, the two gene pools may eventually go on to further sub-divide through reproductive isolation. One species becomes two, then two become four, and so on. At some point, descendants of a lineage can no longer interbreed with their cousins in the other lineage and the genetic isolation is complete. Along the way, the different pools accumulate different variants, leading to differences in shape, color, physiology, and lifestyle. At a simplified level, this how evolution works and how the variety of life on earth has come to pass.

Just limiting ourselves to currently living animals we can see reproductive isolation in various stages of progress, and it's the reason that defining what constitutes a species can be difficult. For example, giraffe and okapai are separate species with a common ancestor of about 11.5 million years ago. But based on genetics there is now good reason to consider giraffe as four different species (even though they can interbreed in captivity) with a few sub-species, rather than one species with nine to eleven sub-species. (This is the kind of thing taxonomists fight over.)

Back to my conversation, it was a group setting and the topic of evolution was a distraction from the business at hand, so I didn't get much chance to respond. Next time I hope to be quick enough to turn the tables and say something like, "the fact that mules are sterile is evidence for evolution, not against it." That will probably cause some surprise, and will hopefully lead to a deeper discussion.


Notes:
1. I have addressed this issue before (link). Also, did you know that the phrase "after their own kind" is not found in the scriptures? Also, there have been a few documented cases of fertile mules.

2. In fairness to President Smith, the field of genetics came into existence around the time that he became an apostle, and the molecular structure of DNA had only recently been determined when this was published. Biology has come a long way since then.

3. This is really a generalization about animals. New species of plants have been known to form through hybridization. And all kinds of things happen with microbes.

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We All Fall

We each had our own fall.

The first, almost immediate condition the fall introduced was a universal physical death. Adam and Eve became mortal through their choice and passed such mortality on to the human family. Whether, as James Talmage thought, eating the forbidden fruit introduced an actual substance that altered the human physiology, making mortal that which was immortal; whether God otherwise effected some other transformation of Adam and Eve’s immortal condition to human; or whether the story is allegorical of the human family’s descent from their pre-mortal abode to earthly, bodily habitations, the fall represents for Mormons the portal though which all humankind pass from God’s presence to a state of vulnerability and physical separation from God.

- Givens, Terryl L. (2014). Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity, p. 192

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How the Creation Accounts Differ

One of the first questions in Lesson 3 (The Creation) of the Sunday school Old Testament manual is, "How do the accounts found in Genesis, Moses, and Abraham differ from each other?" I'm glad you asked! Unfortunately, the brief answer provided in the manual is woefully inadequate. There are lots of subtleties that escape even a careful reading. We miss them, in part, because we have been conditioned by familiarity to not see things staring us right in the face. We also lack contextual understanding about their composition. I thought I would lay the differences I have collected over the years. You may find that this side-by-side comparison is helpful for following along.

Who does the creating?
Genesis 1: God (Hebrew = Elohim)
Genesis 2: LORD God = Jehovah God (Hebrew = Yahweh Elohim)
Moses 2: God
Moses 3: Lord God
Abraham 4-5: the Gods (likely reflecting the literal Hebrew meaning of elohim, which is plural)

What is the overall story?
Genesis: God creates the heavens and the earth, and life on it, in six days and rests on the seventh day. Then for some reason we get a second story where the LORD God creates man, vegetation, animals, and then woman [1].

Moses: God creates the heavens and the earth in six days and rests on the seventh day. Then we are told that everything previously mentioned was a spiritual creation, and on the seventh day the Lord God creates man, vegetation, animals, then then woman.

Abraham: The Gods create the inanimate portions of the heavens and the earth (expanse, oceans, dry land, lights in the sky) and prepare the earth to bring forth life, in six days/times. At the beginning of the seventh time, the Gods carry out their plan for creating life by creating man, vegetation, woman, and then animals.

Elements unique to The Book of Moses:
- The account is changed to first person from God's point of view
- God speaks to his Only Begotten
- Sea and water are singular in some cases
- The sun and the moon are specifically named
- 'green herb' becomes 'clean herb'
- Moses 2:4: "I, the Lord God, made the heaven and the earth." The order of heaven and earth is reversed to match the reference earlier in the same verse.
- The mist is called forth by God
- Extended explanation of spiritual creation
- Man is the 'first flesh' or first creation
- Animals have the breath of life
- "This I know now is bone of my bones..."

Elements unique to the Book of Abraham
- Everything is done by 'the Gods'
- Different vocabulary including: organized, empty and desolate, brooding, and expanse. Some of these reflect Sexias's Hebrew grammar, which Joseph had studied.
- In Abraham 4:1 and 5:1, 'heavens' is plural, which reflects the plural Hebrew word
- References to both days and 'time'
- 'breath of life' is replaced with 'spirit'
- The rivers in Eden are not named
- Reference to Kolob and the Lord's time
- Woman is created before the animals
- "This was bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; now she shall be called Woman..."
- "and for Adam, there was found an help meet for him." Since woman was already created, the word 'not' has been removed.

The Harmonization Instinct
I want to go back to what I said about familiarity causing us to miss things. The harmonization instinct is very strong within Mormonism and we sometimes have difficulty allowing passages to speak for themselves because we want them to say what they are supposed to say. For example, the Abraham 4 and 5 chapter headings say that the plans for the six days of creation are set forth and then implemented. However, a careful reading shows that there is actually a mixture of creating and preparation going on. The Gods actually do create light, create the expanse, create dry land, and organize the luminaries. The planning part has to do with the eventual creation of life. The six days describe the preparation of conditions for life to be created, and then life is created in the following chapter, beginning with Adam.

Similarly, Moses describes six days of spiritual creation, followed by physical creation on the seventh day. Although this runs against the grain of mainstream interpretation, several elements of the story fall in to place when the account is read that way, including the fact that Adam is described as the 'first flesh.' And as a matter of fact, that appears to have been the predominant (or at least an acceptable) interpretation around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century (see First Flesh). This interpretation also makes sense of the following passage from the Doctrine and Covenants:

Q. What are we to understand by the sounding of the trumpets, mentioned in the 8th chapter of Revelation?
A. We are to understand that as God made the world in six days, and on the seventh day he finished his work, and sanctified it, and also formed man out of the dust of the earth, even so, in the beginning of the seventh thousand years will the Lord God sanctify the earth...
(D&C 77:12)

If you are thinking, "Well, that's not how it's described in the temple or in Church publications," you are making my point. We tend to force all four creation accounts (Genesis, Moses, Abraham, temple) to tell the same story rather than taking them on their own terms. And that's why we are likely to miss subtle differences. Our challenge, rather than trying to homogenize them, is to tease out why they are different.


Notes:
1. The explanation from scholars of the Hebrew Bible is two separate stories have been merged together. The change in God's name is one prominent clue.

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Conspiracy Theories are Sweatpants of the Mind

There's a classic scene in Seinfeld where Jerry admonishes George for wearing sweatpants.

You're telling the world, "I give up. I can't compete in normal society, I'm miserable, so I might as well be comfortable."

This scene came to mind recently as I thought about people who trade in conspiracy theories. I think they are sending a signal rather similar to that of the sweatpants:

I give up. It's too hard to keep up with the complexities of modern society. I'm miserable and don't know who to believe, so I might as well be comfortable and adopt conspiracy theories.

Of course, this is not a denial that people sometimes conspire together for ill. However, your typical conspiracy theory typically throws prior probability and simpler explanations to the wind, and postulates the cooperation of many different people who would otherwise have little reason to cooperate. Conspiracy theories also tend to be unfalsifiable in that any evidence raised against them is incorporated as part of the conspiracy.

There are several ironies that come from conspiracy theories. First is the enhancement of tragedy for those affected. The awfulness of having your first grader murdered in his/her classroom, for example, is bad enough. But to then have people publicly accuse you of having faked their death, and harass you about it (as has happened with Sandy Hook), is a supremely cruel compounding of horror. Second, is that conspiracy theories are rather unhelpful in addressing the problem at hand. Simply put, when you wildly misdiagnose the problem your solutions will range somewhere between unhelpful and harmful. Finally, to bring us back to the title of this post, conspiracy theories give their adherents the illusion of knowledge and understanding. Moreover, in their attempt to reach the REAL truth, sincere adherents of conspiracy theories are actually manipulated by those who cynically foster the theories for gain.

I was already developing this metaphor and had started composing this post when current events added another to the genre. What kind of sweatpants does your mind have to be wearing in order to take this seriously, and what should we think about those who composed it and spread it? (See here for why it's total garbage.)

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Remember Planet Nibiru? It's (Not) Back!

Some people never learn. The Washington Post reports that a poor NASA scientist is having to field questions about a mystery planet known as Nibiru or Planet X, and predictions that it will cause catastrophe for Earth tomorrow (having failed to do so in September and October). According to the article,

Nibiru theories have by now become so abundant that if you spend long enough on YouTube or PlanetXNews.com you can find an apocalypse scheduled for just about any given day of the week.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, that's because this isn't the first time the fictitious planet has caused concern. In 2011 I highlighted the same hysteria. At the time, the prediction was for destruction in 2012, and it's the same scientist having to reassure people that this is not a thing. I don't pay as much attention to this kind of crap as I used to, but I figured I might as well document it again for blog posterity.

For more, see my previous post: 2012 Cosmophobia

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Why It's Hard for Me to Get On Board with the Pro-Life Movement

Few topics in politics get as heated as abortion, and the Church is pretty clear about its policy on the matter. Why, then, do I find it hard to get on board with the Pro-Life movement?

Before I jump into my list, I should stipulate that I don't follow the issue closely, and I'm not steeped in the various legal nuances. I'm just giving my perspective as a regular guy who happens to also be a Mormon and a scientist. Also, I said that the Church's position on the matter is pretty clear, but let's make it explicit. The Church opposes abortion but recognizes three classes of exceptions, as stated in Handbook 2:

The Church opposes elective abortion for personal or social convenience. Members must not submit to, perform, arrange for, pay for, consent to, or encourage an abortion. The only possible exceptions are when:

1. Pregnancy resulted from forcible rape or incest.
2. A competent physician determines that the life or health of the mother is in serious jeopardy.
3. A competent physician determines that the fetus has severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth.

Even these exceptions do not justify abortion automatically. Abortion is a most serious matter and should be considered only after the persons responsible have consulted with their bishops and received divine confirmation through prayer.

I support the Church's position, while recognizing that in a diverse society there will be disagreement about where the line of acceptability should be drawn. Nevertheless, I believe that any public policy regarding abortion must at least accommodate these exceptions. With that as background, here is my list:

1. Insufficient confidence that the exceptions above will be respected: In the 2016 Republican presidential primary, several of the candidates expressed opposition to one or more of these exceptions, and this hard-line stance seems to represent that of an increasingly militant pro-life movement. It's fine and dandy to debate these exceptions as abstract concepts, but it becomes serious business when they apply to you or a loved one. The moment a proposed law or legal interpretation significantly impinges on the exceptions above, I'm out.

2. Giving embryos personhood status: Many pro-life activists would like to grant embryos legal protection as persons, and have attempted to do so through ballot measures. This seems to be as much a legal strategy as an expression of belief. If you can get the law to recognize a fertilized egg as a person with rights, then the very concept of abortion becomes much more difficult because now that 'person' has just as much legal protection as anybody else. It has a certain attractive simplicity to it. Every person was once an embryo, therefore every embryo is a person. However, I don't believe this is defensible on scientific or practical grounds [1], and it would lead to all manner of absurdities. Also, see number 1 above: How do the exceptions work if an embryo is legally recognized as a person?

3. Animus toward birth control: Obsession with the well-being of embryos leads easily to attacking contraception. Some people believe that if a birth control method prevents implantation or in any way disturbs a pre-implanted embryo, that it is tantamount to abortion. In this view, pretty much any hormonal or pharmaceutical form of birth control might cause abortion because, hey, can you be 100% sure an embryo was NOT disturbed, disrupted, or inhibited? (If you don't believe me, just Google "contraception abortion". The first result I got claims that hormonal contraception is abortifacient because the uterine wall becomes less receptive to implantation.) Such people are welcome to their belief, but in my mind this takes us back to absurdities because many embryos never implant and are naturally eliminated from the body, nevermind the medical conditions that are treated with hormonal contraception. Further, it is strange to me that people who abhor abortion wouldn't want the next easiest solution to be broadly available. Of course, if you re-define abortion to include the mechanisms of contraception, then I guess there's no difference. But I don't think most people equate the two, and such reasoning doesn't apply to other methods anyway. I recognize that some people have a religious objection to birth control (not the LDS Church, by the way), and I respect their right to refrain from using it. But the moment anti-abortion slips into anti-contraception, I'm out.

4. Animus toward research using fetal tissue: Organ donations save lives, and some people donate their bodies to science (e.g. anatomy labs). These things are generally viewed favorably [citation needed]. But for some reason, when tissue or cell lines are derived from a fetus, many people think an unholy line has been crossed. It would be wrong for women to get pregnant and/or abort just for the sake of science, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that we have laws against, say, paying people to donate their fetuses to science. But given that abortions and miscarriages do and will occur under the best of circumstances, why should it be taboo to use fetal tissue and cell lines for research purposes? It is a historical fact that some embryonic/fetal cell lines have played an important role in medical science, including production of vaccines. In fact, as irony would have it, the vaccine for rubella--a virus that damages fetuses--is grown in a cell line originally derived from an aborted fetus. I don't think that we should view fetal tissue research any differently than organ donation, which is to say that it is legitimate but governed by ethical constraints. As a side note, I'll mention here that the Church has twice stated that it has no position on embryonic stem cell research.

5. Late-term abortion scaremongering: Late-term abortions are not common and are almost universally for reasons covered in the exceptions above (see, for example, articles in Forbes and USA Today). As you might guess, this very assertion is a matter of contention. Nevertheless, 43 states have laws governing late-term abortions. I'm fine with limitations on late-term abortions as long as the exemptions are respected, but the issue seems to be more of a political and cultural rallying point than one of substantive public need [2].

6. Abortion as the axis of politics: Public polling shows that most Americans think that abortion laws should not be absolute (for or against). And yet, the issue has polarized political parties to the point that candidates must increasingly pass purity tests to be acceptable, and many people feel that their vote for a candidate of a particular party translates directly to a vote for or against abortion rights and defines which side of a culture war they are on. This is not healthy for our society. Pro-life nitwits are not preferable to competent pro-choice candidates or vice versa.

So that, in a nutshell, is why I can't fully align with the pro-life movement, in spite of being a Mormon [3]. Does that make me pro-choice instead? I don't think I easily fit in either category, probably like most of America. Maybe we need to make another category.


Notes:
1. What do you mean it's not scientifically defensible? Fertilization brings together a complete genome. Therefore a unique individual--or person--now exists. Sure, but there is still an opportunity for twining, or formation of chimeras. Or it might fail to develop further. So a fertilized egg can represent the beginning of somewhere between zero and multiple persons (in the normal sense of the word).

2. Surely, the number of women who carry a fetus past 20 weeks and then decide to get an abortion of convenience must be dwarfed by those who have made it to 20 weeks only to face serious and heartrending problems.

3. I'm being a little ironic here. Many people (including some Mormons) think that the Church's positions line right up with the pro-life movement. But aside from its opposition to abortions of convenience, there's not as much overlap as one might think, as I've hinted at along the way.

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