She Thought » Science

Do You Believe in Life After Death? Part Two

Wendy Hughes — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:41:03 +0000

This is the second article in a series. Part 1 is here.

The Big Responsibility
My mom is far older than my father lived to be, but much healthier. Maybe because I know more, and I have more control — I’m sure that’s part of the difference in the sense of responsibility I feel. I ask myself all the time what I would want for myself if my daughter were taking care of me and how much decision making power I would want over my own destiny, and that usually my dad took care of all of us instead of the other way around.

I had promised him that I would take care of her. When she became ill, there was an agreement that several of us driving a great distance to see her every week was inefficient, so she moved closer to us. My skepticism became more and more a part of my identity, and the hobby a part of my life, even as the caregiver role began to grow. Eventually, in an impulsive moment, I asked my mother if she believes in life after death.

What I thought I had to do
My father had grown up in poverty in Chicago, but acquired an education in an expanding economy, so he frequently commented that he’d achieved success beyond his wildest ambitions. My mom is comparatively comfortable, not wealthy, but she doesn’t have to get a McJob to supplement her Social Security.

After my dad died my mom sold our old house and moved to the beach. I was between jobs and had lots of spare time; I went to visit her pretty often. We had fun; she would treat me to lunch and a pedicure, and then together we’d watch the sun set before I’d tackle the 18 mile drive back to the Valley.

On one of those visits, one Spring day, I let myself into her apartment; she had sheets of yellow legal paper spread out on her dining table, and was making lists of the numbers from her check register. I asked what she was doing. She explained that she was getting her taxes ready to take to the accountant. I picked up one of the pages, and compared it to the check register, and realized that there was no distinction such as Medical, or Legal; nothing to describe the list to make it useful to the tax accountant. I realized she was imitating what she had seen my father doing at tax time, but didn’t know how. I offered to take over the project for her, and that was the beginning of her dependence on me, a defining moment that I didn’t realize until much later.

Moving to the Valley
When she was first widowed, she had resources and energy. She had girlfriends to travel with and still looked beautiful and loved to shop and dine out. Then slowly, she began to have increasing disability, back pain that no doctor could diagnose — and I dragged her to at least 15 different doctors. (It was during this time that one of the doctors we visited who was a gerontologist assured me that as long as her memory could be jogged by hints or reminders, that whatever was going on with her was not Alzheimers. With Alzheimers, he told me then, the actual brain cells where the memory processes take place are destroyed. He said that sometimes people are forgetful because of distraction or other reasons. That was my test for a long time. What has been happening lately is different.)

She lived in a luxury apartment in the most expensive real estate in Southern California, but couldn’t take a walk. She perched on the edge of her bed watching TV all day because her back was killing her. Finally she fell, and the emergency room doctor asked to see a list of her medications. This doctor noticed in one glance that there were two medications on the list that by themselves are harmless, but together caused an interaction that was causing her pain and paralysis. Even though she stopped taking one of the drugs, the damage was done. After over five years of inactivity, she’d gained weight, and she has never regained the verve and spark she’d had when she moved to the beach.

We persuaded her to move from Santa Monica to the San Fernando Valley. It wasn’t easy, but it made sense. The drive was horrible, and my mother was being sensible. She wanted to be close to her family, and we were willing to accommodate her if she made the compromise.

My hobby — my friends
By this time, I had established myself firmly as a skeptic. My hobby was grassroots skepticism — I’ve served as an officer of my group, the Independent Investigations Group, IIG, in Hollywood, California. I loved volunteering for the Center for Inquiry there, and it served as my social matrix. I have friends from other parts of my life, and I love them, too; I’d never had a hobby before, except maybe painting ceramics, but not a consuming, enduring hobby that held my whole attention.

My identity as a skeptic, not necessarily as an atheist, started when I was listening to the car radio while waiting for my boyfriend to get off work. I had been listening to Dr. Dean Edell talk about Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World. So we bought the book, and in it Carl Sagan had written lovingly about Skeptical Inquirer Magazine. Months later, I received a solicitation for that magazine, and figured if it was good enough for Carl Sagan, it was good enough for me. When I began receiving the magazine, I noticed that advertised on the back cover there was a Center for Inquiry less than five miles from my house. At CFI there is a grassroots skeptics group, the Independent Investigations Group, IIG.

In IIG, I’ve learned to use key words and phrases in search engines to ferret out information not always obvious in cursory research. I have listened to conversations between experienced skeptics and by osmosis picked up handy techniques that I didn’t even realize I’d learned until the opportunity arose to use one of them! And the connections! I know a retired police officer, a lawyer, several film industry and media personnel, physicists, an archaeologist is one of my best friends, and several IT experts. If I want to know something, it’s an email away!

Taking turns
Meanwhile, my sister and daughter and brother and I continued the rotation of visiting our mom/grandmother. We each had “assignments” or specialties. My sister does marketing; I am good at bookkeeping and legal matters; my daughter brings over her children for my mother, their great grandmother to marvel at. There are some variations; but this way she has at least one visit about six days out of seven per week, one evening on her own, and phone calls.

When she was ill in the past, and we’d had nurses care for her, there was an issue of safety. You don’t think about it when you go into a hospital – you hope that it’s going to be safe and you take your possessions with you. You assume that things are secure, that your loved ones are being cared for properly. But even as our discovery in IIG showed that Continuing Education Units for nurses can be awarded for Therapeutic Touch and other non-evidence based practices but also, the state of California can’t guarantee that In Home Support Services workers are not felons.

In my family, our experience when she’d had surgery in the past was not that anyone tried to hurt my mother physically, but there was a little matter of some missing unsigned checks and a very confusing relationship with the nurse and her family that got out of hand. We were just lucky that it wasn’t worse. For that reason, I had been happy we were able to take care of her ourselves as long as possible. It’s not the same for all families; distance, resources, the level of disability — circumstances are all different. My cousins all lived far away from their mom – my aunt; but they found loving, thorough and evidently compassionate professional caregivers who kept my aunt comfortable in her home until her death last year. My cousins’ lives are different from ours, and I think theirs are more the norm. People move away from where they grew up, and there is a reason that in-home caregiver businesses exist.

My mom has the illusion of independence; she has a housekeeper who comes weekly who has been cleaning her house for over 20 years. My mother can do all the ADLs, that means Activities of Daily Living: she can stand from a sitting position, toilet herself, dress and undress, move around unassisted, take care of personal hygiene. ADLs used to be a boundary for insurance companies to use to determine when a person was qualified to receive benefits from their long-term care policy. But now, some policies also include a clause that a diagnosis of cognitive impairment will trigger the policy benefits, even if the patient can do all the usual activities of daily living, but can’t remember what they had for lunch yesterday.

Do you believe?
It was on one of my visits that I asked the question about life after death. I had been afraid to ask my dad. I thought about asking our friend Richard who was dying when we were in our fifties; but that, too, seemed pretty uncool, or I just didn’t have the right words. “Say, Richard, since you are dying, when you are done, and on the other side, if you have time, would you please let us know what it’s like?” When he was in the convalescent hospital before he died, he was only allowed a certain amount of liquid daily. I went to a cappuccino shop to buy him a fat free, sugar free iced latte — and happened to fill out a contest form for a pound of Jamaican blue mountain coffee beans, and forgot all about it. The week after Rich died, I got a phone call from the cappuccino shop that I’d won the coffee, and I never win anything, so I was imagining, just for one minute, that Richard was communicating with us from beyond the grave, that he was fine, but that he really wanted another latte.

My ex-father-in-law died the same year as my father. I used to go visit my mother in law, driving about 90 minutes to Ventura every other week, for about a year. We had been very close, even after I was divorced from my ex husband. She is Jewish, and even older than my mother. We used to go for a walk along the beach, have lunch, and talk about Deep Stuff. There were a lot of things I could talk about with her that I thought I could not share with my own mother. During this time that I was asserting my non-belief, we were in her apartment, changing into swimming suits. We were all alone. I said, “You know what, I don’t believe in God.” She looked over her shoulder, both shoulders, and whispered, “Neither do I…” and that started a dialog that went on for months. This was my first encounter with a Jewish skeptic, but not my last.

It has taken, though, twenty plus years for this dialog to take place with my own mother. I’ve had to explain the tattoo of the Darwin fish on my ankle to her two or three times; she forgets in between. But somehow, when I finally was talking about my hobby skepticism group the other evening, she asked, “Are you an atheist?” And I said, yes, and explained that I never deny being Jewish; I still feel a tremendous responsibility to honor the deaths of six million victims of genocide who did nothing wrong except that they were Jewish, but I just can’t believe that there is a supernatural being who answers prayers and runs things. It just popped out of my mouth: “So Mom, do you believe in Life After Death?” and she said, “Well, nobody has come back to tell us one way or the other.”

Tradition!
Wow! After all the stories about her childhood in the tiny Jewish community in St. Paul, and dating only Jewish boys, and forcing me to go to Sunday school and although we didn’t have to go through Bat Mitzvah, we were forced against our will to endure Confirmation Class after which I never went to Temple again except to take my mother to High Holy Days until my father was dying — Oy! What a thunderbolt!

So – does that mean you, too, do not believe in a supernatural being who answers prayers and runs things? What about all the emphasis on Jewish tradition? Wait a minute — there was no Jewish Tradition. My family was so assimilated that we had a Hanukkah Bush. I specifically remember my parents bickering about it. My mother didn’t know the Friday night blessings over the Sabbath candles and challah. I had to explain to her about the Reform movement and the Jewish Renewal movement that I’d learned about in the little congregation of Jewish Mystics (modern Chasidim).

So I am relieved. I am the apple that has not fallen so far from the skepticism tree as I thought. Why this has come as such a surprise I don’t know. She has already paid for her ashes to be scattered at sea. She said that she thinks that when we die it’s like going to sleep. I certainly hope so; and I hope that it is a peaceful, dreamless sleep that comes painlessly after a really nice day. That seemed to be what it was like for my one friend’s mom, even though her circumstances were very different from ours.

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This post, Do You Believe in Life After Death? Part Two, originally appeared on She Thought on April 11, 2012.
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The Curious Case of the Beauty Queen Bias

Sophie Hirschfeld — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:04:57 +0000

Just hours ago, a close friend of mine joked that if I were only willing to go on medication for the rest of my life and didn’t care about my health so much, I could have a whole piece of cake instead of just two bites of it at his child’s birthday party. Only an hour ago, I learned that I was dropped from a cabaret show because my hourglass figure, complete with large breasts and very broad hips, was tougher to fit on short notice than the other models and one model had dropped out so a need for even numbers meant someone had to be dropped and I, the most challenging model, was the sacrifice. Sometimes things happen that we tie into our attitudes about beauty and vanity and they seem discriminatory, but they’re completely understandable. Sometimes, what might be normal human behavior is seen negatively because of context. Beauty is a subject included in that weird bias. It is through this kind of a lens that I must view the seemingly giant debate over an article by Samantha Brick.

Samantha Brick is too pretty. Samantha Brick has felt hurt by people’s behavior because she’s pretty. Samantha Brick is now hated by masses on the internet for writing about the experience of being pretty. Shame, the internet cries, on Samantha Brick!

I’m not a beauty queen and I wouldn’t say my appearances are better than average. That being said, part of my very well-being, my work and my success in my work, relies on my appearances. I am not a beauty queen and most people would consider Mrs. Brick a superior beauty, but I think I can see her point, a little.

My friend’s joke was funny to me, earlier. That friend has seen me struggle, now, for over a year in a battle against my own body. His comment is a great acknowledgement of things that have become habit to me; things that are stressful and, sometimes, heartbreaking. The lady who dropped me from the Angry Woman Cabaret was also not being unkind. She was trying to be reasonable about her own presentation. But, their actions are from the perspective of those close to me or directly tied to what is going on. People who don’t know me treat these situations differently. I’ve experienced people witnessing me count calories and obsess over food calling me vain and unreasonable. There are few people who guess that I do it because I’m diabetic and controlling my health through diet and exercise. My renewed interest in exercise is seen as similarly obsessive, vain and unnecessary. While only my closest friends would otherwise have known I was taken out of a show, if it were a topic of conversation outside of my social realm, I can only guess how it would be seen. There’s not a way to explain what happened without sounding vain or maybe pathetic to strangers. I have also experienced people comment on my shape and how I dress. I won’t deny that I am vain, either. I am vain. But, I’m not a beauty stereotype, so it is often allowed, depending on the company I keep.

So, as I ponder what I’ve read from Mrs. Brick, I can understand how what she says may not be entirely untrue. And, before people’s thoughts wander back into the question of who is beautiful or not, this isn’t about who you see as attractive. This is about how other people see her. She’s right, when someone is seen as attractive, things do happen. I’ve seen men spend unreasonable amounts of money on women based entirely on their appearance. In one of Richard Wiseman’s books, he talks about a study done that showed women with larger breasts were more likely to be helped if they were hitchhiking. I also think that there are women who become insanely jealous of others based on looks. I don’t, however, think that’s the only thing that powers what Brick was complaining about. I think that another problem is not how others view her appearance. I think it might be how others view her behavior which affects her appearance.

As a culture, both in the United States and, I suspect, most places affected by Western culture, we have a love-hate relationship with vanity. If someone has large breasts, we are mostly fine with it. If someone purchased their large breast implants, though? Many people dislike it. Pretty eyes are a fortunate genetic accident, but pretty eyes surrounded in lots of smokey, powdery make-up is seen as excessive by some harsh critics and stylish by others. Then there is the battle between our concept of beauty and the tipped scales. Big and beautiful is a new, fabulous trend. Confidence in a human form that is often considered unattractive because of some arbitrary line drawn in the sand about what size is attractive is wonderful, to us, at least lately. But if that same big and beautiful person suddenly becomes skinny, what happens? Confidence in herself might be seen differently. We see self-confidence differently if we see it as someone being beautiful and knowing it when they are matched to an ideal than we see it if someone is attractive and atypical.

Interestingly, this debate also reminds me of the awful debate over the Science Cheerleader a year or so ago, when people objected to some sort of objectification rather than accepting and welcoming a different form of science advocacy. The argument was made that we couldn’t have barbie doll science. If we advocated science, we wanted it to be representative of everybody and by “everybody,” we meant the average, eccentric scientist who wasn’t a “barbie.” Many people failed to see the hypocrisy. I’m also reminded of community debates over sexiness in science, activism and general geekery. Are geeks allowed to be sexy or attractive? Aren’t we somehow buying into a culture of objectification if we are? But, as we ask those questions, we’re implying that we want to remain ignorant of the flipside. If we reject these things in our circles, aren’t we then promoting an intolerance to those who fit this stereotype? Aren’t we perpetuating the very bigotry that Samantha Brick is complaining about?

I don’t think that what people are angry about is only that she is beautiful. I think she’s wrong that the backlash is something that proves her point. No, the backlash seems to say that people are angry that she’s beautiful and she knows it. To us, she’s too beautiful to acknowledge that she’s beautiful. She’s too beautiful to be vain. She’s too beautiful because she’s aware. That’s the crime that she shares with the Science Cheerleader and the crime that she shares with countless other women. If you’re too beautiful, we don’t want you to tell us about it and we don’t want you to use it in our social, academic or eccentric social groups. Why? Because we’re too immature to handle it.

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This post, The Curious Case of the Beauty Queen Bias, originally appeared on She Thought on April 4, 2012.
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The Bane of Human Remains

Sophie Hirschfeld — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:00:43 +0000

This article is a repost from indieskeptics.com.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of researching on mummies for a project that I’m working on. This researching has branched off in several directions and

King Tut: An Invasion of Privacy?

resulted in me learning some fascinating things. My research on mummies has a lot to do with hygienic and medical histories of the remains of ancient cultures and, totally coincidentally, io9 recently published this article: Do we have the right to violate King Tut’s privacy?

The article argues that even though mummies come from a time so far removed from our own that current ethical concerns about remains don’t apply, that because we might be looking at medical histories of the long-dead, including King Tut’s, for attention and because we don’t want our own remains treated the way we treat mummies, then we should respect their medical histories as we do modern patients.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen concerns like this expressed. Various groups have raised similar concerns and it is a tough set of questions to address. First, I want to mention a few things about why we study the medical history of mummies and other remains from ancient cultures.

Who Owns History?

Essentially, history is painted for us by the victors of the past, sometimes, and sometimes it is painted for us by what little we find that is left behind. Our history tells us a lot about human behavior and so by looking into the past, we gain knowledge about ourselves. If we ignored history or hid from it, we run the risk of viewing ourselves through a lens that is so distorted, we might repeat past mistakes or ignore the needs that we currently have.

Imagine, for a moment, that we forgot how we think the Black Plague was spread through Europe. We think, currently, that it was spread through the fleas which lived on the rats which were common amongst the people at the time. What would happen if we weren’t aware of not only that, but other cases of how disease has spread in history? How would that affect how we view disease today?

Who Owns Medical History?

Essentially, we gain by knowing about the medical histories of those who died in the past. While we may create headlines by announcing that King Tut had an STD, it is also the case that knowing he had an STD might tell us something about STDs in his time, especially if we learn about other mummies who had them. I know you’re probably aware that we have current medical studies that we also rely on in order to benefit ourselves, but conditions now and conditions in history are different and even the illnesses that we are concerned with now are not always the same as they were in the past; neither are the environmental and social conditions. That doesn’t mean that we have left those elements behind, completely, though, or that we gain nothing by examining events that happened in those different contexts.

In order to approach this matter practically, and to consider it rationally, it may be important to look to the ways that related issues have been addressed in the more recent past. Let me take a detour for a moment and talk a little about the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act.

The Native American Graves and Repatriation Act

Back when the Americas were first being colonized, there were already people here. The colonists, though, didn’t see the people here as being the same as them and they often treated them horribly, denied them rights, stole their land and even made them slaves. Alongside this, the remains of the people who lived in the Americas were also often disturbed. The colonists sometimes saw the remains as novelties, searched them for valuables and even used whatever they found for trade. In order to address the ethical questions surrounding older remains, like those of King Tut, I will compare them to some reasons that NAGPRA was created.

Probably the most important reason for NAGPRA is for the protection of Native American rights equal to the protection of the rights of the other cultures and social groups in the United States. From the onset of colonization until only a few decades ago, the Native American population’s rights that seemed so basic to the invading cultures were not respected. Property rights and inheritance concerns were primary battles for Native Americans who witnessed the graves of their relatives being dug up and looted. NAGPRA was supposed to help change all that by criminalizing the looting of the graves of Native Americans and taking Native remains. This didn’t necessarily put Native Americans under the same legal umbrella as the rest of the country, but it attempted to give them equal footing within cultural settings, history and social situations that were unlike their own.

The First Amendment was also a central point to the creation of NAGPRA. Death itself is viewed, across cultures, as having religious significance. How we deal with the dead within that context varies from one religion to the other and great pains are taken in order to respect the religious wishes of the dead and their remaining relatives. Because of the religious significance of deaths and burials, NAGPRA is considered a protection of Native American religious rights that reinforce the First Amendment, the same law that grants people the right to perform religious ceremonies in prison and to publicly protest.

Human Rights — For the Dead?

NAGPRA was developed in the interest of human rights that were bestowed upon the United States by our adherence to the constitution. While mummies are not privileged enough to have the rights granted by the constitution, it is worth noting that the ethical concerns that grant those protections should be considered when regarding the remains of other cultures. Certainly, due to the laws regarding lineage in NAGPRA, should any of the remains we receive from other countries be remains that can be traced to living family and the family does not grant permission for scientists to examine those remains, the most ethical action to take would be to return the remains. This is because the part of NAGPRA which is concerned with lineage is based on basic principals supported by many bioethicists. In fact, that is where we should look next in order to consider the fate of remains like those of King Tut:

1) Bioethics

Bioethics, naturally, is a complex field of study. Any place where ethical concerns have vast gray areas, where each side has a valid complaint, is going to be a difficult field for someone to not only learn, but to navigate. That being said, bioethics experts have still managed to come up with some basic things to consider whenever they are addressing an issue in the medical or scientific world. In case you want to enrich your knowledge about these matters, I highly encourage you to look up the Belmont Report the following comments are based on it.

2) Justice

While the brief discussion on NAGPRA already touches on this concept, it is a vital concept when it comes to bioethical concerns. Justice is an ambiguous term whose definition swings wildly within each society. In one society, cutting off the hand of a thief may be considered ‘justice,’ while, in another, justice may be only the containment of those who might do harm to others. But justice is not just about punishment, it can also be about the distribution of resources or the way we acquire authoritative positions within a group. So, the question that has to be asked, and that is being asked in the above linked article is, has the treatment of King Tut’s remains and those of other ancient people caused them an injustice?

3) Autonomy

Autonomy, in this case, is the allowance of an individual to make decisions for themselves. If you or I are autonomous individuals, then we are people who are considered capable of making our own decisions. Not everyone considered capable of this task, though, and it is frequently the case that some parts of the population are disallowed to make decisions for themselves. For example, children, the mentally insane and, oftentimes, the dead.

In the case of King Tut, he clearly isn’t capable, in his incapacitated state, to make his own decisions. In his lifetime, the possibility that people would be attempting to examine his medical history a few thousand years into the future, was not really something anyone considered. As such, the King was not even capable of granting his permission or stating his wishes in case something like this were to occur. King Tut was, then, and is, now, incapable of making a decision for himself. When someone in our own time is incapable of making decisions for themselves, those decisions fall to their immediate family. If the family is unavailable, it is then a decision that is turned over to the closest reliable people who are the most informed. This means that the scientists dealing with Tut have to make his decision for him.

This seems like it shouldn’t be such a big deal. We make decisions for the dead all the time. We decide if they should be buried or cremated or if they should be tossed into the ocean or turned into fertilizer. So, what’s so different about King Tut? Well, King Tut is King Tut. The reason we raise concern about King Tut and not the many other corpses that we make decisions for is because King Tut was once someone very important and now he is a gateway of information that lets us look far into the past. But the issues surrounding Tut are not just about decisions regarding his grave. Instead, they’re issues surrounding privacy, to which the same applies. We do very little to respect the privacy of our dead. Instead, the privacy of our dead is one of the first things we violate once they die. We sell their stuff, we investigate their financial and medical issues and, if they’re someone important, we broadcast it across the world, just in case anyone else wanted to know about it.

Autonomy only seems to exist for the dead if the deceased planned far enough ahead.

4) Dignity

The idea that each individual deserves a certain level of respect and ethical treatment is another concept that comes rolling through the debate on how to treat ancient remains. In the case of King Tut and other remains that we allow scientists to evaluate, it seems like their preservation and the effort put into learning their stories is the absolute highest amount of respect that we could possibly give them. Ensuring that they are not smashed about and ground up into some sort of silly compound by some health quack and not leaving them out in the elements to be swallowed back up by the Earth is also, very likely, the best we can do to ensure that the remains are treated in an ethically sound manner.

5) Beneficence and Non-Maleficence

Sometimes, it is important to do something for the good of the individual and sometimes it is important to do no harm. The problem is, sometimes doing no harm means not doing what is best for someone and sometimes doing something for the good of the individual is extremely harmful. The King Tut dilemma seems to boil down to this point. What we gain, overall, from the study and sharing of information of King Tut and other ancient remains stands to benefit our society as a whole. The overall benefit far outweighs the tiny cost that a man that died so long ago may not have liked what we’re doing to his corpse.

I can’t possibly give a completely objective answer to all the questions surrounding human remains and their treatment by science, since there are so many hazy areas to roam through, but I do hope that the added information helps people make some conclusions of their own. My own stance, I think, is a fairly pragmatic one, involving a basic concept of what I think is for the greater good. But first, let me address the main conclusion of the original article that inspired this trail of thoughts.

The author of the io9 article suggests that we use what we know of how we want our remains to be treated in order to make decisions for King Tut. The problem is, there is tremendous variation, even today, in how people want their remains to be treated. Contributions to science does happen to be one of those options. Sure, as living creatures that rely so much on our social links to survive and who have been taught to be embarrassed about things such as STDs (and we happened to have one), we would be horrified if we found out that once we died, billions of people would have access to our medical records. When we’re dead, though, we would hardly have a reason to worry about it.

Doing the Greater Good

It is often said, when someone dies, that the funeral is not for the dead, it is for the sake of the living. It is the living who can measure what they have lost; it is the living who need answers and who seek closure. It seems to me that no matter how long someone has been dead, the most ethical decision to make regarding their corpse is to be as attentive as possible to the needs of the living – to do the greater good. That’s why we have funerals and why NAGPRA exists and why we learn about King Tut and share his story with the world.

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This post, The Bane of Human Remains, originally appeared on She Thought on March 22, 2012.
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Pants on Fire

Sophie Hirschfeld — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 22:04:10 +0000

I have frequently run into conversations, lately, about a controversial topic that I think people need to reassess. Interestingly, encouraging others to rethink their stance on this seems to make me a bad person. Obviously, I’m a bad person, but this is probably not why I’m a bad person. In the last few weeks, I’ve:

told a group of students that lying about your illegal employment opportunities to your family …
told a friend that lying to a guy because he’s a jerk …
told another friend that lying to get a job and lying to the government about how you make money …

… can all be ethical and reasonable actions. That’s right, I’ve told people that lying is good.

We just assume, in our culture, that lying is bad. When we’re children, part of our developmental progress might be measured by when we figure out how to lie and our parents celebrate our progress and then quickly take our dessert from us because someone tried to feed their broccoli to the dog. Lying, to us, is what people do when they have to get away with murdering their rich relatives in order to inherit a fortune or keep from getting arrested for a bank robbery. Lying is what lawyers and courtrooms are for if you can’t have an insanity plea at your court appearance where you’re trying to squirm your way out of

This spider's babies are 10% gentic code and 90% lies. Male Pisaura Mirabilis sometimes gives gifts in order to get the chance to mate. In some cases, the gift is not actually a nutritional foodly item, as the lady expects. Instead, it may be a faked item and the male might get sex, anyway. It is akin to someone offering chocolates to a date, getting sex and then the date later learning the chocolates box was filled with Weight Watchers coupons.

public indecency charges. Lying is for criminals.

I don’t actually think that is the case. In fact, I’m not the only one who disagrees. In Sam Harris’ book, “Lying,” he makes a case for lying as an action that is sometimes good and sometimes bad, mmkay?. I haven’t read his book (though, I just bought it so I could do so, someday, when I have time, which might be never), but I suspect his reasoning is not far off from my own. Lying should be measured based on the merits of its intention and consequences. This is a very novel idea in our culture which has been so intimately bound to certain religious ideas. Lying is bad, to many (if not most) people because some supernatural authority has told them that it is.

While considering deception to be unethical, many people see it as a trait unique to humans; as some sort of maladaptive-adaptive behavior. We think it is bad, but it makes us special. The reality is, that isn’t the case. Deception is an adaptive behavior that is probably rooted deep in our ancestry and it comes in many forms. From how an animal appears to others as a way to discourage predators to a lower status male ape uttering a predator-warning call in order to have some private time with a certain apelady as the others all scurry up a tree to hide. I’m not saying that males of any species *should* lie – at this point, I’m just saying that lying isn’t a special, awesome, ugly trait that only humans have. In fact, some of humanity’s cleverest lies and most popular reasons for them have often already been done by other animals. Want to hide food to keep people from eating it? Want play a prank on someone?

Heini Hediger (1968), a past director of the Zurich Zoological Gardens, knew that apes and monkeys sometimes held drinking water in their mouths to squirt at people who came near them. He was cautious when, after taking pictures nearby, he had to walk past the cage of an old chimpanzee. Hediger noticed that the animals was sitting listlessly with his back to the walkway, apparently playing with his toes and taking no notice of him. He looked at the chimp’s cheeks, but decided that they did not bulge with water. However, when he was opposite the cage, the chimp swung around in a flash, leapt to the front of the cage, and drenched Hediger with warm water from nearly 3.5 m(12 ft) away. The trickster must have collected water just in case Hediger should pass his cage. As an animal psychologist, Hediger was embarrassed to be so caught out, but pleased that the ape’s joke was successful. His dousing also underlined the chimp’s intelligence in thinking up such a prank, as well as the need that captive animals in general have for toys they can use to amuse themselves.

In fact, we may not even be the only creature capable of recognizing deception:

A visitor recently stopped by to see Koko. On greeting the 180-pound gorilla, the visitor pointed to her and then made a small circle with her open hand in the air in front of her own face, signing You’re pretty. Koko digested this comment for a moment and then stroked her finger across her nose; her reply meant false or fake.

Koko the gorilla is obviously aware of her robust jawline, or something, or maybe she was allowed to play with barbies too much.

Of course, something being normal or natural doesn’t necessarily make it a saintly action or necessarily useful in the long run. A girl spider may be following nature by eating her mate, and it is certainly useful to her, but that male spider’s sperm is a product line that is no longer in circulation. The same goes for the praying mantis:

That male should have taken a page from the spider book and brought her a gift of chocolates before spending hours romping with her. Maybe, then, he’d still be alive. That’s really the root of the question regarding ethic and lying, though.

It may make a spider seem like a jerk to fake a gift to a female in order to have sex with her, but if his odd of dying are significantly greater if he doesn’t offer food, maybe his act of deception is not so unethical after all. I know, mot readers of this don’t consider spiders examples of ethics, so let’s bring this to the human side, now.

If a human’s life is on the line, i lying a rational thing to do? I it more ethical? Our problem with the question of ethics and lying is that we are placing a value on a description of an action instead of the action, itself. We examine deception as if all deception has the same value or as if all deception is the same action. We do the same with the concept of honesty. Yet, honesty is harmful, sometimes, too. You don’t see police officers negotiating with a particularly unstable gunman by being honest, like this: “yeah, I’m hiding over here, if you just tip your gun to the left, a bit, you can shoot me.” No, they will hide, lie and even imply false promises in order to remove the risk of danger.

In most of the examples I gave at the start of this article, lying was suggested as an ethical choice. A person at risk of being abandoned may do harm to themselves and others if they are honest about a past involvement with a crime that was of a certain nature. People in abusive relationships who are trying to leave will often lie in order to protect themselves and escape. Finally, people who work contracted jobs, work for out-of-pocket cash or use bartering in order to survive may have to lie about income (or income sources) in order to get insurance, state help or have their children put into Head Start programs. Sometimes these lies mean the difference between life and death, getting food or starving or protecting an innocent person.

Lying is clearly not something we can look at through the cultural lens that we so frequently use. We shouldn’t be evaluating it based on religious creed. In fact, I’m certain that if we had to see deception through the numerous eyes of a horny male spider (lie or die), we would accept lying far more easily as an ethical decision, designed to protect ourselves, instead of as a universally malicious act.

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This post, Pants on Fire, originally appeared on She Thought on March 3, 2012.
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Puscast Podcast: A Non-Expert Review

Anthropologist Underground — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:44:43 +0000

I speak a little Spanish, but just barely. Not even well enough to know the curse words, unfortunately. Basically I’m able to order food and chat about the weather. If I don’t panic when I miss a word or two, I usually understand enough to follow the broad themes of a conversation. I just try to relax and enjoy the experience of immersion.

This is analogous to how I listen to the Puscast podcast, a bimonthly review (in English) of the infectious disease medical literature. I speak Medical Literature about as well as I speak Spanish. Fortunately, I do know how to use Google for clarification.

Puscast host Mark Crislip is an infectious disease doctor practising in Oregon. He is a writer and editor for the Science Based Medicine blog, and heads up his own multimedia empire, where he houses archives and links to his several podcasts, blogs, and book.

The target Puscast audience is physicians. I may be out of my depth for parts of it, but I’m curious and interested in the subject. I try to just listen without worrying too much about, say, the details of how different antibiotics target various bacterial cell receptors. I can always look that up later.

The discussion is surprisingly diverse. Dr. Crislip brings snarky humor to bear on all manner of medical pseudoscience and on mistakes and misguided studies published in established journals as well. What I find especially interesting are Dr. Crislip’s thoughts about how the studies translate to real-world situations and clinical practice. I enjoy learning about how the new data gets applied in medicine. It’s reassuring to note that, for the most part, science-based medicine increases in efficacy over time.

Puscast includes this Black Box Warning:

The following podcasts may include sarcastic comments, snide asides, and rants off the topic of infectious diseases and may cover political, societal, and popular culture concerns. I think it is part of the charm of the podcasts, but if you do not like smartass, then these podcasts may not be your cup of tea and you should go elsewhere. But you can’t say you were not warned.

Some broad thematic trends that I’ve noted include:

Antibiotic overuse is very, very bad. This comes up frequently in discussions about newly resistant diseases.
Tropical diseases like dengue fever and disease vectors like rabid vampire bats appear to be moving north with global climate change.
Previously rare vaccine-preventable diseases are becoming more common in correlation with declining vaccination rates.
Dr. Crislip doesn’t like tattoos.
HIV therapies are amazing. I’m embarrassed to admit that two recent Puscast episodes have exposed my own myopia. One study looked at serodiscordant couples where one partner is HIV+. I live in such a bubble of ignorance that it didn’t occur to me that such couples exist. I assumed that everyone is either + or – or that the relationships dissolved once one of the partners was diagnosed. I had to pause and wrap my mind around this new-to-me but obvious paradigm.

Crislip discussed a couple of interesting HIV studies:

This first study looked at drug therapies which can prevent the spread of HIV to the non-infected partner. Which is awesome, but the regimen is not without risks. If the positive partner’s HIV is suppressed, then maybe the risks outweigh the benefits. Take home: use a condom. Which is generally a good idea anyway regardless of HIV status.

The second study looked at couples where both partners are HIV+. Doctors generally still recommend condom use to prevent the spread of other diseases and also because the partners may have different variations of the HIV virus. In this case, I had assumed that condoms were moot. I had no idea there are various types of HIV, and the other diseases in addition to HIV simply weren’t on my radar.

Again, in hindsight this should have been obvious to me. I like to think I’m so tolerant and enlightened, but clearly I need to bring more humility and humanity to how I think about HIV and its victims.

Dr. Crislip’s Puscast is endlessly interesting and entertaining. It’s challenging in a good way and fairly accessible to most audiences. It’s especially enlightening when it spotlights uncomfortable truths about myself.

Images from wikimedia commons

An earlier version of this article appeared at Does This Make Sense.

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This post, Puscast Podcast: A Non-Expert Review, originally appeared on She Thought on February 20, 2012.
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Do You Believe in Life After Death? A Caregiver’s story

Wendy Hughes — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 18:00:57 +0000

This is the first part of a mini-series. The other parts will be posted at a future date.

My mom as a paper doll cut out. It must have been fashionable to have hand tinted photos cut out, applied to a wooden background carved to the outline shape of the picture, to place in a stand with a slot for the image. My mom must have been about five in this image, c 1926. I've never seen another picture displayed like this.

Disclaimer:

My parents made the average, garden-variety mistakes: interfering with my privacy and insulting my self-esteem; but they generally meant well.

My nuclear family was intact. My parents stayed married until my father died at age 74 in 1988; I am the eldest of their three children.

By accidents of timing and geography, I have not had to overcome the resentment bred by child abuse, poverty, ignorance, nor divorce (even though divorce is a very good idea sometimes; I’ve had two of my own), not even harsh discipline.

I can’t address how those conditions would affect the persistence it takes to follow through sometimes required of a caregiver for an elderly parent. I suspect that a memory of having been beaten by one’s parent with a coat hanger may mitigate the will to persevere. My role as a caregiver is also affected by geography because my sister, daughter and I live within a few miles of our parent. I know when distance is an issue, it changes the strategy.

This is my experience as a woman skeptic who is in a caregiver role with a widowed mother who lives nearby. I can compare the experience I had when my father died over twenty years ago with the experience I am having during my mother’s decline that is taking place now. They are very different.

Do you believe in Life After Death?

Part One

When Daddy died….
My father was only 74 when he died of congestive heart failure. In 1988 a lot less was known about how to treat the condition, and there was a years-long process of treatment and recovery and then gradual relapse, repeated in shorter and shorter intervals, that was hard on the patient and on the family. It was during this time that I got religion, and after my father finally died, I reasserted myself as an atheist and skeptic. I didn’t need a god to see me through my father’s mortality; what I’d needed was a community, and I had not realized that there are communities of skeptics. I have that now, and fortunately the community of skeptics who are my friends have come through for me, during crises and for the long haul, sometimes just listening, offering their own experiences for me to consider, and assuring me that I am not too weird when I need to hear it.

In the mid 1980s
My sister in law suggested that I join a synagogue of Jewish mystics that held Friday evening services every other week, and Torah study on Saturday mornings, a hop, skip and a jump from my house. As a lone atheist, I had no support system, no network of friends to tell me what to do in the stressful, prolonged pain of my dad’s illness. She promised she would attend the first time with me, and have a cup of tea… how much could go wrong? It was wonderful! The candlelight, the familiar music! The language, unintelligible, but also familiar… the people, so glad to see a new face of a youngish woman, welcoming me, not to mention that it was geographically desirable, was all very seductive.

A friend once told me that church is not just for worship. Churchgoing, synagogue, mosque attendance is also for networking, socializing, experiencing life’s milestones such as weddings, births, holidays and deaths. This is what many atheists miss. The attempt to replace it is often by attendance at low-observance churches such as the Unitarians or Secular Humanist Jewish congregations. ** I knew about the UU congregations, but I thought of them as political organizations, and didn’t think that I would find the comfort I needed for this particular crisis.

I not only began to attend services, in exchange for typesetting a little newsletter for the congregation, but I also began to take Jewish Studies classes at the local community college. I had been taking anthropology, communications, and sociology classes in night school, too, so adding Jewish studies that semester was my way of learning how to be Jewish. I wanted to rush this process of figuring out how to get comfort out of my ethnic identity.

I was embarrassed that I didn’t know anything about how to be Jewish. The rabbi’s wife taught me how to say the Friday night blessings over the Sabbath candles and the challah (bread). She explained that it was not unusual for American Jews not to know these things – and I learned the history of the Reform Jewish movement and assimilation. I knew that my grandfather had belonged to two congregations, an old Conservative one, and a newer Reform one that had a nicer cemetery — and it was a good thing, because he had died young.

Every Saturday, the Rabbi asked if there was anyone who had a friend or relative for whom they would like to have a prayer for health. I always raised my hand. I asked for prayers for my dad. Now, I would think of it as intercessory prayer. But at the time, it just seemed like a loving, sweet musical thing, and if it wasn’t going from our lips to God’s ear, at least these nice people were one with me in their concern for my dad.

One day, Mr. Goldstein, one of the members of the congregation, was walking the same way I was toward our cars, and asked me if I thought I was losing my mind. I said yes, as a matter of fact, and why do you ask? He said it was because of congestive heart failure. His uncle had just died of the same disease, and his family had just been going through the same thing: his uncle seeming almost to die, then miraculous recovery, and slowly dying again; treatment that restored him to health, ever shorter intervals… and the family repeatedly on the brink of grief and bouncing back and forth between joy and sorrow and guilt. Nobody else, not the cardiologist, not any nurse, no one at all, had offered anyone in our family this explanation. The relief I felt was like cool water on a redhot sunburn.

The book review
It was during this time, though, that I happened to read a book review of The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. The review was extremely well written; if that was true, I thought, then how could THIS be true? The things I discuss and argue every Saturday for a couple of years, with these people, a few of whom are Holocaust survivors, and who love and accept me, and who have been seeing me through this educational process, this transition, how can I ask them about whether there is a supernatural being who answers prayers and runs things? So I folded up the review, and tucked it into the back of my Tenach, a modern translation of the Old Testament, a gift from Mr. Goldstein and his wife, and decided to think about it later. I have met Dr. Dawkins a few times, and I forgot to tell him this story.

What a rabbi is good for
Before my father died, the hospital Social Worker told us that even though we were in a great deal of pain, that when he finally died, the pain would increase. When my father died at the hospital, I happened to be there alone, and I called the rabbi on the pay phone. I said I don’t feel anything, what’s wrong with me? He explained: “Wendy, you are in shock. This is giving you time to take care of the business you have to take care of, to help your mom. Grief comes in waves. If all the pain came at once, you wouldn’t be able to handle it. It will finally reach a crescendo, and begin to recede. Then you will be able to remember the pain, but it won’t hurt anymore.” That’s what rabbis are good for.

I had learned enough to know that when I accompanied my mother to the Jewish mortuary, I think it was the next day, I could tell her that Jewish custom required only a simple wooden casket, no matter what the salesman was showing us.

The difference now, over 20 years later, with my mom
After my father’s death, I realized I had made it through without any guilt. My daughter had married one of the men in the congregation, and I think they barely noticed when I slipped away. I didn’t need the network to deal with my father’s mortality any longer, and I was free to resume my identity as an atheist.

The network of friends is still important, but the ritual of talking to God or intercessory prayer certainly isn’t part of the picture. Instead, when I was Instant Messaging with a friend about preparing to come to TAM8 in Spring of 2010, I was mentioning my mother’s declining health, and cognitive impairment. He immediately emailed me a link to a memorial brochure about his grandmother, and wrote about her decline and how difficult it had been for him and his family. He urged me to get a diagnosis for my mother, to go to a specialist and not to dawdle around. He said it was important for her safety and for my peace of mind.

Also, not to single out a specific source, because there are many, but I rely on Quackwatch. Science Based Medicine is another source for information about what works and what is questionable. Of course these didn’t exist in 1988, but as a skeptic, in the 21st Century, I take advantage of resources that don’t have a profit motive. The path of least resistance is to subscribe and get a weekly email.

When I feel as though I can’t go out at night to Drinking Skeptically or my former favorite, the CFI-LA Book Club for Skeptics, because I am away from home just too many nights a week, sometimes I want to break free. I want to be young again with no responsibilities to anyone but myself, and shrug off the reins of too much to do. So there is a paradox; the very thing that gives me stimulation and respite, the fun thing to do, is also a little frustrating because I don’t have enough time right now to go enjoy it.

Meanwhile, I did know not to rely on gingko biloba to restore her memory. When the internist was going to prescribe a prescription for a strong medication over the phone, because he knew my mother didn’t like to go to doctor’s appointments, both my daughter and a skeptic friend suggested that was probably not a good idea. I called the internist back and asked for a referral to a specialist.

The internist offered us a referral to a clinic in my mother’s neighborhood that specializes in diagnosis and treatment of geriatric patients. The first time I ever heard anyone talking about that as a possible specialty was in the early 1970s. My neighbor at the time was studying gerontology because he understood that the baby boom generation was going to be a giant cohort requiring specialized care forty or so years in the future. He was quite a visionary.

My mom’s memory lapses are sometimes funny, sometimes alarming. She is trusting and sweet, and I know that is better than the nightmare stories I’ve heard of the parents of others who are paranoid and combative. Comparing what I learned from the experience of my father’s illness and death, and this experience with my mom so far, on balance, this is easier.

How much of that is because I have found an evidence-based community on which to rely for companionship, instead of a faith-based one, in my case, is a little hard to quantify, because of the specific examples I cited. I’ve remembered the hits, and forgotten the misses. I had a lot of relief from the information about congestive heart failure, and about the process of grief that came from that particular congregation. But knowing that I have a community at all is incredibly important, and participating in one, whether it is volunteering, chatting on a bulletin board, or instant messages, I’ve learned a lot. I can’t separate my skeptic/atheist/Jewish self from my caregiver self. So one evening, I asked her, “Mom, do you believe in Life After Death?”

** A recent article in the LA Times Health section quotes an analysis by researchers at Brigham Young University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, compiled data from 148 studies indicating that people live longer who are involved in communities — an effect comparable to that of quitting smoking.
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-friends-health-20100913,0,5533677.story

Science Based Medicine: http://networkedblogs.com/7ACwW
Quackwatch: http://www.quackwatch.org

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This post, Do You Believe in Life After Death? A Caregiver’s story, originally appeared on She Thought on February 13, 2012.
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Skeptic Stories for children – Won’t you please help?

Kitty Mervine — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:00:10 +0000

A note from Sophie Hirschfeld: Kitty Mervine is working on a project that is important to the skeptic community. She needs our help and asked permission to post her plea here on SheThought. I ask that you help her in whatever large or small way you can. She has been tremendously generous to the skeptic community and this is yet another example of her generosity and thoughtfulness. Please do your best to help her. Her humble plea follows:

There is a joke that if Richard Dawkins wrote a book of fairy tales it was start, “A long time ago in a rational kingdom far far away, nothing magical ever happened.” We all know Richard Dawkins has written a wonderful work of non fiction for children. Indeed, there are many excellent works of non fiction for the skeptic parent to choose from for their child. Still, there seems to be a lack of skeptic fiction for very young children. I decided to help rectify that last year by writing a work of skeptic fiction for ages 3-10. The response was so positive that this year decided to write a second book for ages 3-10.

“Fairy Tales, Fairly Told” is a skeptic take on classic fairy tales. “Jack and the Magic Beans”, “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Pied Piper” get a new skeptic twist. Original stories, such as “Elephant Evolution” and “Otterly-Impossible” (which follows), are also included. The artwork is by the very talented young artist Noah Whippie. Noah is a big fan of the skeptic movement, and offered to do the illustrations for free. I decided that a goal of mine would be not only to raise enough for the printing of the book, but to give him a fair payment. Noah’s talent and time is deserving of a paycheck.

How you can help, if you wish, is to please make a pay pal donation to m_mervine@yahoo.com, or to contact me at nobadaliens@gmail.com. Any amount is welcome. It costs a lot of money to self publish (I currently use Lulu). It’s amazing how much just the shipping costs can be. Shipping costs can be $80 on only $500 worth of books. I try to use promotion codes and sales to keep costs down. I really need your help to make “Fairy Tales Fairly Told” a reality. Also, if you can’t help out, but would like a copy of either of my books, please email and ask. I’ll be glad to ship a copy of “Zigge and Lisa” (my first book) or “Fairy Tales, Fairly Told” when it is published.

My husband has kindly taken on the cost of all postage (no matter where you live in the world).

My first book was given out at the CSI children camp, and I hope to have enough copies to donate books again this year. Anyone that wants a copy of either of my books will receive it. I ask people to donate what they can, so I can print more. But no one is ever turned down that asks for a book. It’s not about making money, it’s about helping educate our youngest skeptics!

I often hear people say “Well I want my child to make up her own mind, I don’t want her indoctrinated like I was with religion.” My own personal feeling, raising my two skeptic daughters, was “My Catholic neighbors on one side is indoctrinating their children about their family values and beliefs. My Mormon neighbors on the other side is indoctrinating their children about their values and beliefs. I had better start teaching my children about the values and beliefs our family holds.” Yes, skeptic families do have values and beliefs. Tolerance, critical thinking, questioning, and the value of education are just a few. I think “Fairy Tales, Fairly Told” can be one way for families to make sure their children know what being a critical thinker is, and why being a skeptic is so important.

It should be noted these stories have all been tested on the age group 3-10. They aren’t written for adults. One criticism is that animals talk. However, most children in this age group are reading books in which animals talk, and they still don’t believe Fido is going to suddenly get up and say “hey want to take me for a walk?”. Children like talking animals, so in my books, animals talk.

If you would like to help get what I hope is an important tool for the skeptic family out to the public, please donate. And if you make a donation, please let me know who you are and an address so I can make sure you get a copy as soon the book is printed! (probably early May, since Noah is working as hard as he can on the illustrations!)

I hope you enjoy this small taste from the book.

Otterly-Impossible

Once upon a time, there were three otters. These otters were brothers, and they lived in Scotland. Now, usually otters do not have names. They just call each other “otter.” But these three Scottish otters all had names. That’s because whenever they went swimming together they would hear people crying out, “Oh look! It’s Loch, Ness, Monster!” The otters, who lived in a large lake called “Loch Ness” (Loch means lake in Scotland), assumed that the humans were calling them by name.

“Och,” said Loch, “Humans are a wee bit daft! But if they wanna give me a name like Loch, I suppose it’s all right.” Ness and Monster thought their names were a wee bit daft also, but having their own names did make things much easier. They remembered when all the otters were named “otter”; it made things very confusing. One otter would say “Otter,” and all the others would answer “yes?” Now if Loch wanted to talk to Ness, and not Monster, he could just say “Ness.” If Monster wanted to talk to Loch, he could just say “Loch.”

What the otters didn’t know was that the humans were not calling the otters by name. Instead the humans were very confused. Otters, when they swim, often swim in a row. So Loch would lead, and Ness and Monster would follow behind. Usually Loch would poke his head up to keep an eye on where they were going. Ness and Monster could just keep their heads down following Loch and trusting that he knew where they were going.

Also, the Scottish otter brothers liked to swim early in the morning when it was foggy out. Sometimes they also liked to swim about in the early evening hours. They liked to be on the lake when it was quiet, without a lot of dangerous boats.

One day Loch, Ness and Monster decided to go on vacation to the United States to visit their cousins. Their cousins lived in Lake Champlain, which is part of the state of Vermont. The Scottish otters flew across the Atlantic and met their cousins at the airport. Loch, Ness and Monster were quick to relate how they now had real, if slightly daft, names. The American otters just laughed and said, “come with us!”

Soon all the otters were having a lovely time on Lake Champlain. The American otters then said, “swim with us in a line and see what happens!” The otters all made a long swimming line and soon people on the shore were shouting. “It’s Champy! It’s a really long, giant Champy!” they cried. The American otters turned to their Scottish cousins and said “see, we have names also!” The Scottish otters thought the names “Champ” and “Pete” were wonderful.

“I wonder if all lake otters have been named by humans?” Champ said. They all decided that, for their next vacation, they would fly up to visit their second cousins in Canada at Lake Ogopogo and find out.

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This post, Skeptic Stories for children – Won’t you please help?, originally appeared on She Thought on February 8, 2012.
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When You Die, That’s It.

Anthropologist Underground — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:00:23 +0000

On a long drive between Denver and Laramie, at way past bedtime, my seven-year-old son told me about a magazine he had seen at the barber shop. He’s a good reader, so he could tell me what the words said, but he didn’t understand what they meant. He said there was a picture of a car on fire and the words, “You Can Go To Heaven Or You Can Go To Hell!” He described the page layout, and it sounds like the “go to hell” part was framed as an epithet. Nice…We began by talking about how disrespectful and offensive the phrase “go to hell” is to many people and that we don’t speak to others that way. We brainstormed some alternatives like, “I don’t agree…” or (my well-worn personal favorite), “I need some space to calm down for a few minutes….”Passing Virginia Dale, we talked about how most people are afraid of death. Some people believe in an invisible soul inside of us, like a ghost, that either goes to heaven or hell when your body dies. He said, “But we don’t believe in ghosts.” and I agreed with my standard disclaimer, “Well we’re not sure, but we really don’t think they’re real.”

Descending Pumpkin Vine Hill toward the Monolith Ranch, we talked about various religious mythologies surrounding death and how interesting they all are. We talked about our favorite book about death and reincarnation.

We talked about the similarities between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Because it’s the faith we encounter most often, we talked at length about Christianity, and how each of the the slightly differing sects fractured over minutia. Each sect their believers are the only people who go to heaven. Everyone else goes to hell. Then we fell into fits of giggles about how silly it is that everyone thinks everyone else is going to hell.

As we pulled into our driveway in Laramie, I said, “I don’t know for sure, but I think that when you die, that’s it. We need to really try to appreciate the people we love and lead a happy and peaceful life.”

By coincidence a few days later, we were watching a segment of the awesome (Anthropology porn!) BBC series, Human Planet, depicting a Tibetan Sky Burial. We both found this video a little viscerally disturbing, but it provided another opportunity to talk about the wide array of death mythology. It also beautifully illustrates how the physical environment shapes rituals surrounding death. It’s all incredibly fascinating from a distance.

Shortly thereafter, our sweet, goofy eleven-year-old lab, whom our children loved as a third sibling, started slowing down. A month after the vet suspected seasonal allergies, bone cancer had invaded his left eye orbit and jaw.

Explaining to my son, who has great empathy and compassion for living things, why we had to ask the vet to kill Chaco was very challenging. Convincing my child that he would eventually be okay was even harder. Some day when he’s older, we’ll explore the fact our society fetishizes pornographic violence and yet we can’t allow suffering adults of sound mind the option of euthanasia.

What was really hard for me in the process of having our dog euthanized is the language barrier. I had no way to let Chaco know that he would finally be free from the terrible pain after a month of the bumbling humans subjecting him to the useless eye drops he hated so much. I also desperately wanted to thank him for being so patient and gentle with our kids even during his final painful hours. I wanted to ask if he was as happy as he seemed, and if he was glad we were the ones who chose him at the shelter ten years ago. I hope so. I hope we gave him a good life.

Our vet sent a kind letter of condolence that included the Rainbow Bridge poem. Which was a nice gesture, but not very comforting to godless folk like us. Especially the part about how much the dead pet misses his people. Imagining Chaco waiting and waiting for us to die and arrive at the rainbow bridge to throw tennis balls for him is actually more awful to me than knowing he is dead.

George Hrab has a fantastic atheist tribute to a beloved pet. I can barely listen to it at the moment, but it is the gut-wrenching reality-based antithesis to the rainbow bridge bullshit. Here, with Geo’s kind permission, is the song Small Comfort from the album Trebuchet.

Small Comfort

My two-year-old speaks for us all when she says, “Chaco is died and my can’t find him!”

George Hrab is all kinds of awesome. His fantastic skeptical podcast, The Geologic Podcast is here, and links to his music and other work are here.

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This post, When You Die, That’s It., originally appeared on She Thought on February 7, 2012.
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Wikipedia and Skeptic Women

Susan Gerbic — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:00:50 +0000

Wikipedia has recently been flexing its muscles lately, I’m sure you have heard about their powerful one day blackout protesting SOPA. And why not? Wikipedia is one of the top five used Internet sites, how many of us tried to use Wikipedia that day and got the black shadow screen? I joined the Twitter group #DaywithoutWikipedia and after 1,200 tweets from the group in an hour I ran away. I tried to look up sites twice during the day and as an editor I should know better. Just a natural reflex I suppose.

As I mentioned, I am an editor of Wikipedia, helping to create the most awesome encyclopedia in the world. The price is great, free in price as well as free from ads, viruses and pop-ups. Summer 2011 I launched a focused campaign aimed at the skeptical/secular community asking them to become editors and focus on improving critical thinking content in all languages on Wikipedia.

The project has several goals all of which require people to join in our movement to learn how to edit Wikipedia either improving articles by adding critical thinking articles, removing unsourced opinions on paranormal pages to improving the pages of our spokespeople. I’m writing here today to discuss this project which I call We Got Your Wiki Back!

We know that people are using Wikipedia as their source for neutral general information. We also know (using this cool tool) that whenever anyone/anything is in the public eye there will be a spike in hits.

As an example I’m going to bring up the Rebecca Watson elevatorgate event. Please set aside your opinion and just see this exercise from a quantitative viewpoint. Normally Watson’s Wikipedia page receives 100 hits a day. We can see this in May – June 2011. In July 2011 she averages 675 hits a day, on July 2nd Popular blogger P.Z. Meyers wrote about the elevator story on Pharyngula Blog. That same morning Richard Dawkins responded in the comment section which was like dumping gasoline on the embers. About July 5th (as this statistics tool is off by a 24-36 hours) Watson’s WP page hits 2,038. August and beyond go back to normal plus 10% hits (about 110 per day.) I do not follow Watson’s career so I don’t know if there might have been other reasons why she had nearly a 2K percent spike in people wanting to know more about her on that day.

As I said, I am using this solely as an example. People are using Wikipedia as a source of neutral information. We don’t always know when suddenly the public will become fascinated with one of our own. Sometimes like in the case of the CFI conference we know who the speakers are going to be, and know that a few days before and after there will be an influx of people wanting to know more about these women. Are we prepared?

The Center for Inquiry is sponsoring a Women in Secularism conference May 18-20, 2012 in Virgina. They state “Outspoken, influential secularist speakers at Women in Secularism will discuss and examine the role religion has played in the repression of women.” Who are all these influential women that are representing the secularist community? I don’t know all these names, and doubt that most people do. So I’ve done what most people will do and looked them up on Wikipedia. Here is what the world will see if nothing changes between now and May 2012.

Lauren Becker does not have a Wikipedia page.

The Ophelia Benson page is a stub, missing a picture as well. 457 hits Dec 2011 – almost all the references on the page are by Benson. In order to prove notoriety, prominent secondary sources need to talk about her.

Jamila Bey does not have a Wikipedia page.

The Greta Christina page needs a bit of work also. She received 867 hits Dec 2011. The page has a reference flag which means that only primary sources are used. This challenges her notoriety, as in Benson’s case prominent secondary sources need to be found. The writing on the page needs some work as it reads like a fan has written the page.

Elisabeth Cornwell does not have her own Wikipedia page, but is mentioned in a sentence on the Dawkins Foundation page.

Annie Laurie Gaylor has her own page but like Benson’s it is a stub. 2,176 hits for Dec 2011.

The Debbie Goddard Wikipedia page was flagged for notability Sept 2011. Without a lot of improvement the page will soon be removed. 117 hits Dec 2011. Reading over the talk page for Goddard it seems that its deletion is only waiting until the editor remembers it was supposed to be pulled down months ago.

Jennifer Michael Hecht has a well tended page. 663 hits for Dec 2011.

The Sikivu Hutchinson page is in terrible shape, 3 flags from August 2011, one even stating that the page has no other links to it making it a “orphan”. Its only a matter of time before this page gets deleted. 212 hits to her page Dec 2011.

The Susan Jacoby page looks to be in pretty good shape, though missing a photograph of her. 1,713 hits in Dec 2011.

The Jennifer McCreight page has been improved a lot in the last few months when McCreight noticed that her page was on the list for deletion because of notoriety. McCreight wrote a blog about how it felt to have a Wikipedia page and then to have it taken away, this led to an outpouring of support by her fans. They sought out references and made a good effort to improve the page, the noteworthy flag remains. The page received 535 hits Dec 2011.

Wafa Sultan has a nicely written page though missing a picture. The page had 3,217 hits Dec 2011.

The Rebecca Watson page has 3 flags (one for notoriety) and a nasty bright red citation error in the references section. Hits are 5,961 Dec 2011.

Some might see the glass half-full and be thankful that our female representatives even have this much prominence. I’m usually a pretty optimistic kind of person, but in this case I’m a bit embarrassed. These are some of the top female secular speakers we have and 2 don’t have Wikipedia pages, and several are near deletion. Of the remaining pages only a few are in good shape. I will be bold and say that these sorry excuses for Wikipedia pages ALMOST matches the bad shape that some of our male spokespeople’s pages are in.

Why has this been allowed? These are our representatives, whether or not you agree with their message, by allowing these pages to turn into litter filled vacant lots we are giving the impression that we don’t care about our spokespeople and the world probably shouldn’t care either. If we don’t have their backs who will?

What to do about it? There is a lot that can be done. It isn’t that difficult. Can you supply a current nice portrait of one of these women? Can you help find the links necessary to improve these pages? Improving the writing/grammar on these pages will help make them more scholarly and readable. My blog Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia has hundreds of ideas of how to edit. My offer to virtually hand-hold anyone willing to learn editing stands. This is your chance to make a real difference in the skeptical/secular movement, improving the visibility and prominence of our spokespeople (both female and male) by editing Wikipedia pages is a win-win for everyone.

If you can help, please contact me susangerbic@yahoo.com

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This post, Wikipedia and Skeptic Women, originally appeared on She Thought on January 30, 2012.
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Science is Real!

Anthropologist Underground — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:00:05 +0000

The accessiblity for writing in public and self-publishing is amazing. I feel very fortunate to enjoy a few venues in which to do this. I have a passion for factual reality, and I want to spread the good news. I do love the opportunity to put my ideas out there for critical thinkers to pick over. I love learning and refining my perspective, and I love lively discussion in the comments here.

In real life I encounter far more diversity of rationality. It’s much harder to communicate. Culture, or psychology, or ideology, or misinformation often gets in my way. Which is both fascinating and incredibly frustrating. I’m also terrible at masking my emotions. “What the hell is wrong with you?” is easy to read between the lines on my face.

How can I convince someone of the fact of climate change when he earnestly believes that a skiff of snow anywhere on the planet is evidence that the climate is fine? How do successful science communicators bring reason to bear in public and private discourse?

Writer Greg Correll has a fascinating article about graphically representing information. He advocates all kinds of visual shenanigans to enrich written content.

On the 7 November episode of the Point of Inquiry podcast, host Chris Mooney interviewed Bill Nye (The Science Guy). It was a great discussion about how to communicate with people who are either scientifically illiterate or who for other reasons deny factual reality. One compelling example Money and Nye covered was climate change.

Mooney asked Nye to advise scientists who want to do a better job communicating to the public, especially in hostile media venues where interviews devolve into shouting. Nye responded with three points: keep the answers short; listen to the first question; remember that it’s a process and chip away at it.

One problem in the public discourse is that scientists tend to over-qualify their responses, and that leads the general public to infer scientific ambiguity.

Mooney, “I think I’ve seen research showing that the IPCC climate change language that they use, which is meant to convey a high degree of certainty, they say ‘very likely’ at this point. [...] When an average person hears it, they think that it’s less certain…”

Nye, “Oh, man! Absolutely! And the other example is they asked a guy [...] ‘Is this uh, atom-smasher in CERN, the um, Large Hadron Collider, is it going to cause, can it cause a black hole…in Switzerland, that will consume the earth in a matter of hours?’ And he said, ‘That’s very unlikely.’ And by that he meant, whatever the expression is, twenty sigma to the left of anything that would go wrong. But because he didn’t say, ‘Absolutely not!’ in parentheses, ‘you nutcase, you dingbat,’ uh, people just exactly as you said, seized on it. [...]

You have to talk to people. ‘No! No black hole! Not gonna happen! Uh, in order to get a black hole, you need, now I’m not an expert, but roughly the mass of six suns. Six of our stars. We don’t have that, so chill.’”

Another amazingly effective science communicator, Neil Degrasse Tyson, was a guest on the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe November 19th podcast. The interview begins around thirty six minutes into the episode. Podcast co-host Jay Novella calls Tyson a rock star and asks,

“Now I’m the lowly musician that just bought a guitar, and I want to know how to become a rock star. Is it really a huge portion luck, is there a secret that you stumbled on, is there an avenue that we could practice?”

Tyson spends a great deal of time talking about noticing when, why, and where people are interested. He studies people. He tries to figure out what engages people. He watches his audience for pupil dilation and adjusts his presentations to keep them interested. This requires him to arrive over-prepared and loose on his feet with pop culture references and humor to keep his audience involved.

Tyson and SGU host Steve Novella go on to discuss the importance of incorporating multiple sensory modalities into communication and creating graphical and visual references for people that adds information to the content.

Tyson, “My body is drawing a picture, when it can, of the content that I’m delivering. [...] Students learn more deeply the more senses you can excite in the effort of teaching them. [...] I think we should use all available ways to inform the senses that people have brought.”

Steve Novella, “The research backs that up, too. What you learned is backed up by a lot of research that shows, yeah, there’s lots of ways to affect the retention and people’s attention. [...] Every sensory modality you add adds to people’s perception and retention of the information you’re trying to get across.”

Which reminded me of Smell-O-Vision. If I had Smell-O-Vision, you would be inhaling the aroma of reason right now. This smells like very dark fair trade coffee that has been lovingly brewed in a coffee press.

Tyson has been on The Daily Show with John Stewart a number of times and said he did a great deal of research prior to his first interview. He studied the rhythm of the show and calculated the average time before John Stewart interrupted. Tyson tailored his response to the first question (as Nye advocated) to match that (brief) time frame, thus facilitating Stewart’s joke on a complete thought rather than on a fragment. He parsed his information to match the venue. Here’s a clip from 2007. I noticed both the rhythm and the way Tyson used his hands to illustrate his points.

Both Nye and Tyson spend significant time advocating for scientific literacy, and I completely agree. In this age of slick pundits shouting sciencey-sounding opposite-truths, it’s difficult for people to tell fact from fiction. I think it’s up to all critical thinkers to marginalize willful ignorance and celebrate reason. If someone makes a testable claim and a large percentage of smart people doubt it, look it up for yourself. Find the primary sources and watch for conflicts of interest and other red flags. Especially if the claim resonates strongly with your own biases.

An earlier version of this article appeared on Does This Make Sense.

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This post, Science is Real!, originally appeared on She Thought on January 27, 2012.
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