Irreducible complexity cut down to size

And here is QualiaSoup's second video on irreducible complexity.  It really does dismay me that made-up terms like this get so much attention because of the "argumentum ad ignorantiam" fallacy... It's all a Manufactroversy. That is, a manufactured controversy that is motivated by profit or extreme ideology to intentionally create public confusion about an issue that is not in dispute.  And anyone who denies our understanding of evolution is indeed adherent to an extreme ideology...  Just imagine how you would react to someone who was a proponent of "intelligent falling" as opposed to gravity.  You'd label them as daft, right?  (Yes, I know that it's an Onion Parody, but it applies.  Just like a flat earther, or geocentric follower is equally daft.)

No, Cancer hasn't been cured (yet)

So a bunch of facebook people are getting suckered into posting a headline that basically says “Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice.”  This really drives home my absolute hatred of irresponsible media reporting, and how most of the fuckwads in the media wouldn't know science if it bit them on the nose.

Thankfully we do have some people who can approach the subject with some scientific background.  I give you three quick examples.

Fists, Steve Novella over at Skepticblog has a thoughtful response.  I think EVERYONE should take heed with his conclusion:

The history of cancer treatment has taught researchers to be humble and realistic. New treatments are great, and they are each contributing to the slowly increasing survival of many cancers. We are making progress with a lot of singles – just not the grand-slam home-runs that the media wants for good headlines.

So don’t believe the conspiracy-mongering and the hype. The research is happening. It is being targeted largely to therapies in proportion to their promise. But unfortunately research progresses much more slowly than rumors spread through Facebook and Twitter.

Of course, if you want to know something about biology, maybe talking to a biologist would be a good idea?  At least he knows about what dichloroacetate is and means, right?  P.Z. Myers is one such biologist, and he weighs in with pictures and everything.  I think he states it quite well when he says:

The simple summary is this: that claim is a lie. There have been no clinical trials of dichloroacetate (DCA) in cancer patients, so there is no basis for claiming they have a cure; some, but not all, cancers might respond in promising ways to the drug, while others are likely to be resistant (cancer is not one disease!); and there are potential neurotoxic side effects, especially when used in conjunction with other chemotherapies.

Then there is the ever popular Orac at Respectful Insolence. Here is an actual medical doctor (surgeon actually) with his views.  It's hard to pick one summary quote from this latest entry, but I really liked this one:

I think Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, Deputy Chief Medical Officer for the national office of the American Cancer Society, put it well in writing about this latest DCA study on his blog, Dr. Len's Cancer Blog:

This research still needs lots of work before we know whether it works or doesn't work, and whether it is really safe or not when given to patients with cancer under a variety of circumstances. If that sounds overly cautious, so be it. I have seen too many dashed hopes in my medical career which make me a bit cautious about reports like this. That's not to say I don't think it could work--it could, as I mentioned above--but I want to see evidence in well done trials that prove the point that DCA is effective in the treatment of which cancers under what circumstances. Early in my cancer training there was a substance isolated by a researcher that was supposedly non-toxic and would cure leukemia. The research center where I was working was inundated from people around the globe who wanted this treatment, especially after the lead researcher injected himself on a nationwide morning show to demonstrate its apparent lack of toxicity. Only grams of this medicine existed. Fortunes were offered in return for getting this miracle drug. But the miracle drug--after reasonable clinical trials were done--didn't work after all.

Many are the lists of new "miracle cures" that have met this same fate. The difference today is that the Internet has allowed news of these drugs to be disseminated to more people than ever before--and faster than every before. Moreover, it has linked patients and activists into mutually supportive disease-specific communities, who can inform and educate each other, as well as publicizing research about their disease and lobbying legislators. The dark side of this power, however, is that it can facilitate the spread of false hope and the demand for a drug after only cell culture and animal work, before it even makes it to human trials. Add unscrupulous "entrepreneurs" into the mix, and the potential for harm is great. I like to echo the words of Fran Visco, President of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, who said:

...this isn't about emotion, it's about saving as many lives as possible and not about getting as many drugs out as possible. It's about doing the right research and making sure we have patient protections in place and making drugs available that are truly helpful.

Exactly. Emotion is easy. Conspiracy mongering is even easier.

So there you have it.  Remember that this isn't something new, but it's not the miracle cure that people are touting. Cancer is a horrible disease, and anyone struggling with it has my heartfelt sympathies.  But don't succumb to charlatans and liars that specifically prey on people struggling with it.  As Tim Minchin quipped, "Alternative medicine that actually works is called MEDICINE."

Unweaving the Rainbow: Lottery of Life

Say what you will about Richard Dawkins, he does have a way with words.  I came across this passage from his book Unweaving the Rainbow, and found it a beautiful passage.  It's this sort of wonder and romanticism that debunks the oft referred to canard that knowing and understanding science leaves one unromantic or jaded.  If anything, it heightens one's amazement at how lucky we really are, and paints a much more grand view of the universe than some primitive bronze age fable.  Anyway, I highly recommend the book.  And look at how wonderful, amazing, and rich the universe is without the need for some petty, unimaginative, impotent sociopath lording over us.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. the potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets then Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth, against all odds.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently ...spinning, green and gold harvest festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random would have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation would put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship's ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship's robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

The story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn't that what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn't arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn't burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder.

Of course I am playing tricks with the idea of luck, putting the cart before the horse. It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed. Privileged, and not just privileged to enjoy our planet. More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close for ever.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

Human-chauvinism

When debating with folks about evolution, invariably I get told that humans are somehow unique. That perhaps we really aren't just highly evolved animals. In many cases, the person making that assertion insists that humans are the only animal that does this or that thing. Sadly, it seems for those who hold that opinion that there are fewer and fewer things that we do that other animals don't do. New Scientist has an interesting article and a video on this (sadly you need a subscription to get to all of it).

Furthermore, this argument even seems to come from more skeptical people when debating what could lead to intelligence "elsewhere" (i.e. not on earth). We seem to be so stuck on our one data point that we forget that nature only managed to get to our state of being through many fits and starts. And we aren't very well put together either. As I said in a previous blog, evolution has no goal, aside from propegating a particualr species. The ones that do it well survive, those that don't end up extinct.

So, the point of this blog? Don't be such a human chauvinist!