I hate starting the week off with a depressing news article, but stories such as these are becoming all too common in a society that should be rooted in reason.

An 11-year-old girl from Weston, Wisconsin, died from diabetes after her parents relied on prayer to save her rather than bringing her to the hospital when her situation worsened.

Turns out the parents don’t actually belong to any organized faith:

“Her mother, Leilani Neumann, told The Associated Press that she never expected her daughter, whom she called Kara, to die. The family believes in the Bible, and it says healing comes from God, but they are not crazy, religious people, she said.
…
“We just believe in the Bible, that’s all. …This is our faith.”

Her husband added that, “We believe the word of God and live according to its precepts.”

Leilani Neumann said the family is not worried about a police investigation into her daughter’s death because “our lives are in God’s hands. We know we did not do anything criminal. We know we did the best for our daughter we knew how to do.”

But the worst news of all? The girl’s diabetes was treatable.

How many more children need to die before we all realize that prayer doesn’t work?

Or so the Washington Post says. In one of the most insulting, inflammatory opinion pieces about sex differences I’ve ever read, Charlotte Allen asserts that because of gender differences in spatial perception ability, car accident rates, and even literature tastes, women are dumber than men. She ends her piece by suggesting women might just well be happier if they stayed home and took care of others:

So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home… Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are…kind of dim.

Well. Maybe romance novels aren’t the most mind-expanding book list choice, but at least we can read.

Allen is seeing an awful lot in a few minor differences between men and women. Certainly it’s true that women perform worse on average than men on spatial perception tasks (it’s actually a subject I’ve taken up myself in a past issue of the Humanist), but there is still far more variation in ability among the sexes than between. Plus, even if the differences were huge and across the board, difficulty with direction a dumber sex does not make. Moreover, Allen herself relates data that shows IQ is pretty much level between men and women anyway, so shouldn’t that pretty much clinch it? Maybe she just really hates Eat, Pray, Love.

I certainly don’t think that differences between sexes is a topic that should be taboo—the more we understand about ourselves the better off we’ll be. But to conclude that the science proves women are dim is purely asinine. Shame on Allen, and shame on the Washington Post for tacitly endorsing such drivel.

Today is Darwin Day, and what better way to celebrate than with some primordial soup and maybe a sandwich? (See TedBlog for the validity of adding the sandwich.)

I’ve been enjoying Evolution on PBS with narration by Liam Neeson. It’s a great resource for what evolution is and how it works, for example, to make an eye or a wing. Other good sources are Richard Dawkins’s Climbing Mount Improbable or the video Growing Up in the Universe.

Why not throw a party with either video? Then there’d be no fooling us about transitional fossils. No one would trick us about complex design of eyes or wings. The only thing not covered in the above suggestions is abiogenesis. Fortunately, you can find abiogenesis on the net.

So I suggest a Darwin Day resolution for a bit of entertainment and education. Besides nothing feels better than being able to say “Why yes, actually, half an eye could be quite useful” and being able to explain why. Ah the power of a little science and a little learning.

Did Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution advocate racism and genocide?

Ken Ham thinks so. He is the leader of the Christian group Answers in Genesis and the founder of the Creation Museum built last year in Petersburg, Kentucky. Ham just released a book titled, Darwin’s Plantation: Evolution’s Racist Roots.

The New York Times includes several of Ham’s comments:

”What Darwinian evolution did I would say is provide what people thought was a scientific justification for separation of races,” Ham said in an interview.

In the new book, Ham says that Darwin’s theory that natural selection caused gradual biological changes over time, puts some races ”higher on the evolutionary scale” and others ”closer to the apes.”

”Although racism did not begin with Darwinism, Darwin did more than any person to popularize it,” Ham writes.

Ham further contends that the theory fanned the flames of ”ethnic superiority.”

”Stalin, Hitler and Mao were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions — and it can be shown they did this because of the influence of Darwinian naturalism…,” Ham writes.

The Darwin Report has this to say:

Historically speaking, Charles Darwin came from a family of abolitionists. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, strongly disapproved of slavery. And Charles Darwin wrote negatively about the slavery he witnessed on his travels in his book, The Voyage Of The Beagle. Darwin’s The Descent Of Man is also an argument against racism, since one of the points in it is the common ancestry of all the humans races. And simply using the word “savage,” as Darwin did, in its 19th century context doesn’t make a man a racist. Political correctness and cultural sensitivity were more than a century away.

But of course, David L. Schultz, associate professor of biology at Nicholls State University in Louisiana, sees the bigger agenda, calling Ham’s attempts as “a ploy to get evolution out of the curriculum.”

”Of course everybody’s against teaching children racism, so if you call it racist, you can have it removed,” said Schultz. He testified before a Louisiana legislative panel that took up the bill that would have tied evolution with racism. The measure was eventually stripped of any reference to Darwin.

I think I’d rather take the words of a true biologist with scientific reasoning on his side instead of a non-scientist, creationism-loving nutcase who believes that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together.

I started reading this at Think Progress. On October 15, 2007, President Bush appointed Susan Orr to oversee federal family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) saying she was “highly qualified.” Before serving with HHS Orr has made some rather telling remarks.

In a 2001 article in The Washington Post, Orr applauded a Bush proposal to stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees to cover a broad range of birth control. “We’re quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease,” said Orr, then an official with the Family Research Council. Orr also wrote an article for Family Research Council Called “Real Women Stay Married”. In it she claimed that women should “think about focusing our eyes, not upon ourselves, but upon the families we form through marriage.” She has declared herself against taxpayers supporting birth control and in a 2000 Weekly Standard article Orr spoke out against requiring health insurance plans to cover contraceptives. “It’s not about choice. It’s not about health care. It’s about making everyone collaborators with the culture of death.”

Remember, Orr’s HHS role is not just symbolic. She will oversee a $283 million program, a $30 million program that encourages abstinence among teenagers, and HHS’s Office of Population Affairs, which funds birth control, pregnancy tests, counseling, and screenings for sexually transmitted diseases and HIV.

According to the Carpetbagger ReportOrr will have “extensive power to shape the kinds of information disseminated to millions of women, and will be able to develop new guidelines for clinics, set priorities, and determine how scarce dollars get spent.” The last thing we need is a family planning office headed by someone opposed to family planning. It doesn’t even make sense. Giving someone a job based on their political views is wrong, but seeking their religious views is just as wrong and is clearly doing damage to our country. This type of cronyism needs to end. No more litmus tests other than the right job skills for the job.

Europe has issued a resolution against an “evil American phenomenon”. It’s not pornography or violence in our Hollywood movies. Nor does it have to do with abortion or stem cells. On October 4, 2007, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution titled “The dangers of creationism in education.” The resolution includes twenty points but I think point 11 and 15 are the most important and elegant expressions of the reason why Humanists and others join in the fight to keep evolution taught in our schools:

11. Evolution is not simply a matter of the evolution of humans and of populations. Denying it could have serious consequences for the development of our societies. Advances in medical research with the aim of effectively combating infectious diseases such as AIDS are impossible if every principle of evolution is denied. One cannot be fully aware of the risks involved in the significant decline in biodiversity and climate change if the mechanisms of evolution are not understood.

15.The teaching of all phenomena concerning evolution as a fundamental scientific theory is therefore crucial to the future of our societies and our democracies. For that reason it must occupy a central position in the curriculum, and especially in the science syllabus, as long as, like any other theory, it is able to stand up to thorough scientific scrutiny. Evolution is present everywhere, from medical overprescription of antibiotics that encourages the emergence of resistant bacteria to agricultural overuse of pesticides that causes insect mutations on which pesticides no longer have any effect.

A federal judge temporarily blocked a new Missouri abortion law Monday after Planned Parenthood said the law would harm women by dramatically reducing the clinics available to provide the procedure. The new law, Missouri Senate Bill 370, would categorize any facility that provides more than five first-trimester abortions a month, or any second- or third-trimester abortions as outpatient surgery centers.

The law requires the facilities to meet specific state building, staffing, and health standards. These standards include regulations such as requiring that hallways at the facilities be at least six feet wide and doors at least 44 inches wide.

U.S. District Judge Ortrie Smith granted Planned Parenthood a temporary injunction after hearing the argument that the organization would have to halt abortions at its Columbia and Kansas City offices–either permanently or while expensive and “medically unnecessary” renovations were made. Ortrie will hold a hearing today, September 10, to determine if the injunction should be made permanent.

Some conservatives claim that if Planned Parenthood truly wanted abortions to be safe, legal, and rare, they would be all about supporting this bill. But what about the charges that the law does little to support safety and in reality merely puts “medically unnecessary” blocks up to women getting abortions?

This law and the conservative response to it seem like scare tactics and false advertising to me. If we really want to make abortion safe, legal, and rare, we would provide real sex education, provide condoms, and have better laws protecting women in general against domestic violence and rape. Plan B would be made more accessible especially for rape and incest victims and if an abortion has to be performed we would make it possible early in the pregnancy. I think those are the humane choices, but how do other Humanists weigh in on this issue? Do you agree that clinics should be treated like outpatient surgery centers, even if they only prescribe medication? Or do you think they should be exempted from this law because of the nature of what they do?

Today is the one-year anniversary of Plan B’s approval for over-the-counter status (OTC). Sales of the drug remain high, though Nancy Keenan of NARAL said many women still don’t know you can now get Plan B without a prescription. If the conservative Family Research Council has their way, this lack of awareness will ultimately matter very little–the group has sued the FDA to overturn their decision to offer Plan B OTC. (Ironically, one of their complaints is that the decision to approve Plan B for OTC was made under political pressure. In fact, the FDA had delayed approval of the drug for years due to what many people–including many within the FDA itself–believed was an inappropriate politicization of the issue.)

To raise awareness of Plan B’s availability, Planned Parenthood created a short PSA and posted it on the internet. Watch it here.

According to an article published yesterday at CommonDreams.org, more than 80 percent of all U.S. toys are now made in China and few of them get inspected. The discovery of dangerous levels of lead paint in toys, jewelry, and bibs–and the recent Mattel toy recall–is finally putting scrutiny on the Bush administration for not taking action to ensure the safety of toys and other imported products. With less than 100 U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) inspectors and none in foreign countries, we maybe looking at the era of recalls. The Sierra Club alerted the government to the bib problem. How do we cope if we can’t trust the government to be watchdogs?

By the end of September 2004, the top seven trading partners to the Chinese mainland were the European Union, the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), South Korea, and China’s Taiwan Province, according to state statistics from China’s Ministry of Commerce. At number eight of course is Wal-Mart, although I can never find out if the above U.S. number includes the Wal-Mart total or not. What it does mean is a lot of Chinese goods are coming into a lot of countries. This is important because 60% of the products recalled this year came from China and over three-quarters of our toys our coming from China.

China is the only country out of 48 interested parties to tell a CSPC panel that to bring the lead restrictions in children’s jewelry to the same levels as those imposed on toys and furniture–six parts per million, basically a ban on lead in children’s jewelry–might be a barrier to trade. Since we’ve already seen how well the ban on lead in children’s toys is working via the Mattel and other recalls I don’t know why China is balking. But Guo LiSheng, the deputy director of a Chinese global trade agency, had this to say:

“We agree with the viewpoint of USA of protecting the children’s healthy and safety. And we consider that the method of stick warning mark on the children’s metal jewelry … may be more efficient than setting the limit of lead content.”

Is it China’s fault for resisting control? Or do we blame Wal-Mart for pushing prices down so that suppliers are forced to cut costs no matter what, and how about the Bush administration for cutting the CPSC and siding with business? Bill Maher was recently on Larry King and lamented that on many issues he would look to the Democrats but, “Where’s my champion on this issue?” I think as Humanists we must strive to find champions.

See: Who Regulates America’s Toymakers? in Time and Recent Toy Recalls in the New York Times.

The Los Angeles Times recently printed an opinion piece by Nick Street, “Meditation in schools is not a religious practice that raises any church-state issues.” I disagree with this idea (as does the AHA). My letter to the editor was published on July 27th:

Thoughts on meditation

Re: “Take a breath,” Opinion, July 25, 2007

Specific court precedent prohibits teaching transcendental meditation in publicly funded schools. Humanists, Christians, and others came together in the 1979 New Jersey case that led to this ban. They can be expected to unite again should current teaching repeat old mistakes.

If a meditation technique is rooted in transcendental meditation, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other specific religious practice, then it is clearly religious in nature. To pass constitutional muster, a meditation session would need to be completely sanitized of ritualistic sectarian religious undertones. Otherwise it would show a preference for one religious belief over another as well as for belief over nonbelief.

It has been shown that meditation’s benefits can also be attained through a regular midday nap, the use of long-established secular relaxation techniques, and by other means that are clearly free of religious undertones. There is no need to import stealth religion into the public classroom to get children to chill out.

What do you think about meditation in public schools? Is it inherently religious in nature, and therefore should it be banned in public schools? Or can the religious nature of meditation be stripped away to a secular core, making it appropriate for public schools?

And what about the general safety of meditation? The new issue of the Humanist magazine features an interesting story on this topic by Mary Garden titled “Can Meditation Be Bad for You?”

Nick Street’s article is posted online at the Buddhist Society of Western Australia’s website.

The September/October issue of the Humanist online features a “Web Extra” article by Carl Coon, titled “Beyond the New Atheism.” In it, Coon states:

Something big and creative is happening these days in the continuing search to understand religion from the outside. Theories vary, conclusions have yet to be reached, and division in the scientific community has certainly surfaced.

He briefly describes a back-and-forth between evolutionary biologists David Sloan Wilson and Richard Dawkins, concluding:

While such exchanges wouldn’t appear to unify the secular community, a multiplicity of theories could be turned to its advantage if we were to undertake a full-court press in seriously studying religion from an evolutionary perspective.

What do you think?

Last week non-religious doctors were lauded for helping the poor. Now comes another case of religion impeding certain doctors from helping certain patients. The Humanist Network News ran a story yesterday about doctors asserting their “right to decline.” More doctors, based on their religious beliefs, are refusing to perform abortions, prescribe the morning-after pill, perform artificial insemination, or even prescribe Viagra.

States are stronger in supporting doctors’ rights not to perform certain services than you might expect. Forty-six states permit the right to refuse to provide abortions, 17 states permit refusal to perform sterilization (vasectomy or tubal ligation), and 13 states permit refusal to provide contraceptives. Do doctors give up the right to act according to their conscience when they decide to become doctors? Can patients simply go to other doctors or is the embarrassment they suffer when being refused service or being lectured by a doctor too traumatic for patients?

The reason this is in the news again is the case before the California State Supreme Court. Guadalupe Benitez was refused a medical procedure, artificial insemination, because she was a lesbian patient even though the two doctors charged in the case readily provide artificial insemination to heterosexual patients. Other Californians say they were denied artificial insemination or other procedures because of their doctors’ objection to single parenthood.

The doctors in this case want to be able to chose who they will perform services for instead of as in the above issues, choosing what procedures they will or won’t do.

Kenneth Pedroza, the doctors’ attorney, counters that an “all-or-nothing” rule will drive physicians out of certain specialties. But this begs the question, what good is the world’s best heart surgeon to you if he won’t operate on gays and you happen to be gay? Why shouldn’t a doctor be forced at least to choose a specialty based on his religious convictions if he is then going to invoke those convictions to say what procedures he will and will not perform?

See Elaine Friedman, More Doctors Refuse Service Based on Religion and
Freedom of Religion or Discrimination?

Woo Suk Hwang, the leader of the team of disgraced South Korean researchers who claimed to have produced the first stem cells from a cloned human embryo, had, in spite of everything, achieved a significant first. Recent analysis by Children’s Hospital Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts reveals that the cell line Hwangs’ team created represented the first example of parthenogenetic human embryonic stem cells. These type of cells have since been created in several countries and might represent a significant alternative to regular embryonic stem cells, so why aren’t we hearing more about them?

Parthenotes are eggs that divide without sperm, sort of a virgin birth. In some lizards and fish they may produce viable offspring, but not in mammals. Parthenotes typically result in embryos that survive for only a few days or weeks. That still makes them a potential source of embryonic stem cells, and because human parthenote embryos can’t develop to term, this could potentially raise fewer ethical issues around destroying potential life in working with stem cells. The Washington Post goes so far as to say that “embryonic stem cells derived through parthenogenesis cannot develop normally, so they are free of ethical objections.”

After initial genetic analysis on Hwang’s stem cells were inconclusive, Kitai Kim and George Daley of Children’s Hospital and the other Boston scientists got involved. They compared the genetic signatures of mouse embryonic stem cells made through nuclear transfer and those made from parthenogenetic embryos. The pattern seen in the Hwang cell line matched that seen in the mouse parthenote-derived cell lines.

Here’s the kicker– the U.S. prohibits federal funding for working with parthenogenetic embryos. It has been proven that work with parthenotes is much more efficient at producing stem cell lines than the more common nuclear transfer method, and one would think that using parthenotes should be a more sought-after method as we aren’t killing a viable embryo. So where is the hue and cry for this research? Is it too early in the research to know? Does it seem like farming embryos? If so where should humanists come down on this technique?

If abortion were illegal, how much jail time should a woman serve for obtaining one?

That’s the question being asked of anti-abortion protesters in a fascinating mini-documentary posted on YouTube. Taking place outside of an abortion clinic in Libertyville, Ill., these series of interviews highlight an aspect of the anti-abortion crusade that in retrospect seems so glaringly obvious that I’m chagrined to admit it’s one which I myself hadn’t considered before. But I’m definitely not the only one — upon being asked how much time women should serve for obtaining hypothetically illegal abortions, protesters in the video appear taken aback, many of them stammering while admitting they’d never given it much thought. When pressed for answers as to the punishment such a crime would warrant, the ones given range from “counseling” to “pray for them.”

If you believe that abortion is murder then it follows that you should endorse severe punishment for women who undergo the procedure. However, most of the protesters seem to shy away from such a position and my guess is that most people in the broader society who identify as pro-life would as well. This logical contradiction — it’s unreasonable to argue abortion is murder but should go lightly punished — illuminates the highly emotional aspect of the abortion debate for anti-choicers: it’s a moral issue, not a rational or even practical one, and who cares about the consequences of a ban? Perhaps if we in the pro-choice camp can begin demanding answers to these sorts of very practical questions we can begin to get anti-choicers to at least consider their position more rationally, if not moderate their stance.

Here’s some good news on the statistics front. It seems that atheist and agnostic doctors are just as likely to do good by providing care for the poor as their religious counterparts.The data comes from a new study by researchers at the University of Chicago and Yale New Haven Hospital published in the Annals of Family Medicine. “Spiritual, but not religious,” doctors also ranked high in caring for the poor.

Most studies show religious people more likely than others to help the poor, according to Dr. Harold Koenig, director for the Center for the Study of Religion, Spirituality and Health at Duke University. Which begs the question why those of us who aren’t doctors, myself included aren’t doing our part? Is it that doctors have easier access to needy patients while the rest of us don’t? Do we just settle for the donations we set up at work and figure that’s enough?

Dr. Farr Curlin, who attends a nondenominational church, express his disappointment with the findings.

“Caring for the poor is an expression of faithfulness and commitment,” he said. “But many religious physicians don’t make the connection.”

People who aren’t religious generally view this life as the only chance one gets to help other people.