Girls have caught up to boys in math scores.

The first sign of crankery, by the way, is when you maintain the conclusion, and just change your arguments, after your initial “proofs” are proven wrong.  The idea that women are inherently worse than men at math has been a mainstay of pseudo-science evo psych crankery for a long time now, but now that it appears that it was, as non-choads have said for a long time, a matter of social conditioning and not inherent ability, we can’t expect them to back off the predetermined conclusion, which is that women are inferior in some significant way that explains why we deserve to make less money and have less power.  Any guesses on what women’s next natural inferiority is going to be?  The ability to manage game controllers?

My favorite theory, and I’m amused at how few evo psych choads are willing to engage this one, is that men’s major superiority over women throughout history has been brute strength and swiftness with the back of the hand.  Really, do you need to be better at calculus to subdue another population?  I guess, now that violence is less admirable a trait than it was throughout most of human history, we have to change the arguments around the predetermined conclusion. Civilization: how the patriarchy turns from smack-a-bitch to crank arguments.  I guess that’s progress.

Sorry to come from an on-and-off Netroots Nation plus moving-inspired break to write about vaccinations again, but seriously, there is something screwy going on with the anti-vaccination crankery out there.  At Netroots Nation, the most expensive booth—-easily the most expensive booth—-in the exhibit hall was an anti-vaccination booth.  It was tall, and they had a set of volunteers in matching uniforms, and the booth had a number of widescreen HD TVs blasting anti-vaccination crankery about how mercury in vaccinations causes autism.  It doesn’t.  I’m sure other baseless assertions were being tossed around, because the first sign of crankery is that when the argument is proven completely false, hang onto your conclusions (in this case, vaccines cause autism) and change the arguments.  Lawrence Lessig called out the anti-vaccination cranks during his speech, and castigated them for exploiting the vulnerability of the parents of autistic children, so I’m glad they were confronted in some way.  I thought about it, but couldn’t for the life of me think of what such a confrontation would look like, or what results it would produce. 

We were so curious about how this organization (called the National Vaccine Information Center) dedicated to full-blown crankery got so much money to have such a nice booth.  Jesse walked up and asked them while they were breaking down who their donors were, and apparently, they were really cagey about it, moving between arguments about protecting privacy to implying that non-profits don’t generally disclose that information.  I know that’s not true, but I’m not sure how to research where to find donors, so if any commenters have advice, it would be greatly appreciated.  I checked their tax returns from last year, and they made a little over $300,000, which isn’t chump change, but still seemed low for what they were able to put into this booth and the fliers at Netroots Nation.  Since there’s so many big Hollywood stars involved in anti-vaccination crankery, I wouldn’t be surprised if money was coming from that area.  Which leads one to wonder idly if Scientology is involved in any way. 

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I’d like to thank reader Sara for sending me some links about the ongoing political hell that is the autism controversy.  It remains, to this day, something of a mystery as to why this disease, before all others really, brings in the woo-peddlers and causes so much political strife, but we don’t need to know the causes to know the effects—-families suffer from an overload of bullshit that’s ultimately not helpful, and could be harmful.  Anyway, the first link frustrated me to the point where I felt kind of helpless.  The article, at first read, makes it seem like using chelation to treat autism is, if not effective, at least a bit of harmless alternative medicine that may be helping. It gives aid and comfort to that most innocuous-seeming but deadly argument, “They’re not hurting anyone, so why not?”  Only 7 paragraphs in do you find out that chelation is possibly dangerous.

One of the drugs used for chelation, DMSA, can cause side effects including rashes and low white blood cell count. And there is evidence chelation may redistribute metals in the body, perhaps even into the central nervous system.

Chelation, for what it’s worth, is a real procedure used to detoxify people with heavy metals in their system.  The unproven-close-to-disproven theory is that autism is caused by mercury poisoning,* and from that, people extrapolate that chelation could be used to undo the effects of this supposed poisoning, which requires several steps of really unscientific thinking to get there.  It’s kind of a stunning example of how a little bullshit starts to grow and mature and turn into mega-level bullshit.  It has a weird internal logic to it, but there are just giant reasoning holes.  It would be funny, except that real life children are being subjected to these treatments, and real life parents are convincing themselves it’s working when it’s probably not.

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As you read this, I’m in transit to Hollywood to film an interview for a documentary about the chastity movement.  To no one’s big surprise, I’m against it, but that’s neither here nor there.  The point is blogging may be spotty until Thursday morning, when I’ve safely returned from Gomorrah-on-the-Pacific.  (Sodom is San Francisco.)  In the meantime, I figured you all would be as disappointed as I am to see more choad-based “science” with this research that seems geared towards proving every Nice Guy® who claimed that women really like jerks, not realizing that if that was really so, he’d be rolling in the pussy just for saying that.  Jill’s take is well worth reading, but I have more to add, naturally. 

The article is a stellar example of choad-based science.  First, there’s the weird implication that having more sexual partners=having more offspring, which is actually anti-true nowadays (it’s easier to talk someone into having kids if you stick around), and I’m skeptical if it ever was a better strategy than actually cultivating relationships.  Second of all, they use movie characters as “evidence” for the theory, as if stories about James Bond are some great insight into human nature instead of a male fantasy that’s a fantasy precisely because of how unlikely it is. 

The theory is that jerks have more sex than nice guys.  Well, er, not more sex actually, though we can assume that’s going to be the erroneous assumption drawn by Nice Guys® around the world who use this research to justify their belief that women are too stupid to breathe, much less be trusted to select our own sexual partners.  But actually, the research shows that college-aged men that have a triad of ugly personality traits—-narcissism, callousness, and dishonesty, basically—-are more likely to claim a higher number of sexual partners on a survey.  As anyone who has both done the slutty single thing and the monogamous thing would tell you, slutty singles actually get laid less.  You know, because it’s so much more work.  But yes, you get more notches on the bedpost.  One of the allures of monogamy is the appeal of getting laid all the time, after all.  Of course, as commenters at Feministe noted, the immediate conclusion is that men who lie frequently outside of surveys are probably more likely to lie on a survey, which might be enough to explain this situation.

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Those evo psych quacks are getting craftier about pushing their message (in essence: women are less worthy than men and therefore should have to do more work for less pay)—-the trick increasingly is not to flatter male egos by telling them that they’re meant to roam around town fucking everyone in sight while “natural” women appreciate staying at home being monogamous.  That was a crashing failure and made women eager to look for the flaws in research that doesn’t exactly conform to our experiences of being women.  No, the trick now is to put down men and flatter women in hopes that women don’t notice that, at the end of the day, the evo psych theory is on shaky ground and is dangerous to our rights. That’s the trick in this article that uses the angle of arguing that our “hard-wiring” makes men boring, so see ladies, that smaller paycheck isn’t that big a deal.  (Hat tip.) 

It’s a clever article, because it addresses a real frustration I think a lot of women could relate to immediately (I know I can), and it subtly reverses a stereotype. 

Are men boring? A straw poll among friends and relations would suggest the contention is so irrefutable that evidence is barely necessary. In Brighton, my friend Esme Jones, 38, who has just had a baby, spent a precious night out with her husband, a film editor, and said she kept nagging him to talk. “If I’d been with you or another girlfriend, even if we’d seen each other earlier in the day, we’d have been gabbling away 19 to the dozen.”

Prudence Barratt, 52, a management consultant, went to a dinner party in Hampstead, where she lives, at which the women sat at one end of the table, the men at the other. “And it was the nicest dinner party I’ve been to in ages. Normally when you arrive at a party, the women talk to the women because they know they’re not going to be allowed to later. It was like in the old days, when the women retired leaving the men to drone on over the port and cigars, but for the whole evening. It was bliss.”

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I just found out from listening to the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe that Time magazine graciously printed a very good article about the crank-based questions about vaccinations.  There are many things to love about this article, but what I think gave me a moment of dark humor was this part:

Some parents have taken to cherry-picking vaccines, leaving out only the shots they believe their children don’t need—such as those for chicken pox and hepatitis B—and keeping up with what they see as the life-or-death ones. But that can be a high-stakes game, as Kelly Lacek, a Pennsylvania mother of three, learned. She stopped vaccinating her 2-month-old son Matthew when her chiropractor raised questions about mercury in the shots. Three years later, she came home to find the little boy feverish and gasping for breath. Emergency-room doctors couldn’t find the cause—until one experienced physician finally asked the right question. “He took one look at Matthew and asked me if he was fully vaccinated,” says Lacek. “I said no.” It turned out Matthew had been infected with Hib, bacteria that causes meningitis, swelling of the airway and, in severe cases, swelling of the brain tissue. After relying on a breathing tube for several days, Matthew recovered without any neurological effects, and a grateful Lacek immediately got him and his siblings up to date on their immunizations. “I am angry that people are promoting not getting vaccinated and messing with people’s lives like that,” she now says.

Emphasis mine.  We can all have a dark laugh at the fact that chiropractors are part of the problem—-why wouldn’t one form of crankery promote another?—-only because the little boy had no lasting damage.  But what if he had?  How many other small children are being put at risk because parents erroneously believe that vaccinations are bad because some guy in a white coat pretending to be a doctor said so?  Or because they read that vaccinations cause autism on the internets?  After all, the cranks yell louder than the people talking sense, which makes them more believable sometimes.  (Believe me, I know—-both anti-choicers spreading misinformation about abortion and creationists spreading lies about evolutionary theory are very adept at dominating search engine results and seeming like they know what they’re talking about when they don’t.) 

Information that isn’t surprising: Paranoia about vaccinations causing autism is groundless. 

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