Is Trans Trending Downward? | The Spectator

[Posted by Chuck Almdale]

From the article:

How will we know when we’ve reached “peak trans?” The term, which dates back almost a decade, refers to the point at which the number of people who consider themselves trans reaches its apex and starts to drop. A report from last year shows the number of people who identify as trans or nonbinary is declining. Researcher Eric Kaufmann, who conducted it, notes that in the last decade, there was a 1,000 percent increase in the share of American teenagers who identified as transgender. 

Is Trans Trending Downward?
The Spectator | Katherine Dee | 9 Apr 2023
The market gets saturated, and something new has to come in.

Trans & Title IX – Personal Opinion : The recent citing of Title IX to forbid the barring of transwomen (and transgirls) from competing against cisgender females seems antithetical to the purpose and spirit of Title IX. That purpose was to encourage females in sports and try to even out the money spent on male & female athletes.

Now they want to use this law to permit people-formerly-known-as-male to directly compete against people-always-known-as-female. To contradict a popular straw-man argument, not all trans-women will out-compete all cisgender women, just as not all Ethiopian marathon runners will out-compete all runners from anywhere else. But for a transwoman, those years of natural testosterone-dosing while growing up gives them a distinct advantage. Trans-women in athletic competition are proving this regularly.

When the East German women swimmers showed up at the 1972 Olympics looking like muscle men with breasts-as-an-afterthought and beat everyone in sight, international sports fans and officials began moving to get steroids banned in as many sports as possible. Similarly, transwomen who benefited from years of natural testosterone production have an unfair advantage and should stay out of cisgender women’s sports. Women who support the presence of transwomen in cis-women’s sports are shooting real female athletes in the foot, stealing their funding and the recognition they earned but can’t get because they are now forced to compete against steroid-users.

Pitchforks in hand, the villagers come for E.O. Wilson | Jerry Coyne

[Posted by Chuck Almdale]

That’s my opinion in the title. Jerry Coyne’s title is more restrained.

Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins: In defense of E. O. Wilson
Why Evolution is True | Jerry Coyne | 18 May 2022 | 10 minute read
If you’ve been following the fracas about biologist E. O. Wilson and the intimations that he was a racist or at least friendly with racists, you’ll know that there are at least three articles accusing him either explicitly or implicitly of racism (see here, here, and here). 

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Chuck Almdale adds:
Edward O. (E.O. or “Ed”) Wilson was one of the top biologists of the 20th and early 21st century. Period. Biophilia, consilience, island biogeography, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology: major concepts with new discoveries and advances still being made in their domains, especially in evolutionary psychology.

Some of his books: The Theory of Island Biogeography; A Primer of Population Biology; The Insect Societies; Sociobiology: The New Synthesis; Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process (with Charles J. Lumsden); On Human Nature*; Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind; Biophilia; The Ants*; The Biophilia Hypothesis; Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge; The Future of Life; The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies; The Social Conquest of Earth; The Meaning of Human Existence; The Origins of Creativity; Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies. And over a dozen more. The two with asterisks (*) received a Pulitzer Prize.

His 1956 paper “Character displacement” in Systematic Zoology, coauthored with William Brown Jr., was honored in 1986 as a Science Citation Classic as one of the most frequently cited scientific papers of all time. He was a first rate scientist and writer, constantly creating new ideas, breaking new ground.

So of course the ignorant villagers….er, the Woke…have to take him down. He undoubted said or wrote something that someone, somewhere might think smacks of racism. Maybe he knew someone who said or wrote something someone thinks is racist. Or someone who knew someone who knew someone who…. Guilt by association. Simply comb through his dozens of volumes of writings and dig up a sentence or two, a conversation, a relationship. There’ll be something about which you can beat your breast and rend your shirt.

Jerry Coyne’s piece (linked above) comments on what Michael Shermer (Skeptic Magazine and many books) and Richard Dawkins (many books) have written about the phony charges of racism now being leveled at E.O. Wilson who—now a good target because he is safely dead—cannot respond for himself. The Woke constantly take a page from the Stalinist or McCarthyite (take you pick) book on self-serving persecution and defamation of character.

In Praise of Uncertainty | Harriet Hall | plus Special extras

[Posted by Chuck Almdale]

This article was originally published in Skeptical Inquirer March/April 2020, but cannot be accessed there except by subscribers. Fortunately it is available on Dr. Hall’s own website SkepDoc: Clear thinking about medical matters, as are hundreds of other postings. If you’re wondering about what’s true in medicine or untrue in quackery, that’s her specialty. She slices through nonsense with a hot scalpel.

The special extras are at the bottom.

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Dr. Harriet Hall is a contributing editor to both Skeptic magazine and the Skeptical Inquirer. She is a weekly contributor to the Science-Based Medicine Blog and is one of its editors. She has also contributed to Quackwatch and to a number of other respected journals and publications. She is the author of Women Aren’t Supposed to Fly: The Memoirs of a Female Flight Surgeon and co-author of the textbook, Consumer Health: A Guide to Intelligent Decisions.

In Praise of Uncertainty

Skepdoc.info | Dr. Harriet Hall | 26 March 2020

There is an old joke about a patient who had high praise for her new doctor. She had had headaches for years, and no one had ever been able to explain why. The cause remained uncertain. But the uncertainty ended when her wonderful new doctor promptly diagnosed her with cephalalgia. The joke is that cephalalgia is not a diagnosis: it’s just the medical synonym for headache. She already knew she had headaches but putting a medical label on it validated it for her.

We humans crave certainty, and that craving is a handicap imposed on us by the evolution of our brains. But uncertainty is far more realistic, and we would do well to train ourselves to live with uncertainty and to tolerate ambiguity. Especially in medicine. It’s better to have no answer than to have the wrong answer. The wrong answer could kill you.

Richard Feynman said it best:
“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing.
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs
and different degrees of certainty about different things… It doesn’t frighten me.”

Certainty is over-rated. Research on the Dunning-Kruger effect shows that the less people understand something the more certain they are. Robert A. Burton, a neurologist, wrote the excellent book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not. He showed that your certainty that you are right has nothing to do with how right you are. More…

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Special Extras

British comedy duo Mitchel & Webb look at Homeopathy, then at Lifestyle Nutritionists

QAnon: Blood Libel for the Digital Age | Skeptical Inquirer

[Posted by Chuck Almdale]

Skeptical Inquirer (The Magazine for Science and Reason) is a publication of the Center for Inquiry in association with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). The mission of CSI (link to statement) is to promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims. They publish a wide range of articles on critical thinking, science, philosophy, and on claims of the paranormal, fringe science and quack (or just plain bad) medicine. They have both print and electronic editions of the magazine. Some of their long list of current and deceased CSI fellows: Isaac Asimov, Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Ann Druyan, Martin Gardner, Harriet Hall, Douglas Hofstadter, Sidney Hook, Ray Hyman, Philip Klass, Paul Kurtz, Bill Nye, Massimo Pigliucci, Stephen Pinker, Donald Prothero, James Randi, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stuart Vyse, Marilyn vos Savant, Steven Weinberg, E.O. Wilson.

Last year, due to the pandemic, they began Skeptical Inquirer Presents, presentations from leading experts in science, skepticism, medicine, media, activism, and advocacy, all devoted to the cause of advancing science over pseudoscience, media literacy over conspiracy theories, and critical thinking over magical thinking. They appear every two weeks, each is about an hour long and so far there are fifteen titles ready for free viewing, with more on the way. Here are a few: Combating Fortunetelling Fraud (aka Psychic Fraud); The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet; Persuasive Bullshitters and the Insidious Bullshit Hypothesis; Evolution Only Breaks Things: The Science Denial at the Heart of Intelligent Design; Conspiracy Theories and COVID-19.

A two-part series on Qanon, written by Stephanie Kemmerer, appears in the current (Mar-Apr) and next (May-Jun) issues. Before reading part one I knew next to nothing about Qanon and found it quite enlightening. The following hour-long presentation by Kemmerer covers the same ground as the two written parts. For anyone interested in the myth and facts behind Qanon, this is for you.

QAnon: Blood Libel for the Digital Age
Stephanie Kemmerer | Time 1:07:35 Program begins about 5 minutes in.
Click the screen below to watch.

Wacky Waters

[Posted by Chuck Almdale]

Among the phony things you can blow your dough on and simultaneously look foolish using are expensive bottles of “special” water.

From: University of California, Berkeley Wellness Letter, September 2020

Functional (or enhanced) Water
Amino acids, vitamins, minerals, herbs, caffeine, raw fruits or vegetables, or other supplemental ingredients are added. But there’s no need for functional waters. A bottle of VitaminWater (from Coca-Cola), for example, contains 150 percent of the daily recommended amount of vitamin C, 100 percent of the recommended amounts of various B vitamins, and 25 percent of the recommended amount of zinc – amounts you can easily get from food. A bottle of so-called protein water, typically containing whey protein isolate, may contain 15 to 20 grams of protein (and often added sugar), but the typical American diet already provides more than enough protein.

Alkaline Water
This water contains natural or added minerals (such as calcium, magnesium, and potassium) and may also have acidic ions removed, to achieve an acid-base balance (pH) above 7, meaning that the water is alkaline. Water normally is neutral, with a pH of 7. Proponents claim that consuming too much acidic food compromises health and that drinking water that’s alkaline can prevent or cure diseases. Though there’s a kernel of truth to the idea that a diet that results in a more acidic environment in the body can cause bones to release calcium (thus possibly contributing to bone loss), this is unlikely to be an important effect, especially if you consume adequate calcium. More tho the point, there’s no evidence that drinking such water has any significant impact on the acid-base balance of your body; the body has many mechanisms to maintain a normal pH range in the blood. In any case, anything you consume is acidified in the stomach, and that would be the end of any alkalization from such water.

If you need to get more oxygen into your body,
breathe it, don’t drink it.

Super-oxygenated Water
These waters claim to have more oxygen than ordinary waters, a result of different proprietary methods, including putting the water under pressure, which forces more oxygen to dissolve in it. This extra oxygen supposedly improves heart function, among other claimed benefits, and is even said to fight wrinkles and hair loss. But this is nonsense. The added oxygen doesn’t add up to anything, since oxygen doesn’t readily cross into the blood through the intestines. Rather, in order to get oxygen you have to breathe it. And in a healthy person, blood is already highly saturated with oxygen. Besides, as soon as the top is popped on the bottle, the oxygen, which is poorly soluble in water and only held there under pressure, gets released into the air. Any that remains might end up in your stomach where the main effect will be an expensive belch. There is no credible published research – or logical rationale – to back any health benefits, beyond the hydration the water provides, including no evidence of significant improvements in exercise performance.