I'm calling bullshit on the "government stole my bees" story

In the past few days, a story has been circulating about Terrence Ingram, an Illinois beekeeper that had his bees "illegally" taken by Department of Agriculture officials and destroyed. Furthermore, this destroyed his "decades of research" in breeding a "Roundup immune" strain of bees. I'm sorry, but everything I've read about this story just isn't credible.

First of all, there are no sources. Or as Wikipedia would put it, no reliable sources. I've seen a couple of people post links to this article at GlobalResearch, also a 9/11 troofer site. There is exactly one hit on this in Google News, which turns out to be a blog post at SouthMilwaukeeNOW.com, which cites as its original source this article at Packalert Press, which also thinks the recent OK tornado was artificially created by Obama to distract from the IRS scandal. The site that seems to have written the most about it is Prairie Advocate, which could have published a press release written by Ingram and it probably wouldn't have looked any different.

This whole story stinks. This guy claims to have been performing "research" on the effect of Roundup on bees for decades. There's nothing in Google Scholar by this guy; not a single paper. After having done over 10 years of research, no one suddenly comes out with groundbreaking results having published nothing in the meantime. Ingram claims he was about to reveal proof(!) that Roundup, everyone's favorite bugaboo, causes colony collapse disorder. Well, I'm sorry, but it's not like that hasn't occurred to anyone before. The exact cause of colony collapse disorder is unknown, but it's likely a combination of a number of factors, including parasites, viruses, and environmental toxins like pesticides.

What's a lot more likely is that this guy's hives were infected with American foulbrood, a highly contagious and incurable disease that can spread from hive to hive. In fact, that's exactly what the Department of Agriculture found when they inspected his hives and sent samples to a lab. They notified him multiple times of the fact that foulbrood had been detected in his hives and he was ordered to burn them. He continued to refuse and months later, the DoA came in, seized the hives, and (presumably) destroyed them, as they are legally allowed to do.

Ingram is outraged (outraged, I say!) that the DoA even inspected his hives. The Prairie Advocate story quotes Ingram as saying, "The State Department of Agriculture came in and inspected our hives 4 times, 3 times when we were not home, and without due process. I have never received or found a Search Warrant." Furthermore, several of the articles and blog posts on this around the Web claim that these bees were seized "illegally."

Did you know that Illinois has a Bees and Apiaries Act? Neither did I, but yes, Illinois has an entire section of the law on the keeping of bees. 510 ILCS 20/2-4 says, "The Department shall have the power to inspect ... any bees, colonies, items of bee equipment or apiary. For the purpose of inspection, the Director is authorized during reasonable business hours to enter into or upon any property used for the purpose of beekeeping." So the DoA did not need to serve Ingram with a warrant to inspect his bee hives.

Furthermore, they were entirely within their rights to seize and destroy the infected hives. After Ingram had refused multiple times to deal with the infected hives, the DoA has the authority to do it for him (and send him a bill, at that). From 510 ILCS 20/2c, "In carrying out the provisions of this Section or any quarantine, the Director may, at the expense of the owner, when an infestation, infection or nuisance is located, seize or abate bees, colonies, or items of used bee equipment."

So there simply is no story here. There was no violation of the law. There was no illegal seizure of bees or bee hives. But the fact that this guy claims to have been doing "research" into Roundup means this story is going to be flogged by Monsanto-hating activists from one end of the Internet to the other.

The world's crappiest encyclopedia just got crappier

Unless you're an ignorant Luddite who's just learning to "get on the Internet," you're familiar with Conservapedia, a right-wing attempt to create an Internet Ghetto of Ignorance. It is a place where they can go to not be confronted by facts or be disturbed by reality's well-known liberal bias. It is a place where ideology trumps reality. But now they've set their sights on actually interfering with the scientific process.

Let me explain. No there is too much. Let me sum up. Richard Lenski at Michigan State University has been performing an experiment on E. coli for the past twenty years. Recently, they published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the E. coli had evolved an entirely new feature; namely, that the bacteria could eat the citrate present in the cell medium, where it normally just subsists on glucose that's in there. Here is the New York Times article and here is one of the many good blog articles about his research.

Conservapedia can't let this stand. A demonstration of evolution in action is a direct threat to their creationist views. So Andrew Schlafly, head Conservapedia wingnut, started trying to discredit the paper. He first wrote Lenski demanding his data. Lenski responded saying that all the relevant data was in the PNAS paper. Schlafly wrote again, demanding Lenski's data apparently claiming that he has some sort of right to it since Lenski's work was "taxpayer funded." (As if a scientist working on a government grant has a responsibility to copy decades of work for any yahoo that stops by his lab.) He's even threatened legal action. Lenski responded again with a letter that I can only describe as a thing of beauty. RationalWiki has the entire exchange archived, but it's Lenski's second response that has got to be one of the best takedowns of such an ignoramus I've ever seen. Give it a read.

Oh, but it gets better!

Conservapedia now has a Flaws in Richard Lenski Study page, as well as trying to claim they found lots of errors in his paper at their Richard Lenski page. They're also threatening to write a Letter to PNAS for publication (not unusual if someone wishes to respond to a published paper) pointing out all the "flaws." If they do, just them displaying their ignorance to the scientific community and reading what I'm sure would be an entertaining response letter by Lenski would be so entertaining that it might go a long way to convincing me that there really is a God and he wants me to be amused.

But there's a bigger point here. These people are trying to interfere in the very process that makes science work. That there is this big pseudoscience resource on the Internet -- and let me point out that Conservapedia is intended to be a resource for homeschooled children. They're not making these criticisms in an attempt to forward our understanding of the world; they're making them because this is evidence in support of evolution, and they dare not let it go unchallenged because that would put their religious beliefs in danger. So they throw up a smokescreen and they hound the researchers with spurious demands for "data."

Science is hard. It requires years of study, dedication and then it takes more years of doing research, building a reputation and only then might you come across something really new and interesting. Religion is easy. It just requires a suspension of disbelief and obedience to doctrine. The problem is that science is a tool that leads our society and our knowledge into the future. It's what lets us build new technology, develop new drugs, shrink our transistors, all of which develop our economy. These religious nitwits stand in the way of all that. They attack not just the scientific process, but the population's confidence in its trustworthiness. They are a threat to our future and a threat to our superiority in the world. The sad part is that I think we're outnumbered.

Good posts on the subject:

• Beneficial Mutations in Bacteria, Wherein Conservapedia is Pwned
• Beneficial Mutations in Bacteria, Wherein Conservapedia is Pwned, Take II: Andy Schlafly’s Lawyer Gambit Fails
• The Lenski "Debate": Missing Schlafly's Point
• Hubris, gall, arrogance…inanity

A perfect storm of ignorance

Sigh. The creationists are at it again. It never ceases to astonish me that there are so many credulous and gullible people in this country. It seems to be getting worse, not better.

First, Chris Comer was fired from the Texas Education Agency for forwarding an email about an anti-intelligent design speech. She was the director of science curriculum and in charge of the science standards for Texas schools. "Coincidentally," those standards are up for review this year. The deputy commissioner that demanded her firing used to serve as an advisor to then-governor George W. Bush. Somehow, I'm not surprised. Again, I'm ashamed to be Texan.

A man writes in to the News-Gazette with a "disproof" of evolution that has nothing to do with evolution. Hint: if a disproof of one of the most accepted and evidence-supported theories in all of modern science fits on a 3x5 card and requires only an 8th grade education, there's probably something wrong with your argument.

There's actually a creationist wiki: CreationWiki. Unlike even Conservapedia, participation isn't open; you must first ask the site admins for permission. Believing in Godly creationism is a prerequisite; Hellbound atheists need not apply.

A Florida educator sends out an email asking creationists to fight the inclusion of evolution in Florida's educational standards. Unlike the Texas case, she receives only a reprimand.

Ugh, it's just so frustrating. The good news is that if you go look at the comment on Comey's firing at the Statesman article or at the Chronicle editorial, they are predominantly pro-evolution. The frustrating part is that the anti-science comments are full of the same stuff we've seen a thousand times before: evolution is just a theory, there are no transitional fossils, evolution isn't true because we don't know what came before the Big Bang. Geez, creationism hasn't had a new argument since about 1925.

Does the Pill encourage teenage sex? No.

Apologies, this is likely to be a long one

Executive Summary

You're a busy person, Gentle Reader, so here's the scoop: after a discussion over at Illinipundit, I went looking in the peer-reviewed literature to find out whether or not access to oral contraception increased sexual activity in teenagers. Basically, I was trying to find out whether making oral contraception available encourages teenagers to have more sex. I couldn't find much of anything specifically limited to the Pill, but found quite a lot on contraception in general.

The undeniable conclusion is that access to contraception does not increase sexual activity in teenagers. Similarly and not surprisingly, access to sexual education about contraception also does not increase sexual activity in teenagers. If anything, comprehensive sexual education delays the onset of sexual activity and increases the use of contraception and condoms.

Background

Over at Illinipundit, there was a discussion about a public middle school in Maine with a health clinic that decided to proscribe birth control pills to its sexually active students. Some quick factoids from the NY Times article: there are about 500 students in the school, 135 have the parental permission required to use the clinic, 5 of those were sexually active, and they were all either 14 or 15 years old.

The scope of the teen pregnancy problem is stunning: over 40% of teenage girls are pregnant at least once by the time they're 20. (Kirby) Furthermore, a quarter of sexually active teenagers contract an STD each year. (Kirby)

In the discussion at IP D. Boon asked this:

I would really like to see some of these studies that show the prevalence of The Pill has not led to increased sexual activity at a young age. I have no qualms about saying abstinence only education is probably a not effective, but I've head the opposite about the pill.

Now, I'm pretty sure the research shows that access to contraception does not increase sexual activity in teenagers, but most of what I could remember was about condoms, not the Pill. So I went to look for the actual information.

D. Boon and redstatewannabe both also said that contraception being made available would constitute an "endorsement" of the situation. It was never really explained what that meant, specifically, but I take it to mean that it would have the effect of encouraging teenagers to have sex at a young age.

Methodology

Google Scholar. Really, that's about it. I searched for various combinations of "oral contraception", "the pill", "birth control", "contraception", "sexual activity", "teenager", "adolescent", and similar terms. I found several of what looked like good papers, read them, and followed their references to papers they cited.

I want to make it clear this wasn't an exhaustive or comprehensive search. Google Scholar isn't the best database out there, and finds lots of extraneous stuff. I'm a scientist and engineer; the databases I usually use don't index this sort of social science material. I know there are other databases like Pubmed and Medline, but I don't know how to use them. I also want to make it clear that I'm not a social scientist, so I'm generally relying on the analysis of the authors (I really don't understand how p-values and statistical significance work). Nor did I want to spend more than an hour or two (or five, by now) on this, so I limited myself to less than a dozen papers.

My search was limited to published, peer-reviewed information and their citations. I specifically did not want to rely on any press reports because they almost inevitably over-simplify the science or get it plain wrong.

Findings

In short, neither access to contraception nor sex ed that discussion contraception hasten the initiation of sexual activity. (Committee, Kirby) Everything I found supported that conclusion. It was unanimous. Kirby even describes the amount of evidence supporting this conclusion as "overwhelming."

I was not able to find data specifically limited to the Pill, but part of that may be due to the fact that there are currently at least thirteen different contraceptive methods available, including three different formulations of the Pill. Most studies looked at contraception generally, one I found looked specifically at the effect of condoms on behavior, in the context of HIV prevention.

One thing that became clear is that access to contraception isn't enough. Access to information and education is also very important. Zabin found that access to a health clinic that sounds very similar to the one in Maine (access to sexual education, counseling, and access to contraception and medical services) actually resulted in a significant delay in the onset of sexual behavior. Quoting the study:

While the changes in the age at first intercourse are not large, they are substantial enough -- in the direction of delay -- to refute charges that access to such services as those provided by the program encourages early sexual activity... The project appears to demonstrate that if students in junior high schools are given access to nearby services and if they are offered information and continuity of care, they will use such services, and at levels comparable to those shown by older teenagers.

It usually takes about a year for an adolescent female to seek contraceptive services after the onset of sexual activity. (Committee) The Zabin study found that with one year's access to the program, a female student was about twice as likely to have sought out such services before becoming sexually active, and the percentage at six months was 70%. In other words, it is important that sexual education and contraceptive access start before the onset of sexual activity. The median age for this onset in the Zabin study was about 15. (Admittedly, this was a study in an urban high school, were it is likely to be younger than elsewhere.)

Guttmacher et al. did a study on the effect of the condom distribution program started in 1991 in all New York City schools. This was done in the context of HIV prevention, but their results should be relevant in this discussion of sexual activity as well. They found:

Clearly, making condoms available at school does not lead to increases in sexual activity.

Furthermore,

higher-risk students reported getting a condom from school in significantly higher proportions than lower-risk students.

There was also some concern raised in the IP discussion about the confidentiality of these medical services. Several commenters felt that not informing parents that their children were sexually active was a violation of their "parental rights." According to the Committee report:

The primary reason adolescent's [sic] hesitate or delay obtaining family planning or contraceptive services is concern about confidentiality.

In other words, the best way to make sure teenagers do not use birth control or condoms is to tell their parents. I understand the concern here, but a parent's rights over an adolescent are not absolute. It is the moral and ethical duty of any health care worker to care for his patient's medical needs first; the abrogated rights of a third party are a secondary concern. This isn't to say they're unimportant, as in the case of mandatory reporting of rape or abuse, but a teenager above the age of consent has some medical privacy rights.

Conservatives have been pushing for abstinence-only sex education for some years now. There's even a new TV ad pushing parents to tell their children to not have sex. Personally, I think this is stupid. Not only does it completely ignore the existence of gays and lesbians, not only is it a practice that isn't used by 90% of the American population, and not only is it the only instance I know of where mandated ignorance is a form of education, but there's this to consider:

About 26% of adolescent couple trying to abstain from intercourse will become pregnant within 1 year. [Committee]

Conservatives usually inflate and distort condom failure rates when they try to claim they're ineffective, but they never cite the failure rate for their abstinence programs. Over one quarter of abstinent teenage couples get pregnant within a year, and that's not counting the couples that fail at abstinence and don't get pregnant!

Lastly, I just want to point this out to parents that still look down on sex education and contraception. This has got to be one of the most frightening statistics I've seen:

First intercourse was nonvoluntary for 9 percent of teen females. This percent was higher among those who were younger at first intercourse. (Abma)

If that doesn't make you think "Holy crap!", what does? I'm not quite sure if the use of the word "nonvoluntary" means some of these girls were just pressured into having sex as opposed to out-and-out rape, or if that's just scientific jargon for rape, but it's a stunning percentage. One in ten.

Mind you, that's just for first intercourse. One in four women will be raped in their lifetime. I can't find statistics that break it down any further, but women between 16 and 25 years old are at more than three times the risk of women in any other age group, and about 20% of women are raped by the time they're college-aged. It's sort of out of the scope of this blog post, but remember that women are not the only ones at risk. Six percent of rape victims are men, and in about 10 percent of both rape attempts and sexual assaults, men are the victims.

Conclusions

The literature conclusively states that access to contraception does not hasten the onset of sexual activity. Access to a comprehensive sex ed program as well as contraception actually seems to delay sexual activity in teenagers, if they get it early enough.

References

• Abma, J. C., G. M. Martinez, W. D. Mosher, and B. S. Dawson. "Teenagers in the United States: Sexual Activity, Contraceptive Use, and Childbearing." Advance Data from Vital Health and Statistics. Series 23. Number 24 (2004).
• American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Adolescence. "Contraception and Adolescents." Pediatrics 104. 1161 (1999).
• Guttmacher S., L. Lieberman, D. Ward, N. Freudenberg, A. Radosh, and D. Des Jarlais. "Condom Availability In New York City Public High Schools: Relationships to Condom Use and Sexual Behavior." American Journal of Public Health. 87. 1427. doi:10.1542/peds.104.5.1161 (1997).
• Kirby, D. "Emerging Answers: Research Findings on Programs to Reduce Teen Pregnancy (Summary)." Washington, DC: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy (2001).
• Mosher, W. D., G. M. Martinez, A. Chandra, J. C. Abma, and S. J. Willson. "Use of Contraception and Use of Family Planning Services in the United States: 1982–2002." Advance Data from Vital Health and Statistics. No. 350 (2004).
• Zabin, L. S., M. B. Hirsch, E. A. Smith, R. Streett, and J. B. Hardy. "Evaluation of a Pregnancy Prevention Program for Urban Teenagers." Family Planning Perspectives 18. 119 (1986).

Why are Americans so darn stupid?

I've read in a number of places about surveys that show American's have a truly awful understanding of science. Lots of these things turn out to be apocryphal, so I went looking for actual data. One thing that I found was the General Social Survey, which is a study that has been done every year to two years since 1972. It asks a large number of questions ranging from attitudes on social trends to politics to science literacy. Most of the science literacy questions are new, so there aren't trends to examine. It's very interesting, and I would encourage you to go to the GSS website, download the results for yourself, and have a look. It's only a 2600 page PDF.

I took the results of some of the science questions and turned them into pie charts. Some of the questions I reworded for brevity, but they're basically all the same. Needeless to say, the results are somewhat disappointing.

The first one is a bit predictable, on evolution: (click for a bigger picture)

That's understandable, if frustrating. Americans are constantly lied to by their (religious) authority figures about evolution. Creationism is basically in industry in this country with its own books, videos, and lecture circuit. Since it's usually portrayed as a choice between religion and atheism, all people really know is that they despise atheists, so they chose the religious option.

The next one is a health question:

This one has actual practical consequences. If people think antibiotics are effective against viruses, they are likely to demand them from their doctor or just take leftovers in the case of a viral infection. Since the antibiotics do nothing against viruses, they'll just let any bacteria present possibly build up a resistance.

Here's one on astrology:

My hope here is that people misunderstood the question and thought it was talking about astronomy, not astrology. If not, one in twenty Americans think the position of the stars and planets actually has an effect on your personality.

This one is dear to my heart as I deal with these little buggers every day:

I guess electrons are esoteric to most people, but come on, this is high-school level stuff we're talking about, not the Bohr model vs. electron shells. It's not rocket science.

Here's the one that really scares me:

Go back and look at that again. One in four Americans doesn't know the Earth goes around the Sun. One in four. I can understand if a couple of people just got the question backwards, or answered too quickly and answered wrong by accident. I can't believe that a quarter of the people surveyed did.

Is it just ignorance? Is it just that so few Americans know anything about the world around them? Or does a huge fraction of the population actually reject heliocentrism? It's not a crazy question. There actually are modern geocentrists. Heck, they even have a freakin' annual conference. There is a Catholic group that holds that not only is the Earth the center of the Solar System, but of the entire universe. It is not a coincidence that all these kooks base their ridiculous nonsense on their religion.

That sound you hear? It's Galileo spinning in his grave. Or maybe he's just holding still and the Earth is rotating around him.

Our "liberal" media: science edition

There's an interesting editorial in the Dallas News about science reporting and how stories get spun in the media. Even though we're told non-stop about how the media is "liberal," it turns out that scientific studies that support conservative views get huge attention in the press (and can be distorted to say things they don't actually say), studies that support traditionally liberal views get virtually no traction at all.

[A parenting study] tracked the effects of good fathering on 19,000 children born in 2000 and 2001 and found that by age 3 a child would have more emotional and behavioral problems if the father had not taken time off after the birth.

Don't recall reading about it? You don't remember seeing experts lined up on the morning news shows to explain how crucial the findings were, or advocacy groups noting how this proves it's important to support paternity leave?

That's probably because, although such a study was indeed published, it got virtually no media attention...

Over and over again, studies that appeal to anti-feminists and social conservatives gain media traction, while the ones that come to opposite conclusions languish in obscurity.

For instance, the traditionalists always like studies with results showing large gender differences that support the old-fashioned sex roles. A great example is the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which in 2005 found that women and men differ in their use of the Internet:

More men (30 percent) than women (25) said the Web helped them a lot to learn more about what was going on, while more women (56 percent) than men (50) said it helped them connect with people they needed to reach. These differences are statistically significant.

But when filtered through the media, these findings are interpreted as: "If there is an overall pattern of differences here, it is that men value the Internet for the breadth of experiences it offers, and women value it for the human connections..."

A difference of at most 6 percentage points became an absolute gulf between the sexes, and the media exclaim, "Women are relational; men are factual!"

I'm starting to notice this more and more, myself. When reading about something about science in the media, I often have to just wince because they get it fairly obviously wrong or draw inaccurate conclusions. I mean, does every article about media storage capacity have to tell us how many Library of Congresses will fit on this new media? Does every report on a new transistor design have to mention artificial intelligence?

I didn't realize this the first time I read through it, but the piece is written by J. Goodrich, who runs the feminist harlot blog Echidne of the Snakes. Score one for the bloggers.

Bad porn science

I hate bad science. What I really hate is someone using a thin patina of scienceyness to push some sort of political agenda. That's when people either cherry-pick data to support their position, or produce some ideological-driven "study." John Bambenek did that a few months ago, when he tried (and failed) to produce studies that showed sex caused depression in girls. Two of the studies directly contradicted in their text the very conclusion he was drawing, and the third wasn't even a credible study. I suspect Bambenek has not changed his position on this matter, showing it is ideologically driven and not rational.

Recently, a study is being flogged around by the press about internet porn addiction. Porn addiction is apparently about to destroy society. The study was run by Christianet.com, which claims to be the "most-visited Christian website in the world." The addiction results have been reported by mainstream news sites (here, here, and here) and Christian news sites (e.g. here, here, and here). Gay bloggers have also picked it up; both Pam's House Blend and Wayne Besen have commented on it.

Here's what the study says:

The poll results indicate that 50% of all Christian men and 20% of all Christian women are addicted to pornography," said Clay Jones, founder and President of Second Glance Ministries whose ministry objectives include providing people with information which will enable them to fully understand the impact of today's societal issues. 60% of the women who answered the survey admitted to having significant struggles with lust; 40% admitted to being involved in sexual sin in the past year; and 20% of the church-going female participants struggle with looking at pornography on an ongoing basis.

Fifty percent of men are addicted to porn? Not just that they look at it, but they're actually addicted to it? That's an absolutely ridiculous statistic. If I told you that half of all men were addicted to heroin, you'd look at me with a "What you talking about, Willis?" look on your face. It's absurd on the face of it. What pisses me off is that this statistic is being reported without even a shred of skepticism.

So I thought that maybe the press was picking this up and making more of it than it really was or just flat-out misunderstanding it, as reporters often do with anything having to do with science. So I went looking for this study. What did I find? Crickets chirping. Nothing.

First, I went to Christianet.com. This place hardly qualifies as a website at all. It's an Internet portal. How very 1998. It's mostly a collection of links to things like "Christian Home Loans" and "Meet Christian Singles." Their Blogs section is a hoot, too. Each blog entry consists of roughly two lines of text, plus a link to some other section of their site and an offer to send an e-card.

It turns out that this thing everyone is citing is an internet poll, not any sort of study. There's no information about what questions were asked, how people responded, or even what qualifies as internet port "addiction." I have the suspicion that the people running this poll would consider Michelangelo's David to be Renaissance porn.

I tried to find more information about the poll on their website. Not only isn't there any mention of it on the Christianet website that I can find, there's no contact information for anyone at Christianet. Absolutely zero. No email address, no "Contact us" page. I wrote the admin in the WHOIS entry, but no response.

What's almost worse than this thing getting this level of attention is that it's being looked at with complete credulity. Even though it concluded that half of all men have this addiction, no one even batted an eye. In fact, people mostly just seemed to find it amusing that Christian evangelicals were caught in a bit of hypocrisy. The Stuff article called them "porn-again Christians." (OK, I admit I got a laugh out of that.)

This is how things get caught up in our collective consciousness. Someone reads about this poll in a news article on some website, but no one ever looks up the details. It gets generally accepted as true, even though it's just propaganda from one small group with an axe to grind.