I'm famous!

The Austin American-Statesman had an article a week or so ago about the evolution-related firing of Chris Comer, the science curriculum director of the Texas Education Agency. You haven't read my blog post on the subject because I haven't finished it yet.

My letter to the editor of the Statesman, however, was published. W00t! I am proud to join the ranks of cantankerous old bastards with too much time on their hands.

The Statesman publishes their Opinions page online as a blog, complete with a comments section, so you can read that I'm not welcome back in Texas. Sniff.

It's just another example of politics as tribalism that being pro-science and pro-evolution is the "liberal" position and the anti-science and pro-creationism position is "conservative."

Contraception, continued: A graph

Continuing from my previous blog entry, Does the Pill encourage teenage sex? No., here is the graph showing the cumulative age at first coitus for students that had received and had not received comprehensive sex ed and contraception

The original graph is in black and white and my annotations are in color. If I'm reading this graph correctly, the median age for the entry into sexual activity is about 14.5 for the group without the program, and lightly over 15 for the group with the program. So we can conclude that the program caused about an 0.8 year delay in becoming sexually active.

Furthermore, at the median age for sexual activity for the non-program group (where 50% of them had begun sexual activity), only 35% of the program group was having sex. So we can see that exposure to sexual education and the availability of contraception clearly causes a delay in sexual activity in teenagers.

The Zabin study is from 1986, probably before AIDS prevention programs and condom awareness were in full swing. So the contraception methods uses were probably primarily the pill. In fact, the study goes on to look at pill usage specifically. They also found that, even though girls were likely to postpone sexual activity to a later age, they were more likely to be using the pill when they did start sexual activity.

Dr. Fig was kind enough to send me a big, honking list of references from PubMed. I'll try to go through some of those soon.

Reference:

• 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).

Crappy scientists, take one

From Replace the Lies with Truth and Kevin's Space, I see that Paul Cameron has a new "study" out proving how the evil homosexual agenda exaggerates the numbers of gays in society and how they tend to die young. This is already being touted by Christian media and has been cited by Porno Pete's Americans for Truthiness Truth about Homsexuality. The study is crap. I'm no sociologist and even I can drive a truck through their methodology.

I want to point out here how Cameron and his son are co-opting the scientific process to give their study a veneer of validity it doesn't really deserve. Let me point out that my background is in the physical sciences, so my observations are based on that. Things may be a bit different in the sociological realm, but I doubt by much.

The noise being made by the Cameron about their study, mostly being made via press release, is in regards to "Federal Distortion of The Homosexual Footprint," a poster they presented at the 2007 convention of the Eastern Psychological Association. Their conclusion was that there are fewer gay men and lesbians over 60 that self-identify as gay, therefore they die young.

At a scientific conference there are generally three tiers of events: invited talks, regular talks, and posters. Invited talks are a fairly big deal. They're given by respected scientists, they're fairly long (usually about an hour), and there are relatively few of them. They're the most prestigious. Regular talks are given by scientists and grad students. They're shorter, perhaps fifteen minutes with five minutes for questions, so there are about five times as many of these as the invited talks. They're the bread-and-butter of scientific conferences. Now, sometimes, the authors of regular talks are asked to write their presentation up into a paper, and these are published in a proceedings. Proceedings can be cited by someone else in a scientific paper, but they're not considered good citations, because they haven't undergone peer review and are not generally as high quality as a real paper.

Posters are the lowest tier at a conference. Basically, you put your poster up in a room of about fifty other posters and stand in front of it. People walk around the room looking at posters, possibly asking questions about them. Often, poster sessions include food subsidized by a company, because otherwise, people wouldn't show up. These are invariably done by graduate students; I've never heard of anyone else presenting a poster. They're not peer-reviewed and, most of all, they're not documented or published anywhere. There's barely any evidence that the Camerons even presented this poster, let alone what it said or if anyone paid attention to it.

Here is how the press release is touting Cameron's credentials:

Paul Cameron, a reviewer for the British Medical Journal, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, and the Postgraduate Medical Journal...

The fact that Cameron is a reviewer for these journals means nothing. It's about as prestigious as saying he's a dues-paying member of a psychological organization (which he may not be, since he's been kicked out of two of them).

The way that peer review works is that a scientist submits a paper to a journal. The editor of that journal sends the paper to two or three other people to look it over and critique it. If there are any major flaws, errors, or inconsistencies, the reviewer sends comments back to the editor, who forwards them back to the original scientist. He can then revise the paper, or respond to the commenter. Once the comments have been addressed to the satisfaction of the reviewers, the paper is them published. (I imagine this is very field-specific. Again, this is only in my experience.) Editors are usually fairly indiscriminate about who they ask to review a paper.

So the fact that Cameron's press release lists among his credentials the fact that he is a reviewer for these journals says more about his lack of esteem in the scientific community than anything.

An orgy of studies

An alternative title for this post could be "Slutty feminists, chapter III: In which my chair at the adult table is permanently revoked." For background information, there was my first response to John Bambenek's letter in the Daily Illini, and then a look at the data he used to support his statement that "99% of abortions are for sexual convenience."

Last time I showed why Bambenek's claim in his recent Daily Illini silliness that "99% of all abortions are for 'convenience'" wasn't supported by the very Institute he cites. Now, I'll take a look at the three studies he finally cited on his blog that (he says) show sex causes depression in women. He cites three studies:

• Rector, Johnson, and Noyes. "Sexually Active Teenagers Are More Likely to Be Depressed and to Attempt Suicide." The Heritage Foundation, Center for Data Analysis Report #03-04.
• Jennifer Warner. "Depression Often Follows Risky Teen Behavior." WebMD News. Sept. 20, 2005.
• Grello, Welsh, Harper. "No Strings Attached: The Nature of Casual Sex in College Students." J. Sex Research. 43. 255. (2006).

The first of these, the Heritage study, I just don't find credible. This study was never anything other than vanity published and was never peer-reviewed. Furthermore, the Heritage Institute is a conservative think tank. Their very mission statement says that they "formulate and promote conservative public policies." Of course, this study is going to reflect bad on sex; it's the job of Heritage employees to produce such studies. If the study had shown otherwise, it probably wouldn't have seen the light of day.

Because this study is so useful to conservatives, even if it is unscientific, it has been cited often in the conservative media, including World Net Daily and TownHall.com. More importantly, it caused fellow conservative Joseph Sabia to publish an actual peer-reviewed study examining their results: "Does Early Adolescent Sex Cause Depressive Symptoms?" J. of Policy Analysis and Management. 25. 803 (2006). It's a long study and I won't bore you with the details. Here are the juicy bits from the conclusion:

[Recent] claims about the causes and consequences of early teen sex have been overstated... This study presents consistent evidence that early entrance into sexual intercourse is not the cause of depression, but rather is an observable indicator of depression... it is inappropriate to infer a causal link between early teen sex and depressive symptoms.

Turning to Bambenek's second study, actually it's a news article on the actual study, which I assume is Hallfors, et al. "Adolescent Depression and Suicide Risk." American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 27. 224 (2004). This study looked at the incidence of depression and suicidal ideation in boys and girls 16 ± 5 years old. This study did show an increase in the rates of depression and suicidal ideation in boys and girls having sex. "Ah ha," you say? "Bambenek was right, you say?" Well no. From the study's abstract:

Although causal direction has not been established, involvement in any sex or drug use is cause for concern, and should be a clinical indication for mental health screening for girls;

And from the study's conclusion:

There was some indication that substance use ... led to depression rather than the reverse, but there are other studies indicating that adolescents may become involved in risk taking in response to preexisting depression.

In other words, these fact that these teens were having sex may well have been a symptom of their depression, not the cause of it.

Furthermore, this was a study on teenagers, not the slutty college-age-and-up feminists Bambenek was berating. The study included girls and boys down to age eleven, which I don't think tend to be avid readers of Gloria Steinem.

(Also, the study showed that having highly educated parents led to a slight decrease in depression, but a large increase in suicidal ideation. Go figure.)

On to the third study. This is the most relevant study to Bambenek's assertion, in that it studies casual sex among college students and a possible link to depressive symptoms. At first glance, it seems to support what Bambenek is saying, that sex causes depression. Except that's only true for the women studied. In the case of men, casual sex actually correlated with a decrease in depressive symptoms. But the authors of this study specifically do not draw the conclusion Bambenek claims:

Perhaps depressed females may be seeking external validation from sex. They may be maintaining a vicious depressive cycle by unconsciously engaging in sex in doomed relationships. Possibly, these females' negative feelings of self-worth or isolation may increase their desire to be wanted by or intimate with another... Furthermore, the more depressive symptoms females reported, the more partners they had. We speculate this may be associated with either little sexual satisfaction or increased efforts to fill an internal void.

So, again, we see speculation from the researchers involved that sex may be a symptom of existing emotional problems, rather than being the cause of the problems themselves. The Grello study was done at a "university located within the Southern Bible Belt with a fairly conservative student population." If this university had attitudes like Bambenek's, referring to women as sluts and harlots, I don't think it's a big leap to suspect engaging in sex could lead to feelings of guilt and shame which could lead, in turn, to depression.

I wonder why Bambenek didn't find this in these studies, if he was using them to support his position. After all, the Hallfors study says that they did not find a casual link between sex and depression right in the abstract. Perhaps it's unfair of me, but I suspect it's because Bambenek started out with his conclusion, and cherry-picked studies that supported it. For an intellectual study of any subject -- and a scientist should know this -- that's exactly the bass-ackwards way to go about it.

Of course, all this analysis on my part was pretty much a waste of time, because Bambenek's main assumption, that feminists think women should be slutty, is ridiculous. Just to check that my belief was correct, I went looking. At the website for the National Organization of Women (and what bigger group of man-hating, inner-slut-mentality-having feminists could there be?). I couldn't find anything relevant when searching on "sexuality," "casual sex," or "hooking up." Unable to think of any more search terms, I went to their "Issues" page, where there really isn't any information about sex. Economic equality, women's health, rights for mothers, sure, but nothing about living in slut-dom. The closest thing I found was in their Health section, on how to prevent STDs. What's the first method they suggest for not contracting an STD? "Do not have sex."

Obviously, they're not very good harlots.

(Wow, you read to the end. I'm impressed. Hope you're not too bored.)

Update (2007-10-30): Added BPR3.org icon.

Finally, some data

After insulting the intelligence of anyone who dared question him, John Bambenek has updated his anti-feminist tirade at his blog to include the studies he used in his DI editorial. So lets take a look at what he's basing his opinions on.

His first point was that "99% percent of all abortions" are for "sexual convenience." Unfortunately, the link he posted is broken, so it's hard to judge that. But, he said that he used the Guttmacher Institute for his data. Instead, lets take a look at an article they list in their Abortion section: Lawrence Finer, et al. "Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives" Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health. 2005, 37(3):110–118. The reasons that women have abortions are varied and complicated, but the largest reasons are that a child would interfere with the mother's education, job, or their ability to care for their current children. Seventy-three percent said they wouldn't be able to afford to care for a child. (Respondents could select more than one answer.)

Bambenek wraps all of these up in the petty-sounding description of "convenience," as this reason is not listed anywhere in the study. It's a term that he's invented, he's defined, and which he can use to over-simplify this complicated into a nice, tidy sound bite. I'm not sure how in anyone's mind "I can barely feed the children I have now, and I'll get fired if I have to take off time from work to have another baby" can reasonably be called a matter of "convenience." Obviously, Bambenek concern here is to trivialize the reasons women have abortions to make them sound petty and selfish.

The Guttmacher paper also says that 25% of women cited concerns with their health or the health of the fetus as a consideration. Bambenek casually disregards these concerns with:

Now I don’t regard "health" of the mother as particularly indicative of anything because pregnancy is, by definition, a HUGE factor for the health of the mother and comes with no small share of risk. It’s used flippantly in debates and I have no reason to see the same crowd doesn’t use it flippantly in research.

Wait, what? First he says that pregnancy is a "huge factor for the health of the mother" and then disregards these concerns as "flippant." In other words, there's this huge issue, which one in four women consider when having an abortion, and Bambenek is just going to ignore it because he finds it inconvenient.

Well, next time my cousin in lying in the hospital with pre-eclampsia, pumped full of steroids to where she looked like a balloon so that the baby's lungs would develop enough that he would be able to survive when they delivered him prematurely, I'll make sure to tell her to stop whining because she's being "flippant."

Actually, it looks like Bambenek's choice of the word "convenience" may be part of a tactic of the anti-choice movment as a whole. Quoting from the Guttmacher paper:

Yet some broad concepts emerged from the study. A crosscutting theme was women’s responsibility to children and other dependents, as well as considerations about children they may have in the future. Most women in every age, parity, relationship, racial, income and education category cited concern for or responsibility to other individuals as a factor in their decision to have an abortion. In contrast to the perception (voiced by politicians and laypeople across the ideological spectrum) that women who choose abortion for reasons other than rape, incest and life endangerment do so for "convenience," our data suggest that after carefully assessing their individual situations, women base their decisions largely on their ability to maintain economic stability and to care for the children they already have.

(I was also going to look at the studies he offers showing how women become emotionally "devastated" if they have sex, but I just don't have time tonight. More later.)