Drowning, Rabies, Cheetahs, Hepatitis, and Atheism

Hey look, I found some science:

1. A Proposed Decision-Making Guide for the Search, Rescue and Resuscitation of Submersion (Head Under) Victims Based on Expert Opinion (Resuscitation)
   The really fascinating part, in my opinion, is the difference in survival outcomes between cold water and warm water submersion. One ER doc I met told me about the case of a young girl who was successfully resuscitated after 83 minutes at the bottom of a frozen lake. “It is concluded that if water temperature is warmer than 6°C, survival/resuscitation is extremely unlikely if submerged longer than 30min. If water temperature is 6°C or below, survival/resuscitation is extremely unlikely if submerged longer than 90min.”
2. Survival after Treatment of Rabies with Induction of Coma (New England Journal of Medicine)
   This is a pretty famous case report, which I only recently learned about after hearing a presentation from one of the authors. It’s basically the first known case of someone surviving rabies without having received immune prophylaxis. You can watch a terrifying video showing the clinical course of rabies HERE. You can watch a documentary detailing this specific case HERE.
   
3. Cheetah Paradigm Revisited: MHC Diversity in the World’s Largest Free-Ranging Population (Molecular Biology and Evolution)
   MHC allelic diversity within a species is important for long-term protection against diseases. Even if a given individual is vulnerable to a pathogen, the immunological diversity across a population increases the likelihood that SOME individuals will be protected, and helps to guard against extinction. Humans have thousands of known HLA alleles, but other species (such as the cheetah) have much less diversity. This paper basically shows that free-ranging cheetahs might actually have more MHC diversity than originally thought: “We examined whether the diversity at MHC class I and class II-DRB loci in 149 Namibian cheetahs was higher than previously reported using single-strand conformation polymorphism analysis, cloning, and sequencing. MHC genes were examined at the genomic and transcriptomic levels. We detected ten MHC class I and four class II-DRB alleles, of which nine MHC class I and all class II-DRB alleles were expressed.”
4. RNA Replication Without RNA-Dependent RNA Polymerase: Surprises from Hepatitis Delta Virus (Journal of Virology)
   Hepatitis D is an RNA virus (technically a subviral satellite, since it requires coinfection or superinfection with Hepatitis B). So you would think it would use an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase to replicate its genome, right? Wrong. Turns out Hep D is a unique case. It actually uses host RNA polymerase for the job…and scientists don’t really know how the heck that’s even possible. (Since, you know, host polymerase requires a DNA template). “Hepatitis delta virus (HDV) and plant viroids present an exception which still confounds the conventional thinking. None of them encode an RdRP, and yet they can undergo robust RNA replication autonomously once inside the cells.”
   
   
5. Atheists Become Emotionally Aroused When Daring God to do Terrible Things (International Journal for the Psychology of Religion)
   This study uses a pretty small sample size, so I think it’s important not to overstate the conclusions. Still, the findings are pretty intriguing, and seem to support the Christian view [Romans 1:18-21] that all men possess an awareness of God (even if they’ve suppressed that knowledge…maybe even to the point of no longer being aware that they’re aware). “The results imply that atheists’ attitudes towards God are ambivalent in that their explicit beliefs conflict with their affective response.”
   

More Hard-Hitting Journalism from “Slate”

This morning I ran across one of those articles that manages to be both frustrating and (unintentionally) hilarious. And also kind of revealing.

I’ll be addressing it in block quotes, but you can read the original piece on Slate.

The author’s primary complaint seems to be that the successful film “It’s a Girl” – a documentary about the horrific practice of sex-selective abortions in China and India – was directed by someone with…*wait for it*…religious and pro-life connections. Since the film isn’t heavy-handedly “pro-life” in its approach, it’s being screened by a number of prominent feminist and pro-choice organizations.

“How did this happen? How did a movie linked to a pro-life group become the darling of the pro-choice community? The story involves clever disguises on the part of financing sources that managed to hide their involvement and pass off a movie about the horrors of sex-selection abortions as just a sympathetic movie about the plight of women in India and China.  And the pro-life message is subtle enough that they got away with it.”

It’s often said that pro-life and pro-choice activists should compromise by keeping abortion legal and simultaneously working together to reduce its prevalence and abuses. (Trent Horn correctly points out that this isn’t really a compromise at all. “Compromise entails two sides giving up parts of their position in order to reach a middle ground. This is just asking pro-life advocates to give up fighting for the unborn child’s right-to-live.”) Yet, ironically, a documentary that manages to achieve broad appeal across the pro-choice/pro-life spectrum is being attacked here simply because it was created by someone who is pro-life.

The author discovered this insidious pro-life connection by doing some online detective work (i.e. googling a few names).

“I finally searched the owners of the domain name associated with the film’s official production company. The domain name of Shadowline Films is registered to Evan Davis of Tucson, Ariz., (the same name as the filmmaker except without the middle name). Only after searching for ‘Evan Davis Tucson Arizona’ was I able to discover that Davis is also the media director of Harvest Media Ministry, and the domain name of that company is also registered to Evan Davis of Tucson…Among its portfolio of works, the website features a video describing ‘unborn children’ as ’46 million people who will be killed this year.’”

(Nice use of scare quotes, right?)

“On the website of Harvest Media, Evan Davis’ biography proclaims that his ‘passion is to equip those who are called to bring the hope and light of Jesus Christ to the world through the provision of strategic media communication tools and storytelling methods.’ Yet on his Facebook page that is associated with the film, under his religious views, he states that ‘it’s against my relationship to have a religion.’”

…which is an extremely common expression in many evangelical circles. But to her credit, the author did manage to sort out this apparent contradiction by interviewing Mr. Davis. He explained: “I don’t identify myself with a denominational group. But I believe in God. My faith is a factor in what motivates me in wanting to help people around the world and never tried to hide that.”

“Yet the film’s press kit does not mention his affiliation with Harvest Media Ministry and describes him as a ‘social justice advocate’ who writes videos and directs educational documentaries ‘championing the causes of the poor and exploited.’”

(Since, you know, these things are clearly incompatible with being religious and pro-life.)

“Why go to such efforts to hide the fact that Evan Davis aka Evan Grae Davis has also worked for a company that creates videos on behalf of faith-based groups to promote their interpretations of the teachings of Jesus Christ?”

Wow, this guy was even using an alias! Sometimes he used his middle name, and sometimes he didn’t. What a scumbag. Fortunately, efforts to hide his connection with Harvest Media Ministry were no match for this author’s unstoppable search engine skillz.

“When I asked Davis about this, he said that there was no ulterior motive in his failure to disclose his affiliation with Harvest Media Ministry and said he no longer works for the organization even though his biography is still on their website.”

Caught. Red. Handed.

“Pro-life groups have in recent years begun using the practice of sex-selective abortion—a practice that is rare in the United States—in foreign countries as an excuse for limiting women’s access to abortion here at home. A bill was recently filed in the North Carolina legislature to ban sex-selective abortion, and a similar bill was defeated in the U.S. House of Representatives last year. Although no one supports sex-selective abortion, pro-choice groups correctly worry that such laws could be misused to restrict abortion more broadly.”

Wait…”no one” supports sex-selective abortion? Clearly some people do, or they wouldn’t be happening.

“Regardless of what Davis’ goal is in making the movie, it is clear that efforts have been made to hide any affiliation with Harvest Media Ministry. In fact, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, a partner organization for which the film’s official website seeks donations, and whose founder features prominently in the film is also part of a coalition that seeks to ban sex-selection abortion in the United States.”

Yeah, you read that right. It turns out that the director of a documentary exposing the “tragic practice of sex-selection abortions” (<< the author’s words, not mine) is, in fact, in cahoots with an organization that seeks to ban sex-selective abortions in the United States.

Margaret Sanger Seems Pretty Nice

Margaret Sanger was the esteemed founder of Planned Parenthood. Although she and her organization sometimes face unfair attacks from conservatives and anti-choice extremists, it turns out she was a pretty thoughtful and compassionate lady.

For one thing, she supported the right of women to decide for themselves how many children to have.

“Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most.”

She believed that reproductive decisions should be between a woman and her doctor, and that family planning should be left up to families (rather than the government).

“No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit.” (Plan for Peace, Article 4)

She was extremely charitable, and believed in providing aid to the poor…

“[Charity] conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face unpleasant facts…It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.”

…and she had mercy on the children of large families.

“The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

Since she highly valued reproductive privacy – and all sorts of privacy, really – she tried to prevent people from becoming detectives. [author's note: re-check this]

“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”

She was always pleasantly honest about her motives for providing undesirables and “the feeble-minded” with birth control…

“The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.”

…and like every good birth control activist, Sanger believed that ALL women, even dysgenic ones, should have the right to choose.

“Give dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.”

Environmentalists might like to talk about “clean air” and “clean water”, but Sanger had even loftier goals.

“Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”

She embraced diversity, and believed in reaching out to minority churches and communities.

“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities.  The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Yet shockingly, Sanger sometimes resembled a backwards anti-choicer in her thinking. Although a staunch advocate for contraception, she was far less enthusiastic about abortion.

“[Abortion] is an alternative that I cannot too strongly condemn. Although abortion may be resorted to in order to save the life of the mother, the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious. I bring up the subject here only because some ill-informed persons have the notion that when we speak of birth control we include abortion as a method. We certainly do not. Abortion destroys the already fertilized ovum or the embryo; contraception, as I have carefully explained, prevents the fertilizing of the ovum by keeping the male cells away. Thus it prevents the beginning of life.”

Evidently she bought into the vicious lies of scientists, who tell us that human life begins at conception. Ah well. Nobody’s perfect.

Bioethics and Worldview

I recently came across this 2010 story from CBS News:

“According to a mail-in survey of nearly 4,000 British doctors, those who were atheist or agnostic were almost twice as willing to take actions designed to hasten the end of life. They were also far more likely to offer “continuous deep sedation until death” and discus end of life options with their patients.”

You can find the original JME paper HERE.

This story caused me to ask myself, “How does a person’s worldview influence his stance on bioethical issues like physician-assisted suicide, abortion, and human embryonic stem cell research?” Having discussed and debated these issues with fellow medical students, it always seems like the conversation, when continued long enough, eventually boils down to differences in ideology.

In other words, you’re never going to reason someone into changing his stance on euthanasia if he’s approaching the question from a different ideological starting point than you are.

To highlight how our religious and philosophical beliefs influence our approach to bioethics, consider this article on bioethicist Leon Kass:

“Unlike questions of segregation and, before it, slavery, where evil was clear and the only question was how to deal with it,” Dr. Kass says, “the evils that I saw close to my own area of work were ones that were embedded in very high-minded pursuits: better health, peace of mind and the conquest of nature. Yet they contained within them the seeds of our own degradation.”

The trouble wasn’t so much with science itself, he thought, as with “scientism,” by which he means “a quasi-religious faith that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge worthy of the name; that scientific knowledge gives you an exhaustive account of the way things are; and that science will transcend all the limitations of our human condition, all of our miseries.” Scientism’s primary goal, Dr. Kass says, “is to put the final nail in the rule of revealed religion.”

We can think about many of these bioethical conundrums in light of the question, “Can the end justify the means?”

Is it morally justifiable for a doctor to kill a patient in order to satisfy that patient’s wishes? Is it morally justifiable to dismember a developing human fetus in order to increase “net happiness”? Is it morally justifiable to kill a human embryo in order to discover new ways of treating disease?

According to Dr. Kass, the concept of “human dignity” carries powerful moral ramifications. Bioethical decisions shouldn’t be made strictly on utilitarian grounds; they need to account for the fundamental value of human life, regardless of age, race, gender, or other such attributes. Certain (noble) goals cannot be justified, therefore, if they require that one violate human dignity.

Yet atheist psychologist Steven Pinker offers a drastically different opinion in his 2008 article, “The Stupdity of Dignity“:

“The general feeling [of conservative ethicists] is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity.

Whatever that is. The problem is that “dignity” is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it…Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, ["dignity"] adds nothing…”

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In Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous 1973 short story, she describes the utopian city of Omelas – a place of luxury and comfort, without sickness or fear or pain.

“A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life.”

Yet the happiness and good fortune of Omelas must come at a price. Beneath the city, in a dark and filthy cell, a single small child must be kept in perpetual anguish.

“They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas…They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.”

Upon learning this truth, most of the citizens of Omelas are temporarily horrified…but they eventually come to terms with the child’s plight, rationalizing it as a necessary evil for the good of society. A few of the citizens, however, have a very different reaction.

“At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back.”

Fine Tuning and Retrospective Probabilities

The fine tuning argument for the existence of God is based on the observation that there are numerous physical parameters (the mass and charge of a proton, the gravitational constant, matter-antimatter asymmetry, etc.) which appear “finely tuned” to produce a universe capable of harboring life. What fine tuning effectively shows is that, given random chance, it seems astronomically improbable that these parameters would align in such a way as to produce a universe with galaxies, stars, planets, and life.

I recently asked 23 atheists how they account for fine tuning (question #3 in the survey). Several respondents made a point that I found interesting, and wanted to address. They compared fine tuning to “winning the lottery”, and our own existence to that of “lottery winners”. For the lottery winner, the odds against winning the lottery are meaningless in retrospect…because he’s obviously already won. Thus, probability arguments like fine-tuning are worthless, because they can’t be applied to events that have already been actualized. One respondent put it this way:

“The term ‘finely tuned’ is an anthropomorphic spin on ‘it just is the way it is’. If things were any different we wouldn’t be here to ask the question. We have the power of hindsight and from our point of view, can see what looks like impossible odds of our existence. However, with any possibility of it being the way it is, no matter how small the chance is, then it’s possible. And since we are here to ask the question, the possibility was obviously realized, no matter the odds.”

The problem with this “lottery objection” is that it discounts alternative explanations, and assumes that we MUST have overcome these astronomical probabilities. But that puts the cart before the horse by presupposing a naturalistic explanation.

Imagine that your buddy Joe shows up to work one day, and starts throwing stacks of hundred dollar bills at everyone he sees. You know he’s not a rich guy, so clearly he recently acquired a huge sum of money. It’s possible that Joe just won the lottery (because even though the odds of winning are small, someone obviously has to win). Yet it’s also possible that Joe stole the money, or received it as a gift, or inherited it from a relative, or found it in a suitcase next to a dead guy in the middle of the desert.

“Seems legit.”

Hopefully you see where I’m going with this. The point is that none of us can really “know” with empirical certainty exactly how our life-permitting universe got here. The statistical improbability of fine tuning can’t be waved off as “inevitable good luck” unless one has already ruled out the alternative explanation to “luck”. So the fine tuning argument is effective because it (indirectly) lends credence to this “alternative explanation”: that these fundamental physical constants were intentionally and intelligently set by a Fine Tuner.

Capstone Marriages and Cornerstone Marriages

My wife and I belong to that peculiar, sometimes-applauded, often-scorned, steadily-shrinking club of “Christian kids who married young”. We’d both turned 21 within a few weeks of the wedding. So naturally I’ve taken a passing interest in the recent controversy over youthful marriages (sparked, I think, by the “Knot Yet” report and Karen Swallow Prior’s article in The Atlantic).

In her article, “The Case for Getting Married Young”, Prior points out that the average age for marriage has reached historic highs (29 and 27 for men and women, respectively). She cites some interesting statistics (“unmarried twenty-somethings are more likely to be depressed, drink excessively, and report lower levels of satisfaction than their married counterparts”), then explains how the prioritization of education and career objectives has led to a shift in society’s conception of marriage:

“The religious framework for marriage is also crumbling. Marriage has become, therefore, to use Thompson’s apt term, “hedonistic,” based on the exponential amount of pleasure—material, emotional, sexual, familial, you name it—that can be derived from the coupling of two individuals.”

Like myself, Prior rejects this modern view of marriage, in which young people are encouraged to spend the first decade of their adult lives “finding themselves”…attaining an education and career, clubbing and barhopping, traveling the world, experimenting with multiple romantic relationships, cohabitating, and eventually getting married once they “figure out who they are”. Instead, like myself, Prior views marriage as a “cornerstone” rather than a “capstone”.

“We invested the vigor of our youth not in things to bring into the marriage, but in each other and our marriage.”

Although I’m not arguing that everyone should marry young (or even that everyone should marry, period), I do think there’s something to be said for navigating the challenges of early adulthood with a teammate.

In another recent article on Slate, Julia Shaw illustrates this point:

“Marriage wasn’t something we did after we’d grown up—it was how we have grown up and grown together. We’ve endured the hardships of typical millennials: job searches, job losses, family deaths, family conflict, financial fears, and career concerns. The stability, companionship, and intimacy of marriage enabled us to overcome our challenges and develop as individuals and a couple.”

…as does Collin Garbarino over at First Things:

“I married relatively young and managed to get three graduate degrees while married. Marriage provided my wife and me an anchor that helped us focus on our goals while we were in our twenties.”

Again: I’m not saying that everyone should get married at 21 like myself. I think the real issue here, rather than “age”, is the attitude that one brings into marriage (the “cornerstone model” vs. the “capstone model”).

In light of my own experiences, I’m actually opposed to one-size-fits-all statements like “everyone should marry young” or, to quote one of the feminist responses that I read, “women, don’t marry young”. Given the advances women have made in education and (many) career tracks, I think most people are quick to recognize the injustice of telling a young woman “you need to give up (or postpone) your career in order to marry and raise a family”…but are less quick to recognize the injustice of telling a woman, “you need to give up (or postpone) marriage in order to first pursue your career.” Shouldn’t feminists be encouraging the prototypical young woman to decide for herself what’s important to her?

But I digress. I’ll close with an excerpt from a 2009 report from sociologist Mark Regnerus:

“[The] age at which a person marries never actually causes a divorce. Rather, a young age at marriage can be an indicator of an underlying immaturity and impatience with marital challenges — the kind that many of us eventually figure out how to avoid or to solve without parting. Unfortunately, well-educated people resist this, convinced that there actually is a recipe for guaranteed marital success that goes something like this: Add a postgraduate education to a college degree, toss in a visible amount of career success and a healthy helping of wealth, let simmer in a pan of sexual variety for several years, allow to cool and settle, then serve. Presto: a marriage with math on its side.

Too bad real life isn’t like that. Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you’re fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life. “Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth,” added Tennyson to his lines about springtime and love.”

Noteworthy Links: April 2013

Do you remember that time last October when I was too busy to write a new blog post, so I passed along some interesting links instead? Well, I’m at it again:

1. The Adventure of the Elected Man (Dead Heroes Don’t Save)
   Mike over at Dead Heroes Don’t Save has posted a fictional encounter between Sherlock Holmes and Charles Spurgeon, in a convincing imitation of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous short stories. Written from the perspective of Dr. Watson, we’re treated to an intellectual and theological exchange when the famous preacher pays a visit to 221B Baker St. [Note: this story is being published in installments, and is currently still a work in progress.]
2. The Crusades: Wanton Religious Violence? (J.W. Wartick)
   The Crusades are often presented as an archetype of “violence in the name of religion”. My friend J.W. examines this claim in light of the larger geopolitical context of that time period, and offers some thoughtful commentary on the nature of religious and secular violence. “The Crusades have been used as a kind of polemic device against Christianity. Whenever it is argued that Christianity is reasonable, someone inevitably brings up this historical period…I have argued for the notion that these events were historically complex, involving a number of factors beyond purely war for the sake of a faith.”
3. An Open Letter to the Church from a Lesbian (Sententias)
   This one pretty much speaks for itself. “Have you been Christ-like in your relationships with us? Would you meet us at the well, or restaurant, for a cup of water, or coffee? Would you touch us even if we showed signs of leprosy, or aids? Would you call us down from our trees, as Christ did Zacchaeus, and invite yourself to be our guest? Would you allow us to sit at your table and break bread? To those of you who would change the church to accept the gay community and its lifestyle: you give us no hope at all. To those of us who know God’s word and will not dilute it to fit our desires, we ask you to read John’s letter to the church in Pergamum…”
4. What to Believe About Miracles (Nature)
   This excellent commentary appeared in the journal Nature way back in 1986. “It is not logically valid to use science as an argument against miracles…Miracles are unprecedented events. Whatever the current fashions in philosophy or the revelations of opinion polls may suggest, it is important to affirm that science (based as it is upon the observation of precedents) can have nothing to say on the subject.”