From Bob Park’s science bulletin What’s New:

1. DOVER PAYBACK: HOUSE VOTES TO LIMIT THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE.

The nation was distracted this week: the leaked Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a terrifying new report on global warming, continued high gas prices, a White House lobbying scandal that grew from “a few” contacts with Jack Abramoff to 485, not to mention the news that two men have stepped forward claiming to be the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby. That allowed the House to quietly pass H.R. 2679, the “Public Expressions of Religion Protection Act of 2006,” with scarcely a mention in the media. The bill would prevent plaintiffs from recovering legal costs in any lawsuit based on the “establishment clause” of the First Amendment, which of course only happens when the court finds the plaintiff’s Constitutional rights have been denied. The Senate is expected to pass a companion bill, S. 3696. Congress cannot simply abridge the Bill of Rights. Maybe they think the Supreme Court is stacked. Or maybe it’s the election.

That’s right: Congress has just ruled that a plaintiff cannot recover legal costs even when they have won their case, and this applies specifically to the separation of state and religion. This sort of bill is usually only enacted in response to a growing abuse of legal privileges that were not anticipated by earlier legislators. In this instance, there has only been one lawsuit in recent memory, the Dover case, which was won so conclusively by the plaintiffs that there can be no consideration of it being an abuse of the legal system. In fact, Dover represents exactly what the establishment clause is intended to do: protect the community against individuals misusing public positions to further their personal religious agendas.

It is easy to see it in Bob Park’s terms: as payback. But I don’t believe that for a moment. The Bush administration is currently buried under a mountain of important issues from the Iraq War to the economy that it needs to devote all its energies to evading. I find it hard to believe that Congress has time to deal right now with payback over a single lawsuit in a Pennsylvania courtroom that has not been appealed. It seems to me, cynical as I am, that if Congress isn’t responding to a plethora of “establishment clause” cases, then it fully expects to.

Remember, the bill says that plaintiffs cannot recover their legal costs if they are successful. This is a message bill. The message to those who believe in secular education is: even if you prove your case in a slam dunk, you’re going to have to pay for the privilege of doing so. What it’s saying to religious activists is: go ahead, ignore your constitutional duties on establishment issues; the worst that can happen is you have to go to court, in which case a number of conservative legal bodies like the Thomas More Centre are likely to provide your defence pro bono, and you won’t run the risk of paying your opponents’ costs even if you’re contemptuously in the wrong. This bill isn’t about payback, it’s about securing the future of constitutional abuse.

Over at The Questionable Authority, we find that the Intelligent Design crowd has been tinkering with Wikipedia for propaganda purposes.

Following the Dover trial, which the intelligent design forces lost embarrassingly, the Discovery Institute and its friends have been covering their losses by pretending Judge Jones is an activist judge (actually, he is a conservative Lutheran appointed by George W. Bush and has no track record of “judicial activism”), by pretending the judge overreached his jurisdiction by finding that intelligent design wasn’t science (despite the fact that both the plaintiff and the defence asked for this subject to be ruled on and presented evidence pertinent to it), by claiming that pro-evolution expert witness Jeffrey Shallit was excluded from testifying (in fact, Shallit was a rebuttal witness to William Dembski; on seeing that Shallit would be critiquing his testimony, Dembski withdrew from the case, whereupon all sides agreed that Shallit would not need to appear if Dembski didn’t).

Thus far, the ID apologists have limited themselves to their own blogs and websites, which are naturally read mostly by like-minded people. But now they have discovered the power of Wikipedia.

An ID “friend” (according to William Dembski) added the book Of Pandas and People to Wikipedia’s list of banned books. But Of Pandas and People was never a part of the school curriculum and the Dover case made no recommendation to remove it from libraries. How exactly was it banned? Well, the school board wasn’t allowed to force it onto the biology curriculum. By that standard, Origin of the Species is also a banned book, and so are all of Richard Dawkins’s books, not to mention genuinely controversial biology books such as Steve Pinker’s The Blank Slate. By the “not on the curriculum” standard, 100% of all books have been “banned” somewhere.

Clearly this has nothing to do with truthful representation, but with propaganda. The entry was soon removed by another Wikipedia user, sparking off a discussion about what should and shouldn’t belong on the list.

I’m thinking of adding “Banned in Dover” to the cover of my next book.

It’s interesting, if not comforting, to get some sort of “official” confirmation of what we already knew: that the US-led War on Terror and occupation of Iraq has served to give strength and focus to worldwide terrorism. So suggests a consensus report on the State of Play by 16 intelligence agencies within the US government, in their classified National Security Estimates. So now, they say, the threat of Terrorism is worse than before the war to stamp it out. Hmm, violence begets violence. Now why didn’t we think of that before?

Read the article.

It has taken Grass a long time to peel his onion – and the result is a book that, like the vegetable, induces tears of irritation rather than emotion.

– Daniel Johnson reviews Peeling the Onion by Günter Grass

Like all great images, it’s not just beautiful, it means something.

For full effect, read the explanatory notes, and take a look at the larger (22 Kb) image file.

One of the founding editors of Aurealis, Stephen Higgins, has returned to the helm of the respected small press journal. The news has yet to appear on the Aurealis website, but has been verified by outgoing co-editor Ben Payne on his LiveJournal.

My two cents: I don’t see why Ben and Robert Hoge’s efforts deserve to be seen as somehow not up to the standards of the “glory days” of Aurealis. But all that to one side, congratulations are due to Stephen on his return to the editor’s chair, and a big cheer to Ben and Robert for their infectious enthusiasm in a difficult role.

Two glowing reviews from Strange Horizons.

James A. Trimarcho on Lucy Sussex:

Strongly feminist, linguistically muscular, and historically erudite, Lucy Sussex is an Australian writer who deserves to be more widely read outside of her home country.

I should add that Lucy Sussex deserves to be more widely read within her own country. Also, any publisher who has the guts to put Heisenberg’s Uncertainty equation on the cover of a book deserves your support.

Dan Hartland on Jonathan Strahan:

The best of the four [Year's Best] anthologies discussed here is Jonathan Strahan’s, for Locus Press…[T]he “year’s best” of SF—that is, the actually decent fiction—is right there in Strahan, consisting of around half his volume’s page total.

Lucy Sussex, Absolute Uncertainty; Jonathan Strahan, Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005

Not long ago I commented on a paper by Christine Barry of Britain. Now, from the other side of the Atlantic, comes an even worse paper. The article is “Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power, and fascism,” by Dave Holmes, Stuart J Murray, Amélie Perron, and Genevieve Rail. You can find it on its official website via IngentaConnect, but you have to pay $52.23 plus tax for access. There are quite a few sites now hosting the paper for free, which violates copyright, but then, since when did fighting fascism involve demanding payment for publicly-funded research papers?

So why is this paper worse? Well, for a start, it shares Barry’s anti-rationalism and her gleeful wallowing in stupidity, but it goes further in labelling evidence-based medicine a form of fascism (no, I’m not making that up), and unlike Barry, who misrepresented a sequence of correspondence, these authors misrepresent so many things that they seem to be making it up as they go along. Plus, Barry wrote her own paper all by herself, where this took four authors. And finally, this paper is worse because the lead author is Associate Professor of Nursing at the University of Ottawa. That is, he teaches nurses. One wonders if he has any interest in teaching nurses about nursing, or whether he prefers to feed them particularly muddled Foucaultian analysis.

The title of another of Holmes’s papers is instructive: Holmes, D., Perron, A., & O’Byrne, P. (2006). Evidence, Virulence, and the Disappearance of Nursing Knowledge: A Critique of the Evidence-Based Dogma. Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing, 3 (3), 1-8.

Read that again: “Evidence, Virulence, and the Disappearing of Nursing Knowledge: A Critique of the Evidence-Based Dogma.” It should come as no surprise that Holmes doesn’t have the wit to understand that “evidence-based dogma” is about as sensible as “opaquely transparent” or “orbital submarine.” After all, his use of “fascism” indicates that he doesn’t care much about using language to convey meaning. But more than that, look at the assumption behind his title. To Holmes, evidence-based medicine is “virulent” because it causes the “disappearance of nursing knowledge.” Apparently the quality of that nursing knowledge is not important. If a nursing technique is shown to be useless, or even harmful, it seems that Holmes’s advice would be that it must continue to be used anyway. It is more important to preserve knowledge, even wrong knowledge, than to provide the best available care to patients. Surgeons are no longer trained in the art of prefrontal lobotomy to treat schizophrenia, even though Egas Moniz won the 1949 Nobel Prize for the technique — and this, by the way, was a technique that worked. The knowledge behind it is not incorrect, merely unnecessary with modern treatment. In extremely rare refractory cases of schizophrenia, lobotomies are still performed, but the modern techniques are far more precise than 50 years ago. Would Holmes really want a neurosurgeon today to perform classic Moniz procedures just because they represent a form of knowledge?

There have been a number of responses to the “fascism” article. The very best I’ve read is this one from J. Carter Wood. It is a wonderful analysis of everything that is wrong with the paper’s logic. It is quite long, but its headings make a very good summary. Here is a very heavily edited excerpt of the paper. (Contrary to standard practice, I’ve left out all the many ellipses to preserve readability.)

One: Regardless of what Deleuze and Guattari say, ‘fascism’ is not an all-purpose word for ‘Anything Which is Really, Really Bad’.

‘Fascism’ - as a label - is experiencing a real renaissance lately. Usually for the wrong reasons. We are not more than a hundred words or so into this article and we’ve already been told that the topic they are to be discussing - which, remember, is using evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of health-care procedures - is an example of a phenomenon which is ‘more pernicious’ than the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler.

I have to say this again: think about this. Think about it.

After all, one’s expectations get rather seriously raised when one is promised something more pernicious than street battles, the SS, the death camps and tens of millions of war dead.

Two: Specifics are always helpful.

In this article, the procedures of EBHS are never critiqued in terms of any clear criteria which could replace it. The only ‘evidence’ presented that there might be something wrong with EBHS consists of a lot of quotes from a handful of writers and theorists - none of whom were medical scientists - and a discussion of a well-known novel.

Three: Knowledge is power…but that’s a good thing, isn’t it

The authors make what is sadly a common assumption in postmodern writing about science. That is that scientists, rather than primarily being interested in investigating diseases, developing medicines, peering into the universe, cataloguing new species of butterflies or whatever, are mainly propping up some kind of illegitimate, oppressive political regime.

Four: Fighting pretend problems with pretend politics.

If it were true that the problem we face is fascism, I would suggest that deconstruction is not exactly going to help us much. Fascism is physically violent and scary. Deconstruction - whatever its merits - is…a method of textual analysis. Outside of a text, it’s not going to protect you. Staring down real fascism requires other means.

Fortunately, as I think is clear, we are not facing a real fascist crisis in the health services. Perhaps even the authors would agree. They might say that the fascism they identify is purely metaphorical. To which I would respond: given the variety of problems facing the world today (including the very real problem of effectively managing healthcare systems), is pursuing a metaphorical revolt against a metaphorical fascism really the most productive way of spending one’s time?

The organisation that takes the most stick in this paper is the Cochrane Collaboration, but as Ben Goldacre points out in the Guardian, the Cochrane Collaboration is based on the life work, and is named after, Archie Cochrane. But Cochrane was no fascist. He served against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Of course, we shouldn’t expect much of this paper. Apart from this gratuitous insult to an anti-fascist, the authors can’t even get the name right (they call it “The Cochrane Group”), and they mistakenly assert that the Cochrane Collaboration only considers randomised control trials, the sort of basic factual error that would have been corrected with a few minutes’ actual research. Furthermore, contrary to the idea that the Cochrane Collaboration dictates policy, it does no such thing. All the Cochrane Collaboration does is collect volunteers to research a question of interest in medicine by digging up available studies and summarising their findings. It has no political, bureaucratic, or popular mandate. The only influence it has comes from the quality of the material it collects.

Many commentators have pointed out the idiocy of this paper, but I think it can be taken a step further. By singling out EBM as fascistic, by refusing to do basic research, and by mislabelling the legacy of a well-known anti-fascist, these authors are contributing to the disintegration of the word fascism and doing their level best to undermine health bureaucracies’ ability to administer effective medical care. And the worst of it is, this was published in a peer-reviewed journal. I think the board of directors ought to take a very good look at the contracts of their editorial department.

Pluto is no longer a planet. Children all over the world are grieving. Professional mnemonicists are looking forward to the business opportunity. Meanwhile, Jimmy and the Keyz sing “They Demoted Pluto” with the plaintive chorus “God, I hate the IAU!” The IAU needs to take better care of its planets. If we lose one more, the solar system will end, much like the gastrointestinal tract, at Uranus.

The Catholic Church appears to be reconsidering evolution under Pope Benedict XVI. Even his arch-conservative predecessor, John-Paul II, officially pronounced evolution to be “more than a hypothesis,” but Benedict this week said that people who follow the standard scientific understanding of evolution have been “fooled by the atheism that they carry inside of them, imagine a universe free of direction and order, as if at the mercy of chance.” His close colleague, Cardinal Schönborn, wrote a column for the New York Times last year aligning himself with the intelligent design evangelism of the Discovery Institute, and has stated as if a bald fact that “Neo-Darwinism is wrong” and claimed that John-Paul’s pronouncement on evolution was “rather vague and unimportant.” Soon Benedict, Schönborn, and other hand-picked Catholic scholars will convene to discuss the role of evolution in creation. In response, a correspondent to The Register wrote, “I too am confused as to why we need the Catholic Church to form a committee of MEN to decide what GOD thinks. Surely the answer will magically appear in a piece of burnt toast somewhere in France or Italy?”

Some time on Saturday or Sunday, the SMART-1 space probe will crash into the Moon at a velocity of 2 km/sec. The resulting crater will only be about 10 metres wide, but it should kick up an impressive dust cloud that may be visible through low-powered amateur telescopes or even binoculars. The impact site has been chosen for maximum visibility. For details on how to view it, check the ESA’s online advice here. Unfortunately, Australia may be in too much sunlight to appreciate the view. Still, the joy of smashing expensive equipment into celestial bodies cannot be overstated. This should be fun.

Addendum: How could I forget? The Hugos! The Huuuugooos! The Hugo Awards ceremony took place over the weekend. Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin won for Best Novel, when I had earlier declared it didn’t have the populist credentials to go far in ballots. I was wrong. Delightfully wrong. Over and over again the Hugos have shown that a popular award can be a better reflection of quality than an industry award. If you want to educate yourself about the recent history of science fiction, your best bet is to read all the old nominees and winners in the Hugo or the LOCUS Awards. Our own Margo Lanagan’s “Singing My Sister Down” won the first round of ballots and then garnered nothing in the subsequent rounds, which suggests to me that anyone who read it thought it was the best story, but not enough people read it because it was published in a personal collection rather than one of the majors. Well, that’s my biased take on it anyway. Connie Willis played the role of Master of Ceremonies and awarded herself Best Novella. The Hugo committee tried to take it off her, but the animal glint in her eye was enough to scare them off and they decided to let the result stand. (OK. OK. I’m making it up.) Harlan Ellison came on to present an award and, for a joke, groped Connie Willis’s breast. Sadly, this one actually happened. Ellison quickly offered a full public apology. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity. It’s a complete mea culpa. But you know, an apology is meant to be more than sincere. An apology is meant to be contrite as well. Meanwhile, Greg Egan’s Distress won the Seiun Award (not a Hugo, but presented at the same cermeony) for Best Translated Novel in Japan, which Sean McMullen accepted. This is how it went down according to a witness who was on another continent at the time.