Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists

Did you all attend the event with Dan Barker today? It was fun, with lots of good questions, though unfortunately we didn’t get to hear him play piano.

Meeting minutes! The following discussion is from last week’s meeting on February, Friday the 13th. Please note that this week’s meeting is not in the usual room of Ackerman 2408. Looking carefully, we instead have the room Kerckhoff 152 reserved.

I’ll let you all in a little secret. If you stick around after meetings, you’ll find that we often have social activities, like eating out and watching movies. It is a Friday night after all.

Meeting discussion

We began the meeting with a sample from the manifesto of Jim David Adkisson, the guy known for shooting up a Unitarian Universalist Church. Apparently, the Unitarian Universalists are Ultra-Liberals who hate America. They’re all part of a sinister cult of Secularizm [sic]! Hey, wait, I think he might also be talking about us!

Shifting topics, there has been a lot of recent news about the vaccine/autism controversy. If you were not previously aware of this controversy, the story is that autism usually appears in kids around the same age that they get the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. The scientific evidence tells us that two events are completely unrelated, but there is still a movement which seeks to promote a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The source of this claim is a 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield which showed a link between the two. The results of the paper have not been replicated by other scientists, and according to recent news, Andrew Wakefield’s research was fraudulent. Also very recently, a US court ruled that there is not sufficient evidence supporting the link between the vaccine and autism.

I would not be surprised, however, if the anti-vaccination movement still survives. This movement even includes the celebrities Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, because as we all know, actors are whom everyone goes to for medical wisdom. That said, the pro-science side also has actress Amanda Peet among their supporters, and I’m told that she even made a commercial. That’s cool. As Ben noted, if less then about 90% of the population take vaccines, it endangers so-called herd immunity, and thus endangers public health.

Our second topic was nominally Theistic Evolution and Intelligent Design. Theistic Evolution (TE) is the idea that God created the whole process of evolution, rather than tinkering around with the details. Intelligent Designers (ID) tend to dislike TE because, as Ana said, it’s like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But from a theological standpoint, one could also say that ID is simply insulting to the creator, as if God could not orchestrate such a grand process.

Getting sidetracked into some thought-provoking tangents, we talked about the irreducible complexity argument (favored by ID), which says that there exist complex systems which could not function if they were missing any parts. Spencer talked about the example of blood clotting, which requires a group of proteins. It seems that blood clotting would be nonfunctional if it were missing any of those proteins, but scientists have discovered organisms in water environments which require as little as two proteins.

Matt brought up the question: would we have done all this science if it weren’t for ID? Is ID driving a lot of funding to paleontology to find transitional fossils? Kwame thought that the major benefit was that it drives scientists to be more involved in politics. More science is always good, right? Lest any stone go unturned, Matt started talking about how we need science funding before we get more scientists. Fun times.