#2274: Mitchel Soltys

Answers in Genesis is apparently still running their own vanity journal, the Answers Research Journal, and the garbled nonsense that finds its ways into its pages is still strangely fascinating. Many of the contributors to the journal are completely unknown, and we have to admit that we have no clear idea who Mitchel Soltys might be. For volume 4 of the Answers journal, however, Soltys penned “Toward an Accurate Model of Variation in DNA”, which is, to be honest, more annoyingly tiresome than fascinating. In the paper – discussed here (yes, there is a lot of toward, in the gesturing sense) Soltys flogs the long-dead creationist “information cannot originate in statistical processes” gambit, which, as always, is based on fully failing to understand “information” and what it might mean in the context of genetics. (Yes: the “information is a code, and a code requires intentions” should sound like a pretty silly equivocation even to those who don’t know anything about DNA or information theory; and yes: Soltys does cite Werner Gitt, and no: he doesn’t address any of the damning objections to Gitt’s claims.) And just to cover his bases, Soltys added a standard “[m]utations don’t result in new genes” stock phrase, completely without backing it up. The really telling passage in the paper, however, is “As we continue our discussion we could use actual gene mappings, but that would be overly large and complex […]”: yes: science, detail and fact is uninterestingly complicated. The primary aim of the article is, relying on analogies, to come up with a definition of “biblical kind”, “[t]he set spanned by all organisms having the same instructional segments and structural arrangements in DNA.” Supporting data? Oh, ye doubting fools.

Diagnosis: Nonsensical pseudoscientist. Probably a very minor figure, though, and unlikely to win many new converts to pseudoscience.

#2273: Stan Solomon

[Update: Did he die, back in 2015 or so?]

Stan Solomon is a fundie wingnut radio host who does the kind of stuff fundie wingnut radio hosts do, such as demanding that the police murder peaceful protestors when he disagrees with the contents of those protests and palling around with deranged crazies like Alan Keyes and Larry Pratt.

Fundamentalism

Solomon is not only a fundamentalist, he hates anything he deems non-Christian, and deems non-Christian anything he hates, thus giving himself reason to hate it even more: Latinos, Jews, gays, environmentalists, and just about everyone else: “… it doesn’t make a difference what group it is. If you put anything ahead of doing what’s right in God’s eyes, or better yet ignoring the reality of God, then you’re a tool, you’re a useful idiot.” “God’s eyes” in this context means his eyes, of course.

And importantly, his enemies are all the same: “The left, which is godless and serves Satan, has an agenda. To accomplish their agenda they have to get idiots, morons, numbnuts to do stupid things so the focus will be on them and not on the libs, not on the leftists. Jews, homosexuals, blacks, gays, Islamists, you may think they’re disparate groups, they’re not, they’re all tools. Because while we’re mad at these two punks, we’re mad at Trayvon Martin, that thug that deserves to be dead and I’m glad he’s dead.” (Maintaining focus is not Solomon’s strong side.) Continues Solomon: “Pieces of crap, homosexuals like what’s that one guy’s name? [Dan] Savage. That faggot. That horrible, awful, terrible excuse for a human being who is at the White House promoting attacks on Christians. I hope he dies – he probably will – of every disease known.” Worst of all, though, are black people and Latinos, and Solomon has called on his white listeners to buy guns to protect themselves against black and Latino people: black and Latino public school and college students are “terrorists in training” who are deliberately “being taught” to hate white people in an effort to start a race war. Solomon even predicted that Obama would would establish “a black force” to attack white people.

Solomon also thinks that having humanist chaplains in the military is a really bad idea because humanist chaplains would try to convince soldiers to kill themselves.

Anti-gay efforts

It should hardly come as any surprise that Solomon is virulently anti-gay. Indeed, Solomon has opted to go for Scott Lively-style conspiracy theories about homosexuality, and claimed that homosexuality is even to blame for Nazism; according to Solomon, not only is homosexuality “destructive of the individual, destructive of the society and every society in the history of the world that has accepted homosexuality has crashed and burned – someone tell me where I’m wrong” [he doesn’t really want you to tell him where he is wrong], but “many people don’t know that the Nazi party was born out of a homosexual group; they call it the pink swastika.” There is, of course, a good and rather obvious reason why many people don’t know that.

He has also warned that liberals will take the children of conservative parents and put them into the homes of abusive gay couples. And of course, “the media won’t talk about it”, which means that it must be a conspiracy, which is all the evidence for his claim Solomon ever needed. (Phyllis Schlafly thought he was on to something with that one.)

Politics and general wingnuttery

In 2014 Solomon suggested initiating a violent uprising against Obama and have “100 million march on Washington” to depose Obama and the then-current government – “I don’t think our military and the few pitiful police they have there wouldn’t be able to stop us,” said Solomon. Though he seems to suggest that fascism is bad when he blames homosexuality for fascism, he rather explicitly doesn’t think it is bad.

Politicians who support gun laws, meanwhile, should be shot; indeed, “that’s why we need to have guns, you know what, more than one politician has been dispatched while doing a dance trying to avoid certain, shall we say, metal jackets.” After all, politicians who disagree with Solomon are evil people who will use Obamacare to force gun owners to undergo electroshock therapy, his evidence being apparently that this is the kind of thing evil people would do. So it goes.  

He does seem to have a particular obsession with Michelle Obama. For instance, when she was promoting healthy eating among youth, Solomon responded: “They have that Michelle O-Buick butt Obama’s you know, by the way, she doesn’t eat that crap, she eats like a garbage disposal at a fast food joint. Actually, they might name one after her … They just eat the biggest junk in the world.” President Obama, meanwhile, was, according to Solomon, “a homosexual Muslim married to man”; yes, it all comes together – Solomon’s mind isn’t spacious enough to keep thoughts apart. The evidence is apparently that Obama is a “wussy guy who throws a ball like a girl.” That, apparently, means that Obama also wishes he could be a drag queen. Phyllis Schlafly applauded Solomon’s reasoning, thanking him “for being a voice of truth and sanity on the air.” Solomon is of course also a birther: “Barack Obama is not an American, never has been, not in his actions, not in his speech, not in his politics and not in his birth.”

As mentioned above, Solomon expressed great joy over the death of Trayvon Martin; he was apparently equally happy about the death of Michael Brown: “I’m glad he’s dead. He deserves to be dead.”

Apparently, according to himself, NSA is monitoring his show, so when Larry Pratt, a recurring guest on Solomon’s show, expressed his excitement about Sarah Palin running for Senate in Alaska by saying that she would be a much-needed “bomb-thrower” in the Senate, Solomon felt the need to clarify: “By the way, NSA, if you’re monitoring our show, that was just a manner of speech, ‘bomb-throwers.’ We’re not Muslim morons. We’re not Democrat idiots. We’re actually intelligent life forms, so drop dead.”

  

Diagnosis: If Phyllis Schlafly congratulates you for being a voice of sanity, you are not a voice of sanity. Stan Solomon competes with people like Rick Wiles for the title of “most incoherently crazy wingnut” with regular access to an audience, and stars in the wingnut movement continue to flock to his show.

#2272: David Snoke

David Snoke is one of the central characters of the intelligent design creationist movement. A physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh and Fellow of the American Physical Society (and, it must be emphasized, a respectable scientist in his own field), Snoke was also a co-author on a controversial paper with Michael Behe in 2004. The topic of that paper was of course outside of Snoke’s area of expertise, and apparently his contribution was an appendix verifying the numerical results with analytical calculations showing that for a novel feature requiring multiple neutral mutations the time to fixation has a sublinear dependence on population size – of course, what was wrong with the claims in the paper, which ostensibly supported Behe’s notion of irreducible complexity, was not the calculations themselves, but the thought that they measured something relevant for any aspect of the theory of evolution (there are some good comments here and here; more damning counterevidence here). Indeed, contrary to Behe’s claims (as became clear e.g. during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial) the article might ultimately even undermine the notion of irreducible complexity, as Behe had to admit under oath. (The Discovery Institute still had no trouble hyping it, of course, since for them this was never about science, truth or evidence.)

But the Behe collaboration was not a one-off for Snoke – he has even tried on a number of variants of the old creationist appeal to information – who later wrote a gushing endorsement of Behe’s book in 2014 (with Jeffrey Cox and Donald Petcher), published a numerical study of the evolution of novel structures in the journal Complexity with a (lego) model attempting to show that “natural assumptions” for the cost/benefit of building new structures should lead to a dramatic increase of useless, or vestigial, structures in a population, and arguing that the lack of observation of such large numbers of vestigial parts in organisms thus pointing to fine tuning of the mechanisms of evolution – of course, Snoke et al. never seems to consider the, from a biological point of view, obvious alternative: numerous organisms, some with suboptimal parts, instead of single organisms with massive amounts of suboptimal parts; it’s little wonder real biologists were unimpressed. In 2014 he also published a review article for the Discovery Institute arguing that the prevailing paradigm of modern systems biology favors an intelligent design perspective, and this bizarre post appears to argue that lack of evidence for a designer is evidence for design. Snoke is also a signatory to their bankrupt petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.

His 2006 book A Biblical Case for an Old Earth, argues in favor of a “day-age” interpretation of Genesis as consistent with biblical inerrancy, and he has spoken and written extensively on how to reconcile science and biblical inerrancy.

Diagnosis: Real scientist with a decidedly pseudoscientific side-career – there are some of those – and a good illustration of how expertise in one area may result in nothing but feeble nonsense when dabbling in another.

#2271: Warren Cole Smith

Warren Cole Smith is an evangelical writer (e.g. coauthor of Restore All Things), WORLD Magazine associate publisher, vice president of mission advancement for The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview and raging fundamentalist, whose columns for WORLD are also run by the American Family Association.

In 2012 Smith created a bit of a stir when he published a column pledging not to vote for Romney because a Romney presidency would be a boost for Mormonism: Romney’s beliefs matter, since “[i]f the beliefs are false, then the behavior will eventually – but inevitably – be warped.” Then, to undermine a point that could have been seriously defended (cf. W. Clifford), he invoked the Mormon doctrine of “continuing revelation” to explain Romney’s history of flip-flops and warned that a Romney presidency would “normalize the false teachings of Mormonism the world over” and draw people into the LDS church to the detriment of fundamentalist Christianity. Smith doesn’t really have a very good grasp of the truth/falsehood distinction.

Smith is also a creationist, and has called it “unscientific” that scientists don’t invite creationists to conferences dealing with matters of science (his magazine really, really doesn’t like BioLogos since they advocate that Christians should accept evolution). It’s telling, but hardly surprising, that Smith fails to see the difference between scientific debates and feeding manufactroversies (this commentary is also pretty good). 

Fervently anti-gay, though usually able to dress his bigotry up in milquetoast colors, Smith has not given up the fight against marriage equality: “it is not over. And I’ve read the last chapter of the book, and guess what? God wins,” which should give anti-gay activists some comfort: “we should be happy warriors in this process, knowing that […] God is indeed on our side.” Yes, it’s a common enough idea, but that doesn’t make it any less ludicrous to default-interpret those who disagree with you as being in some kind of divine spiritual fight with you. 

Diagnosis: Standard fare, though Smith does, despite his raging fundamentalist, admittedly have a good pastor’s knack for coming across as patient, mild-mannered and reasonable – the contents of his utternaces is a different matter. Moderately influential and dangerous.

#2270: Robert Smith II

Smith in a not-quite-recent
photo.

We’ve encountered one Robert Smith before. The current entry’s Bob Smith, however, is perhaps the most high-profile loon of that name covered thus far: Robert Clinton Smith served as a member of the United States House of Representatives for New Hampshire’s 1st congressional district from 1985 to 1990, and the whole state in the US Senate from 1990 to 2003 (nominally a Republican, Smith has also had a long involvement with the Constitution Party); he even tried his hand at the presidential election in 2000, but withdrew his candidacy before the primaries began. During his Senate tenure, Smith was best known for his strident opposition to gay rights: he voted to keep anti-gay employment discrimination legal, opposed hate crimes protections, and refused to even institute a non-discrimination policy for his own employees. Notably, with Jesse Helms, he introduced a 1994 amendment denying federal funding to schools that “encourage homosexuality” by teaching about LGBT families in an inclusive way (it passed) – Smith called such messages “trash”. Smith and Helms also proposed special protections for the Boy Scouts’ right to discriminate; “Rome died from a lot less than this,” said Smith, adding that “when you dilute your moral code to this extent, and if this keeps up, the obituary for America is going to be written.” With regard to confirmation of LGBT nominees, Smith said that sending Ambassador James Hormel to Luxembourg was “like sending Louis Farrakhan to Israel,” and that confirming Roberta Achtenberg as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development could lead to America becoming “a society cast off from our moral underpinnings and set adrift.”

His long list of wingnuttery also includes asserting that the National Endowment for the Arts is unconstitutional and consistently advocating for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education, supporting school vouchers instead. Part of the reasoning for the latter was of course based on Smith’s desire to get more religion into public education; Smith has otherwise also co-sponsored a suggested constitutional amendment to mandate school prayers. 

Diagnosis: A deranged pile of rot fueled by bigotry. He might be considered more of a village idiot or curiosity at present, but the level of lunacy involved doesn’t exactly set him much apart from many of the loons currently in positions of power.

#2269: Lamar Smith

US representative for Texas’s 21st congressional district for 16 terms until 2019, and for several years the head of the House Science Committee, Lamar Seeligson Smith was for several years perhaps the most dangerous loon in the US (in part because he was far from the only loon on said committee). A notable climate change denialist, Smith received ample funding from oil and gas companies (and built his own fortune partially on oil and understood nothing of the science he criticized and rejected. Before joining the science committee in 2013, Smith was chair of the House Judiciary Committee, where he for instance proposed the 2011 Stop Online Piracy Act (which did not go particularly well for him). Smith has also had a career e.g. as contributor to Breitbart and as a business and financial writer at The Christian Science Monitor. He has no science background.

Perhaps Smith’s main goal during his tenure on the Science Committee was to put all climate research on ice, e.g. by slashing NASA’s budget for earth sciences, subjecting grant reviews at the National Science Foundation to “extra scrutiny” and trying to rewrite the funding standards to replace peer review with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress, and railing against environmentalists and the media for buying into the “climate-change religion” (a Christian Science follower himself, Smith might not have exactly been disposed to grasp the distinction). 

His strategy as head of the science committee was nicely laid out at a Heartland Institute conference in 2017: “Next week we’re going to have a hearing on our favorite subject of climate change and also on the scientific method, which has been repeatedly ignored by the so-called self-professed climate scientists.” Of course, by “scientific method”, Smith didn’t mean scientific method. Smith doesn’t have the faintest grasp of scientific methodology. He meant my politically motivated conclusions. A key element of his strategy, however, has obviously been to try to redefine common scientific terms to rig the rhetorical game for public opinion. He also supported writing legislation that would punish scientific journals publishing research that doesn’t adhere to standards of peer review, which might sound reasonable until you realize that the standards in question would be those crafted by Smith and his committee. It might be instructive, in that regard, to note that Smith has claimed that the journal Science is “not known as an objective” journal. His favored sources for science-related talking points, on the other hand, are primarily misguided criticisms of science from climate change denialists and conspiracy theorists that are notably not, at present, published in peer-reviewed journals – clearly, then, there is something wrong with peer review.

As an illustration of his strategies as head of the Science Committee: In 2015, Smith accused federal scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of colluding to doctor data in a global warming study that refuted the long-held denialist misconception – “myth” is probably more accurate – that the planet’s warming had “paused” on the grounds that he didn’t like the answers. In particular, Smith accused the scientists of tampering historical global temperature data to advance Obama’s “extreme climate agenda” and promptly subpoenaed the scientists and other NOAA staff, demanding that they turn over the data as well as internal emails related to their research in a rather explicit attempt at bullying and intimidation; neither Smith nor his crew would of course have the expertise to review the data, all of which were already publicly available to review anyways, making it rather abundantly clear that his efforts never had anything to do with the data or the analysis of them. And yes, it really is the head of the science committee engaging in InfoWars-style delusional and baseless conspiracy theories, though we admit that the fact that the administration engages in such may not strike people as that surprising anymore. (The documents, needless to say, contained no support whatsoever for Smith’s allegations.) To see how ridiculous this particular conspiracy theory actually is, this one might be helpful. 

And with regard to Smith’s publicly funded political witchhunt of scientists: as chair of the House Committee Smith issued more subpoenas in his first three years than the committee had done for its entire 54-year history – the NOAA case was certainly not an isolated one; no organization supporting research into climate change would apparently be safe if they didn’t come up with the answers Smith likes. To justify his practice, Smith cited the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s as valid legal precedent for his investigation, no less. And of course, Smith continued to use the talking point that the “global warming has stopped” as if that and other studies soundly refuting the claim had never happened. 

Other favored tricks include lying, misconstruing scientific studies and cherrypicking, and under Smith’s leadership the House Science committee held hearings that featured the views of prominent climate change deniers in an attempt to provide false balance. In response to the 2014 release of the fifth version of the IPCC assessment, Smith apparently tried to play bored, saying that the report “says nothing new,” which, if true, is somewhat difficult to construe as a criticism. Perhaps more tellingly, he also said that “[s]imilar to previous reports, the latest findings appear more political than scientific” – telling, because it actually does illustrate Smith’s inability to tell the difference. He also said that “it’s time to stop fear mongering and focus on an honest dialogue about real options.” It is safe to say that Smith wasn’t really interested in an honest dialogue.

In 2016 Smith hosted an event where noted climate expert Sarah Palin was invited to promote the denialist film “Climate Hustle,” which dismisses global warming as part of a conspiracy to help government takeover and claims that rising carbon emissions are, in fact, beneficial. 

In 2017, after praising the physical and mental powers of president Trump, Smith encouraged people to get their “unvarnished” news directly from the president, not from the media. Smith has long been worried about “liberal media bias”, accusing Google of blocking “references to Jesus, Chick-fil-A, and the Catholic religion” and thanking Fox News for being “the only balanced coverage out there.” It’s instructive that balance is the core value here rather than truth and accuracy, but then, as his Google accusation amply shows, Smith has little time for such old-fashioned virtues; he is hip and post-truth. Otherwise, Smith has expressed deep concern for the free speech of spambots.

Diagnosis: For a while Smith was possibly the most dangerous man in the US. Though officially retired, he still wields plenty of influence, and the standards he set – conspiracy mongering and post-truth – seem to remain firmly in place. 

#2268: J.C. Smith

J.C. Smith (right) being interviewed.

The appreciation of science, evidence and medicine among chiropractors varies. Chiropractor J.C. Smith represents the non-appreciating faction. According to Smith, science and scientists, biased as they are toward truth, evidence and reality, are waging a war against chiropractors, especially those who, like Smith, find themselves on the more overtly pseudoscientific end of things, and in 2011 he (self-)published his magnum opus The Medical War Against Chiropractors: The Untold Story from Persecution to Vindication detailing the battle in an exposé comparable, in his view, to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s exposé of slavery. According to Smith, the American Medical Association has waged a dirty war on perceived competition, and the motive is primarily money – though not only that: according to Smith, real MDs are apparently attacking chiropractic because it is based on a vitalistic philosophy, which doctors and scientists oppose because they are mostly atheists. The fight for the legitimacy of chiropractic is according a “religious war to keep the heretics out of the medical den of iniquity.” It is, apparently, also an attack on academic freedom and comparably to the bigotry in America before Civil Rights, when desegregation led to resentment and deadly attacks. The book-burning mindset of scientists and medical doctors will, as Smith sees it, go down in the annals of history alongside Joseph Goebbels’s book-burning policy. Indeed, Smith’s book contains a remarkable amount of references to Nazis and racial prejudice in addition to its more predictable half-truths, falsehood and general crackpottery. 

The general narrative of the book is approximately as follows: Before chiropractic licensure was approved chiropractors occasionally got themselves in legal trouble for practicing medicine without a license, and as Smith sees things, this was apparently a bogus charge, but one that forced noble chiropractors to hide like Anne Frank or escaped slaves; chiropractors persevered despite AMAs aggressive efforts to combat quackery, however, and finally got their long-awaited licensures. AMA is, throughout the book, compared to the KGB, Gestapo and CIA, and he even mentions the showers of Auschwitz; medical doctors are like storm troopers, and criticizing chiropractic is like making Rosa Parks sit in the back of the bus. Suffice to say, the book probably did not do chiropractors who want to be taken seriously any service. There is a good and reasonably comprehensive critique of the book here.

His book. It is published
by Tate Publishing.
Apparently there is a sequel,
too: To Kill a Chiropractor:
The Media War against
Chiropractors. 

As for his claims on behalf of the efficacy of chiropactic, Smith decides to go all D.D. Palmer. Deep into subluxation woo, Smith is very concerned about the proper flow of nerve energy, claiming that spinal dysfunctions disrupt the flow and cause heart attacks and visceral disorders like dysmenorrhea, asthma, enuresis, and infantile colic. Indeed, spine dysfunctions can even cause brain damage and premature aging. And manipulation is, of course, effective for all these disorders. As evidence for his nonsense, Smith relies for instance on the 1979 New Zealand Chiropractic Report developed by a panel consisting of a barrister, a chemistry professor, and a retired headmistress of a girls’ school (and comprehensively discussed here); the NZ report relied primarily on selected testimonials, draws conclusions in direct conflict with all current evidence obtained by using actual scientific methods, and nevertheless concluded that chiropractors should be strictly monitored, not present themselves as doctors, not encourage patients to consult a chiropractor in preference to a medical doctor for any condition, and not mislead the public into believing that chiropractic is an alternative to medicine. To bolster his case, Smith has arguments from popularity and patient satisfaction, and even arguments from antiquity: according to Smith, Hippocrates and Imhotep wrote about chiropractic (they did not). He also quotes Gary Null and Dana Ullman, and dismisses critics as being in cahoots with the AMA.

Smith also runs a website called Chiropractors for Fair Journalism, where he attacks critics of woo for oppression and for engaging in mafia tactics (The Institute for Science in Medicine, for instance, is referred to as “The Medical GoodFellas”), and accuses anyone who points out the pseudoscience and quackery that underlie chiropractic of “bigotry”, like: “His [Morris Fishbein, MD] intolerant quasi-KKK attitude about all non-allopathic CAM professions set the tone for the Jim Crow, MD, bias we see in many members in the medical profession today.” Likewise, efforts to inform the public of medical science and medical evidence that Smith doesn’t like is “fear-mongering and slander”. The main problem, though, with organizations like the ISM, which offers medical information and criticize pseudoscience, is apparently that they seek to “alone determine[…] what qualifies one method as ‘pseudo-scientific practices’ and the others as ‘scientific’,” and that “it is not its role to act as watchdogs since this is a governmental issue within each state. No one has endowed ISM to act as such, but the AMA has never subjected its power to any governmental agency in its quest to remain the medical monopoly.” Not indicative of a particularly well-developed ability to draw obvious distinctions or avoid massive strawmen, is it? 

Diagnosis: A shining illustration of the all-too common failure to distinguish criticism from oppression and facts from opinion. At least his efforts are probably unlikely to do quacks any favors.

Hat-tip: Harriet Hall @ sciencebasedmedicine.