TO INTRODUCE THE FINAL TYPE OF ERROR, HERE IS FORMER Missouri congressman Todd Akin, answering a question about whether abortion restrictions should make exceptions for victims of rape:
It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.1
The “legitimate rape” quote became a punch line, a calling card for the antiscience (and antiwomen, according to many critics) viewpoints of many political leaders. In a way, it was fortunate that the line was so ridiculous; pretty much everybody who heard this bit of gibberish understood it to be just that right away.
This is a prime example of the STRAIGHT-UP FABRICATION, a claim about science that has no basis in fact or any sort of reasonable or understandable sourcing. We won’t go so far as to call such claims lies, since intent is a hard thing to sort out, but these are statements that are plucked from thin air and presented as truth, regardless of exactly why the speaker decided to do the plucking and presenting. This is arguably the most depressing of the errors covered here—politicians simply relying on the idea that the loudest voice is often considered the most correct, whether or not their point is defensible or fact based. It can also be, unfortunately, quite hard to see through; without any real origin for the claims, where does one start to try and cut through them? The only lucky aspect is that these are often—though certainly not always—ridiculous in nature, and your BS detector is likely to sniff them out.
With Akin and legitimate rape, there is not much debunking work to do. It is just pure nonsense. Rape is just as biologically likely to result in pregnancy as consensual intercourse; the body does not know, somehow, that the sperm seeking to fertilize an egg are unwelcome guests in the fallopian tube, that the resulting embryo is unplanned and the result of violence and thus should not implant in the uterus. Biology is biology, whether Todd Akin says so or not.
Though his statement was quickly ridiculed from all corners, and Akin lost the Missouri senatorial election largely because of that ridicule, it is wrong to dismiss it as though it had no negative effect whatsoever. Sometimes, making mistakes about science can have effects that reach into the social sphere; in the years since Akin’s gaffe, the pervasive “rape culture” of the United States has become a central issue on college campuses and elsewhere. Some have argued that, by spreading misinformation about how women’s bodies actually work, Akin contributed to that culture. For example, here’s how Michael Jeffries, writing at the Atlantic, described the problem:
We cannot reduce the ignorance of people like . . . Akin to sound bites or place it in the category of election-season inanity. Their statements are the toxic runoff of our culture’s failure to prevent and address sexual violence in all its forms.2
Again: science doesn’t sit by itself, alone in a lab coat, pondering the mysteries of the universe with little outside influence or consequence. When politicians mistake scientific issues, it can have ripples in our everyday lives.
PERHAPS SOMETHING ABOUT sexuality brings out the worst in politicians. The United States is a country founded by Puritans, after all, and we have had a complicated relationship with sex ever since. Many of our elected officials sometimes sound as if they maintain some of the seventeenth-century opinions or values espoused by our Puritan forefathers, especially when it comes to issues regarding sexual orientation.
In an interview in early 2015, as Dr. Ben Carson was gearing up for his presidential run, he disputed the idea that the progress toward marriage equality mirrored the civil rights battles of the mid-twentieth century. The difference, he said, lay in the fact that people have no control over their race, but they can, in fact, choose whether or not to be gay. CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked Carson why he thought that was the case, and Carson responded:
Because a lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight and when they come out they’re gay. So did something happen while they were in there? Ask yourself that question.3
This is an absurd position to take. Being gay is a choice because people change their sexual orientation in prison? Though Carson insisted this was true to Cuomo, there is absolutely no evidence for his point.
First of all, ignoring the prison red herring for a moment, what does science actually say about sexual orientation and this idea of choice? In short, it is a complicated issue and one we still don’t understand particularly well, but there is a general consensus that the vast majority of us do not experience our sexual orientation as a choice. The American Psychological Association describes the situation this way:
Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.4
Surveys have borne that idea out. For example, one 2010 study involving 662 individuals found that 88 percent of gay men and 68 percent of lesbians “reported having had no choice at all about their sexual orientation.”5 Those numbers rise to 95 percent and 84 percent when including people who say they had a “small amount of choice” in the matter.
If it is not a choice, then what is it? Sexual orientation almost certainly has a genetic component, as shown in several studies over the last few decades. In 1993, researchers published a paper in Science showing that male cousins and maternal uncles of gay men—meaning other males who shared some genes—were themselves more likely to be gay.6 This study, involving 114 families of homosexual men, found that there was no such increased likelihood among fathers or paternal relatives, suggesting that sex-linked transmission (meaning the genetic information stored on the X or Y chromosome, which determines our gender) may play a role. The authors concluded that there was more than a 99 percent chance “that at least one subtype of male sexual orientation is genetically influenced.”
More recently, other researchers have suggested that your orientation could be influenced in utero, by “epigenetic” effects.7 Essentially, this means that hormone exposure differences while in the womb could play a role in turning on or off certain genes that we all have, and the complicated interaction of those genetic switches could play a role in eventual sexual orientation.
A common argument trotted out against the notion of genetic underpinnings to homosexuality is the idea that it creates an evolutionary paradox: since gay men and women are less likely to reproduce, wouldn’t a gene that determined their orientation die out with ease as time passed? In fact, studies looking into this question have found a convincing explanation for why this is no paradox at all.
In one such study of 98 homosexual men and 100 heterosexual men and their relatives—totaling more than 4,600 individuals—the maternal relatives of the gay men had a higher “fecundity” than relatives of straight men.8 Fecundity is essentially a measure of fertility; the study found that relatives of gay men have more children. That could offset the relative lack of offspring from the homosexual men themselves, meaning, again, that the paradox is explained. Another study, published in 2012, found essentially the same thing, concluding that the increased fecundity among relatives “compensat[ed] for the reduced fecundity of homosexuals.”9
So, science has told us that there is almost certainly some genetic component to sexual orientation, and that almost nobody experiences a large degree of choice in the matter. Carson’s argument, though, hinged on what he claimed was the experience of people changing their orientation while in prison. Is there any truth to that?
Nope. Carson said that “a lot of people” go into prison straight and come out gay, which somehow would prove that homosexuality is a choice. In reality, there is almost no research on changes to sexual orientation while incarcerated. In fact, only one study—and apparently only one—asked a question that was even remotely related; this investigation was conducted by researchers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2013.
The researchers—Christopher Hensley and Lauren Gibson—conducted a survey of 142 inmates at a single maximum-security prison. These inmates were asked what their sexual orientation was before incarceration, and how they would characterize it “today” (the survey included many other questions on sexuality and other issues as well). Twenty-four inmates did, in fact, report a change in sexual orientation; most of these changed from straight to bisexual.
Hensley himself has said that this was a very small sample and does not necessarily tell us anything at all about the prison population at large, or about sexual orientation and choice.10 The study also did not follow up with inmates upon release from prison, which would more closely resemble Carson’s tortured point. Since this is as close as we can get, essentially zero actual evidence supports what Carson said.
The prison comment is an example of the STRAIGHT-UP FABRICATION that could actually sound convincing to those listening. Carson was assertive and insistent, as if this was simply a known fact about prisons and choice, when in fact he had pulled this tidbit out of thin air. And once again, this is a scientific error that has echoes in other arenas: the LGBTQ community has, of course, faced discrimination and harassment in virtually all parts of life, and misconstruing what is actually known about sexual orientation makes overcoming this monumental civil rights challenge that much more difficult.
IN THE INTRODUCTION, we traveled back to the Reagan administration to find what may have been the first example of the “I’m not a scientist” refrain. His topic was volcanoes; thirty years later, former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee trotted out a STRAIGHT-UP FABRICATION on that very same topic, though focusing on a different volcanic emission. Here’s the Huckster in an interview with Katie Couric in 2015, responding to the question of whether man contributes to global warming:
He probably does, but a volcano, in one blast, will contribute more than 100 years of human activity. So when people are worried about it—you know?11
Since the question was about global warming, we can only assume that Huckabee meant this mythical volcano is spewing out massive amounts of carbon dioxide, unlike Reagan’s claim on sulfur dioxide. The degree to which Huckabee was wrong about this is truly amazing.
The US Geological Survey, citing various available studies on the topic, says that the average total CO2 output of all the world’s volcanoes is 0.26 gigatons—a gigaton is 1 billion metric tons, in case you forgot—per year.12 Humans, meanwhile, are responsible for about 30 gigatons every year (though hopefully that number will start to come down soon). That means we have volcanoes beat by more than a hundred times.
But wait, it’s worse than that! Huckabee said you would need one hundred years of human activity—so actually, he was off by ten thousand times, or about one million percent.
Except the governor said a single volcanic blast, not the entire global population of volcanoes! One of the biggest eruptions in recent memory was Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. According to the USGS, that eruption released 0.05 gigatons of CO2, or about 50 million metric tons. So the actual math involves a 50-million-ton blast versus more than 3,000 billion metric tons: you would need more than 60,000 Pinatubo eruptions (or 350,000 of President Reagan’s preferred eruption, Mount St. Helens) to match a hundred years of human emissions.
If that isn’t enough wrongness for you, it actually gets worse. When it comes to Huckabee’s topic, global warming, the fact is that volcanoes actually have an opposite effect on the global climate system. The major result of massive eruptions like Pinatubo is to inject large amounts of sulfates high into the stratosphere—yes, just as Reagan spoke of, though he certainly got the numbers wrong. Those particles reflect sunlight back into space, and actually cool the Earth; the 1991 Pinatubo eruption resulted in a about a half-degree cooling effect over the following year. Huckabee brought up volcanoes to try to argue that human contributions to global warming are trivial compared to that of the natural world, when the exact opposite is true: humans are warming up the planet in spite of the world fighting back and trying to cool it down!
This STRAIGHT-UP FABRICATION, unfortunately, represented just another in a long line of climate falsehoods told by the TOADS. And even this bit of nonsense, off by a factor of sixty thousand or more, can be tough to spot; during the interview, Couric seemed to lack any data to refute Huckabee, and she simply let the enormous mistake stand. It’s hard to blame her, given the lack of a specific source and the vast number of ways climate deniers have found to question the consensus.
THE VERY LAST EXAMPLE we’ll explore in this book is another STRAIGHT-UP FABRICATION, one that has reared its head several times since the anti-vaccination movement sprang up, and is perhaps more damaging than virtually anything else a politician could say. It is quite literally a matter of life and death.
The original MMR vaccine scare centered around the idea that the immunization could be the cause of a child’s autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. Even after more than a decade of countering evidence, the idea that vaccines could cause neurological or behavioral problems remained. In 2011, then-Congresswoman Michele Bachmann related an anecdote about the vaccine for human papillomavirus:
The problem is, it comes with some very significant consequences. There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine. There are very dangerous consequences.13
Though we know nothing about the specific person Bachmann cited, her goal was to scare people away from a lifesaving vaccine. And her reasoning, that Gardasil and other HPV vaccines can cause “mental retardation,” is utterly lacking in scientific merit.
Though many were quick to debunk this mythical connection at the time, the idea would not die. In 2015, Senator Rand Paul—an actual doctor, with an MD—repeated a very similar claim in an interview:
I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.14
In a debate in September 2015, Donald Trump repeated much the same idea, using Bachmann’s technique of telling an unverifiable story:
Just the other day, two years old, two-and-a-half years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever. Got very, very sick, now is autistic.15
These are all just slightly altered versions of the old vaccine dog whistle—that the MMR causes autism—and they are just as untrue.
Neither the MMR nor the HPV vaccine has been shown to cause any sort of “profound mental disorder” or “mental retardation”; in fact, they have been proved to be remarkably safe. As with any drug or medication, there can be adverse effects, but with the vaccines available today, these are almost universally quite mild. There are reports of more severe reactions or events, but usually they are so rare that a cause-and-effect relationship cannot be determined.
This is not to say, though, that the scientific community has not taken the possibility of dangerous vaccines seriously. It has, and has found that our immunizations are, in general, remarkably safe. A 2011 report by the Institute of Medicine summarized the safety of all the vaccines that the CDC currently recommends; the report specifically rejected the possibility of a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism.16 It also found no evidence of a causal relationship between the MMR or DTaP (which protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, also known as whooping cough) vaccines and type 1 diabetes, and between the flu vaccine and Bell’s palsy, as well as worsening of asthma. The IOM found there was in fact evidence of such a relationship for a few adverse effects, including very rare cases of anaphylaxis (a severe allergic reaction) and the HPV vaccine, and other less dangerous problems. For the vast bulk of reported adverse effects, though, we lack anywhere near enough evidence to make a determination of causality. Here’s how the IOM report concluded:
Vaccines offer the promise of protection against a variety of infectious diseases. Despite much media attention and strong opinions from many quarters, vaccines remain one of the greatest tools in the public health arsenal. Certainly, some vaccines result in adverse effects that must be acknowledged. But the latest evidence shows that few adverse effects are caused by the vaccines reviewed in this report.
The weight of evidence is clear: the repeated claims that various vaccines have caused “mental retardation” or “profound mental disorders” have absolutely no basis in science. Senator Paul walked back his comments in dramatic fashion in the ensuing days, even appearing in a New York Times photo as he received a hepatitis A vaccine booster.17 But his STRAIGHT-UP FABRICATION didn’t stop at the first blunder: that same day, he appeared on a radio show and dug his hole a bit deeper, proving that one of the only doctors in the Senate wasn’t exactly on top of the current medical research:
I was annoyed when my kids were born that they wanted them to take hepatitis B in the neonatal nursery, and it’s like, that’s a sexually transmitted disease, or a blood-borne disease, and I didn’t like them getting 10 vaccines at once, so I actually delayed my kids’ vaccines and had them staggered over time.18
First of all, regarding hepatitis B, the vaccine protecting against this disease is indeed administered in the neonatal nursery. There is a very good reason for this: hep B can be passed from mother to infant at birth, and the vaccine is extremely effective at preventing that transmission. Thus, it is the only vaccine commonly given at such a young age. Since the CDC began recommending the hepatitis B vaccine for all children in 1991, new infections among children and adolescents have dropped by an astonishing 95 percent or more.19
But what should we make of Paul’s strategy to stagger his kids’ vaccines? Paul sounded so reasonable on that count; wouldn’t it make sense to try to space out all these substances being injected into a child’s body? There are a lot of vaccines! Here’s an “easy-to-read” version of the CDC’s immunization schedule for birth through six years of age, highlighting just how many vaccines children get at about the same time:
Credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For more explanation on these immunizations,
visit www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules.
As sensible as staggering vaccines may sound, it has no scientific basis whatsoever. For example, one 2013 study published in the Journal of Pediatrics examined whether exposure to more of the antigens found in vaccines correlated with autism spectrum disorders; they tested this in 256 children with such disorders and 752 control children with no such diagnosis.20 Their results were remarkable: for every 25-unit increase in total antigen exposure, the risk of autism changed by essentially zero. (To be precise, it changed by a factor of 0.999, where 1.0 would mean no effect at all.)
Other studies have looked beyond autism to other broader “neuropsychological outcomes.” One study in Pediatrics in 2010 found that timely vaccination—that is, vaccines administered within thirty days of the recommended age—was not associated with any negative outcomes at all out to ten years later.21 In fact, getting vaccinated on time actually improved some neuropsychological outcomes. “These data may reassure parents who are concerned that children receive too many vaccines too soon,” the researchers concluded. Yet another study found that timely vaccination did not raise the risk of seizures, and in fact delaying the MMR increased the risk of seizures compared with on-time immunization.22
Most fundamentally, delaying vaccinations means that a child is at risk for the diseases the vaccines target for a bigger chunk of childhood. “It’s stupid,” is how one vaccine expert, James Cherry of UCLA, put it. “That will allow these illnesses to occur.”23 This is not guesswork; the recommended schedule is recommended for a reason, and it does not increase the risk of problems. Rand Paul was completely, utterly wrong.
In spite of what the most vehement among the anti-vax crowd might say, there is no grand conspiracy to pump “toxins” into the world’s children through vaccination programs. Vaccines are one of science’s greatest achievements and have resulted in many, many thousands of lives saved over more than a century; the CDC estimates that they saved 732,000 children’s lives during just a twenty-year period.24 The science is clear: vaccinate your kids, and do it on time.
More generally, look out for the STRAIGHT-UP FABRICATION, as hard as it can be to spot. If something sounds ridiculous—“legitimate rape,” or prison-based sexual orientation changes—unleash your inner skeptic. And for the less ridiculous, more reasonable-sounding claims on issues like vaccines, the only antidote is to look for reputable sources and do your homework. The politicians are hoping you won’t; try to disappoint them.