Reducibly Complex

It will be interesting to see what response, if any, the anti-vaccination crowd will have for this report that the National Health Service (UK) Information Centre has found that the rates of autism in adults directly correlates to the rates of autism in children.

The anti-vax movement, spearheaded by Jenny McCarthy, has been pushing the idea that vaccinations cause serious illnesses as side-effects to preventing others. In particular, the MMR vaccine (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) is blamed by anti-vaxers to cause Autism.

The MMR vaccine has been available only since the early 1990s. Thus, it would be expected that, if this vaccine were causing autism, that rates of autism in children would be higher than rates of adults, since children with the MMR vaccine have not had time to become a part of the adult population.

The NHS study, however, shows that this is not the case:

“The NHS Information Centre found one in every hundred adults living in England has autism, which is identical to the rate in children.”

Case closed. If the MMR vaccine was causing autism, then rates of autism rates in children should be higher than adults. They are not, so the MMR vaccine is not causing autism.

This study goes beyond the simple rates, though. Autism in girls as compared to women were completely equal and the same is true of boys compared to men. The rates are constant, whether the person has received the MMR vaccine or not.

Why is this an issue? What’s the harm in not getting your child vaccinated? To find out, check out www.whatstheharm.net/vaccinedenial.html.

(as usual, Dr. Steve Novella has a much more thorough analysis of this study on his blog, neurologica.)

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Ryan Gregory of the Genomicron blog has put together a quick, but excellent, list of predictions made by the theory of evolution that have later been confirmed. The list can be found at:

http://genomicron.blogspot.com/2009/09/does-evolutionary-biology-make.html

Even though I’m sure this is old and that most evolutionists in America have probably seen it already, it is new to me and I think its great!

“If anybody had that cure out there, like so many people swear they do, you’d be two things. You’d be very rich, and you’d be very famous. Otherwise, shut up.” — Patrick Swayze (1952-2009) to the cancer cure quacks.

Thanks to wastrel on the SGU Forums for this quote.

Wow, it’s been a long time. No promises of more posts to come (I’d like to start writing in here again, but who knows if I’ll have time), but here’s a funny atheist video that my colleague Tim sent to me.

The clincher was the reverend claiming some kind of “mutation” explaining everything. Brilliant.