Category: Answered Questions

Should Your Homeschool Graduate Go to College?

A portion of the Brooklyn College campus (click for credit)

I just got back from the Texas Homeschool Convention, which took place in Round Rock, Texas. I gave three talks and spent a lot of time speaking with homeschooling parents and homeschooled students. I always enjoy my time at conventions like this one, and I am sorry to say that I am done with my convention appearances this year. However, I am already scheduled to speak at all Great Homeschool Conventions next year, as well as the ICHE conference in Bourbonnais, Illinois.

During one of my talks, I got a question that I was happy to answer at the time, but I thought I would also answer it here. As near as I can remember, the question went like this:

With all the anti-Christian sentiment that exists on college campuses, should we even send our children to college? If so, should it be only to Christian schools?

Let me start by saying that while the mood on many college campuses (including several that call themselves “Christian”) is definitely anti-Christian, it doesn’t really affect the students that much, at least not in terms of their commitment to their faith. As I have discussed previously (here and here) studies show that those who go to college are more likely to retain their faith than those who do not. Thus, if you are worried about your child “losing faith” in college, that is the exception, not the rule.

Now having said that, let me also say that there are way, way, way too many students attending college these days. As someone who has been teaching at the university level for more than 30 years, I can assure you that MOST students should not go to college, because they don’t need it. In my opinion, there are two reasons a student should go to college:

1. The student is just a natural scholar and loves to learn.

2. The student has a career path planned that requires a college degree.

If a student doesn’t meet one of those two criteria, the student is mostly likely wasting his or her time, along with a few buckets of money. Most students would benefit more from going to a trade school or joining the workforce. Some of them might eventually go to college, after their real-world experience ends up giving them one of the two criteria listed above.

So…let’s suppose your child meets one of those two criteria. He or she should go to college, but should it be a Christian college or a secular college? That depends on the student. Some students (myself included) experience an enormous amount of spiritual growth at secular colleges, mostly because we thrive when our faith is challenged. There are others, however, who will grow more at Christian colleges.

This is where you, as a homeschooling parent, have a distinct advantage. You know your children much better than most parents. Thus, you are in a perfect position to help them in choosing their college environment. Ask yourself how your student will react to having his or her faith challenged pretty much on a daily basis. That will tell you what kind of college your child should attend.

Also, please note that you cannot believe a college is Christian simply because it says it is. Over the years, I have experienced many “Christian” schools promoting decidedly anti-Christian ideologies. Thus, if you think your college-bound child will thrive best at a Christian college, you should make it a point to visit the campus, ask the officials hard questions about social and theological matters, and have your child ask some current students about their evaluation of the Christian nature of the school.

I will end with this piece of advice, which is probably the most important: Regardless of the type of college you choose for your college-bound student, make sure he or she is an active part of an ON-CAMPUS Christian fellowship group (like Intervarsity, Navigators, Cru, etc.). This doesn’t replace church, but it is vital for your child to have access to likeminded brothers and sisters who have experienced “that professor” or “that situation” and can help your child deal with it. In my opinion, being an active part of an on-campus fellowship group is significantly more important to your student’s spiritual life than whether the college is Christian or secular.

About That New “Dragon Man” Fossil….

A fanciful imagining of what the person who left behind the skull being discussed in the article might have might have looked like. (image from the scientific paper)

The media is abuzz with a “new” fossil discovery. Consider, for example, this article, which says:

A new species of ancient human dubbed Homo longi, or “Dragon Man,” could potentially change the way we understand human evolution, scientists said Friday.

A reader asked me to comment on the discovery, which I am happy to do. Please remember, however, I am not a paleontologist nor a biologist, so my comments are clearly from a non-expert position. Nevertheless, I think I can add a bit of perspective that is sadly missing in most discussions of this fossil find.

First, while this fossil is just making the news, it is anything but new. As one of the three scientific papers written about it informs us, the skull was discovered in 1933 by a man who was part of a team constructing a bridge. He hid it in an abandoned well, apparently with the idea to retrieve it later. However, he never did. Three generations later, the family learned about the skull and recovered it. One of the scientists who wrote the papers learned about it and convinced the family to donate the skull to the Geoscience Museum of Hebei GEO University back in 2018.
So what’s “new” isn’t the discovery of the fossil; it’s the analysis contained in the scientific papers.

Of course, one part of the analysis tried to answer the question of how old the skull is. Two different radioactive dating methods were used (comparing the ratio of two thorium isotopes as well as comparing the ratio of one thorium isotope and one uranium isotope). As is typical with radioactive dating, the two different methods didn’t agree with one another, and even the same method gave different ages depending on where the sample was taken from the skull. In the end, the ages based on these analyses ranged from 62±3 thousand years old to 296±8 thousand years old. Based on many factors, the authors said that the youngest this fossil could be was 146,000 years old.

Before I move on, I want to use these data to highlight something I have discussed before. The numbers that follow the “±” sign represent what scientists call error bars. They are supposed to tell you the most likely range over which the measurement can actually fall. When you read “62±3 thousand years old,” that is supposed to mean, “62,000 years is the most likely date, but it could be as low as 59,000 years or as high as 65,000 years.” In fact, the actual date could be lower or higher, but the most likely range is 59,000 years to 65,000 years. Notice, of course, that these error bars are utterly meaningless, since the measurements ranged from 59,000 years old to 304,000 years. This is one of the many problems with radioactive dating. Error bars that are utterly meaningless are constantly reported, giving the illusion of a very precise measurement, when in reality, the measurement is anything but precise!

With the “measured” age of the skull out of the way, let’s discuss the main issue. The scientific papers, as well as the media reports, indicate that this is a new species of human. It doesn’t represent “modern” humans, and it doesn’t represent other known “archaic” humans. There is one big problem with this idea. The paper says that based on the characteristics of this skull, the human it represents is more closely-related to modern humans than is Neanderthal Man. The problem, of course, is that we know Neanderthal Man is fully human, because we know that Neanderthal Man interbred with modern humans. Thus, Neanderthal Man is from the same species as modern man. Since this skull indicates its owner is even more closely related to modern humans, it is a modern human as well.

So while this skull can tell us something about the variety that has existed among humans over the years, it tells us nothing about the “story” of human evolution. It simply represents another variety of human being.

The American Biology Teacher Uses False Statements to Reassure Teachers

When dinosaur fossils like this one are tested, they contain carbon-14 in significant quantities, which is not possible if they are millions of years old.
Quite some time ago, a reader sent me this article from The American Biology Teacher. It attempts to assure biology teachers that the large amounts of carbon-14 found in dinosaur fossils is compatible with the scientifically-irresponsible idea that those fossils are millions of years old. The reader asked me to comment on the article, since I have said several times that carbon-14 in dinosaur bones is a very strong indication that the bones are not millions of years old. The author of this article (Dr. Philip J. Senter), however, is confident that this is not a problem at all. How can he be so confident? Because he seems to believe a lot of false information.

Early on, he makes a statement that indicates he has not studied carbon-14 dating very seriously:

…bone mineral is usually useless for radiocarbon dating, even though the carbonate that bone mineral incorporates during life contains 14C. The uselessness of bone mineral for radiocarbon dating is due to the fact that bone mineral accumulates new 14C after death, yielding a falsely young radiocarbon “age.”

This statement is utterly false, and anyone who knows carbon-14 dating would know that. Hundreds of radiocarbon dates have been published in the scientific literature using bioapatite, a bone mineral. This study examined using bioapatite in carbon-14 dating extensively, comparing it to two other commonly-used substances in carbon-14 dating. It concluded:

Most Holocene samples exhibit reliable 14C ages on the bioapatite fraction. Late Pleistocene samples have shown reliable results even for extremely poorly preserved bone in the case of samples derived from a non-carbonate environment.

The Holocene supposedly dates back to about 11,700 years, while the Pleistocene supposedly goes back to 2.6 million years. “Late Pleistocene” samples, then, would be samples that go back to the limits of carbon-14 dating (about 50,000 years old). Indeed, in that study, one of the samples had a carbon-14 date of 37,000 years old, which is older than most of the dinosaur bones that have been dated with carbon-14. So the idea that minerals from bone are “useless” for carbon-14 dating is demonstrably false.

Dr. Senter tries to back up his statement with a reference, but the reference doesn’t invalidate the use of bioapatite in carbon-14 dating at all. It does indicate that when you compare the date derived from collagen (a non-mineral that is often used in carbon-14 dating) to the date derived from bioapatite, the bioapatite date is often younger. However, the results depend heavily on where the fossil was found. More importantly, we know this has nothing to do with the carbon-14 dates of dinosaur bones, since many dinosaur fossils have been dated using both mineral and non-mineral samples (including collagen), and the ages are similar. In a hadrosaur fossil, for example, bioapatite dated as 25,670 years old, while the collagen dated as 23,170 years old. Note that contrary to the study Senter cites, in this case, the bioapatite age is older than the collagen age.

Senter then tries to explain why dinosaur bones read so young with carbon-14 dating. Most of his argument boil down to the idea that modern carbon has gotten into the fossils, and since the modern carbon is very young, it makes the fossil read young. The problem with that, of course, is that if modern carbon is getting into the fossil from the environment, there must be more contamination near the surface of the fossil and less near the center of the fossil. Thus, the carbon-14 age of the bone should vary depending on where in the bone the sample was taken. However, that’s not what is seen. In this study, Figure 7 has circles around the dates for samples taken from different parts of the same bone. They show very good agreement, indicating that what is being detected is not from contamination.

There is one argument Dr. Senter makes which isn’t about contamination. He says that radioactive materials can be absorbed by a bone, and those radioactive materials can cause nuclear reactions which will add carbon-14 to the bone, making it look young. Once again, he cites studies to support his claim, such as this one, but once again, the studies don’t support his claim. For example, the study I just linked shows how uranium decay can lead to the production of carbon-14, but as anyone who understands nuclear reactions would tell you, the effect is ridiculously small. Indeed, the study shows that nuclear reactions can account for no more than one hundreth (1/100) of the lowest amount of carbon-14 detected in dinosaur bones! Thus, there is no way that nuclear reactions are a viable means of explaining around the carbon-14 found in dinosaur bones.

In the end, then, we see that Dr. Senter must use false information to assure his readers that carbon-14 in dinosaur bones doesn’t invalidate the dogma that they are millions of years old. Unfortunately, since many teachers read the magazine in which his article was published, I am sure that this false information will be spread around, fooling unsuspecting students. Nevertheless, the more this is investigated, the more we will see that it poses a huge problem for those who are committed to believing that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago.

Why Do Creationists Use the Bible for Science?

Matthew Fontaine Maury, who was inspired by the Bible to map ocean currents.
This blog has been more quiet than usual, because I am trying to put the finishing touches on my new book, Discovering Design with Earth Science. As soon as that job is complete, you will be able to see preview materials at my publisher’s website. I decided to pause for a moment, however, because I was recently asked the following question by a frustrated atheist:

Why would you even think of using the Bible for science? It isn’t a scientific book!

It turns out that Discovering Design with Earth Science has two answers to that question. I shared them with him, and I thought I would share them with you as well. In the book, I present both sides of the age-of-the-earth issue in as unbiased a way as possible. I start with the uniformitarian view, which requires a very old earth. I then present the young-earth creationist view. The first answer to the atheist’s question is found at the beginning of that discussion:

Suppose you are examining the ruins of an ancient city and want to learn as much as you can about when it was built, how it was built, and how it fell into ruin. You see some of the remains of buildings, streets, walls, etc., but nothing has been preserved intact. You can learn a lot by investigating the ruins, but your conclusions will be based on your interpretation of what you see. Now suppose you found out that there was a book written shortly after the city was built, and it discusses the politics of the city for several centuries. While the focus of the book is on the government, it does cover many aspects of how and when the city was built.

Would you completely ignore the book and just examine the ruins, relying on your own interpretation to determine the city’s history? Of course not! If you wanted to learn the truth about the city’s history, you would read the book and let it help you interpret the ruins that you are investigating. This is how young-earth-creationists (YECs) study the geological record. They believe they have a book (the Bible) that comes from the Creator Himself. While the book focuses on more important things like salvation, morality, and our duties to God, it does discuss the creation of the universe, the earth, the organisms that lived on earth, etc. Since YECs consider the Bible to be an accurate source of history, they use it as a guide to studying the “ruins” of the geological column and fossil record. There’s a lot more to the history of the earth than what is in the Bible, but at least the Bible gives YECs a starting point to help their interpretation of the geological record.

The second answer to the atheist’s question comes from my discussion of the surface currents found in the ocean. While others had mapped some of those currents (Ben Franklin, for example, mapped the Gulf Stream), the man most responsible for mapping the ocean’s surface currents was Matthew Fontaine Maury, who is pictured above. He was inspired to search for the “paths of the seas” that are mentioned in Psalm 8:8, and after an exhaustive research effort, he ended up producing a detailed map of those currents. This revolutionized ocean travel, so he became quite famous in his time. He ended up writing a very important text on oceanography (what they called “physical geography” back then): The Physical Geography of the Sea. In that book, he references the Bible several times. In my earth science book, I tell the students all of this and then I add:

Many scientists didn’t like that and tried to discourage him from connecting the Bible to science. In a speech given at the founding of The University of the South, he gave those scientists a stern rebuke:

I have been blamed by men of science, both in this country and in England, for quoting the Bible in confirmation of the doctrines of physical geography. The Bible, they say, was not written for scientific purposes, and is therefore of no authority in matters of science. I beg pardon! The Bible is authority for everything it touches.
(Diana Fontaine Corbin, A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury, Samson, Lowe, et. al., 1888, p. 192)

Young-earth creationists like me really believe that. The Bible is an authority when it comes to all the important things of life: salvation, morality, our duties to God, etc. However, because it was written by the Creator Himself, we believe it is an authority in whatever it mentions, including science.

A Monkey/Man Embryo

An illustration from the scientific paper being discussed.
A few readers have sent me news stories like this one, entitled “Human-Monkey Hybrid Embryo Created by Joint China-U.S. Scientist Team.” Obviously, the concept of mixing the embryos of people and animals is abhorrent, so these readers wanted my view on the experiment and what it means. Since “science journalists” know little about science and even less about journalism, I ignored what has been written in the press and went straight to the actual scientific paper to find out what had been done. While the paper alleviated some of my initial concerns, it most certainly didn’t alleviate all of them.

What did the researchers actually do? They first developed a method for fertilizing the eggs of a long-tailed macaque (Macaca fasciularis) so that the monkey embryo could start development in a lab dish instead of the body of a female macaque. Once they accomplished that, they took human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) that had already been developed and injected them into the lab-dish monkey embryos once they reached a specific stage in development, called the “blastocyst stage.” They then followed the development of these mixed embryos over time.

Why would someone want to do something like this? The scientists on the project were mostly interested in trying to understand how the cells in an embryo communicate with one another so that they can do the jobs they need to do to make a baby. They thought that if they could see how the human cells communicated with one another in this kind of system, it would help them understand human embryonic development better. Of course, to “sell” the research, they also indicated that it could help produce animals that could grow human organs for transplant, since many people die waiting for an organ transplant.

Were they successful? Not really, but they were able to get some results. They started with 132 separate monkey embryos, and they injected 25 human stem cells into each of them once they reached the blastocyst stage. Stem cells have the ability to develop into many different kinds of cells, so they hoped that human cells would communicate with one another and mimic what happens during early human embryonic development. However, over the course of 20 days, most of the embryos died. Only three of them survived for 19 days, and there was significant interaction between the human and monkey cells. As a result, it’s not clear how much of what happened to the human cells is related to actual human embryonic development.

Now remember, I said the paper alleviated some of my concerns. That’s because the source of the human cells is not immoral. There are three ways to get human stem cells. The first way is to extract them from a human embryo. This kills the baby, so murders must be committed in order to use such cells. Thus, no one with any sense of morality should be involved in such research. Fortunately, this experiment didn’t use such cells.

The second way to get human stem cells is to harvest them from the umbilical cord after birth or from certain parts of an adult. This doesn’t kill anyone, so there is nothing unethical about their use. Indeed, several successful medical treatments are based on such cells, which are usually called “adult stem cells.” This experiment didn’t use those cells, either. Instead, it used mature cells (from an adult) that had been chemically reprogrammed to act like stem cells. Such cells are usually called “induced pluripotent stem cells,” and once again, no one is killed in the process. Thus, at least the source of human stem cells used in the experiment is a moral one.

However, my concerns are not fully alleviated. After all, this experiment could be done by others who are immoral enough to use stem cells that require babies to be murdered. Indeed, there are probably scientists reading this very paper thinking that one reason the survival rate was so low was because the stem cells did not come from a human embryo. As a result, they might try to replicate this experiment with immorally-sourced stem cells.

Of course, the other serious issue is that this experiment could be altered so that the mixed embryo is implanted back into a female monkey, in hopes that some kind of creature would actually be born. I seriously doubt such a thing could actually happen, because embryonic development is so complex that the communication between monkey and human cells would eventually cause the process to break down. Nevertheless, the possibility exists that such a monster could be produced, which is morally repugnant.

Now I do have to say that the authors of the study went to great pains to make sure that their experiment was deemed “ethical.” However, that doesn’t comfort me in the slightest. After all, the medical community thinks abortion is ethical, and it is clearly not. Given this fact, I don’t think this line of research should be extended. There are just too many ways it could be done immorally, and the medical community has shown that its sense of morality is, at best, stunted.

About That New Physics….

Fermilab’s muon 2- storage ring, where some are saying new physics has been confirmed. (click for credit)

A reader sent me this article over the weekend. The long title indicates something exciting is happening:

A new experiment has broken the known rules of physics, hinting at a mysterious, unknown force that has shaped our universe

I have been sent similar articles by others. Most of them have the same breathless excitement: physicists have found that the laws of physics as we know them can’t be right, because an experiment at Fermilab shows that they are being broken. If true, this is really exciting news. However, much like the “faster-than light neutrino” results that were later found to be incorrect, I remain very skeptical that there is any reason to think that the laws of physics as we understand them are wrong.

So what’s the story here? Twenty years ago, physicists at Brookhaven National Lab were studying muons, which are particles that have the same negative charge as the electron but are significantly heavier. Because they are charged, they produce a magnetic field, just like the electron does. The physics that we know right now (collectively referred to as the “Standard Model”) predicts the behavior of particles that produce magnetic fields, and the way the electron behaves agrees perfectly with the Standard Model’s prediction. Because muons are heavier than electrons, their behavior is more complex, so they can be used as an additional test for the Standard Model. In the Brookhaven experiments, the muon’s behavior differed very slightly from the predictions of the Standard Model. However, because of the limits of the experiment, the physicists couldn’t rule out the idea that the result was a fluke, so the team made no concrete statement about the accuracy of the Standard Model when it comes to muon magnetic fields.

Recently, Fermilab announced that they replicated the Brookhaven experiment, using the same basic setup as what was used at Brookhaven, but they did it with higher precision. They confirmed the Brookhaven experiment’s results, and based on the quality of their data, statistics indicate there is only a 1 in 40,000 chance that the result is a fluke. Because of this, there is a lot of excitement in some parts of the physics community. After all, if the Standard Model can’t correctly predict something, that means there is something wrong with it, and that means there is “new physics” to discover.

Of course, this line of reasoning ignores one inconvenient fact. There is another possible reason the Standard Model’s prediction for the muon is wrong: The prediction itself could be incorrect. It turns out that the muon’s complex behavior causes the math in the Standard Model to be very difficult to solve. As a result, the prediction against which these experiments are compared used a well-accepted shortcut: it incorporated some independent experimental results into the calculations to make things easier. Of course, this leads to a problem. Those experimental results produce uncertainties, because all experiments have error in them. As a result, what’s really going on here is that an uncertain prediction is being compared to an experimental result, which has its own uncertainties. When uncertain things are compared to other uncertain things, it’s not clear what the difference between them means.

To solve this problem, Borsanyi and colleagues did the tough math. They used millions of CPU hours at a supercomputer so that the prediction they produced was purely mathematical. They found that their prediction agreed with the experimental results at both Brookhaven and Fermilab. Thus, as far as they are concerned, there is no discrepancy between the behavior of the muon and the predictions of the Standard Model. Is that the end of the story? Of course not! It could be that Borsanyi and colleagues are wrong. However, I would think their conclusion is more reliable, since a prediction made with pure mathematics has less uncertainty in it.

So my bet is that there is no new physics here, and the Standard Model has been vindicated once again. Of course, only time will tell whether or not I am right. However, there is a lesson to be learned here, and it is an important one. Borsanyi and colleagues’ calculation was published at the same time as the Fermilab results. However, most science “journalists” aren’t bothering to mention their conclusion. Why? Either because it isn’t exciting, or because they haven’t bothered to see what other physicists are saying about the situation. Either way, it’s truly unfortunate, and it confirms what I have said many times before: most “science journalists” know little about science and even less about journalism.

A New Kind of Vaccine for COVID-19

Pfizer’s description of how an mRNA vaccine works (click for larger version)
There has been a lot of talk about Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, and a reader asked me to comment on it. The company claims it is more than 90% effective at preventing the disease, which is better than what most health-care experts were expecting. If true, that news is exciting enough. To add to the excitement, it is a new kind of vaccine that has great potential, if it works the way it is supposed to. There is another company trying to produce a similar vaccine, but it looks like Pfizer is in the lead, so for the purpose of this article, I will focus on its version.

Let me start by saying that I have no connection to Pfizer or any other pharmaceutical company. I am a science educator who writes about science issues like this one. I am also not a medical doctor or medical researcher. I am simply a nuclear chemist who has broadened my knowledge base by writing (or co-writing) a series of textbooks used by home educators and teachers in Christian schools. Thus, I am no expert on these matters. However, I get most of my information by reading the scientific literature, which allows me to avoid a lot of the misinformation found in the standard media outlets and (even worse) social media.

Before I talk about Pfizer’s vaccine in particular, I want to explain how this kind of vaccine works. To understand that, remember that a traditional vaccine uses a weakened/inactivated form of the pathogen whose infection it wants to prevent (or a chemical mimic of that pathogen). This causes your body to react as if it is being infected by the real thing. As a result, it mounts a defense that is specific to that pathogen and remembers how to fight it. That way, if you get infected by the real thing, it can mount a swift immune response. This process takes advantage of your acquired immune system. However, you also have an innate immune system, and the active ingredient of the vaccine does not stimulate it. As a result, traditional vaccines have additives, called adjuvants, which are designed to stimulate your innate immune system. That way, everything in your immune system works the way it is designed to work.

Continue reading “A New Kind of Vaccine for COVID-19”

Regardless of What You Have Heard, the COVID-19 Deaths in the U.S. are Real

The purple bars are the deaths in the U.S. each week since2017. The yellow line represents the maximum number of deaths that were projected for those weeks. (graph by The Conversation, data from the CDC)

I have referenced this article in some comments I made previously, but I want to highlight it in a separate post, because the graph it contains (also shown above) makes it clear that the COVID-19 deaths are not some manipulation of the data. They are real. Very real. The purple bars in the graph represent all deaths recorded in the U.S. each week since 2017. The yellow line represents a projection of the maximum number of deaths that should have happened each week. The projection is based on historical data, and it fluctuates with the season. That’s because there are usually more deaths in the winter and fewer deaths in the summer, and as you can see, the actual deaths show that same fluctuation.

Notice that for most weeks, the actual deaths were lower than the maximum number of projected deaths. That’s expected. If the projection is done well, there should rarely be a time when the actual number of deaths meets or exceeds the maximum projection. However, there were some weeks in December of 2017 and January of 2018 when that happened, because there was a particularly virulent strain of the flu that season. As a result, more people died than were expected.

But those excess deaths are dwarfed by the ones that start showing up the last week of March in 2020. In that week, about 4,000 more than the maximum projected deaths occurred. Since then, the actual deaths have exceeded the maximum projected deaths by a considerable margin every week. All of this is discussed in the article from which I took the graph. However, I want to make a couple of additional points.

First, look at the shape of the excess deaths. There appear to be two peaks – one very large one the second week of April, and a smaller one at the end of July. This is important, because it looks very, very similar to the COVID-19 deaths reported over the same time span:

When the excess deaths have essentially the same time profile as the COVID-19 deaths, you know that the COVID-19 deaths make up most of the excess deaths. This tells us that the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths are real and most certainly represent people who would not have died had there not been the COVID-19 pandemic.

Second, some friends have asked me why they don’t know anyone who got the disease or died from it. After all, if there really have been more than 180,000 people who died from the disease and more than 6 million confirmed cases, shouldn’t everyone know someone who has suffered from it? Of course not! There are 328.2 million people who live in the U.S. That means about 2% of the population has contracted COVID-19, and about 0.05% have died from it. Thus, your chance of knowing someone who died from it is ridiculously low. While your chance of knowing someone who contracted it but didn’t die from it is significantly higher, remember that for most cases, the disease is mild. Thus, you would have to know someone well enough that you track his or her common illnesses to be aware that he or she had the disease!

It disturbs me that there are so many people (many of whom are Christians) who think this pandemic has been made up. The data clearly say that it hasn’t been. Lots of people died because of the disease, and misinformation will only increase the number of deaths. Now please understand that I am not saying that I support any of the measures that governments have taken to slow the spread. We don’t know enough about the disease or the consequences of the actions that have been taken to know whether or not they are a good idea. I said this before, and I will say it again:

As a scientist, let me assure you that no one really knows what we should be doing. There are a lot of experts saying a lot of different things, and you should listen to all of them. Then, you should decide what works best for you and your family, and you should start doing it. But once you decide what you and your family should be doing, please please please show grace to those who choose to do something different. Since the experts can’t agree on a proper course of action, there is no reason to expect your neighbor to agree with your course of action.

In addition to showing grace to others, please please please stop spreading the false idea that the COVID-19 deaths are few in number or not real at all. They are real, and there are a huge number of them. There is simply no other way to understand the data.

Can a COVID-19 Virus Communicate with Other COVID-19 Viruses?

I am writing this post because a reader asked me a question that I thought was very interesting and relates to a broader concept in biology. Before I answer her question, however, I want to make an important point about the virus that causes COVID-19 and how we should react to it. A few weeks ago, I gave the commencement address to a group of homeschoolers. Before I started my official remarks, I said this:

I am not going to say much about this virus, but I will say this: As a scientist, let me assure you that no one really knows what we should be doing. There are a lot of experts saying a lot of different things, and you should listen to all of them. Then, you should decide what works best for you and your family, and you should start doing it. But once you decide what you and your family should be doing, please please please show grace to those who choose to do something different. Since the experts can’t agree on a proper course of action, there is no reason to expect your neighbor to agree with your course of action.

I think that is the best way to approach this pandemic. The experts still can’t agree on exactly what to do because we just don’t know enough about this virus to make definitive choices. As a result of this ignorance, we must all muddle through this as best we can and realize that none of us has all the correct answers.

Now let me share my reader’s question:

Recently I came across a discussion online about quorum sensing in viruses. The initial topic had been the difference between groups meeting indoors verses outdoors, as many churches are now doing. I had never heard of quorum sensing before, so I did a little research, but I wondered if you would consider addressing this sometime. It sounds pretty fascinating to think viruses and such can actually monitor their environment.

Continue reading “Can a COVID-19 Virus Communicate with Other COVID-19 Viruses?”

Yes, the Coronavirus Bill Was Introduced in 2019. No, It’s Not Because the Pandemic Was Planned.

***PLEASE NOTE: This is not a political post, and all political comments will be deleted without mercy.***

A good friend of mine asked me about something he had seen on Facebook. It wasn’t this particular post, but the message was the same. The image on the left comes from the post I linked. As it shows, the Coronavirus bill that became law on March 27, 2020 (called the CARES ACT) was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on January 24, 2019. That’s long before we knew about the COVID-19 pandemic. How in the world could this bill be introduced in the House before anyone knew about the virus? As the Facebook post says:

Attention: The conspiracy theorists were right in calling this a “plandemic” and the proof can be found at www.congress.gov. Look up H.R. 748- CARES Act (the Bill that was passed for Coronavirus relief).

To someone uninitiated in the vagaries of legislation in the United States, the fact that the bill was introduced almost a year before anyone heard about the novel Coronavirus does seem to confirm that the entire pandemic was planned. However, like most conspiracy theories, a bit of education is all it takes to understand the real reason behind this odd timeline.

The U.S. Constitution says that all spending bills must originate in the U.S. House of Representatives. Thus, to be Constitutional, any spending bill (including the CARES act) must originate in the House. After it passes the House, it moves on to the Senate for consideration. During that process, the Senate can amend the bill, changing things it doesn’t like. However, once the Senate passes an amended bill, it must go back to the House, and it cannot be sent to the President for his signature until the House concurs with the Senate’s version of the bill.

Because Congress wanted the CARES act to move quickly, it essentially skipped the first step. It did so by taking a bill that had already passed the House and been sent to the Senate. That bill was HR 748, which was originally entitled, “Middle Class Health Benefits Tax Repeal Act of 2019.” Its intent was to repeal a tax that the Affordable Care Act placed on “Cadillac” health insurance plans. It passed the House but was never voted on by the Senate. As a result, it just “sat” in the Senate until March of 2020.

At that point, the pandemic was upon us, and the Senate decided it needed to pass a relief bill fast. It took HR 748, stripped the bill of its content, changed the title, and “amended” it by writing an entirely new bill. The details of the bill were crafted with input from the House leadership so that once it passed the Senate, the House would quickly concur with the “amendment” so that it could be signed by the President, who had also been consulted to ensure that he would sign it right away.

So the strange timeline of the CARES act is the result of a “loophole” that the Senate uses in order to speed up the passage of a spending bill, not because the pandemic had been planned ahead of time. You might wonder if using such a “loophole” is really Constitutional. I personally don’t have enough expertise to figure that one out. I have read legal opinions on both sides of the issue, and they just left me with a headache. However, I can tell you that this is not the first time the Senate has used it. In fact, the Affordable Care Act, which was originally called the “Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009,” was passed in the same way.