Prior to becoming the Editor of Gotham Skeptic, it had been my dream to be a skeptical blogger. A dream I had nurtured for, oh, a good 6 months before it became a reality and the opportunity of GS fell in my lap. My interest in blogging about skeptical issues (or issues that were in need of skepticism) were mostly selfish. Frequently, I would find myself researching a particular controversial topic to help myself develop an educated and informed opinion, but to what end? So that I might deliver a factoid from a reputable resource should the topic come up in conversation in the hopes that factoid would change the mind of the fuzzy thinkers? Unlikely. However, writing up my research into a pithy (I hoped) format that others might stumble upon when doing their own research served as a terrific incentive to actually synthesize the information I was cobbling together. A skeptic is not someone who has critical thinking skills; a skeptic is one who constantly endeavors to further develop their critical thinking skills.

But in addition to the obvious lessons involved in running a blog, I gained new insight and found a voice I had lost. Fresh from graduate school where any trace of personal voice in my writing was beaten out of me (no, not literally), writing for the Gotham Skeptic forced me to share opinions and reexamine how I feel about topics of science and policy and society. This lesson was more valuable to me than any web development or social networking skills I gained.

So it is with heavy heart, but full mind that we bid adieu to the Gotham Skeptic blog. But fear not! We will have all of the tremendous content that was produced by our fantastic contributors over the last couple of years available online into perpetuity (in one format or another).

Thanks to all of our contributors:

The quixotic meanderings of Jake Dickerman
Michael Rosch’s adamant commitment to rooting out unfounded conspiracy thinking
Lisa Bauer’s statistical and methodological take on society and ourselves
Gracious contributions by star skeptics like Massimo Pigliucci, John Snyder, Michael Dedora, and Kylie Sturgess
And the thoughtful contributions of AJ Mell and Barry Lieba

And special thanks to our readers, both those who drink the Kool-Aid and those who do not (I’ll let you decide which group is which in this analogy). Your thoughtful comments, critiques and occasional illustrative You Tube videos always reminded us that had to give careful consideration to our words, resources, and analyses.

Finally, thanks to the New York City Skeptics who have dutifully hosted this site.

-Page

I arrived at Penn Station. We spilled out of the train, down the stairs, as if choreographed, and then up onto the street. I walked across 34th street, headed east towards 6th Avenue. It was mid-afternoon, the streets were filled, but not clogged, with holiday shoppers. I stopped and looked up at the Empire State Building.

I had been thinking since first receiving word that the Gotham Skeptic was going offline what I would write as a final piece. And as I stood there, I felt dwarfed by the enormity of New York; tiny. I then tried to imagine how truly small I am in the universe. It’s difficult, really, to picture just how contextually microscopic all of us are, or conversely, the enormity of the universe itself. It was challenging to do, as I paused there, undoubtedly in someone’s way, for that moment. But the difficulty I experienced revealed something rather surprising, something I hadn’t considered.

I couldn’t truly imagine how small I am, because I didn’t feel that small. I feel large, as large as the universe; I felt connected to everything around me.

Nonbelievers, like myself, are all too often robbed of such a spiritual experience. Feeling connected as I did, as I do, in the fluttering and orderly chaos of midtown Manhattan,  is a feeling more often ascribed to the person who believes there are unseen forces that bind us all.  The lovers of science, the fact seekers, reference checkers, testers of hypotheses, the skeptics, we all have the ability (if perhaps not always the inclination) to explore the many ways in which we are in actuality connected. From the journey across the synapse to our voyages in space, science uncovers the truth of the spectacular nature of humanity. To put it bluntly, the pursuit of science is far more spiritual a quest than anything taught in scripture.

Being a skeptic, a nonbeliever, even in a city like New York, I found myself constantly in conversation with those who would most likely prefer to interpret the experience I described as other worldly, perhaps even religious. I know of many that might suggest that some force was reaching out to me. I have had quite serious interactions with quite serious individuals who aimed to convince me, for example, that a strange dream was a message from an invisible being (usually male) that wanted me to direct my wayward soul towards the proverbial light. However dearly I might love such individuals, it can be exhausting and very lonely.

Things changed, however, when I found there were others like me; when I found the New York City Skeptics. The broader skeptical movement was at first an exciting discovery, and it remains important to me, but a local skeptical group held promise for the possibility I had been seeking: connection. Yes, we skeptics aren’t the most cohesive bunch, but we are a community.

Bring us your incredulous; your unflinchingly wayward masses. The heretics, the unconvinced, the inquisitive. Send these, the often cantankerous, unto us.

And so I stood there, surrounded by innovation, many thousands of generations since first we were us all a primordial soup, and I felt what I can only imagine to be blessed. Blessed to be a skeptic, and to have found my kin. Blessed to know all that I know, and blessed to be eager to learn that which I do not.

Writing for the Gotham Skeptic for the time that I have, while often laborious, has provided me with a sense of belonging I previously did not think possible. More so, the people I have met, the discussions I have had, the sheer value of these interactions is incalculable. And while I didn’t write as often as I would have liked – my time is incessantly consumed in service of larger and broader personal goals – I read. I have enjoyed being a part of this conversation.

As I was leaving that night, I saw several fliers for other upcoming events and one of them was a Saturday afternoon lecture hosted by a group calling itself the New York City Skeptics. The speaker was someone I’d never heard of by the name of Steven Novella. It sounded interesting enough and so I attended. There, I found myself so impressed by Dr. Novella’s lecture that when he mentioned he hosted a podcast, I decided to check it out. Today, it’s own of my favorite podcasts.

In many ways, that NYC Skeptics lecture was my introduction to skepticism. So when Page invited me to write for the organization’s blog over a year ago, I was honored. Though I’m not nearly as articulate as Steven Novella, I hope that in the time I’ve been writing here, I’ve helped inspire others towards skepticism and skeptical activism.

So I’d just like to thank everyone at the NYC Skeptics as well as my fellow Gotham Skeptics and my readers for indulging my rants. And while I will no longer be writing for this great organization, I will  continue to contribute to it in some other form.

So with that, I bid you all adieu.

Therefore, it is with some sadness that we say goodbye to the blog, but also with excitement as we look to our other projects which are growing like gangbusters.

Keep an eye out this week as each of our most frequent bloggers bid adieu with a final note.

In fact, on any given day, if you visit the Age of Autism blog, you’ll find infinitely more entries condemning vaccines for all sorts of things than you’ll find articles actually discussing autism.

But that being said, they can just as easily be referred to as autism deniers given that they quite literally deny the most basic facts about the condition, particularly the role genes play in causing autism. Of course this position is just a means to an end because since their real target is the vaccines, any science that demonstrates something other than vaccines contributes either a little bit or entirely to causing autism hurts their vaccine unifying theory of evil and therefore must be denied. It’s like how Jack Thompson can never admit to anything other than video games playing as a main role in causing school shootings or why creationists can never accept evolution because it demystifies what in their mind is the majesty of divine creation.

I decided to write about this after discovering a sickening post by Generation Rescue’s own J.B. Handley on Age of Autism where Handley flat-out calls the evidence demonstrating the role genetics play in autism a “hungry lie.”

He reaches that conclusion through mystery-mongering, a denialist favorite:

The researchers, from Harvard and MIT, were surprisingly forthright in characterizing the current state of genetic autism research:

“Modern approaches that harness genome-scale technologies have begun to yield some insights into autism and its genetic underpinnings. However, the relative importance of common genetic variants, which are generally present in the human population at a frequency of about 5%, as well as other forms of genetic variation, remains an unresolved question…Although the Nature paper identifies a handful of new genes and genomic regions, the researchers emphasize that the findings are just one piece of a very large — and mostly unfinished — puzzle.”

Unresolved? Mostly unfinished puzzle? Unlike many journalists, these researchers don’t sound very definitive. In fact, in the study itself, the researchers spell it out even more clearly, saying “attempts to identify specific susceptibility genes [to autism] have thus far met with limited success.”

Now I’m not going to try to go through all the logical fallacies in Handley’s piece but I decided to just dissect the nonsense in this one excerpt. Readers are free to subject themselves to the whole piece if they’re truly in need of a good facepalming.

First, Handley’s confuses journalists, who thrive on sensationalism, with actual scientific researchers, implying that it’s incredibly rare for researchers to be “forthright” and not definitive about their findings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scientists typically don’t act like Bill O’Reilly, declaring their baseless opinions as facts while huffing and puffing when their views are challenged. That’s what ideologues do. Ideologues like Handley. Rather, science deals in provisional conclusions and more often than not, researchers aren’t quick to declare “Eureka” and close the case.

This leads to Handley’s next problem, his argument from ignorance by way of a false dichotomy. Just because we don’t know absolutely everything there is to know about the human genome,  it remains “unresolved”, and researchers are very reserved in their language, that doesn’t mean we know nothing or that our current findings aren’t fairly reliable. The fact is that Handley remains as ignorant of the science as he’s been since the founding of Generation Rescue and he’s just looking for any shortcut to dismiss whatever science he doesn’t like. So he’s just ripping out an excerpt from an improperly sourced journal article that superficially appears to justify his argument from ignorance and trying to use it to say whatever he wants it to say. A creationist could just as easily quote-mine the same passage to argue against evolution.

While it may be true that we don’t fully understand the full role genes play in autism and that researchers are still considering the possibility of additional environmental factors, as every reputable source will tell you, the overwhelming evidence is leaning more and more towards genes playing the most important role and we’ve already fairly definitively found hundreds of genes directly linked to autism spectrum disorders. And unlike Andrew Wakefield and David Kirby’s completely invented links between vaccines and autism, this research has been repeated and survived peer review.

Here’s just a sample of articles from various sources discussing the evidence showing autism is the result of genetic and other natural factors [J.B. Handley denies everything printed below] :

Science Daily – “Brain Scans Detect Autism’s Signature”

“Early Diagnosis of Autism – Implications for the Vaccine Hypothesis” by Steven Novella
Medical News Today – “Autism Susceptibility Genes Identified”
“Genome-wide study of autism published in Nature”
Science Daily – “Possible Link Between Autism And Oxytocin Gene Via Non-DNA Sequence Mutation”

Science Daily “Nature Nurture Gene Link Sheds New Light On Autism”
“Autism Genes Discovered; Help Shape Connections Among Brain Cells”
ABC News: “Research Points to Genetic Link in Autism”

“New Clues to Autism’s Cause” by Claudia Wallis
Enlarged Amygdala: The Cause of Autism?
“UT Southwestern researchers uncover Fragile X syndrome gene’s role in shaping brain”
Science Daily – “Modeling Autism in a Lab Dish: Researchers Create Autistic Neuron Model”

“The Genetics of Autism” by Steven Novella

“More Evidence that Autism is Genetic” by Steven Novella
Telegraph – “New hope for autism treatments from gene finds” By Roger Highfield
NY Times – “Focus Narrows in Search for Autism’s Cause” By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Science Daily – “New Insights Into Autism, Obsessive Behavior: Decreased Levels Of Binding Gene Affect Memory And Behavior”
“The real agony of autism” by Kent Miller
“New findings released on the genetic basis of autism”
Time Magazine: “Researchers Find First Signs of Autism Even in Infancy” by Claudia Wallis
Time Magazine: “A Genetic Clue to Why Autism Affects Boys More” by Alice Park
“Parents of two autistic sons vaccinated one but not the other” By Robin Hausman Morris
“Researchers: minor genetic flaws may combine to cause autism” By John Timmer
“Experts Summarize State of the Science in Autism Disorders”
New Scientist – “Autism and schizophrenia could be genetic opposites” by Bob Holmes
Time Magazine – “New Research on Autism” By ALICE PARK
“Genes implicated in twins’ autism” By Kelly Brewington
“New study of autism reveals a ‘DNA tag’ (methylation) amenable to treatment”:

For far too long, autism research has been side-tracked by the cranky notion that it’s caused by the MMR vaccine,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. “Studies like this, which define genetic and epigenetic changes in discrete subgroups of the autism spectrum, offer real hope that effective treatments and accurate diagnosis are closer at hand.

Scientific American – “Schizophrenia shares genetic links with autism, genome study shows” By Katherine Harmon
“It’s not the vaccine”
“IntegraGen Announces The Publication Of The Results Of A Study Assessing The Impact Of A Combined Analysis Of Four Genetic Variants On Autism Risk”
The Philadelphia Inquirer – “Research points to new causes of autism” By Marie McCullough
“Genetic Map of Autism Comes Into Focus” by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
Medical News Today – “New Autism Susceptibility Genes Identified”
Science Daily – “World’s Largest DNA Scan Reveals Rare Variants That Disrupt Gene Activity in Autistic Children”
“Autism and the search for simple, direct answers” by PZ Myers
“More evidence for a genetic basis for autism” by Orac
WebMD – “New Autism Research: More Proof It’s in the Genes” by Ari Brown, MD
“The genetics of autism” by David Gorski
“Cellceutix Autism Research Demonstrates Increase In Serotonin Levels In Three Areas Of The Brain”
“Canadian Study Uncovers DNA Changes In People With Autism Spectrum Disorders”
Science Daily – “Gene Variant Associated With Both Autism And Gastrointestinal Dysfunction”
“A-Z of Genetic Factors in Autism” by Kenneth J. Aitken
Forbes – “Unlocking The Genetic Secrets Of Autism” by Henry I. Miller and Elizabeth Whelan
“Babies as young as 1 month may show signs of autism.”
Medical News Today – “Researchers Connect APC Protein To Autism And Mental Retardation”
Science Daily – “Autism Linked to Multisensory Integration”
“Gene scan finds link across array of childhood brain disorders”
Science Daily – “Misfolded Neural Proteins Linked to Autism Disorders”
“Autism in some boys linked to missing DNA” By Sheryl Ubelacker
Science Daily – “Link to Autism in Boys Found in Missing DNA”
“Social Demographic Change and Autism: part 2″
“Neonatal Jaundice Linked to Autism” By Nancy Walsh
LA Times – “Siblings of autistic children may have some autism-related traits, study says” by Eryn Brown

“Will all babies get tested for autism in the womb?” By Charlie Jane Anders