Day: February 1, 2008

Debate Over Performance Enhancing Drugs

A few weeks ago, Bob Costas moderated a debate on the proposition that, “We should accept performance-enhancing drugs in competitive sports.” NPR has the completed, unedited debate in streaming media format on this page, or you can download a PDF transcript of the debate (PDF).

On the Reason magazine blog, debate participant Radley Balko describes a bit of the debate from his point of view, noting that at least when it comes to safety issues, performance enhancing drugs like steroids are far safer than other things that top tier athletes are regularly required to do to their bodies in order to meet the requirements of their particular sport,

[Sportscaster George] Michael also took offense to a comparison I made between the relatively modest risks of steroids and HGH and the other health risks other athletes take to excel. The example I used was horseracing, where the athletes subject themselves to sweat boxes, diuretics, eating disorders, and all sorts of other damaging weight-control techniques. Michael, a horse breeder, was offended that I’d make such accusations—until he realized I was talking about the jockeys, not the horses. Oddly, that didn’t seem to bother him as much.

Dr. Norman Frost put that argument more explicitly in the debate, which NPR features in a pull quote on its page,

I ask you in the audience to quickly name, in your own minds, a single elite athlete who’s had a stroke or a heart attack while playing sports. It’s hard to come up with one. Anabolic steroids do have undesirable side effects: acne, baldness, voice changes … infertility. But sport itself is far more dangerous, and we don’t prohibit it. The number of deaths from playing professional football and college football are 50 to 100 times higher than even the wild exaggerations about steroids. More people have died playing baseball than have died of steroid use.

In general, the argument against allowing performance enhancing drugs in sports tend to lack any coherence. Rather, people who complain about performance enhancing drugs seem to have the same sort of visceral reaction as people of a different era had when anesthesia became widely used to alleviate pain during childbirth — it just violates widely held moral intuitions that amount to one society-wide “ick” at the thought of athletes explicitly modifying their body chemistry with drugs in order to achieve better performance.

It just seems wrong, even if the arguments against it aren’t all that logically consistent.

Ben Stein – Creationist Idiot?

Ben Stein — the Win Ben Stein’s Money Ben Stein — is fronting a pro-creationist documentary called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie is set to come out in April, and looks to advance the typical sort of creationist claims that they’re being oppressed because the scientific community rejects their claims.

Stein has been blogging about the movie, and if his blog posts are any indication, the movie’s going to be an outright embarrassment. This post in particular, illustrates just how far off the rails Stein has gone.

The post, titled “Darwinism: The Imperialism of Biology” makes an fairly standard argument against Darwinism, but one that usually comes from the Left rather than Right,

Darwinism, the notion that the history of organisms was the story of the survival of the fittest and most hardy, and that organisms evolve because they are stronger and more dominant than others, is a perfect example of the age from which it came: the age of Imperialism. When Darwin wrote, it was received wisdom that the white, northern European man was destined to rule the world. This could have been rationalized as greed–i.e., Europeans simply taking the resources of nations and tribes less well organized than they were. It could have been worked out as a form of amusement of the upper classes and a place for them to realize their martial fantasies. (Was it Shaw who called Imperialism “…outdoor relief for the upper classes?”)

But it fell to a true Imperialist, from a wealthy British family on both sides, married to a wealthy British woman, writing at the height of Imperialism in the UK, when a huge hunk of Africa and Asia was “owned” (literally, owned, by Great Britain) to create a scientific theory that rationalized Imperialism. By explaining that Imperialism worked from the level of the most modest organic life up to man, and that in every organic situation, the strong dominated the weak and eventually wiped them out.

This is, of course, simply the radical feminist/postmodernist critique of science — those imperialist white men created it, so it must be simply another tool of oppression. Under this view, science becomes an inherently political activity.

On the one hand, this is a lousy argument because it can be just as easily applied to Stein’s arguments — just posit that Stein and his ilk advocate their views simply for political purposes, and write them off. The ultimate end is that science becomes held hostage to politics (Google Lysenkoism sometime for an indication of where that leads).

On the other hand, when the science is not on your side — as it definitely is not for Stein — this is one of the few arguments left (in other blog posts, Stein picks up the other creationist meta-argument by attacking the idea of “materialist science” as if a “non-materialist” science makes any sense at all).

Similarly, Stein wants to smear Darwinism by blaming it for the Holocaust,

Alas, Darwinism has had a far bloodier life span than Imperialism. Darwinism, perhaps mixed with Imperialism, gave us Social Darwinism, a form of racism so vicious that it countenanced the Holocaust against the Jews and mass murder of many other groups in the name of speeding along the evolutionary process.

First of all, despite what the term implies, most of the Social Darwinist ideas preceded Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species and some were not even Darwinists at all. For example, the archetypal Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer was a Lamarckian who advocated a precursor to a laissez faire political theory.

And, of course, anti-Semitism and massacres of Jews plagued Western Europe for centuries completely unaided by Darwin. Presumably those who marched in the German Crusade of 1096 did not have godless natural selection in their hearts when they slaughtered Jews in the Rhineland. Edward I knew nothing of DNA or genes when he achieved in England what Hitler would try in German centuries later — the complete expulsion of Jews for almost four centuries.

Certainly Hitler wrapped his anti-Semitism in part in a crude distortion of Darwinism, but it was the centuries of Christian progroms and oppression of Jews across the European continent that created the fertile soil for the Holocaust to take hold.