CAN WE TRUST THE CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) STATISTICS? — PART 3

So true Doug. Here’s a similar quote from an American sage:

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”–Mark Twain.

“You are rich. It does not take a billion dollars to be rich.”

Tom,

I am truly rich, but I don’t think my modest wealth is any big part of that. Indeed, it is the most insignificant part of it. Money is only important to people who have none and to people who have way too much. I’m not sure what your point is.

I’ve been contemplating what it means to really pray lately, what I should pray for, who I should pray to. In this day and age of televised and live steamed Christian worship, of churches grand and humble, all telling us how and what to pray for, that may be a weird question and you may wonder how it could be topical to this discussion, but I think it is pertinent to the issue of certainty as we address this coronavirus.

If I were very poor or very rich, then money would necessarily drive me, so should I pray for more money? How about health if I or my family were sick? Whether very poor or very wealthy, sick or healthy, if God granted me money and vigor, would I then be rich in any meaningful way?

If not, what do you think we should pray for that will make us individually and as a community truly rich in the view of God? An afterlife? Less suffering in this life? For myself? My family? My community? Why should I assume that suffering is not part of God’s plan or that an afterlife is the aim of this life now?

If prayers for our hearts’ most material desires and prayers to abate our hearts’ most material fears may not find their mark in the mysterious plan of an infinite God, then what can I pray for that is certain? What if nothing is certain and God is endlessly sublime?

Here’s a definition of the word”sublime”:

“of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe.”

I think in that definition, especially when we apply the word to God, by “awe” we must also mean an open appreciation in pure wonder at the beautifully limitless mystery of God. Could that kind of “awe” at the sublimity of God be a kind of prayer and could the answer to that prayer be the grace of some small or large epiphany?

Some of us crave certainty: God is this. God wants this. This dogma is what I must do or think to call myself a Christian. And yet the most inspiring thing to me about God, about life, about love is to pray as constant contemplation and wondrous awe of the beauty of divine sublimity.

I sometimes listen to the TED Radio Hour while I’m running the Biloxi Seawall along the beach.. The program that I listened to today as I slogged through a heat index of over a 100F was about human sexual biology. The first speaker was a person born with a vagina and an internalized set of testicles. She has an X and a Y chromosome but grew up to all outward appearances as a woman, including having natural breasts. However, she cannot have children and does not menstruate as she has no ovaries. Unlike even most women, her body does not produce testosterone so she does not grow any hair on her arms or legs and definitely none on her face. She was said to be quite stunningly beautiful.

You may think that her sexual identity, which is called intersex, is rare, but apparently about two percent of the population is one of at least seven categories (and probably a spectrum of many more) of intersex combinations. That is about the same number of humans that are natural red heads. We simply don’t know about them. Many people don’t even know themselves unless they are genetically tested. In the past, parents simply chose a sex, had their children operated on and did not ever tell them about it.

Some people have two Xs and a Y and some people have a double Y and an X. At one time in the late 20th Century, it was thought that the double Y persons, dubbed “super males” were more likely to be violent but these studies have since been debunked. (No one thought to speculate that the extra X females were more docile). In fact, it turns out that biological sexuality in the X chromosome, the one that every human has, only attributes for four percent of the work of that chromosome’s structure: The rest of the X chromosome does other unrelated things in the human body. The guy who originally discovered the X and Y chromosomal patterns did not want to call them the “sex chromosomes” because he thought it misleadingly simplistic.

So my epiphany today was learning that sexuality is far more complex than a mere binary thing. God is extravagant. God is endlessly diverse. God is infinitely mysterious. We are one of his more extravagant and mysterious creations. God and all of God’s creations are endlessly, awesomely, beautifully sublime. Hallelujah! That was my little prayer and my small epiphany today.

Tom,

If I remember correctly, at one time you were educated as a biochemist. At that point, did you know all the “truth” about that vast field of study or was there still a bit of mystery out to be figured out? I’m not that great at math and my understanding of this is slight, but isn’t the possible combinations of genes in a given chromosome something like factors of 10, or in other words, stars in the sky or grains of sand on all the beaches type numbers. Forgive me for being kind of boggled and amazed when you get to those levels of possibilities, much less the probabilities.

The fact that the woman being illustrated even exists throws out any notion of the binary certainty of “truth” that you are trying to assert, and yet, like a child obstinately clinging to Santa Claus long after figuring out that Dad really is the guy in the red suit, you cover your eyes and ears to all wonder and curiosity for the comfort of a false (or at least misleading) certainly,

To me this is a fascinating response from you, and it really explains a good deal of the anti-science bubble of thinking that persists in the small mindedness of Trumpists with regard to so many topics from the The Theory of Evolution to man induced climate change to now COVID-19 that Doug and MW keep trying to explore and puncture. Since “even you are not that stupid” that you don’t see that history is fraught with this conflict between comfortable taboos and superstitions and the wonderful uncertainty that comes from the discovery of hundreds of new wonders that in turn lead to thousands of new questions, I wonder how you, as a trained scientist, can keep squaring that circle? Perhaps you could explain it in terms that someone even as stupid as me can understand because I’m am open to the endless possibilities. My first question would be, as a trained scientist, why aren’t you?

Interesting too is the moral aspect of your assertion of an absolute “truth” right in the face of an obvious inconsistency, as is the defensive anger imbedded in your response. “She” is obviously not absolutely a guy, nor is she obviously a girl, but some miraculous variation on a spectrum of possibilities that, as she demonstrates, is definitely not binary, and where God has purposely and intelligibly created a spectrum of variant possibilities that may again be on the scale of powers of ten. And she isn’t what she (or her parents) artificially “chose” her to be; she is exactly what God made her to be and yet you make an absolute moral assumption that she must be crammed into one of only two categories, even when it is quite obvious the “she” doesn’t necessarily fit, and without any regard to her freedom to chose where “she” may be most “pursuing her happiness” or is even comfortable. Why? If you can only explain it with sweeping dogmas, and angry denials, then have you thought about the possibility that your response is definitely not scientific and that it may be presuming overmuch for God about the mystery, the wonder, the extravagance, the endless diversity, the sublime quality of God’s infinite “truth”? Just a thought.

Liz,

Yes, I know. I thought it was obvious that I was being hyperbolic to illustrate a point. “Median” mortality is an almost useless data point, and it’s more misleading than helpful to policy makers. More important data points in judging risk and in doing a cost benefit analysis are the full spectrum analyses of those who get sick and those who die. What are the risk categories that have little to do with age? What is the monetary cost and the cost in pure suffering of those who get sick and don’t die? Which mitigation possibilities are cheap and effective and which are prohibitively costly.? When we change one thing (like sending the COVID sick to nursing homes) what are the predictable unintended consequences, and how do we remain nimble enough to adapt to unpredictable unintended consequences?

If I were a policy maker, these are the things I would want to know from the experts constantly learning about and crunching the data before I adopted a national strategy . . . but unfortunately, we have an idiot leading us who is incapable of comprehending any of that.

“Because we are fallen creatures nothing works quite the way it should, not even the sexual differentiation between men and women. Nevertheless, we have to do the best we can. So, when some guy insists he is a gal and tries to enter the ladies room and participate in female sports, sensible people see a problem with that and protect the ladies.”

How positively patriarchal of you Tom. Tell us Liz, do you feel that you need Tom and I to protect you in the restroom from the intersex lady occuping the next stall? Would you even know she was there? Fear not then good damsel, Tom will rescue you!

Tom, if your naïveté in these matters were not guileless, it would be scary, but as it is, it’s just mildly amusing. 🙂

“I never said anything about being forced into gay marriage. I spoke of the definition of marriage.”

I had a dream the other night that someone changed the law on marriage, and then after I woke up in a terrible fright, I remembered from my law school classes on marriage law and my practice of marriage law in Alabama 20 years ago that this has been happening for literally centuries. And then I laid my head back down and slept like a drunk baby. 😏

The science says that sexual biology, much like most of Gods natural universe, exists on wondrously a diverse spectruM. Big surprise! You disagree with the science. But explain to me again how you are somehow victimized unless an intersex adult (or any adult) person is legally banned from “the pursuit of happiness” in marrying the consenting adult of her choice? Do you see a pattern here of science denial if the science does not fit your narrow ideology?

“You think two people of the same sex can marry, and I have to explain why they cannot? That requires an explanation?”

Well, in this case, you are the one affirmatively trying to legally ban someone else from doing something that they quite obviously legally and harmlessly can do and are doing all over the world. You can believe chocolate is an abomination, and no one should force you to believe otherwise, but what you are essentially saying is that everyone else must be banned from having chocolate too. That is the definition of the kind of government tyranny that you claim to abhor . . . unless, of course, it’s the kind of tyranny over others that you like.

“You may have not have noticed, but the biological misfunction that results in your intersex lady is actually extremely unusual.”

Tom,

You are extremely rare. On the spectrum of humans throughout millennia, there has never been another being exactly like you. As a defining scientific truth of existence in a scandalously, extravagantly diverse universe, rarity is ubiquitous.

Tom,

Here is a link to a very good article on the subject of those born intersex:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.todaysparent.com/baby/baby-health/intersex-when-a-baby-isnt-quite-boy-or-girl/amp/

If you read the article, you will find that the science, like most science, in this one subset of sexual identity research is in an ongoing state of discovery. There appears to be a good deal of controversy, however, not on the facts as they are known to this point, but on what to do when a child is born intersex. The article seems fairly objective in discussing the current science and that controversy.

It appears from this article and other articles that I skimmed, that the basic facts presented by those interviewed during the Ted Radio Hour concerning this particular phenomenon of human sexual diversity were essentially correct. The whole Ted Radio Hour program is here:

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/06/899845707/listen-again-the-biology-of-sex

I found it very enlightening. My point in all this was not to assert any expertise in this field, nor am I interested in gaining such expertise, but only to present something that should be obvious by now and, which any cursory research shows has become obvious to most scientist who practice in this area: the diversity of human sexual identity is simply not binary, but exists on a naturally occurring diverse spectrum. The thing to ask yourself when going against all the experts in this field, therefore, is why it is important to you that the experts be wrong in this area of scientific theory and in Evolutionary Science Theory and in Climate Change Science Theory, and finally, in the topic at hand, how we should characterize the level of the threat and the need for mitigation in the COVID-19 crisis?

The common denominator in each of these controversies has nothing to do with the truth finding function of scientific epistemology, and everything to do with political ideology. Sorry, but something can still true even if it upsets a comfortable dogma and something can be ambiguous even if we crave certainty.

This has been a great discussion, but it’s gotten too long and unwieldy for me to keep up with all the threads. Thanks for letting me participate.