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Movie Review of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”

Apr 22

Posted by Carl Drews in Faith, Movies, Science | 1 Comment

Last night I went to see Ben Stein’s film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” at my local hexadecaplex. For $9.75 I got to see a terrible movie, and you got this review. I recently served as a guest speaker for an adult Sunday School class entitled, “The Harmony of Faith and Science” at a local Christian church, so this topic is fresh in my mind. I brought a clipboard with me and did my best to take notes in the dark: 5 pages of notes, and 3 more afterwards out in the cinema lobby.

The “Expelled” movie starts right off with an amateurish cinematic device: displaying old black-and-white newsreels of bad historical events while the narrator intones something you’re supposed be scared of. The opening sequence features the construction of the Berlin Wall. Throughout the movie we see clips of tanks, guns, Nazi soldiers, fistfights, a condescending school teacher, even Eddie Haskell beating up The Beaver! – flashing up on the screen whenever Ben Stein talks about Something Bad. When the film makes claims of repression and academic unfairness, you can bet that another old newsreel with scratchy sound is coming. My audience even laughed at a guillotine coming down on an empty block, it was so ridiculous! These clips are a childish device for trying to convince people. I don’t know why anyone over the age of 10 would fall for them.

Anyone expecting a Christian movie here will be disappointed. By my count Jesus is only mentioned in a background song, and the word “Christ” is spoken once. The Bible is mentioned a couple of times, but the Book is never opened. God is mentioned a fair number of times, but mostly in the general sense. The movie contains no in-depth discussion of God’s revelation in the Bible or in the person of Jesus Christ.

The movie reviews at Wikipedia and Scientific American are scholarly reviews, with proper citations and clear reasoning. They leave you with the unfortunate impression that “Expelled” is in the same class of scholarship. But make no mistake – “Expelled” is a really bad movie! Even those bad reviews make the movie sound more sophisticated than it really is. Think of Ben Stein blundering his way through a series of interviews and you’ll have a better idea of what “Expelled” is about.

The movie makes some astoundingly wrong claims. David Berlinski states, “We don’t even know what a species is!” Huh? What has he been reading? A speciesis “often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are often used, such as based on similarity of DNA or morphology.” It is true that species distinctions are sometimes fuzzy, but this fuzziness is evidence for evolution. Berlinski is citing evidence for evolution in the very act of denying that there is any.

I was amused to see how the filmmakers used bad lighting and unusual camera angles to make Richard Dawkins look like a vampire. Dawkins The Vampire appears throughout the movie, the very embodiment of all that is evil in modern science. He even gets his own theme music; my fellow movie-goers were very polite not to holler out “Don’t go in there!” Dawkins The Vampire is extremely useful to Ben Stein for creating Outrage, and this is the same use that creationists have for him.

“Expelled” attempts to make the usual creationist connection between “Darwinism” and atheism. This is bunk. Looking for theology in Origin of Species is a bit like looking for fishing techniques in the Gospels; you can find valid information, but it’s obvious that the main message is something else. Nevertheless, here is how Charles Darwin closed his Sixth Edition:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

The “Creator” is Darwin’s reference to God in the Victorian language of his time. Darwin may be a Deist or an agnostic, but the theological view expressed here is certainly not atheism.

If anyone cares what Adolf Hitler said, here is a quotation from Mein Kampf regarding God:

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord (Adolf Hitler, 1943, in Mein Kampf. Translated by R. Manheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Volume 1: A Reckoning, last sentence of Chapter 2: Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna).

If this blog were a Ben Stein “documentary” we would zoom in on the words “Almighty Creator”, like he does with a quotation by Thomas Jefferson. However . . .

I need to review an important concept for everyone’s benefit: The Christian Church does not formulate doctrine based on the views of Adolf Hitler. The Church does not derive its position on biological evolution by examining the views of Adolf Hitler. The Church does not take a stance on homosexuality based on what Adolf Hitler did. The Church does not learn about the Creator based on what Adolf Hitler wrote, either in a positive or a negative sense. I hope that’s clear now. And by the way, checking against Mein Kampf is not part of the scientific peer-review process either.

My Anglican church uses the Bible to determine doctrine, and the Bible alone. Anglican Article Six states: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” So what does the Bible say? Here are some verses from Genesis 1:

11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

The Bible describes the earth as God’s agent of creation – the earth brings forth life at God’s command. This picture is in accordance with a theistic view of evolution, or BioLogos if you prefer the terminology of Francis Collins. Kenneth Miller also holds this view. Genesis 2 emphasizes that life is ultimately made from dirt, which is also in accordance with biological evolution.

Ben Stein raises the possibility that Christianity and evolution are compatible, citing the positions of the Catholic Church and most Protestant denominations, then quickly discards the notion based on quotations by Dawkins The Vampire and a reporter (with glasses; I didn’t catch his name). I don’t know why any Christian would expect theological truth to come out of Richard Dawkins’ mouth. But Stein gets the brief quotes he wants and then quickly moves onward, but not so quickly that he can’t mention the term “liberal Christians”. Later Count Dawkula reads through a list of insulting terms for the God of the Old Testament.

I simply can’t believe the claims of academic unfairness in “Expelled” without further investigation. The movie quickly and firmly establishes its non-trustworthiness through the use of those interspersed newsreel clips. If Ben Stein will do that, he’ll do anything. Here in Boulder we are familiar with the recent case of Ward Churchill, and we know that there is often a large discrepancy between why a person says he was fired and what his employer says. I’m not going to sit there in a movie theater and say, “Gosh this is a “documentary”! Everything must be true!” I recommend reading the Wikipedia article for more information.

During many interviews it’s obvious that the film editors have selected certain short film segments from a larger interview to make that person look bad or stupid. If the subject rubs his nose during the interview you’re sure to see that clip. Ben Stein acts needlessly stupid and looks bored during most interviews. Is this some kind of clever interviewing technique? A particularly stupid comment from Stein is, “I thought science was determined by the evidence, not by the courts!” Kitzmiller vs. Dover did not decide a scientific question; it decided that Intelligent Design could not be taught in the public schools.

There were two people in the film for whom I have great respect: Alister McGrath and John Polkinghorne. McGrath is the author of an excellent book about the King James Bible that you should read. He delivers a convincing and well-deserved criticism of Dawkins The Vampire. The Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne is a Physicist and an Anglican priest. Elsewhere Polkinghorne has stated: “As all sensible people know, scientific Evolution is completely compatible with Christianity: so is Gravity, Relativity (and the rest of Physics, Chemistry and Biology for that matter).” Stein claims that nobody he interviewed believes that evolution and faith are compatible, but that’s obviously not true.

The tour of the Nazi medical facility at Hadamar was sobering. Ben Stein exploits this event by prompting the tour guide to connect it with Darwinism. The only substantial connection between Darwin and Hitler was to interview Richard Weikart and talk about his book From Darwin to Hitler. But anti-Semitism existed for centuries before Darwin! Even Ben Stein concedes that “Darwinism does not automatically equate to Nazism, but was used to justify it.” And Hitler was a psychopath who would twist any “hodgepodge of ideas” to suit his purposes.

Eugenie Scott comes across pretty well, despite the best efforts of Stein and the film editors. They do manage to show that she has a messy desk. There is very little of substance in this movie.

I was surprised to see Michael Behe, the Apostle of Intelligent Design, neither featured nor even mentioned in the “Expelled” movie. Perhaps he was not invited to appear in the film, or he wisely decided not to have anything to do with this farce.

I expected that the “Expelled” movie would make me angry. Instead, I was chuckling as I left the theater. I was chuckling at how pathetic the movie was! “Expelled” might become a cult film someday: “How Not To Make A Documentary”, or “How To Make A Totally Unconvincing Movie While Looking Like A Buffoon”. “Expelled” is just a terrible movie!

At the very end Ben Stein confronts Dawkins The Vampire one final time. It’s hard for me to believe that Count Dawkula, as smart is he is supposed to be, did not see that he was being set up to be the villain. But that’s exactly what happens. Count Dawkula also fell for the oldest interviewer trick in the book: Stein remains silent, and the evil Count thinks he has to fill in the awkward silence with something. So Count Dawkula rambles into speculation about how if there were intelligent designers who designed this planet, they must also have evolved. But it’s mostly incoherent. Score one for Ben Stein.

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A Cosmic Back of the Envelope Calculation

Apr 16

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Science | No Comments

Scientists and engineers love equations. Not only do they make the modern world possible, they can be a lot of fun at parties. At least the kind scientists and engineers throw. And we (I’m just a country engineer) all love a good back of the envelope calculation, which is how one turns a WAG (Wild Assed Guess) into a SWAG (Scientific Wild Assed Guess). So I have to applaud Prof Andrew Watson for this Cosmic SWAG of a calculation:

Is there anybody out there? Probably not, according to a scientist from the University of East Anglia. A mathematical model produced by Prof Andrew Watson suggests that the odds of finding new life on other Earth-like planets are low, given the time it has taken for beings such as humans to evolve and the remaining life span of Earth.Structurally complex and intelligent life evolved late on Earth and it has already been suggested that this process might be governed by a small number of very difficult evolutionary steps.

Prof Watson, from the School of Environmental Sciences, takes this idea further by looking at the probability of each of these critical steps occurring in relation to the life span of Earth, giving an improved mathematical model for the evolution of intelligent life.

….

His model, published in the journal Astrobiology, suggests an upper limit for the probability of each step occurring is 10 per cent or less, so the chances of intelligent life emerging is low – less than 0.01 per cent over four billion years.

I bet that makes him a big hit at all the parties, especially with thePanspermia-ists, who were a pretty lively bunch to begin with.

The Other Metabolic Clock

Apr 16

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Science | No Comments

Or we’ve all got rhythm in our bones, even if it was discovered in our teeth.

Dr. Timothy Bromage discovered a pattern to growth rings in human teeth, and then in our bones as well. Then he discovered them in other organisms, including that lab favorite, the rat:

The newly discovered rhythm, like the circadian rhythm, originates in the hypothalamus, a region of the brain that functions as the main control center for the autonomic nervous system. But unlike the circadian rhythm, this clock varies from one organism to another, operating on shorter time intervals for small mammals, and longer ones for larger animals. For example, rats have a one-day interval, chimpanzees six, and humans eight.

The article links short intervals to small size and short life:

Reporting his findings today in the “Late-breaking News” session during the 37th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research, Bromage said, “The same biological rhythm that controls incremental tooth and bone growth also affects bone and body size and many metabolic processes, including heart and respiration rates. In fact, the rhythm affects an organism’s overall pace of life, and its life span. So, a rat that grows teeth and bone in one-eighth the time of a human also lives faster and dies younger.”

Humans have by far the most variation in these long-term incremental growth rhythms, with some humans clocking as few as five days, and others as many as ten. Correspondingly, humans have the most variability in body size among mammals.

I assume you have the exact same question I do – namely, do human also have the most variability in life span among mamals as well? Should I be happy that my son, who just turned 14, still has some baby teeth left? Maybe people who live fast and die young are just metabolically programmed that way. Will life insurance companies request a tooth so they can set their rates appropriately? Maybe you should look a gift horse in the mouth.

Who Says Adventure is a Thing of the Past?

Apr 15

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Science | No Comments

Have you ever desired to pit yourself against nature and see who comes out on top?

Have you ever wanted to go off into the wild blue and bring back enlightenment?

Have you ever seen a gladiator movie?

OK, I have a deal for you – join a Russian Arctic drift expedition and spend 7 months drifting around on a piece of ice. You can follow the path blazed by Jürgen Graeser, the first German to take part in a Russian expedition. But floating around on a slab of ice and sending a weather balloon up every day wasn’t all fun and games (unlike playing peek-abo with Polar Bears):

In spite of its importance for the global climate system, the Arctic is still a blank on the data map. Up to now, continuous measuring in the atmosphere above the Arctic Ocean is missing. “We are not able to develop any reliable climate scenarios without disposing of data series with high temporal and local resolutions about the Arctic winter. The data which Jürgen Graeser has obtained in the course of the NP 35 expedition are unique, and they are apt to considerably diminish the still existing uncertainties in our climate models” said Prof. Dr. Klaus Dethloff, project leader at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.

Eh, what’s this, you mean there’s still some real science to be done in Climatology? Say it ain’t so, Al, say it ain’t so.

I have to applaud Jürgen Graeser’s dedication to science. Adventure and learning in one package – what a deal. Who says adventure is a thing of the past?

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Funny Bone Meets Thinking Cap

Oct 7

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Science | No Comments

Hot off the press, get it while it lasts — the 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded:

  • BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night. No link to her classic lecture “A Bed Ecosystem,” but you can look it up in the lecture abstracts of the 1st Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, November 4-5, 1994, p. 36. However, if you value a good nights sleep as I do, I recommend against actually reading her work.
  • CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring — from cow dung. I just wonder why they thought to look for vanillin there in the first place. Toscanini’s Ice Cream, the finest ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a new ice cream flavor in honor of Mayu Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel ceremony. The flavor is called “Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist.”
  • LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word “the” — and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order. Hey, Microsoft can’t properly order numbers, so we have no hope of handling “The” properly. A maybe, An probably, but not The.
  • PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon — the so-called “gay bomb” — that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other. I’m outraged they didn’t include a citation for the fact that this groundbreaking work also examined the desirability of a chemical weapon that created “severe and lasting halitosis” – or that it dates back to at least 1994.

While there is a certain silliness to the these, there is more than a little importance. As the award states, the Ig Nobel is for achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think.

The Skinny On the Skinny Gene

Sep 5

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Science | No Comments

The good news is that yes indeed there is a gene that can keep you skinny. The bad news is that a therapy utilizing it is 10 years away.

Khosrow Adeli, professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Toronto and Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, who studies obesity, called the most recent finding an important one.”Many of the genes we have found so far appear to promote obesity,” he said. “This one appears to basically control it.”

However, multiple factors are involved in obesity, including metabolism, fat cells, liver, and most recently, the brain, Prof. Adeli said.

“We certainly are going to see more of these similar discoveries to fully understand all of the factors involved,” he said, adding that it’s more difficult to design drugs that increase, rather than inhibit, something.

“If one can devise a way to increase activity of this adipose [gene], then it can certainly be very helpful in treating cases of obesity.”

Until then, I’ll be eating whole grain barley for breakfast.

Hey, I’m not overweight, I just don’t provide enough stimulation for my adipose gene.

Why Do Research?

Mar 13

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Science | No Comments

How’s this for a provocative title: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False:

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.

The article is relatively short and readable, and makes me wonder why I haven’t heard about it before — I guess because it isn’t in scientists or journalists interest for the public to know this. Here’s something to ponder as you read the lastest research finding:

Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true. This seemingly paradoxical corollary follows because, as stated above, the PPV of isolated findings decreases when many teams of investigators are involved in the same field. This may explain why we occasionally see major excitement followed rapidly by severe disappointments in fields that draw wide attention. With many teams working on the same field and with massive experimental data being produced, timing is of the essence in beating competition. Thus, each team may prioritize on pursuing and disseminating its most impressive “positive” results. “Negative” results may become attractive for dissemination only if some other team has found a “positive” association on the same question. In that case, it may be attractive to refute a claim made in some prestigious journal. The term Proteus phenomenon has been coined to describe this phenomenon of rapidly alternating extreme research claims and extremely opposite refutations [29]. Empirical evidence suggests that this sequence of extreme opposites is very common in molecular genetics.

Make sure you read the part “Claimed Research Findings May Often Be Simply Accurate Measures of the Prevailing Bias” – and wonder how much out there is a null field and ponder this the next time someone tells you about “the scientific consensus” in a particular field.

There is science, and then there is science – like the time my mother claimed a study showed the worst weather was on Saturdays and the best was on Tuesdays. Does such a study have any meaning – the weekly cycle is a human invention that has no basis in meterology, but statistically you can pick out a “best” and “worst” based some definition of weather quality (rain, snow, departure from mean temperature, or whatever).

But even within real science, there is research and then there is research. Number one would be studies that are just too small to pick out the effect they are looking for. When examining probabilistic effects, sample size matters. How much does smoking increase heart disease? It’s not a simple smoke and get heart disease, or not smoke and don’t. It’s normally 50% of non-smokers get heart disease, and 75% of smokers do (in made up numbers). Teasing that kind of information out of an assemblage of non-identical people requires lots of people. I’d be willing to bet most health studies simply lack enough participants out of the gate to be reliable. Yet they still happen, the results are still reported breathlessly, and some other equally unreliable study will be equally breathlessly reported when it contradicts the first – or worse, the study that comports with accepted ideas will be given far more play than the one that doesn’t.

Common sense has a part in science:

Finally, instead of chasing statistical significance, we should improve our understanding of the range of R values –the pre-study odds — where research efforts operate [10]. Before running an experiment, investigators should consider what they believe the chances are that they are testing a true rather than a non-true relationship. Speculated high R values may sometimes then be ascertained. As described above, whenever ethically acceptable, large studies with minimal bias should be performed on research findings that are considered relatively established, to see how often they are indeed confirmed. I suspect several established “classics” will fail the test.

Sadly, common sense isn’t common enough.

I suppose this is one of the things turn of the century physicist types disliked about quantum mechanics – probabilistic vs. deterministic results. The great thing about all the classic phyiscs experiments is that they are deterministic — the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant that can be measured; either there is an ether or there isn’t (as Michelson and Morley proved), the charge on an electron is constant and can be measured exactly (for which Robert Milikan won the nobel.) But I digress.

There have been a couple of recent responses to Dr. Ioannidis. First is
Most Published Research Findings Are False —  But a Little Replication Goes a Long Way:

In a recent article in PLoS Medicine, John Ioannidis quantified the theoretical basis for lack of replication by deriving the positive predictive value (PPV) of the truth of a research finding on the basis of a combination of factors. He showed elegantly that most claimed research findings are false [6]. One of his findings was that the more scientific teams involved in studying the subject, the less likely the research findings from individual studies are to be true. The rapid early succession of contradictory conclusions is called the “Proteus phenomenon” [7]. For several independent studies of equal power, Ioannidis showed that the probability of a research finding being true when one or more studies find statistically significant results declines with increasing number of studies.As part of the scientific enterprise, we know that replication — the performance of another study statistically confirming the same hypothesis — is the cornerstone of science and replication of findings is very important before any causal inference can be drawn. While the importance of replication is also acknowledged by Ioannidis, he does not show how PPVs of research findings increase when more studies have statistically significant results. In this essay, we demonstrate the value of replication by extending Ioannidis’ analyses to calculation of the PPV when multiple studies show statistically significant results.

Sorry Virginia, don’t trust a result until it’s been replicated more than once. When will you know, since you’ll never read about even a second study replicating the first in general publications? Now you’re starting to see the problems I hope.

The other response is When Should Potentially False Research Findings Be Considered Acceptable?:

As society pours more resources into medical research, it will increasingly realize that the research “payback” always represents a mixture of false and true findings. This tradeoff is similar to the tradeoff seen with other societal investments — for example, economic development can lead to environmental harms while measures to increase national security can erode civil liberties. In most of the enterprises that define modern society, we are willing to accept these tradeoffs. In other words, there is a threshold (or likelihood) at which a particular policy becomes socially acceptable.In the case of medical research, we can similarly try to define a threshold by asking: “When should potentially false research findings become acceptable to society?” In other words, at what probability are research findings determined to be sufficiently true and when should we be willing to accept the results of this research?

Here’s the basic conundrum: If you don’t do any research, you won’t discover anything. If you do do research, you will discover all kinds of stuff that isn’t so — and you won’t be able to tell the accurate from the spurious without even more research. And you will do things that while intended to help will in fact cause harm. Of course, the same thing will happen without doing any research.

The conclusion:

In the final analysis, the answer to the question posed in the title of this paper, “When should potentially false research findings be considered acceptable?” has much to do with our beliefs about what constitutes knowledge itself [24]. The answer depends on the question of how much we are willing to tolerate the research results being wrong. Equation 3 shows an important result: if we are not willing to accept any possibility that our decision to accept a research finding could be wrong (r = 0), that would mean that we can operate only at absolute certainty in the “truth” of a research hypothesis (i.e., PPV = 100%). This is clearly not an attainable goal [1]. Therefore, our acceptability of “truth” depends on how much we care about being wrong. In our attempts to balance these tradeoffs, the value that we place on benefits, harms, and degrees of errors that we can tolerate becomes crucial.
…
We conclude that since obtaining the absolute “truth” in research is impossible, society has to decide when less-than-perfect results may become acceptable. The approach presented here, advocating that the research hypothesis should be accepted when it is coherent with beliefs “upon which a man is prepared to act” [27], may facilitate decision making in scientific research.

So why do research? Because you will have less imperfect information on which to act.

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The Towers of Chankillo

Mar 2

Posted by Kevin Murphy in History, Science | No Comments

What did people do before the internet was invented?

They built massive stone solar observatories to figure out when and where the sun was going to rise and set that day.

Now you can just go online to somewhere like Time and Date.com.

Once again we discover that people who lived a long time ago were pretty darn smart, they just didn’t have the latest tools (perhaps because they were busy inventing them?).

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Not All Science Is As Fun And Pointless

Feb 16

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Fun, Science | No Comments

If you’re like me, you hear “like nailing jello to a wall” and you immediately translate the phrase to “impossible.” Fortunately, not everybody thinks that way, as this scientifically inclined person demonstrates. The man (while I don’t know the person’s gender, I’m assuming only a man spends so much time on a project like this) chronicles his attempts to nail jello to a wall, starting with the expected tragedies but culminating in triumph.

He then attempts to nail jello to a wall while the jello is vertical! Did he succeed? See for yourself:

Keeping The Immune System On The Right Track

Jan 9

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Science | No Comments

How’s this for a mystery: You have more bacteria living in your small intestine than cells in your body, and your immune system does nothing:

For years, scientists have wondered whether the same mechanism is at work in tissues that come in regular contact with bacteria and other microbial organisms. The small intestine, for example, which absorbs essential nutrients from food and drink and protects the body from invasive microbes, is literally teeming with bacteria, which help break down waste. The presence of so many bacteria is a potential trigger for an immune system response. Why do T cells almost always ignore the small intestine, leaving this vital tissue unharmed?

No, the butler doesn’t do it.

Normally, dendridic cells by displaying antigens teach the immune system what not to attack. But not in the small intestine. Instead, stromal cells in the lymph node do it. Why should you care? Scientist wonder if this method to keep healthy tissue from being attacked by the immune system can’t be used in autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

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