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5X5 Episode 38

2012-10-23T15:19:11Z

Lion Tamarin:

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{{Template:5X5 infobox 
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 38 
|verified = y
|Contents = Pareidolia 
|episodeDate = 24th September 2008 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|evan = y 
|guest1 = M: Mike Lacelle
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-09-24.mp3 
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=38 
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com//index.php/topic,14375.0.html 
|}}
== Skepticism 101 - Pareidolia == 
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S: This is the SGU 5X5 and our continuing series on Skepticism 101. The topic for this week is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia pareidolia.] Now, pareidolia is the tendency to see a familiar pattern in essentially random visual stimuli.

R: And that can be as an image or sound. Usually we refer to it when we're talking about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptions_of_religious_imagery_in_natural_phenomena Virgin Marys] in grilled cheese sandwiches or on overpasses or any number of other places. It's just a evolutionary quirk that our brain developed in order to survive.

S: Yeah, our brains primarily function through pattern recognition, that's how we recognize and store information. So when we see visual stimuli our brain does a lot of processing of the visual information that comes in. It tries to find something familiar, something that we can recognize, and then it enhances those things, those aspects of the image that reinforce what we think we're seeing. The brain will connect the dots even when that connection is not really there. It will emphasize the features and deemphasize things that don't fit and then the image just sort of pops in your mind. So you might be looking at a cloud or the side of a mountain or the bark on a tree or an oil stain on the side of the road and then your brain will try to match an image to the randomness and it'll see a face and then the eyes will become more prominent, your brain will make a shadow into a chin et cetera until it looks like a face. And then once you see that image, it's hard not to see it. Then it really gets fixed in place.

B: Plus it's easy to understand how the selective pressure for such an ability would be important. As we're evolving and somebody's walking in the woods; the person that was able to see say the tiger crouching, you know, behind the tree or behind the leaves, if you could spot that, if you could create that mental image of the predator from scanned visual stimuli, then bam then you had a survival advantage. But nowadays of course in our complex cultures and society where we're being bombarded ever day by images and so many different things, that we're kind of like in pattern-recognition overdrive and pareidolia is present everywhere you look.

M: Rebecca mentioned that there's auditory pareidolia as well. A couple of examples of that are EVP or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voice_phenomena electronic voice phenomena] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Masking backmasking,] where people hear sounds when playing an audio track backwards. And don't they use pareidolia in the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test Rorschach inkblot test] to help determine aspects of people's personality?

S: Yeah, well the Rorschach test isn't really legitimate per se, it can be used as part of, as a therapy technique but it doesn't really fit the core claim that you get an insight into the person by what they say. It hasn't really been validated.

B: But it is pure pareidolia, I mean that's exactly what it is.

(simultaneously)

S: It is pure pareidolia. That's right.

E: Well sometimes entire pseudoscientific stories and legends have been built solely on pareidolia. For instance the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_Mensae#.22Face_on_Mars.22 face on Mars.]

S: The face on Mars is perhaps the most famous, I think, bit of pareidolia.

E: Where back in 1976 the Viking orbiter was taking pictures of the Martian surface and of course one of the images came back with what is this face looking like what they claim is a large structure built there in the face of a man. And then of course many years later when a more sophisticated orbiter and new pictures of the exact same structure was taken, it was clearly just a natural formation of rock. But a whole legend arose from this and still continues to this day, even though it's been debunked.

R: We've also had [http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10214.jpg Big Foot on Mars] too which happened pretty recently. That was probably just a weird rock with a shadow. But it looks a lot like Big Foot.

E: It sure did - swinging arm and all.

S: Pareidolia is interesting because it's one of those things that everyone experiences, we all see faces in clouds. We all see faces and the reason why we see faces, by the way, is because that's the most familiar image to humans. We have a large part of our cortex, our visual association cortex, dedicated to recognizing faces so it's no surprise that that's the pattern that our brain most enthusiastically searches for. But we all have that experience, we understand that there really isn't a face in the bark in the tree; there really isn't an animal in the clouds - it's just seeing a pattern on randomness and yet if the pareidolia image has some kind of significance, if it has religious significance or pseudoscientific or paranormal significance, then suddenly people claim that it's real. That Mary really did appear on the side of a bank as opposed to it being just pareidolia. But why not believe then that [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_the_frog Kermit the Frog] really did appear on Mars, or that [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_simpson Homer Simpson] really appeared on Mercury? They're no different. The only difference is that one has a cultural or psychological significance that people want to latch on to. But understanding the power and the nature of pareidolia helps dispel those illusions.

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5X5 Episode 33

2012-10-23T15:04:03Z

Lion Tamarin:

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{{Template:5X5 infobox
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|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 33
|Contents = The Shroud of Turin - Shroud scientists try to resurrect the controversy
|episodeDate = 20th August 2008
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|downloadLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcast.aspx?mid=2
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=33
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=13277.0
|}}
== The Shroud of Turin - Shroud scientists try to resurrect the controversy ==
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S: This is the SGU 5x5 and tonight's topic is the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin shroud of Turin]. Researchers John and Rebecca Jackson are calling for a reinvestigation of the famous [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_14 carbon-14] dating that dated the shroud of Turin to the mid 14th century, the same century that other lines of evidence also point to.

B: Well, you know what? I say go ahead, retest it! You know, redo the carbon dating. Let them do it and let's see what the conclusions are with some more modern technology and everything, like… who cares?

R: The only problem I see… I'm fine with a close circuit of idiots testing and retesting and retesting the thing, but the fact is it's been debunked so many times! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Nickell Joe Nickell] debunked it conclusively and you know, it's kind of wasting newspaper space now. It's in the [http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/17/nation/na-turin17 L.A. Times]. I mean, shroud of Turin stirs new controversy, really? I mean, come on people, we're pretty much over this!

B: But we can't expect the media to do it correctly, but the bottom line is I would actually like to see it happen again. And I think it's not a bad thing for them to retest it with modern equipment, because every time they retest it and they say 'no, it isn't' and another generation of people gets to hear that it's not the real thing.

E: Yeah, but here's the reason why they want to retest it. They said at a conference sponsored by the Shroud Science group at Ohio State University the past weekend. [http://www.lanl.gov/index.php Los Alamos National Laboratory] presented findings that the 1988 test results were flawed, because samples tested came from a portion of the cloth that may have been added to the shroud during medieval repairs.

S: Yeah , that's lame! So here's why this is completely lame. The artistic evidence, the historical evidence, all points to a medieval forgery. A 14th century forgery. The three independent labs did the carbon-14 dating in 1988 and they found that it dates to the mid 14th century, like 1349-50 , within a very very small margin of error. The shroud scientists, those who are claimed to be scientifically investigation the shroud, but who clearly are dedicated to the conclusion that it's a 2000 year old genuine artifact from Jesus. They have been fishing for any excuse to debunk the carbon-14 dating. Initially they said it was from bacterial contamination throwing the data off. Now they're saying it's from the repairs sections, and they said maybe it was the fire. They just keep going from one excuse to the other one. But here's the thing: what they're saying is that whatever contaminated the shroud to throw off the carbon-14 dating happened to throw it off exactly by the right amount to make the date come out to exactly what we predicted it would be based upon all the other lines of evidence. That makes it an extraordinary coincidence if they're right. These guys have made many other claims before as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Schafersman Steven Schfersman], who is a geologist who maintains a website, skeptical to the shroud said. He's had other ideas but they've all been shut down and this one would be shut down too.

B: Plus, the repairs seems pretty funny to me, because when you look at a high res image of the shroud, the repairs from the burns and from the fire that the shroud suffered, it's pretty obvious where they are and where the damage was. I just can't imagine you're cutting snippets off of this shroud and you're gonna...

S: Yeah...

B: … you're gonna pull it from these areas that were blatantly repaired areas. To me that was very surprising that they would even suggest that.

E: They're suggesting that the scientists back in 1988 totally screwed up, effectively.

J: So let them go through the process again. We will see the results, and no one really is gonna be harmed by them going through this testing again. I think it would be a good exercise just to reestablish the fact that the carbon dating was correct the first time.

S: But we know what's gonna happen. The carbon dating would confirm the date, approximately, and it will change nobody's mind. The shroud scientists will not alter their opinions, because obviously they're not swayed by evidence. They'll find some new round of excuses, cause they want to test and test and retest until they come up with the result that they want.

R: Yeah , I think that this is just a way to get it back in the news and to get it back in peoples' minds, when it should be something that quietly fades away and is never seen again. Because, there are so many valid criticisms even aside from the carbon dating. It's… I mean it's just silly… like, let it die. It's not real, people.

B: And what really upset me… the one line that upset me more than anything in this article, and it really made me really realize that they would just… the facts are kinda meaningless things to them. The article says that they concluded that the shroud was not painted, dyed, or stained, and that the blood stains were real. That was a supposed conclusion from the 1978 team of scientists "led by Jackson".

E: Uhmmm...

B: My God! That can't be further from the truth. If you can't even get that information right… I mean, each pretty much generally believed now that it's tempera paint from all the scientific studies done, that this was paint and there is no blood on it. And they can't even believe that by now, then the facts don't mean anything.

R: Exactly!

B: Have any of you guys seen the technique where they carve a bronze plate to look like a face and its sloped in a 3D… the carving is 3D and then what they do is they heat the plate up and then they kind of burn the image onto the cloth? That was one techniques that they mentioned.

S: Yeah, there are artistic techniques that can exactly duplicate the shroud. And Bob's right, there's paint on the shroud, not blood. Every independent scientist who didn't dedicate their life to proving that it was a miraculous relic has come up to the conclusion this is a medieval forgery. It's only people dedicated a priori to the belief that it's the burial shroud of Jesus who come up with these different findings.

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5X5 Episode 30

2012-10-23T14:47:21Z

Lion Tamarin:

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{{Template:5X5 infobox
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|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 30
|Contents = Therapeutic touch on bone cells in culture
|episodeDate = 29th July 2008
|rebecca = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = M: Mike Lacelle
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-07-29.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=30
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,12661
|}}

== Evaluation of a UCONN study of therapeutic touch on bone cells in culture ==

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S: This is the SGU 5X5 and tonight we're talking about therapeutic touch and a new study conducted at the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Connecticut University of Connecticut] medical center. This was done by [http://picim.uchc.edu/faculty/profile_gronowicz.html Gloria Gronowicz] who does research into [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteoblast osteoblasts] which is bone cells and the growth and formation of such cells. And recently she has she has been involved in studying the effects of therapeutic touch on the growth of both normal bone cells in Petri dishes as well as osteosarcoma-derived cells, which is a form of bone cancer. And in her latest research, which has just been [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18524012 published], she claims that [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_touch therapeutic touch] significantly increased the growth of normal bone cells but not cancerous bone cells.

R: (sarcastic) That's convenient.

E: And how did she come to that stunning conclusion?

R: Well she apparently had some therapeutic touch practitioners come into the lab twice a week and for 10 minutes at a time they held their hands a few inches from lab dishes and she claims that she saw growth in the dishes with the therapeutic touch applied. There are also dishes that had sham therapy applied meaning somebody, some student or assistant just came in and held their hand over it without sending their good vibrations, I guess. And another set of controls were just sitting there with no mojo.

J: Yeah, but it seems like she only did one round of testing on a limited number of Petri dishes. She didn't duplicate the experiment, no one else has duplicated the experiment. You know, it's such a small amount of data that it's definitely at this point untrustworthy.

E: And this is over the course of three years that this twice a week therapeutic touch regiment was conducted. I mean it seems like unless you have some really tight controls in place, Petri dishes are going to get handled and touched, certainly, you know, by other people over the course of three years. And who's to say there isn't some source of contamination going on here that's more likely the cause of whatever growth that's been occurring.

R: We should probably just clarify quickly that in therapeutic touch you don't actually touch anything. You just hold your hands somewhere near whatever needs to be healed.

S: Yeah, I've some theoretical problems with this study. Therapeutic touch practitioners are supposed to manipulate a human energy field that they can sense. They're supposed to have an intention of healing a person. And that's supposed to be critical to their techniques. And, in fact, previous negative studies like the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Rosa Emily Rosa] study where she demonstrated that therapeutic touch practitioners couldn't even sense the presence of such a field, proponents have criticized such negative studies by saying that it was too artificial and there wasn't a relationship therapeutically between the practitioner and somebody that they wanted to heal. So how does that at all jive with this type of study? Could a bunch of cells in a Petri dish have a human energy field? And the practitioners had the intention of healing these cells? So that doesn't really jive with their prior excuses for negative studies.

Now, of course, the human energy field doesn't exist to science; there's no way to test it, there's no way to detect it. No one can demonstrate reliably that they are able to detect it's presence. It doesn't have any properties that anyone can demonstrate. It's completely unnecessary to our understanding of biology and health and disease. Essentially, it is a pre-scientific, superstitious, magical belief. Therapeutic touch itself was invented by Dolores Krieger and others in the 70s, it's actually a very recent practice. And there is really no credible evidence that it does anything or that it even exists. So if we take the position of the prior probability, the plausibility, the prior probability that therapeutic touch is real, it approaches zero. This study, this data, barely touches that probability. You can't look at this data in isolation. You have to look at it in the context of the plausibility and prior probability.

So, and Jay you're correct, although she did collect some, you know, data over several years. This data is meaningless unless it could be replicated at will. Unless other labs with other researchers can replicate it. Otherwise, this is currently in the same boat that the homeopathy research of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Benveniste Jacques Benveniste] was in. When he was doing research, allegedly, on cells in Petri dishes and test tubes, the data was stunning. Turns out it was all fraudulent. And it couldn't be replicated by other labs. So until this gets replicated we can't rule out some methodological flaw, a statistical fluke, or fraud. The fraud doesn't necessarily have to be on the part of Gloria Gronowicz. It's like with Jacques Benveniste it was a lab assistant who was doing the fraud not the researcher himself. So I'm not accusing anybody of anything, the point is that we can't know all of this from one isolated lab doing, which is on completely theoretical grounds, dubious research. Certainly this doesn't come anywhere close to establishing that therapeutic touch is real or that a human energy field exists.

M: I wonder what her criteria were for legitimate therapeutic touch practitioners. I mean, are they trained? And by who? And, you know, for how long? Where? And do they have successes? Or anything like that?

S: Unfortunately there is formal training in therapeutic touch within the nursing profession. And you can get certificates and complete actual approved and accredited training programs. Unfortunately. It's all internally regulated so there's no external validity to this whatsoever. A degree in nonsense, you know, essentially is worthless. But that's the criteria that are used.

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5X5 Episode 26

2012-10-22T23:38:28Z

Lion Tamarin:

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{{Template:5X5 infobox
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 26
|Contents = New study sheds light on genetic vs environmental contributions to sexuality.
|episodeDate = 29th June 2008
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|rebecca = y
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-06-29.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=26
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,11831.0.html
|}}
== New study sheds light on genetic vs environmental contributions to sexuality. ==

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S: This is the SGU 5x5 and the topic for this evening is a new [http://www.springerlink.com/content/2263646523551487/?p=5310511181974ce6b6abe4ac49752533&pi=4&MUD=MP study] which shows that homosexual behavior is due partly to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_sexual_orientation genetic] and partly to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_and_sexual_orientation environmental] factors. This is a study published in the scientific journal [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archives_of_Sexual_Behavior "Archives of Sexual Behavior"]. Researchers from the Queen Mary School of Biological and Chemical Sciences and the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karolinska_Institutet Karolinska Institute] in Stockholm. A report on the results of a very large [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study twin study]. Now, a lot of twin studies are done in Sweden because they have an excellent database of basically everyone in Sweden, so it's the - the data is easy to get to, it's easy to do these kinds of studies. That's why you're always going to see these genetic twin studies coming out of Sweden.

B: Also, twin studies is uniquely suitable for teasing out the difference between genetic contributions and environmental contributions.

S: That's right, and that's exactly what they did in this study. They looked at 3826 same gender twin pairs. They looked at both fraternal and identical twins. So, identical twins share 100% of their genes and 100% of their environment. Fraternal twins share 50% of their genes and 100% of their environment. So they were able to then do statistical analysis to say how much relative influence is genetics playing on a behavioral measure--like a self-reporting behavior measure--of sexuality, of homo- versus heterosexuality and how much of the - did the environment play.

R: One thing I think it's important to point out is that when you're talking about environment in this case, it's not necessarily - you're not talking about the way they're raised, like family or parenting things, but you're talking about fetal development and biological factors like that, right?

J: Oh, because I actually read it that way, Rebecca, I really did.

R: Yeah, it-

J: Yeah.

R: -can be kinda confusing if you don't.

B: Yep.

R: And I think that's kind of the important thing of this is that it sorta - doesn't it sorta rule out the idea that your family life plays a role in determining whether or not you're a homosexual?

S: Well, actually you are correct in that the environmental factors that they're talking about includes the environment of the womb as well as other biological factors, although it doesn't rule out other environmental factors, so it could include the home situation, for example.

J: They're not mutually exclusive.

S: Yeah, so it just - all environmental factors were kind of pooled together in the way this analysis was done; they really didn't have a way of splitting apart biological environment versus social environment or family environment.

J: But Steve, was there anything determined about the environment of the womb that was considered to be irregular or anything?

S: Well, not in this study. Again, this is just-

B: No.

S: -this was really just asking a very specific question. What relative contribution is genetics playing versus the environmental factors. It wasn't really exploring any other aspect of those environmental factors-

R: Steve I have to-

S: -but there's other studies that we can look at.

R: -correct you though, one thing, is the researchers specifically say that genetics accounted for around 35% of the differences between men and homosexual behavior and other individual specific environmental factors, that is, not societal attitudes, family, or parenting, which are shared by twins, accounted for around 64%. So they did rule out the family side of environmental factors.

S: Yeah, but I'm not sure how they did that. Because-

R: Well, twins are raised together by the same family so I think if-

E: Normally.

S: Yeah, but they also are in the same womb.

R: But, doesn't fetal development differ from child to child, even if they're sharing a womb?

S: No, not in this - no, no and in the context of this study, I think that's confusing in the article that you're reading, because both fraternal and identical twins share a womb environment and that's critical to the analysis that they did, because you can separate the genetic from that womb environment because that's the difference between fraternal and identical twins. Fraternal and identical differ only in the number of percentage of genes that they share, but they're the same in that they completely share a womb environment. But they also share, unless you're doing a separated at birth study, which I was trying - I read this - I didn't see anything commenting on that, but maybe that's something that's just missing from the accounts that I've read. If you then look at twins that have been separated at birth, ''then'' and only then, can you distinguish social family parenting factors from biological factors.

J: Steve, what do they mean in the article, "In other words, men become gay or straight because of different developmental pathways, not just one pathway." What is the pathway?

S: So, what they're talking about there is that there's not a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_gene gay gene], right. There's not one genetic factor or one gene that's determining it. By developmental pathways, they're talking about developmental biology, as they're developing as an embryo, a fetus, etcetera. And that's determined partly by genes, partly by the biological environment and as Rebecca said, in this study, for men, it was 35% genes, 64% environment, but you have to take those statistics with a grain of salt. It doesn't mean that in an individual 35% of their whatever, their sexual orientation was determined by genes, it's just a statistical way of referring to the degree of concordance, the degree to which you can explain the differences based upon one factor versus the other. So-

E: One of the co-authors of the study acknowledged that there's limitations to this study that they did and I'm quoting him, he says, "We used a behavioral measure of sexual orientation which might be ok to use for men, but less so for women. Despite this our studies prove the most unbiased estimates presented so far of genetic and non-genetic contributions to sexual orientation."

S: Yeah, it was a good study. Also, it's interesting that the genetics only explained about 18% of the variation for women and 35% for men, but that could be an artifact of, as they said, that - of in women, their attitudes and orientation are not as closely tied to their behavior as it seems to be for men.

B: There's also another point that I think we need to stress even a little bit more. According to Dr. Qazi Rahman, the study co-author, she said that this study puts cold water on any concerns that we're looking for a single gay gene or a single environmental variable which could be used to select out homosexuality. Even one of the original proponents of gay gene theory, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Hamer Dr. Dean Hamer], according to gaywired.com, now concedes that it's unlikely that something as complex as human sexuality can be explained solely in terms of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heredity genetic inheritance].

S: Right, and that belief that there was like a gay gene, and as you said, that it could be selected out - also, there's an unstated premise there, that it's a quote-unquote problem from an evolutionary point of view which has led to what is called the homosexual paradox: why hasn't evolution selected out the genetics that would prevent somebody from passing on their genes? And this is an interesting area of study. One possibility is that the genes that make a male more likely to be a homosexual also make females more fertile, have more kids. So, this could just be an epiphenomenon of genetics that make women more fertile and have more kids. But there's also other studies which show that having males that are not competing for females in a population may actually confer an advantage to the group. So, this is still a complex area that hasn't completely been fleshed out, but you can't ''assume'' that homosexuality is an evolutionary disadvantage when you look at all the factors.

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5X5 Episode 112

2012-10-22T23:20:21Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 112
|Contents = Anecdotal Evidence
|episodeDate = 2 May 2012
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52012-05-02.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=112
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=41624.0
|}}
== Anecdotal Evidence ==
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S: This is the SGU 5x5 and tonight we're talking about anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is a casual observation; one that is not done under any strict scientific protocol. There are extreme limitations to using anecdotal evidence as evidence, and it does not qualify as scientific evidence for these reasons. For example, anecdotes can not be statistically analyzed, because they are not gathered in a systematic or a thorough way. Therefore they're subject to so-called cherry picking. People may remember or just point to those anecdotes that tend to support something that they wish to believe in. This leads to what we call confirmation bias: selecting only confirming evidence, and dismissing or forgetting disconfirming evidence. There are lots of logical fallacies inherent in anecdotal evidence as well, such as the hasty generalization. Because anecdotes are not controlled or systematic, there is no way to know if anecdotal experiences are typical. Therefore, they; trying to generalize from an anecdote is a form of hasty generalization. So, anecdotal experience is not the same as scientific evidence because a scientific study endeavors to capture all of the information on a relevant question systematically, so that it is possible to do statistical analysis, outcomes are randomized and efforts are made to make sure that there is a representative sample, so that the outcome ''can'' be generalized to whatever the population in question is. In short: scientific studies allow for the control of variables, controlling for possible confounding factors, whereas anecdotal experience does not. It's quirky, it's biased, and it is not therefore a source of reliable evidence.

R: That said, there are instances in which a particular type of anecdotal evidence can be useful to science. For instance what we call case studies. Case studies are in-depth analyses of specific events, taking into account the context in which those events happen. Now, this is not in any way to be considered, for instance, a scientific study on its own. However it can be useful in, for instance, falsifying certain hypotheses. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper Karl Popper], a famous philosopher of science, came up with a famous example in which he said "all swans are white" and then proposed that one single observation of a black swan would be enough to falsify that proposition, and that observation of the black swan would be the case study. A case study is very good for finding those black swans and detailing them, and that type of case study can be very helpful in forming a hypothesis, from which you can then go and do more scientific research using more evidence that you can gather.

S: Yeah, I think a good way to summarize the role of anecdotes in science is that they are useful for generating hypotheses, they are just not useful for testing hypotheses. For that you need scientific data.

E: Steve, another problem with anecdotal evidence has to do with the fallibility of human memory. People are innately poor historians; our memories have limitations and over time our memories tend to decay, or warp, or merge with other memories. In the case, for example, of a person suffering from some sort of medical illness, anecdotes can become contaminated with false memories and exaggerations due to the sensitive and deeply personal nature of the experience. There's a tendency for details to evolve over time to make a story sound more clean and profound. So in a patient's own memory, they might exaggerate certain things, such as the severity of the symptoms ''prior'' to the treatment or exaggerate the response to the actual treatment. They might clean up the timeline of events so that improvement began very soon ''after'' a certain treatment took place rather than ''before'', or long after. They might forget other treatments that were taken, or distort what they were told by their various health-care providers and so on, and so on. When we're recounting stories about our own suffering of illness, and the remedies involved in our recovery, then to take our anecdotes as some sort of unbiased data is actually little more than a hopelessly flawed body of evidence, both logically ''and'' scientifically.

S: Yeah, I think Rebecca was talking about case reports, and they are anecdotal, but they're one notch above the anecdote, in that at least the details are written down and therefore fixed. They are no longer subject to all of the vagaries of human memory that you were talking about Evan.

B: It seems clear that anecdotal evidence is a powerful but flawed driver for belief in people, and as such, has to be strictly controlled in courts of law, as well as normal day-to-day or scientific activities. If someone gives testimony in court that cannot be verified due to its very nature, for example, if somebody says: "The deceased told me that the defendant threatened to kill him", then it's legally called anecdotal, or more often, 'hearsay' evidence. According to the website [http://www.laws.com/ Laws.com], hearsay is "any information is any information gathered by one party or person from another, concerning a particular event, condition or thing that was not directly related to the accused person".<ref>Laws.com: [http://trial.laws.com/trial/conviction-based-on-hearsay Can You Be Convicted Based on Hearsay?]</ref> Now how many times on legal shows, guys, have you heard someone say "Your honor, that's hearsay"? It's very common, you hear it all the time. Like science itself, and skepticism as well, the legal system - of the United States - has a very poor opinion of anecdotal, or hearsay, evidence. So poor, in fact, that as a general rule, this type of evidence is not allowed in a civil or criminal trial, as described by the hearsay rule. There are only limited situations when it may be allowed, including when a case makes a very severe charge. In these situations it's usually used to bolster a defense, or perhaps to hasten a verdict. One problem, though, that exists with anecdotal evidence in courts however, is that it can be very fuzzy to define. Sometimes the line between fact and anecdote can be a bit blurred, so it's often up to the courts, or the judge, to determine when to allow some types of this kind of evidence.

J: So as you can see, anecdotal evidence is actually very powerful. As an example, you could do hours of research about something on the internet, say, and then a single comment by a friend or family member that contradicts the information that you've been reading about could wipe it away. And I happen to have an example that happened to me recently, that illustrates this perfectly, and don't think for a second that I missed the irony in the fact that I'm giving you an anecdote about anecdotal evidence. But I think you'll get the whole thing once I tell you this quick story. I was at work, and I noticed a co-worker had a calorie-burning monitor - like a watch type of thing - and he explained that it tracks all these details about what you do during the day, and it estimates how many calories you burned. So he said he loves it, and he went on saying that it actually helped him lose weight, and we talked about it for about, you know, 5-10 minutes, I was asking him questions. And then afterwards, I was sat there wondering how accurate could it be and if I should get one? So, about 10 minutes later, another co-worker who works right near there came over, and he said he heard the entire conversation, and that the other guy didn't do a good job at tracking the burned calories. He said that with authority, and in that instant, I convinced myself that he was right, and that I wasn't gonna buy it. His story matched what I suspected, and in that moment, as soon as I heard something that matched what my internal dialogue was, I went with that piece of information, regardless of what the ultimate reality was.

S: So I'd just like to finish with a quote from a friend of mine, who unfortunately is no longer with us, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Beyerstein Barry Beyerstein], who said: "Anecdotal evidence leads us to conclusions that we ''wish'' to be true. Not conclusions that actually are true".

{{5x5outro}}

== References ==
<references/>

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|Legal Issues & Regulations = y
|Myths & Misconceptions = y
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5X5 Episode 23

2012-10-22T23:03:02Z

Lion Tamarin:

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|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 23
|Contents = Lame car design analogy to intelligent design from the Discovery Institute.
|episodeDate = 8th June 2008
|bob = y
|evan = y
|rebecca = y
|guest1 = M: Mike Lacelle
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-06-08.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=23
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,11245.0.html
|}}
== Lame car design analogy to intelligent design from the Discovery Institute. ==
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5 and the topic for this week is: A blog entry by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Luskin#Staff Casey Luskin] from the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute Discovery Institute] propaganda blog, [http://www.evolutionnews.org/ Evolution News and Views]. Casey Luskin writes an article entitled [http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/05/do_car_engineers_turn_to_darwi006771.html 'Do Car Engineers Turn to Darwinian Evolution or Intelligent Design?'] Now, this is a blog that is just one stupid entry after another. It really is a textbook of misinformation, propaganda and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy logical fallacies], but we decided to talk about this one because Casey Luskin outdoes even himself in the stupidity department. He starts the blog entry, "Don't read into this post too much", which means what he's saying is I know this is utter BS and crap, but I'm gonna say it ''anyway'' because it has propaganda value to me. Then he goes on to say that car engineers praise the "intelligent design" of their cars. They don't talk about the evolution of their cars.

R: Except for that they do. Wasn't Lexus or someone - they recently had a slogan that was 'The evolution of design'.

S: Yes, 'The evolution of design'; there's also the [http://www.interiormotivesawards.com/ Interior Motive Design Awards] - the car design evolution continues. Or the evolution of car logos. There's also an Evolution Auto Design company. So, the concept of technology evolving over time is absolutely used as a concept within the automotive industry.

M: Yeah, well, it's just the three companies that Luskin mentions, Hyundai, Honda and Toyota - I did a quick search on their web site just for evolution and Darwin and - on Hyundai's web site, they mention evolution of the engine, the company's technological evolution, the evolution of their sedan class. On Honda they talk about evolution of product and product engineering, the evolution of the modern sports car with their Accura NSX, and the evolution of their F1 car design and - finally, Toyota mentions the evolution of fuel cell technology, the evolution of hybrid technology, and most importantly, in late 2007, the Toyota International Teacher Program sent 24 teachers to the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galapagos_Islands Galapagos Islands] to "Follow in Darwin's footsteps and bring home what they've learned to share with their students".

R: So, I guess if we're deciding important scientific theory based upon what car engineers say, evolution it is.

(laughter)

R: Case closed!

M: There you go.

S: And there's nothing worse than basing a logical fallacy on a factually ''wrong'' premise. So you get it wrong ''both'' ways. The logic stinks and your premise was wrong.

B: Not only that, one quote from this blog, "Further intelligent design details such as lightweight valve springs...prove the Honda S2000 is a model of engineering perfection". So, does that mean that human beings are a model of engineering perfection as well? Hello! We're the biggest engineer kluge I've ever seen. There's no-

S: Yeah.

B: -perfection about evolution and the end products that we see. Also, another quote that struck me was that these advertisements and reviews don't say random variation in unguided selection-based design, they say intelligent design. But then there's also things like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life artificial life] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithms genetic algorithms] that actually do use random variation and unguided selection to produce-

S: What - what about unguided selection? That kinda makes it sound like the selection is not-

B: Right.

S: -is random-

B: Right.

S: -or something. But it is-

B: Which is a fallacy.

S: -guide - it's not guided, in that it's looking into the future, but it is guided in that the selection's not random. It is selecting those things which work better and therefore it can actually move the design towards optimal or better efficiency and function.

B: Right, plus - but also there - but there are things such as artificial life and genetic algorithms that actually do - using code based ''entirely'' on evolution and natural selection and random variation, have produced things that - these gorgeous end products, like code - code that sorts things in fewer lines of code than any other - than any person has been able to devise. Or actually evolve these little software organisms that are - that have actually verified things that we have learned about evolution and showed in evolution and evolution of these - of software programs that are just - just stunning. It's amazing what they've done and this is just the beginning of what these genetic algorithms are gonna be able to do. In the future we may actually run a car design through genetic algorithms to produce designs that no human could have done in a comparable amount of time.

S: But let's be clear: the whole thing is a non-sequitur.

E: And also, our friend over at the blog Skepdude wrote about this and he ended his entry this way - and I think it's appropriate. He said, "Claiming that because cars are intelligently designed by engineers means that we were designed by a supreme intelligent designer is logically equivalent to claiming that because cars run on gasoline we should be gulping down gallons of gasoline every day to keep ourselves running."

{{5x5outro}}

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{{5X5 categories
|Creationism & ID = y
|Logic & Philosophy = y
|Nature & Evolution = y
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5X5 Episode 23

2012-10-22T23:02:26Z

Lion Tamarin:

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{{Template:5X5 infobox
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 23
|Contents = Lame car design analogy to intelligent design from the Discovery Institute.
|episodeDate = 8th June 2008
|bob = y
|evan = y
|rebecca = y
|guest1 = M: Mike Lacelle
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-06-08.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=23
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,11245.0.html
|}}
== Lame car design analogy to intelligent design from the Discovery Institute. ==
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5 and the topic for this week is: A blog entry by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Luskin#Staff Casey Luskin] from the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute Discovery Institute] propaganda blog, [http://www.evolutionnews.org/ Evolution News and Views]. Casey Luskin writes an article entitled [http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/05/do_car_engineers_turn_to_darwi006771.html 'Do Car Engineers Turn to Darwinian Evolution or Intelligent Design?'] Now, this is a blog that is just one stupid entry after another. It really is a textbook of misinformation, propaganda and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy logical fallacies], but we decided to talk about this one because Casey Luskin outdoes even himself in the stupidity department. He starts the blog entry, "Don't read into this post too much", which means what he's saying is I know this is utter BS and crap, but I'm gonna say it ''anyway'' because it has propaganda value to me. Then he goes on to say that car engineers praise the "intelligent design" of their cars. They don't talk about the evolution of their cars.

R: Except for that they do. Wasn't Lexus or someone - they recently had a slogan that was 'The evolution of design'.

S: Yes, 'The evolution of design'; there's also the [http://www.interiormotivesawards.com/ Interior Motive Design Awards] - the car design evolution continues. Or the evolution of car logos. There's also an Evolution Auto Design company. So, the concept of technology evolving over time is absolutely used as a concept within the automotive industry.

M: Yeah, well, it's just the three companies that Luskin mentions, Hyundai, Honda and Toyota - I did a quick search on their web site just for evolution and Darwin and - on Hyundai's web site, they mention evolution of the engine, the company's technological evolution, the evolution of their sedan class. On Honda they talk about evolution of product and product engineering, the evolution of the modern sports car with their Accura NSX, and the evolution of their F1 car design and - finally, Toyota mentions the evolution of fuel cell technology, the evolution of hybrid technology, and most importantly, in late 2007, the Toyota International Teacher Program sent 24 teachers to the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galapagos_Islands Galapagos Islands] to "Follow in Darwin's footsteps and bring home what they've learned to share with their students".

R: So, I guess if we're deciding important scientific theory based upon what car engineers say, evolution it is.

(laughter)

R: Case closed!

M: There you go.

S: And there's nothing worse than basing a logical fallacy on a factually ''wrong'' premise. So you get it wrong ''both'' ways. The logic stinks and your premise was wrong.

B: Not only that, one quote from this blog, "Further intelligent design details such as lightweight valve springs...prove the Honda S2000 is a model of engineering perfection". So, does that mean that human beings are a model of engineering perfection as well? Hello! We're the biggest engineer kluge I've ever seen. There's no-

S: Yeah.

B: -perfection about evolution and the end products that we see. Also, another quote that struck me was that these advertisements and reviews don't say random variation in unguided selection-based design, they say intelligent design. But then there's also things like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life artificial life] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithms genetic algorithms] that actually do use random variation and unguided selection to produce-

S: What - what about unguided selection? That kinda makes it sound like the selection is not-

B: Right.

S: -is random-

B: Right.

S: -or something. But it is-

B: Which is a fallacy.

S: -guide - it's not guided, in that it's looking into the future, but it is guided in that the selection's not random. It is selecting those things which work better and therefore it can actually move the design towards optimal or better efficiency and function.

B: Right, plus - but also there - but there are things such as artificial life and genetic algorithms that actually do - using code based ''entirely'' on evolution and natural selection and random variation, have produced things that - these gorgeous end products, like code - code that sorts things in fewer lines of code than any other - than any person has been able to devise. Or actually evolve these little software organisms that are - that have actually verified things that we have learned about evolution and showed in evolution and evolution of these - of software programs that are just - just stunning. It's amazing what they've done and this is just the beginning of what these genetic algorithms are gonna be able to do. In the future we may actually run a car design through genetic algorithms to produce designs that no human could have done in a comparable amount of time.

S: But let's be clear: the whole thing is a non-sequitur.

E: And also, our friend over at the blog Skepdude wrote about this and he ended his entry this way - and I think it's appropriate. He said, "Claiming that because cars are intelligently designed by engineers means that we were designed by a supreme intelligent designer is logically equivalent to claiming that because cars run on gasoline we should be gulping down gallons of gasoline every day to keep ourselves running."

{{5x5outro}}

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{{5X5 categories
|Creationism & ID
|Logic & Philosophy = y
|Nature & Evolution = y
}}

5X5 Episode 23

2012-10-22T23:00:45Z

Lion Tamarin:

5X5 Episode 17

2012-10-22T22:48:37Z

Lion Tamarin:

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{{Template:5X5 infobox
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|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 17
|Contents = T-Rex proteins closely related to chickens
|episodeDate = 27th April 2008
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|rebecca = y
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-04-27.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=17
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,10320.0.html
|}}
== T-Rex proteins closely related to chickens ==

{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5 and our topic for tonight is: Comparing the connective tissue proteins of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-rex T. rex] fossils and modern birds such as chickens. A biologist at Harvard University, [http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/edwards/people/postdocs/organ.htm Chris Organ], has evaluated fossilized connective tissue, specifically [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collagen collagen], which is a type of protein that makes up most of our connective tissue, that was recovered from the fossil of a T. rex. This is a very rare find where the fossil is preserved well enough that there are still some proteins that they can analyze. They compared the proteins to other living reptiles as well as birds, such as chickens, and they found that the T. rex is ''more'' closely related to a chicken than to living reptiles.

E: So, Steve, is it a matter of that we kinda knew this before this protein was discovered but the protein now kinda puts the nail in the coffin on this and seals it up?

S: Yeah, you can also look at it as different lines of evidence are lining up. So, the fossil evidence points to birds evolving from dinosaurs, specifically the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theropod theropod] dinosaurs, the bird-like dinosaurs, ones that walked on two legs like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velociraptor velociraptor], for example. There's actually a little bit of a question as to whether or not T. rex fits within the subset of dinosaurs that are theropods or if it's related to another branch, but I don't think it matters for the purposes of this analysis. What this means is that dinosaurs, all dinosaurs are more closely related to birds because birds are basically descended from dinosaurs, than they are to other living reptiles. Which makes sense, if you think about the way the branch - the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_tree branching tree] would go, birds would be closer to dinosaurs than dinosaurs would be to other living reptiles.

R: And now don't anybody get confused, we still do believe that a monkey can kick a bird's butt-

E: Right.

R: -any day of the week.

S: You think so?

R: Yeah, I think so. It just means that some distant cousins of birds might have, at one time, been able to kick a monkey's butt.

J: Steve, and there's no protein - real protein left, though, correct? There's no [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dna DNA]?

S: Well, DNA is not protein. Right, so, DNA is the genetic code, deoxyribonucleic acid. There's no DNA recovered from this fossil and right now scientists believe that DNA could not survive for 65 million years for - unfortunately for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_%28novel%29 'Jurassic Park'] type of scenarios. There's probably no dinosaur DNA that is viable, that hasn't broken down. It probably breaks down within a million years or two, so we're never going to find it for - for dinosaurs.

B: But the whole chicken, though, I don't think there's much relevance to the chicken, because - isn't it true that the most recent common ancestor of birds was after the Tyrannosaurs - the Tyrannosaur group and the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_birds#.22Proto-birds.22_.28extinct.29 proto-bird] group split. Therefore every bird - isn't every bird equally closely related to the Tyrannosaurus?

S: Yeah.

B: So, isn't the chicken just - so it's every bird, it's not just the chicken, it's-

R: Well they did-

S: Yeah, there's nothing special about the chicken-

R: -they did specifically-

B: -well then ok-

R: -say that they compared it, the collagen from the T. rex to the collagen of the chicken, right? I think that's why-

S: Yeah, but you're right Bob they could have-

R: -the chicken is given.

S: -and they also mentioned an ostrich-

R: Yeah.

S: -I think, just to get two - two diverse birds, but yeah-

B: Right.

S: -all birds-

B: All birds.

S: -will - and I also suspect all birds are probably more closely related to all dinosaurs-

B: Right.

S: -than to other reptiles, although, probably mainly the theropod dinosaurs, which is the branch that we think that the birds evolved from. They also used a similar technique to compare [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon mastodons] and elephants and they confirmed that they are indeed closely related. Now mastodons-

B: Duh.

S: -died out only thousands of years ago, so it's actually quite possible that we could recover some viable DNA and actually reconstitute the mastodon, or the wooly mammoth.

R: That's not quite as scary.

S: Yeah, but it's cool, though. I'd love to see one of those; that could happen, theoretically in our lifetime.

J: Steve, where did they find the fossil?

S: The fossil was found by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Horner_%28paleontologist%29 John Horner], who is a pretty famous dinosaur hunter, in a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Creek_Formation fossil-rich stretch of land that spans Wyoming and Montana].

J: Oh boy, I hope they - they find a lot more there.

S: Yeah, it would be great, although, again, the preservation good enough to - to recover soft tissue is extremely rare. So, very very cool, but it still won't lead to 'Jurassic Park' with T. rexes walking around, unfortunately.

{{5x5outro}}

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5X5 Episode 22

2012-10-22T01:50:08Z

Lion Tamarin:

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|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 22
|Contents = Researchers allow monkey to control robotic arm with its mind.
|episodeDate = 1st June 2008
|bob = y
|evan = y
|rebecca = y
|guest1 = M: Mike Lacelle
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-06-01.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=22
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,11091.0.html
|}}
== Researchers allow monkey to control robotic arm with its mind. ==
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5 and the topic for today is: monkeys learn to control a robot arm with just the power of their mind.

R: Birds stare into a mirror and chirp.

(laughter)

S: This was research done at Duke University, project leader is [http://www.bme.duke.edu/faculty/miguel-nicolelis Miguel Nicolelis] and what they did was they attached a interface with monkey brains, they put the monkeys in a box so they couldn't move and attached to them was a robotic arm and the monkeys very quickly learned to control the robotic arm so that it could reach out, grab a piece of food and then deliver the food to their mouths. So they were essentially able to feed themselves without moving physically, but just mentally using the robotic arm.

B: This has obvious potential applications for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosthetics prosthetics], for people that have lost an arm or a limb. Remote [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telerobotics telerobotics] or remote control of robot devices. Steve, earlier you mentioned that--when we were discussing this--potentially the possibility of accessing information using this kind of type of interface has some interesting ramifications.

S: Yeah, this is a tremendous proof of concept but what this demonstrates is the ability for information to go from the brain to a computer board or a computer chip - to a computer interface. And this is hooked up to the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_cortex motor cortex] of these monkeys. So it's the part of the brain that's used to moving something physical - moving an arm, for example.

B: Yeah, this a key distinction because other prosthetics that I've seen, they would actually attach the prosthetic to say, your pectoral muscle. You would flex your chest muscle of, say, the side of your body without an arm and that muscle would then - you would use it to control the prosthesis-

S: That's right.

B: -and, so this is the first- Is this the first one Steve, that was - that is in fact connected to the motor cortex and not to muscle?

S: That's correct. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that this is the first one, although there were previous experiments where - actually, I mentioned the researches at Duke University, they actually did the prior research a few years ago where monkeys were able to control a cursor on a screen. This ''new'' research just published in [http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html "Nature"] online was done at the University of Pittsburg by [http://www.neurobio.pitt.edu/faculty/schwartz.htm Dr. Andrew Schwartz] and they were the first ones to connect the motor output--the connection to the brain--to an actual external device, a robotic arm. So this was just taking this one more step in their proof of concept. You're right. I mean the obvious extension of this is the bionic man type of robotic prosthetics. Giving legs to somebody who is paralyzed from the waist down, for example. Obviously they wouldn't have to replace missing limbs, it could be an exoskeleton over their legs that is controlled with their mind.

E: Another neat practical application for something like this is to have a robot go into a dangerous situation, disarm a bomb, go into combat - something like that and you have somebody at the other end just with a wire hooked up to their mind being able to control everything that goes on.

S: Yeah, the question would be, could this interface get so sophisticated that it would provide superior control to just a joystick or manual interface, like we have now.

B: Also, there's another application I've been thinking of. Guys, tell me what you think of this. Kind of extending the whole prosthesis idea is increasing human bandwidth in a sense, so that not only could your hands control the device but in conjunction with your hands or even, say your legs, say when you're flying a helicopter. But your mind - you throw the mind into the loop at the same time, which could kind of add another dimension to the task. Say it's already maxed out because you only have two arms and two legs and you could add another dimension to the task so that it can become even more - you could perform even more complicated, say, maneuvers than you would normally-

S: Hmm.

B: -because you just don't have enough limbs to do all these controls.

M: So you can have a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Octopus Dr. Octopus] thing going on.

B: There you go, hey-

R: That would be rad.

B: I like it.

R: Even I admit that.

S: Of course, the next place to go with this type of research is to get the information to go the other way, from the computer ''to'' the brain. This could be useful for providing sensory feedback. So imagine controlling this disembodied robotic arm that you can't feel. That'd be kind of weird. But imagine if you felt it as if it were-

E: Hmm.

S: -your own arm. It would giving you sensory feedback to make it seem like you actually possessed it, you owned it. That - then the amount of control over that limb could be ''truly'' natural and genuine, like - as much as you control your own limbs.

{{5x5outro}}

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5X5 Episode 21

2012-10-22T01:38:34Z

Lion Tamarin:

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|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 21
|Contents = Family claims women miraculously brought back to life after rigor mortis
|episodeDate = 25th May 2008
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = M: Mike Lacelle
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-05-25.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=21
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,10919.0.html
|}}
== Family claims women miraculously brought back to life after rigor mortis ==
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5 and the topic for this week is Val Thomas, who is a woman who had several heart attacks. She's 59-years-old. She was rushed to a West Virginia hospital and the story is pretty typical of someone who has a cardiac arrest in the field. She was resuscitated, although they had a hard time getting her back. She was worked on for a couple of hours. During - at one point they cooled her body and then warmed her back up. She was by reports on a ventilator the entire time, but she did not respond to the resuscitation, she appeared not to have any pulse or rhythm. The doctors and the family agreed that she wasn't going to make it and she was actually being kept on a ventilator so that she could be potentially an organ donor and then, "miraculously" she awoke and survived the experience.

J: She could not have been brain dead, obviously. What would you consider her to be during that time period?

S: The real story here is the absolutely horrific science reporting. This was probably not reported by a science journalist. The details are kind of all mixed up; they don't really hold together as a solid story and I looked in vain for even the slightest skeptical or critical reporting of this story on the internet. Every version of this story was essentially the same one. A lot of things don't make sense about this story as it was told. Now it's being promoted as a miraculously recovery, doctors are literally - baffled is the word that's being used. We like to joke around that 'doctors are baffled' or 'scientists are baffled' - those are the headlines. The family reported that [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigor_mortis rigor mortis] had set in. None of these details make any sense whatsoever. They never did the kind of examination that would be necessary to declare somebody brain dead and there's no mention of that being done. I think, again, the reporting is very loose: they're throwing around terms like rigor mortis and brain death, etcetera, without really knowing what they mean.

B: The one thing that really gets to me is the way they're throwing around rigor mortis. I really don't think they know what this means. At one point in the story, it said "Val Thomas, 59, suffered two heart attacks, had no pulse and rigor mortis had set in." Apparently her son, Jim Thomas, said at one point her skin had already started to harden and her fingers curled. I think that's what he's taking as being rigor mortis. If she actually experienced rigor mortis and came back then that would be truly a miracle and that clearly did not happen. Rigor mortis does not start until two to four hours have passed unless you're in an extreme environment which I don't think she was in. And rigor mortis basically is - what's going on with rigor mortis is the muscle cells are contracting and it actually takes energy or the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine_triphosphate ATP] for muscle cells to uncontract, so they kinda go into this default state and it takes a while to get there, about two to three hours and she clearly was not dead.

S: And that's after tissue death-right, that's after tissue-your muscle tissue has been dead for three hours.

J: Plus they had her on a ventilator. If they had her on a ventilator, that means that she was having circulation.

S: That's exactly right. You wouldn't put somebody and keep somebody on a ventilator if they literally had no heart pumping and no circulation at all; there would be no purpose for it.

E: Back to the point about the poor reporting on this, because, the story is a couple days old. I did go back to see if anybody did any follow-up reporting on this story. I could not find anything-

S: Uh-huh.

E:-I - you had to kind of dig into even just the comments on some of these sites that are carrying the article. I'm looking for a doctor's opinion or something substantial here that stabs at an explanation of what's been going on. The most interesting post I did see by someone is that they had a prediction: 1) The medical details of the report were not accurate and 2) The fine people at the SGU podcast would be covering this topic. So that was the most interesting comment I could find.

S: Very astute.

M: Doctor Kevin Eggleston is actually quoted as saying she had no neurological function. Does that mean the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeg EEG] was flat?

S: We're not given any of those details. We don't know if she had an EEG, we don't know if anybody did a neurological exam, if there was even a neurological consult called. It could have just meant she was just unresponsive. That is not a meaningful statement. We're not given the details necessary to put it into any kind of context. What is happening here - one possibility about the rigor mortis is that she was ''cooled'' at one point and ''cooling'' does cause the muscles to contract and shrink a little bit and that could have been misinterpreted by the family as rigor mortis and then passed onto the absolutely credulous journalists who didn't do their job and try to figure out what was actually going on here. Plus - I'm sure that her perfusion was very very poor. She probably had a very faint heart rhythm and her pulse was too soft to pick up. You can miss the pulse of somebody if it's very very faint. These kinds of things happen all the time. Lots of people get resuscitated in the hospital. They may be prematurely declared dead or they may have a pulse that was not picked up on and then they can surprisingly come out of it because they were being ventilated, they were breathing or they - their heart was beating, they were getting some circulation. So this not unusual. What's unusual is just the extent to which the science reporting has degenerated and these stories are now popping up with regularity as medical miracles baffling doctors and it's all nonsense.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 Navigation}}
{{5X5 categories
|Science & Medicine = y
|Science & the Media = y
}}

5X5 Episode 16

2012-10-19T00:06:34Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{5X5 editing required
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{{Template:5X5 infobox 
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 16 
|Contents = Surgery under hypnosis. 
|episodeDate = 20th April 2008 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-04-20.mp3 
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=16 
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,10105.0.html 
|}}
== Surgery under hypnosis. == 
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5. Tonight's topic: a hypnotist undergoes very painful surgery without any [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anesthetic anesthetic]. British hypnotist Alex Lenkei underwent hand surgery which involved actually chipping away part of the bone, in his, in the bones in his wrist and his thumb, and he did so by (according to the [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/sussex/7355523.stm news reports]) without any anesthesia simply by hypnotizing himself just before the procedure.

J: This is the first I ever heard that you could hypnotize yourself. Is that possible?

B: Well somebody has to hold the watch for you but yeah.

(Laughter)

E: Or spin the disk with the swirly thing.

R: Well when you consider that hypnotism would be a certain form of meditation then it would be possible-

B: Right.

R: -I suppose to "hypnotize yourself" (and I'm using the little air quotes there.) But whether or not you could do it to the point where you could relax yourself to the point where you wouldn't mind major surgery is another point all together and I for one am calling shenanigans.

E: Well yeah I don't know how this claim can be validated. How do we know that this person did not have any medication at all? I don't think there's any way really to know.

S: Well this is the report from the surgeon, who is David Llewellyn-Clark. And there are both written reports and [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M96V80F_P8o video] interviews of him on the internet. He says that he underwent no anesthesia and that he described the surgery you know they filleted open his wrist and thumb-

B: It's a 4 inch cut!

S: -and he actually had to use a chisel and saw you know to work on the bone. That would ordinarily be an incredibly painful procedure. He also went out of his way to point out that they were monitoring his respiratory rate and his blood pressure and his pulse rate and they correctly said that if somebody if he were just you know grinning and bearing the pain through incredible self discipline his vital signs would go up and that's generally true that's correct. So if that report is correct he was actually not feeling significant pain during the procedure but the big question mark in this whole affair is whether or not he received any local anesthesia. There actually is published protocols for so called [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10986765?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum "hypnoanesthesia"] and it involves giving local anesthesia and not a single report that I could find anywhere specifically addressed the question one way or the other. Neither did the doctor mention it on the interview itself.

R: And this case reminds me of back in the 70's the same sort of thing happened with acupuncture where there were reports coming out of China saying that these major surgeries were being performed with just acupuncture but then it was later discovered that it was actually a cocktail of drugs-

S: (agrees)

R: -plus a local anesthetic that was quite easily fooling reporters into believing that it was just acupuncture. So that's what sprung to mind as soon as I heard this, set the little skeptical detector off.

E: Yeah I think a doctor from Yale discovered it, went and took a trip to China to find out what was going on and found out the truth.

J: So if we look at the possible outcomes of this or the possibilities of what's happening here, either it's true, the guy was able to do it, he's completely lying, the patient was on medication before he went or...

S: Or if he was getting local anesthesia and that they just neglected to mention that little detail in all of the news reporting. Which I think is by far and away the most likely scenario.

R: I vote for that.

J: Right.

B: But also I think that it's interesting to point out: in my research I was a little surprised to find previous studies that seem to clearly show that hypnosis can have an impact in pain perception such as [http://journals.lww.com/rapm/Abstract/2004/11000/Clinical_Hypnosis_Modulates_Functional_Magnetic.8.aspx November/December 2004 Issue of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine] talked about a study where volunteers were hypnotized and studied during [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_imaging FMRI] and they found significant reduction in pain perception using FRMI-

S: Yes

B: -and another and other similar studies. I was surprised that pain perception could be reduced by hypnosis in a clinical setting and showed you know clearly at least these preliminary studies.

S: I'm not surprised by that at all. Pain is a completely subjective experience, and a huge component of pain is attention: are you attending to the pain? And another component of it is just your emotional state: are you anxious or relaxed? So yes if you meditate, it's probably not accurate to call it hypnosis in that it confuses it with stage hypnosis which is a completely different thing but they do use the term "hypnoanesthesia" which really is a form of just very intense meditation where you draw your attention away from whatever the source of the pain is and you relax yourself-

B: Right.

S: - and that absolutely can reduce your perception and emotional response to the pain. However, what it will not do is make you completely numb to the pain; make you have zero pain and that's what they were reporting in this case and that's what I just don't buy unless this guy is a very unusual situation, you know that has not been reported previously.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 Navigation}}
{{5X5 categories
|Science & Medicine = y
}}

5X5 Episode 12

2012-10-18T23:50:31Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{5X5 editing required
|redirect = y 
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{{Template:5X5 infobox
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 12
|Contents = Faith-healing cults
|episodeDate = 23rd March 2008
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|downloadLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcast.aspx?mid=2
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=12
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=9376.0
|}}
== Faith-healing cult leads to child death from medical neglect. ==
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5X5. The topic for this evening is the death of a 15-month-old Oregon City girl [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/28/madeline-neumann-11-year_n_93903.html Ava Worthington]. The 15-month-old girl was sick with pneumonia. Her parents, who are members of a local Pentecostal cult called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Followers_of_Christ The Followers of Christ Church], believe in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_healing faith healing] and did not seek medical attention for their daughter, and as a result, unfortunately, the little girl did die. The parents are now under investigation because in 1999 a new law was passed in Oregon.. umm… removed some of the protections for parents who seek protection under their religious beliefs for this kind of medical neglect.

E: The Followers of Christ Church… this is nothing new to them… unfortunately, they've been relying on faith healing for pretty much their entire existence, since late in the 19th or early 20th century. The followers believe in a literal translation of the scripture which states that the sick shall be anointed by elders and the faith will heal all. Death comes if it's God's will - they believe. Child deaths have plagued this church for a long time; at least 21 of 78 children who have died at the Church since 1955 likely could have been saved with routine medical care. This is all part of an ongoing series of reports and investigations into this… well, cult as far as I'm concerned, for quite a long time now.

J: Also, it started with one guy. His name is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodie_W._White Walter White]. so called "fire and brimstone" preacher who brought the church to Oregon in the 30s. His followers believed that God appeared to this guy in a dream, and chose him to be the leader of their group.

S: He's definitely a cult figure.

E: Absolutely!

R: It's pretty much how most religions start: angel appeared to me in a dream, told me I have God's blessing, blah blah blah, and it's sad though when it has this sort of result. You look at Christian scientists it's the same kind of thing where there's a focus on faith healing and God will heal us if it's meant to be. And because of that, we have for instance mumps outbreaks and measles outbreaks in Boston, and it affects the most innocent member of the family like the little kid who can't even make decisions for themselves.

S: Yeah, obviously, when you're trying to balance the freedom of religion and the rights of a parent over their children with the duty to protect a child and to give at least the basic necessities of life, it's a very thorny issue. But I think that there is a general consensus that children should not be neglected to the point of permanent harm or death, regardless of what the views of their parents are. The primary promoters in this country of the rights of parents to rely entirely upon faith healing are the Christian scientists and even in this… the recent Oregon law that was passed largely in reaction to this cult or this church… the Christian scientists mobilized and tried to prevent this new law from passing to weaken the protections for faith healing parents.

J: It's good to see that the states are starting to notice this and pass laws that are going to protect the children … but really, when does it step on freedom of speech or those people's rights to, you know, worship their religion? What do you guys think about that?

R: Well yeah, I mean you can never… it's a fine line and obviously I don't think that we should ever pass a law that infringes upon a person to make their own independent choice about what they believe in just so long as we protect the people who can't decide what they do or don't believe in. And that's the little kids, so any law that's gonna protect children without affecting someone's own personal belief and how they conduct themselves, I'm going be o.k. with. But it is definitely a fine line there.

S: But once kids are involved, as you say, it's a different story. I did come across, while researching for this piece, a group called [http://www.childrenshealthcare.org/ CHILD] which stands for Children's Health Care is a Legal Duty and they are a child advocacy group that trying to act to have more of these Oregon type laws passed to protect children from medical neglect because their parents follow a faith healing belief system. This was actually started by Rita and Doug Swan who were in the Christian Science Church and their 15-month-old son Matthew died of an untreated meningitis because at the time they were believers and then later came to realize, you know, how misguided they were and are now, in his memory, trying to undo the damage that they did, started this group called CHILD. So hopefully this is the start of a trend and we're gonna see more laws in the direction of protecting children in cases like this.

E: And fully prosecuting the parents whose responsibility it is to make sure their children remain alive and get the treatment they need.

S: That's right.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 categories
|Alternative Medicine = y
|Energy Healing = y
|Religion & Faith = y
}}

5X5 Episode 12

2012-10-18T23:33:14Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{5X5 editing required
|redirect = y 
|}}
{{Template:5X5 infobox
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 12
|Contents = Faith-healing cults
|episodeDate = 23rd March 2008
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|downloadLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcast.aspx?mid=2
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=12
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=9376.0
|}}
== Faith-healing cult leads to child death from medical neglect. ==
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5X5. The topic for this evening is the death of a 15-month-old Oregon City girl [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/28/madeline-neumann-11-year_n_93903.html Ava Worthington]. The 15-month-old girl was sick with pneumonia. Her parents, who are members of a local Pentecostal cult called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Followers_of_Christ The Followers of Christ Church], believe in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_healing faith healing] and did not seek medical attention for their daughter, and as a result, unfortunately, the little girl did die. The parents are now under investigation because in 1999 a new law was passed in Oregon.. umm… removed some of the protections for parents who seek protection under their religious beliefs for this kind of medical neglect.

E: The Followers of Christ Church… this is nothing new to them… unfortunately, they've been relying on faith healing for pretty much their entire existence, since late in the 19th or early 20th century. The followers believe in a literal translation of the scripture which states that the sick shall be anointed by elders and the faith will heal all. Death comes if it's God's will - they believe. Child deaths have plagued this church for a long time; at least 21 of 78 children who have died at the Church since 1955 likely could have been saved with routine medical care. This is all part of an ongoing series of reports and investigations into this… well, cult as far as I'm concerned, for quite a long time now.

J: Also, it started with one guy. His name is Walter White so called "fire and brimstone" preacher who brought the church to Oregon in the 30s. His followers believed that God appeared to this guy in a dream, and chose him to be the leader of their group.

S: He's definitely a cult figure.

E: Absolutely!

R: It's pretty much how most religions start: angel appeared to me in a dream, told me I have God's blessing, blah blah blah, and it's sad though when it has this sort of result. You look at Christian scientists it's the same kind of thing where there's a focus on faith healing and God will heal us if it's meant to be. And because of that, we have for instance mumps outbreaks and measles outbreaks in Boston, and it affects the most innocent member of the family like the little kid who can't even make decisions for themselves.

S: Yeah, obviously, when you're trying to balance the freedom of religion and the rights of a parent over their children with the duty to protect a child and to give at least the basic necessities of life, it's a very thorny issue. But I think that there is a general consensus that children should not be neglected to the point of permanent harm or death, regardless of what the views of their parents are. The primary promoters in this country of the rights of parents to rely entirely upon faith healing are the Christian scientists and even in this… the recent Oregon law that was passed largely in reaction to this cult or this church… the Christian scientists mobilized and tried to prevent this new law from passing to weaken the protections for faith healing parents.

J: It's good to see that the states are starting to notice this and pass laws that are going to protect the children … but really, when does it step on freedom of speech or those people's rights to, you know, worship their religion? What do you guys think about that?

R: Well yeah, I mean you can never… it's a fine line and obviously I don't think that we should ever pass a law that infringes upon a person to make their own independent choice about what they believe in just so long as we protect the people who can't decide what they do or don't believe in. And that's the little kids, so any law that's gonna protect children without affecting someone's own personal belief and how they conduct themselves, I'm going be o.k. with. But it is definitely a fine line there.

S: But once kids are involved, as you say, it's a different story. I did come across, while researching for this piece, a group called [http://www.childrenshealthcare.org/ CHILD] which stands for Children's Health Care is a Legal Duty and they are a child advocacy group that trying to act to have more of these Oregon type laws passed to protect children from medical neglect because their parents follow a faith healing belief system. This was actually started by Rita and Doug Swan who were in the Christian Science Church and their 15-month-old son Matthew died of an untreated meningitis because at the time they were believers and then later came to realize, you know, how misguided they were and are now, in his memory, trying to undo the damage that they did, started this group called CHILD. So hopefully this is the start of a trend and we're gonna see more laws in the direction of protecting children in cases like this.

E: And fully prosecuting the parents whose responsibility it is to make sure their children remain alive and get the treatment they need.

S: That's right.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 categories
|Alternative Medicine = y
|Energy Healing = y
|Religion & Faith = y
}}

5X5 Episode 81

2012-10-16T01:40:48Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
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|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 181 
|Contents = Naturopathy 
|episodeDate = 18th November 2009 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|guest1 = M: Mike Lacelle
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52009-11-18.mp3 
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=81 
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,24241.0.html 
|}}
== Naturopathy == 
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5X5 and tonight we're talking about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturopathy naturopathy]. Mike Lacalle's sitting in for Rebecca Watson tonight.

Naturopathy [Nature-opathy] or Naturopathy [Naturo-pathy] is a system of practice, of medical practice or healing practice, that's about 100 years old and is based primarily on the principle of using natural or non-invasive remedies in order to enhance the body's ability to heal itself. It really is a philosophical or philosophy-based medical practice. It's overtly not a science-based practice. It is still relatively on the fringe in that in at least most states in the United States, for example, it is not a licensed recognized medical profession, though it is licensed in some states. It has not gained widespread acceptance within the mainstream medical profession because of its use and endorsement of a host of unscientific modalities.

M: That's right. Naturopaths believe that the body heals itself if it's kept in a fully natural environment. They also believe we're a combination of a natural body, a soul and a nonphysical mind. And they use lots of words like ''balance'' and ''energy'' and ''harmony''. Naturopathy is rooted in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism vitalism.] Vitalism is the belief that we possess a kind of energy or force that gives us life.

S: But of course, you know, vitalism, which was a viable scientific notion 150-or-so-years ago, but it's gone the way of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether aether] and other unnecessary hypotheses within science. There essentially was nothing for the vitalistic force to do once we figured out how biology works essentially. So it lingers on only in these philosophy-based notions like naturopathy.

E: Yeah, modern day naturopathy can be traced back to Father [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Kneipp Sebastian Kneipp] from Germany, who opened a water cure center after becoming convinced that a fellow student had cured themselves of tuberculosis by bathing in the Danube river. And another person who was responsible for introducing naturopathy to the United States was [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedict_Lust Benedict Lust] who took Kneipp's ideas, brought them to the United States and opened his own water cure institute in New York City. And he took the term ''naturopathy'' in 1902 and combined it with the use of massage and herbs, homeopathy, spinal manipulations and various other types of occult healing. Eventually he opened the American Institute of Naturopathy and that's how things got started here in America.

B: One common tactic used by naturopaths is to claim that their methods can be used to boost the immune system. They assume that many, if not all, diseases are caused by impaired immune responses. The fact is, many diseases - cancer among them - can ravage the body even with completely uncompromised immune systems. Add to that the absence of any scientific evidence that naturopathic treatments can enhance immune response and you have at best wishful thinking and at worse scam artists.

J: As of this recording, 15 states and the District of Columbia have licensing laws for naturopathic doctors. In these states, naturopathic doctors are required to graduate from a 4-year residential naturopathic medical school and pass extensive post-doctoral board examinations, which they call the NPLEX, in order to receive a license. These people also have to fulfill state mandated continuing education requirements. I believe that those are required annually.

S: The problem with the whole licensure thing, however, is as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edzard_Ernst Edzard Ernst] quite eloquently [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-regulation-of-nonsense/ stated,] even "the most meticulous regulation of nonsense must still result in nonsense." The problem is that in order to acquire licensure, naturopaths are not required to prove that anything they do is scientific, or that they have an appropriate evidence base for their treatments, or even that they adhere to any ethical standards. Essentially, they have to prove only that they are internally organized, that they track their members, that they make them take exams, that their paperwork is in order - logistical things like that. But nothing that really asks the question of "is the practice ethical and scientifically legitimate?" Jay, you mentioned that they have to pass exams, but actually they have been criticized for adjusting the scores of the exams so that all of the naturopaths who take the exams pass them. So essentially the exams are worthless because they just pass everybody.

Naturopaths will often make the claim that licensure is necessary in order to prevent bad naturopaths from practicing. They want to make sure that only the legitimate naturopaths can practice. And that's somehow going to protect the public. Unfortunately, there's no difference between a "good naturopath" and "bad naturopath" as there's no science base to anything that they do. They will frequently use practices that are not evidence- or science-based so without a science-based standard of care, what is the difference? That is really just a political ploy that they use in order to get licensure and to really inhibit competition. It's just one body of naturopaths trying to insulate themselves from competition, from other practitioners, but it is in no way protecting the public from unscientific or substandard care.

M: So naturopathy, from my observations, they're the jack-of-all-trades of quackery. I see dozens of receipts for naturopathy every day and I've seen everything from food allergy tests to prescribing homeopathic remedies to acupuncture, aligning of the crescent moon, whatever that is. I've seen receipts for drug prescriptions, certain, well, vitamin prescriptions, and I've also seen one or two receipts for minor surgeries.

S: That's right, and they, it's really a loose collection of anything that's been discarded by science-based medicine, or that is either disproven or is implausible and hasn't been studied. There really isn't any cohesive or coherent theme to the different modalities that they use. They sort of white-wash it all by saying "yeah, it's all natural," or "it's all supporting the body's own self-healing," but that's quite glib and superficial. When you really look at all the different things that they do, they don't really have anything to do with each other except that they're not legitimate scientific practices.

{{5x5outro}}

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{{5X5 categories
|Alternative Medicine = y
|Science & Medicine = y
}}

5X5 Episode 19

2012-10-16T01:27:41Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
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|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 19 
|Contents = SF Movies 
|episodeDate = 11th May 2008 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-05-11.mp3 
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=19 
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,10654.0.html 
|}}
== The Science of Science-Fiction Movies == 
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5X5 and the topic for this evening is a recent [http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13864-five-science-fiction-movies-that-get-the-science-right.html?full=true article] in the New Scientist which discusses five science fiction movies that get the science right. This is an article by Michael Marshall and he discusses five fairly good science fiction movies - [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/ 2001: A Space Odyssey,] the [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338013/ Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/ Alien,] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ Gattaca,] and Solaris [[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069293/ 1972] and [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307479/ 2002.]] Why don't we begin with ''2001''.

R: Duh.

B: It gets one thing right that so many movies don't get right, is that it is perfectly quiet in space.

S: But there is one thing in ''2001'' where I think they got the science wrong, and that was when they were on the moon base, when inside the buildings on the moon base, they're at earth's normal gravity —

B: Yes

S: — and there's no reason for that. They should still be bouncing around as if they were on the moon even though they're in a room with an atmosphere et cetera.

B: The spaceship Discovery is basically a spinning centrifuge to create artificial gravity, which is great, but at one point an astronaut climbs up towards the center of the centrifuge and as he did that you would be getting lighter and lighter until eventually you would weigh nothing towards the center.

S: Mmm hmm.

B: And he's obviously not getting lighter. You know, a subtle point but still it's interesting.

S: Let's go on to ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind''.

R: I don't get it. It's not a sci-fi movie, like it's one of my favorite all-time movies but I would never call it a sci-fi movie and it has really nothing to do with real science at all.

S: This is the movie with Jim Carrey where he has his memories selectively wiped. But I guess that element is science fiction, so that was enough. Actually, you know, speculative fiction or science fiction actually is a very broad tent. You can very very broadly define that, and since that element was enough I guess to make him think that this was a science fiction movie.

J: But Steve, aren't memories in multiple places in the brain?

S: Yes, actually I disagree that this is a very plausible thing. In the movie the character like wipes his memory for, or attempts to, for all of his memories of his relationship with a person. The author of the article is arguing that that is plausible because, for example, certain types of dementia may wipe out certain types of memory, like semantic memory, not other types of memory, like personal memory. But I don't think that's a good analogy actually.

R: Yeah, the movie doesn't actually borrow from that at all.

S: I think that's implausible because memories are so massively parallel and so massively interconnected, I think it would be probably difficult to impossible to completely extricate one entire theme from your life's memories you know.

B: ''Alien'''s a great movie.

S: ''Alien'' is an awesome movie and do you guys know that the bit he's praising in this article?

J: Well isn't it the suspended animation?

S: Well yes, so they put the crew in suspended animation because traveling between star systems will take a really long time, because, you know, faster than light travel is not plausible. But actually if you do the math the ship's still going awfully fast. (laughs)

B: Well yeah, but if by 'awfully fast' you mean faster than light, I still think, I mean Ripley missed what, she was 50 years behind the times when she got back for the second movie?

S: Mmm hmm.

B: Man, that's assuming that the star system she was at was farther away than Centauri stars, still I think that's cutting it real close. But yeah, still great great stuff, I still love it.

S: If you're going 30, if she was 30 or 40 light years away from the earth, that's no —

B: Yeah

S: — that's still going awfully fast, right.

B: Right

S: — that was, yeah, not, didn't necessarily go faster than light. The fourth movie was ''Gattaca'' which is based upon —

(talking over one another) 

R: — nobody actually saw, so that's alright, we'll just skip that.

E: — Well it was Ethan Hawke.

S: — Well I saw it.

B: — yeah great movie by the way. I enjoyed it. I liked it.

S: It was about a future in which everyone is genetically identified and you can do DNA analyses and you know and maybe —

B: In a moment.

S: — Yeah, pretty much made by comparing your DNA, and most babies are conceived with IVF (in-vitro fertilization.) He's praising this one because of its, the way it dealt with the issues of genetic determinism.

B: But that's also its failing as well.

S: Yes.

B: Because it's all determinism in the movie, at least that's how most people believe, although at the very end they kind of show you that it's not, but most of the movie is all, the whole society is about determinism, and I can't imagine a society that sophisticated believing it to that extent.

J: It also shows that the people that were truly imperfect were the ones that were supposed to be perfect, which is interesting —

R: — Oh the irony.

S: Yeah, I mean —

(laughter)

S: — that's kind of, the point of the movie was dealing with that issue, the whole issue of how much of ourselves is really determined by our genetics. And the final movie is ''Solaris'' which I thought was a very weird movie actually.

R: If by weird you mean boring as shit, yes.

J: Yeah, it's..

(laughter)

E?: That's one definition.

S: The article makes it seem like you have to have read the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel) book,] read the novel in order to really get what the movie was about, which I believe. And the central point was that extra-terrestrial intelligence would be so bizarre and strange that we really wouldn't be able to understand it, which I guess is why the movie was incomprehensible.

E: That's a fair point though.

J: So basically talking to aliens would be a mind-screw.

S: Yeah, basically. And actually I totally agree with that. I think that science fiction movies in general grossly underestimate the alien-ness, both physically and mentally, of aliens.

E: Except ''Star Trek''.

(laughter)

S: Certainly you know ''Star Trek'' is a good example why that is done for practical purposes, but just in terms of the science and the fiction, you know I do appreciate it when writers try to make aliens truly alien. Some do.

E: There was a sixth movie that was supposed to make the list, [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063442/ Planet of the Apes,] but unfortunately it got booted from this list.

{{5x5outro}}

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{{5X5 categories
|General Science = y
|Entertainment = y
}}

5X5 Episode 14

2012-10-16T01:12:34Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 14
|Contents = Nomophobia - the fear of being out of cell phone range.
|episodeDate = 6thth April 2008
|previous = 13
|next = 15
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay =
|evan = y
|guest1 = M: Mike Lacelle
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-04-06.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=14
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,9783.0.html
|}}
== Nomophobia - the fear of being out of cell phone range. ==
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5 and the topic for this evening is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomophobia nomophobia] or the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. This is being promoted as a new phobia and is being characterized as a plague of our 24/7 age. Articles on this topic estimate that as many as 13 million Britons may be affect by this disorder, nomophobia. Up to 53% of mobile phone users. I say the whole thing is a bunch of malarkey. What do you guys think?

E: It sure smells like malarkey to me.

B: I don't think it is.

R: 53% of mobile phone users have a phobia?

B: That claim might be--yeah--that might be inflated. I'm not disputing the fact that that number--I don't think that number is necessarily correct, but the fact that it's a phobia of sorts, sure. What does it take--

S: What do you mean by 'of sorts'? You said the word phobia--the word phobia is being overused.

R: Yeah.

S: Let me read for you the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders DMS-IV] diagnostic criteria for a phobia. So this is the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual. This is the book by which psychological/psychiatric diagnoses are officially characterized. So here are the diagnostic criteria: 'A marked and persistent fear that is excessive or unreasonable cued by the presence or anticipation of a specific object or situation. Exposure to the phobic stimulus almost invariably invokes and immediate anxiety response which may take the form of a situationally bound or situationally predisposed panic attack. The person recognizes that the fear is excessive or unreasonable. The phobic situation is avoided or else is endured with intense anxiety or distress. The avoidance, anxious anticipation or distress in the feared situation interferes significantly with the person's normal routine, occupational or academic functioning or social activities or relationships or there is marked distress about having the phobias.' So, there are some other little details but that you have to reach a certain threshold before you start slapping the word 'phobia' on it. People might have some reasonable anxiety about their phone going dead and then missing a phone call or being inconvenienced by that. But in order to say that it's a phobia, it has to be excessive or unreasonable, provoke an anxiety attack and to actually disrupt your normal routine or life. I doubt that 53% of phone users reach that threshold or anything even near that number.

B: I agree.

E: Boy, think about how many people lose their cell phone service at some point during the day. That's practically everybody. Are you really saying that people going into shutdown mode because they can't get a cell phone signal?

M: I kinda get that when I go to my parent's camp. Once we hit that point, there's just no more signal to my cell phone, I feel kinda disconnected from the rest of the world like I need to get reconnected, like something's missing. It's just a weird feeling, I guess. I don't think it's a phobia, though.

S: Yeah, it doesn't provoke a panic--

M: Right, exactly.

R: Right, there is an interesting story there, in that we've become so used to being connected to the rest of the world all that time, that being without that is certainly jarring. But of course, as usual, the media has to go above and beyond and exaggerate it to the point of phobia and giving it a cutesy name, which is just not all right.

B: Yeah, I agree. I think that number is way up, but I don't doubt that there are a lot of people that go to that extreme. How many? I don't know, but I think it's a valid phobia.

E: Well, do people have previous dispositions for phobias?

S: Sure, but Bob just to also clarify further, it can't be part of another disorder. So, if you're an obsessive compulsive personality type, then it's subsumed under that--

B: Ok.

S: You don't have an additional phobia. So if you're just talking about people that are A-type personalities who may even be a little obsessive compulsive and they do get actually anxious by being out of contact, that doesn't qualify as having a separate psychiatric phobia disorder. I just think there's harm in throwing that term around because it diminishes genuine psychiatric disorders. It waters down the use of such terminology to the point where it becomes meaningless.

R: You know, when you get right of your nomophobia, you have nomonomophobia.

(laughter)

S: Nomonomophobia?

(laughter)

R: Thank you, I'll be here all week.

(laughter)

M: (Mimics drum [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_%28musical_phrase%29 sting])

R: Try the salad bar.

B: You want to hear some real phobias? I've got some good phobias here that I found. There's the ever-popular, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coitophobia coitophobia], fear of sexual intercourse--

E: Rare.

B: I know many people who have [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergophobia ergophobia], which is fear of work.

E: Oh yeah.

B: And then there's one I just cannot relate to, hedonophobia, fear of pleasure. And there, of course, there's the panphobia--

S: But you can relate to coitophobia, that's what you're saying?

(laughter)

B: And of course there's, then there's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panphobia panphobia], a non-specific fear of everything.

S: Of everything.

(laughter)

R: That just sucks.

S: We'll just chalk this one up to just one more silly media escapade.

{{5x5outro}}

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{{5X5 categories
|Science and Medicine = y
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5X5 Episode 97

2012-10-16T01:01:53Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 97 
|Contents = Repressed Memories 
|episodeDate = 11th April 2012 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52010-12-20.mp3 
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=97
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,32509.0.html 
|}}
== Repressed Memories == 
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5X5 and tonight we're talking about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory Repressed Memory Syndrome], or as some call it, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome False Memory Syndrome].

R: Wait, I don't remember agreeing to this.

(Pained laughter from all.)

S: This is a controversy that started mainly in 1988 with the publication of the book [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_courage_to_heal The Courage to Heal] by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. The book alleges that as much as 45% of women were sexually abused as children but that most women have repressed this memory and it is now manifesting later in their life with psychological problems such as eating disorders, anxiety or depression. They therefore recommend pursuing the possibility of repressed memories of sexual abuse or other abuse in patients, especially women who present to therapists with these other problems. This has led to an explosion of such diagnoses by so-called repressed memory therapists over the ensuing years and the fiery controversy over whether or not repressed memories are real. There was no scientific evidence to back up Ellen Bass's and Laura Davis's claims at the time they made them and the research before and subsequently shows that repressed memory syndrome essentially doesn't exist and that in fact the process of therapy that repressed memory therapists undergo, if anything, creates false memories of the alleged abuse, thereby victimizing their clients and those who are falsely accused of having abused them.

E: The whole concept of repressed memories actually originated with [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud Sigmund Freud] in an essay from 1896 called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud's_seduction_theory#Freud.E2.80.99s_seduction_theory On the Aetiology of Hysteria]. Freud more or less stated that the whole issue about repressed memories during the clinical cases that he oversaw in the late 19th century inspired him to develop his psychological theories about the nature of unconscious mental processes. When Freud preformed those case studies on women who were victims of sexual abuse, he had concluded that when people experience trauma, a mechanism in the brain unconsciously represses this trauma from our awareness as a way for us to protect ourselves from those haunting experiences. He used the term repression to describe the way the emotionally painful events would be blocked out of our consciousness. Freud wound up abandoning this theory actually not long after he had first suggested it and in the early 20th century he replaced it with his concept of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego ego, superego and id].

B: There are therapies that are claimed to be tailored to specifically recover repressed memories as Steve alluded to earlier. This therapy is called, you guessed it, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered_memory_therapy Recovered Memory Therapy]. This term is not however recognized by the DSM, which is the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] which is pretty much the standard in the field and nor is the term used by mainstream psychotherapists. There are many techniques that can be used during this therapy including hypnosis, visualization, group therapy, even trance writing. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnosis Hypnosis] is one of the more common techniques that you may have heard of. Hypnosis is problematic because of suggestion and leading questions and confabulation that can happen so often when people are hypnotized, which can actually cause false memories that are all but indistinguishable from real memories. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_therapy Group therapy] can evolve quickly into an environment in which the creation and support of false memories are reinforced. Visualizations or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_imagery guided imagery] can also be used and they will often start with a real childhood memory, which is then distorted and added to causing the patient to believe horrendous things with no external corroboration. And the final one that I'm going to cover is this trance or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing automatic writing] which I hadn't been familiar with. This is actually used sometimes to supposedly recover these false memories. It generally involves writing quickly without conscious thought at all. So the idea is that the unconscious mind - the real inner you - is kind of like taking over, which can pull up these memories that you don't have conscious access to. Some people even believe that a spirit guide is actually guiding your hand, helping you get in touch with these memories that you've somehow lost. But of course I'm not surprised that there's no evidence at all that this technique has any therapeutic value at all.

R: There are a few famous, or semi-famous I guess, researchers who look into the idea of repressed memory and have become skeptics of it. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Pope Harrison Pope] and James Hudson are Harvard University psychiatrists and they published papers in the past claiming that there's no evidence for the idea of repressed memory. And in 2006 as a way to sort of prove their conclusions they held a contest in which they asked people to suggest any mention of repressed memory that occurred prior to 1800. Their point being that if it were a real phenomenon then it would have effected people prior to that date. And they claimed that of the hundred responses they received none of them qualified and therefore they proved their point. This was contested by Ross Cheit who is a political scientist at Brown University [who has [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory#Legal_issues won lawsuits] based on his own recovered memories]. He came up with a literary example in the form of a 1786 opera called Nina that apparently referenced repressed memory. The Harvard researchers admitted that he was correct and they gave him the $1000 prize they'd been offering. However they didn't issue any kind of formal retraction of their original article.

J: The repressed memory notion has even led to significant lawsuits. After the idea of recovered memories became popular, many people began suing those who supposedly were accused to abuse them. In the late 1990s the idea of recovered memories became discredited and was seen to be actually implanted false memories. People began to start suing their psychologists and psychiatrists for implanting those memories and breaking up their families and causing them all sorts of other problems in their lives. A significant shift happened where people were originally suing people that were supposedly abusing them and then it quickly shifted over to people suing those who actually implanted the false memories.

So there's three reasons why a recovered memory lawsuit is difficult to win today, which is very different than in the '80s. That is, first of all, the field of recovered memory therapy has been extremely discredited within the psychological community. So it's difficult to find a credible therapist to argue for its validity. Many people know that recovered memory therapy is actually implanted false memories so most juries won't believe it even if they do hear it and even when these cases are presented to them. And finally there's little evidence in a trial that comes down to whose memory is more accurate. So without physical evidence or witnesses there isn't much of a case and just on false memories alone people cannot win court cases anymore.

S: This entire episode has a lot of lessons in it. Bass and Davis were actually not experts in the field, they were not experts in memory or in therapy. They published the book to the public making the case for a very controversial notion without first passing their ideas through peer review, through the usual mechanisms of evaluating those ideas. Specifically they weren't tested in any way systematically with scientific evidence. So they essentially bypassed the scientific method which is supposed to be there as a filter for ideas, you know most new ideas like this are in fact wrong. So they did create a lot of harm by bypassing science and going straight to the public. It also reveals the notion that if you try to come up with the one answer for a wide variety of complex and different problems, then you're likely to again come up with a similar situation where you are proposing essentially a false answer. In medicine we call that problem "if your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail to you," so essentially what they were saying was that all of these diverse mental health issues are really at their root all repressed memories of sexual abuse in childhood.

Also many people have likened the repressed memory syndrome accusation as a modern day [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt witch hunt], and the book The Courage to Heal as being the equivalent of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum Malleus Maleficarum]. In essence what Bass and Davis were saying is that there can be this past event of abuse even in the absence of any evidence, even with the absence of a memory of the event itself. Essentially that is a witch hunt where using spectral evidence, repressed memories and using [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading special pleading] to explain away the complete and utter absence of any corroborating evidence. They also grossly underestimated the degree to which memory is malleable and subjective, the fact that it's so easy in fact to implant false memories, and the notion that when you end the effective confirmation bias, essentially they felt because you assume that, for example, somebody that comes in with depression had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, that if you start to dig for those memories that you would find them. They then assumed that because they found those repressed memories that confirmed their hypothesis when in fact they completely ignored the possibility that they were just manufacturing those memories. So they ignored a lot of basic scientific and medical protocols and completely ignored everything that we had learned up to that point about human memory and human psychology and launched into what turned out in retrospect to be a modern day witch hunt. These are lessons that are important to learn otherwise these types of episodes will just be repeated again.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 categories
|Neuroscience & Psychology = y
|Science & Medicine = y
}}

5X5 Episode 9

2012-10-16T00:55:26Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 9 
|Contents = Emmy Winning Actress and 9-11
|episodeDate = 2nd March 2008 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|evan = y 
|guest1 = ML: Mike Lacelle
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-03-02.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=9
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,8980.msg194205.html#msg194205
|}}
==Emmy Winning Actress and 9-11== 
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5, Mike Lacelle is sitting in for Jay Novella tonight. Tonight’s issue is actress [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Cotillard Marion Cotillard], who has recently won the Oscar for best actress, for her portrayal of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89dith_Piaf Édith Piaf] in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vie_en_rose_%28film%29 La Vie en rose], stunned Hollywood by saying something stupid.

R: Oh my god!

S: (laughter) This has never happened before. We were shocked!

R: Never! Not since [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Nelson Willie Nelson].

S: She has essentially endorsed 9-11 conspiracy theories by calling into question the collapse of the World Trade Center. She said, and I quote, "We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes, are they burned? There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burned for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there, in New York, in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed." Well, there you go!

E: How can you argue with that?

S: That’s right.

R: It’s brilliant. Clearly she’s an expert on the case. Case dismissed.

E: She went, she went to the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_O%27Donnell Rosie O'Donnell] school of engineering, all about buildings.

R: Okay, there’s so many problems with what she said. I’d say there’s at least like one factually incorrect thing in every sentence. First of all, we see other towers the same kind being hit by flames? Where? Go on, name one. Anyone?

S: Of the same kind is the key there. I mean with the same kind of construction as the towers? I don’t think so.

R: Right. Now, she brings up the tower in Spain, which she’s referring to the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_Tower_%28Madrid%29 Windsor building], which was a building that was on fire back in 2005. Completely different building, like not at all like the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center World Trade Center]. It was 32 floors compared to a hundred and some. It was steel reinforced concrete, as opposed to being steel frame. And the steel inside the Windsor building did suffer a complete structural collapse. The only thing that was left was the concrete. She’s an actress though, I mean ... why are we putting stock in what she says? It’s kind of depressing. I’m certainly not saying that ''we’re'' putting stock in it, but it depressed me that this is like, big news. Just shut up and act!

B: It gets worse though. She said that the buildings were "a money-sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring it up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying it." So that’s kind of her take on it, that it was old and outmoded and it would have been expensive to update it, so we just concocted this whole thing. Well, I think that the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloseum Colloseum] in Rome needs re-cabling as well...

(laughter)

B: let’s just fly the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle Space shuttle] in it, and be done with it.

(laughter)

S: Yeah, I don’t think we, we don’t keep buildings for more than 30 years, I mean, come on!

B: Aghh, God!

R: And I’m picturing like that guy from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_%28game%29 Monopoly] with the money bags, like that’s what I’m picturing running away from the World Trade Center: ha-ha-ha suckers! Money everywhere!

S: Now, to put things into a little bit of perspective, she also called into question the moon landings.

B: Ah-ha

S: She doesn’t think that America actually landed on the moon.

ML: Her attorney actually recently made a statement saying that her remarks were taken out of context. I watched the interview and, where she makes the comments, and just before she start talking about 9-11 she says, well she says: "''J'ai tendance à être plutôt souvent de l'avis de la théorie du complot''" which is her admitting that she has a tendency to accept conspiracy theories. So you know, it’s pretty hard to take a statement like that out of context.

S: So she placed it into context for us. Thank you!

(laughter)

R: Yeah. Unless she said everything I’m about to say is a complete and utter stupid lie, there’s really no taking it out of context.

S: Right, right. Now I was interested in this because my memory was that one of the first 9-11 conspiracy books was actually written by a French author, and that was the book [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11:_The_Big_Lie ''Horrifying Fraud''] by... that book was by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thierry_Meyssan Thierry Meyssan]. And that was like right in 2002, that was very soon after 9-11. My recollection is that was when… that was the first I heard of the whole 9-11 conspiracy thing. So it really, the 9-11 conspiracy theorists got their start in France. I also found that there was a French politician who is currently a minister in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_Sarkozy President Sarkozy's] government and this is the French Housing Minister [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Boutin Christine Boutin] also said very similar comments about 9-11 and interestingly also called into question the moon landings. Using almost the exact same terms as the actress. So there seems to be... maybe they’re reading the same websites.

E: So what do we have here Steve? Do we have like these people’s brain are hardwired a certain way to just fall in and believe these conspiracy theories whole sale?

S: One can only speculate. We do see people who believe in one conspiracy tending to believe in many conspiracies. There definitely is a mindset at work here.

{{5x5outro}}

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{{5X5 categories
|Conspiracy Theories = y
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5X5 Episode 8

2012-10-14T19:27:42Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 8 
|Contents = Crytozoology - Hunting for the Thunderbird
|episodeDate = 25th February 2008 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|evan = y 
|guest1 = ML: Mike Lacelle
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-02-25.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=8
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,8801.msg189815.html#msg189815
|}}
== Crytozoology - Hunting for the Thunderbird == 
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5, 5 minutes with 5 skeptics. This week, Mike Lacelle is seating in for Jay Novella. And this week’s topic is a close encounter with a "thunder bird". This is an article written this week by Stan Gordon from Paranormal News. Stan Gordon was writing about the recent alleged sighting of a thunder bird in West Virginia. According to the witness he saw a bird with a wing span of over 20 feet.

R: That’ a big bird.

E: You’re a bird watcher Steve, correct?

S: Yes, I am.

E: And do you know, are you aware of any birds that have wing span of approximately 20 feet?

S: Well, I’ll tell you Evan. The largest bird is the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andean_condor Andean Condor]. Largest flying bird I should say. And that has a wing span of just over about 10 feet. The [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandering_albatross Wandering Albatross] is also has a similar wing span of over 10 feet, maybe up to 12 feet. The condors are a little bit heavier, the Wandering Albatross has a little bit bigger wing span. So those are the two largest flying birds and they’re about half the size of what the witness describes seeing. Also neither bird lives in the East Coast of the United States, in the West Virginia area, or in the Pennsylvania area where a lot of alleged sighting have been made. Occasionally, birds are spotted well outside of their natural range. When that is the case they are called ''accidentals''. So it would not be impossible or even that unusual for a condor, for example, to be accidentally found on the Eastern Coast of the United States.

R: And let’s remember that we’re hearing this report second, well, third hand. It’s Stan, this guy Stan Gordon he has his own UFO sighting website basically, so he’s really into this stuff. And he’s just reporting on this unnamed witness who may have seen something back in October of 2007. So when you have a story that’s been, you know, passed along through multiple people, it’s very easy to see how it might get exaggerated. So it’s not totally out of consideration that it could be going from 10 foot wingspan to a 20 foot wingspan.

ML: Yeah, and that’s the problem with this type of claims, the cryptozoological claims, their main evidence is usually just, you know, like eyewitness accounts, and I think we all know how reliable those could be.

S: Right.

R: Right. And the article even says that the guy had a cell phone camera next to him and just didn’t think to use it.

B: Agh jeez! Also, the classic problem with this cryptozoological creatures is the amount of specimens you would need for a viable community of these animals. You know, unless, unless you’re saying that this is the last one. How does a community of birds with 20 foot wingspans just kind of escape notice? You know, It’d be like, Bigfoot, it makes Bigfoot seem like, you know, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_Waldo where’s waldo].

R: Yeah. It’s like Bigfoot living out on the prairie.

E: Well, plus, plus how does this person really know this wingspan was 21 feet, you know

S: Ah-hmm

E: ...UFO sighting, they always get the distances and measurements wrong. Things that appear to be close up and, moving fast, are really, you know, very far away objects, so… who knows?

S: Well, he did say that it was on the ground and that he used the road as a guide. So it's wingspan was as wide as the road, which they later measured as 20 feet. But still either the story is exaggerated or that sighting was simply an error, for whatever reason. Because the angle of that was viewed at, or whatever. Certainly as Bob said, that's a much more likely explanation than there’s a hidden population of birds with 20 foot wingspans that is somehow escaping notice. I mean, it’s one thing, this does remind me a little bit of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivory-billed_Woodpecker Ivory-billed Woodpecker] which was thought to be extinct for about 80 years, but then recently a couple of individuals thought that they might have seen one, and there’s in fact a video of this bird although... it’s probably just a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pileated_Woodpecker Pileated Woodpecker], the video, so far it has not been authenticated as an actual Ivory-billed Woodpecker. But here we’re talking about a, you know, a specimen that’s relatively small although, you know, it’s actually large for a woodpecker, it’s actually, you know, it’s a small bird, and living deep in the swamps. Yeah, okay, that could es- a swamp population of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers could escape notice. Not a population of 20 foot enormous birds. Okay, so we’ll file this one under another implausible claim of the cryptozoologists.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 Navigation}}
{{5X5 categories
|Cryptozoology = y
}}

5X5 Episode 97

2012-10-14T19:25:56Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{5X5 editing required
|categories = y
|redirect = y 
|}}
{{Template:5X5 infobox
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 97 
|Contents = Repressed Memories 
|episodeDate = 11th April 2012 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52010-12-20.mp3 
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=97
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,32509.0.html 
|}}
== Repressed Memories == 
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5X5 and tonight we're talking about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory Repressed Memory Syndrome], or as some call it, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome False Memory Syndrome].

R: Wait, I don't remember agreeing to this.

(Pained laughter from all.)

S: This is a controversy that started mainly in 1988 with the publication of the book [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_courage_to_heal The Courage to Heal] by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. The book alleges that as much as 45% of women were sexually abused as children but that most women have repressed this memory and it is now manifesting later in their life with psychological problems such as eating disorders, anxiety or depression. They therefore recommend pursuing the possibility of repressed memories of sexual abuse or other abuse in patients, especially women who present to therapists with these other problems. This has led to an explosion of such diagnoses by so-called repressed memory therapists over the ensuing years and the fiery controversy over whether or not repressed memories are real. There was no scientific evidence to back up Ellen Bass's and Laura Davis's claims at the time they made them and the research before and subsequently shows that repressed memory syndrome essentially doesn't exist and that in fact the process of therapy that repressed memory therapists undergo, if anything, creates false memories of the alleged abuse, thereby victimizing their clients and those who are falsely accused of having abused them.

E: The whole concept of repressed memories actually originated with [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud Sigmund Freud] in an essay from 1896 called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud's_seduction_theory#Freud.E2.80.99s_seduction_theory On the Aetiology of Hysteria]. Freud more or less stated that the whole issue about repressed memories during the clinical cases that he oversaw in the late 19th century inspired him to develop his psychological theories about the nature of unconscious mental processes. When Freud preformed those case studies on women who were victims of sexual abuse, he had concluded that when people experience trauma, a mechanism in the brain unconsciously represses this trauma from our awareness as a way for us to protect ourselves from those haunting experiences. He used the term repression to describe the way the emotionally painful events would be blocked out of our consciousness. Freud wound up abandoning this theory actually not long after he had first suggested it and in the early 20th century he replaced it with his concept of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego ego, superego and id].

B: There are therapies that are claimed to be tailored to specifically recover repressed memories as Steve alluded to earlier. This therapy is called, you guessed it, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered_memory_therapy Recovered Memory Therapy]. This term is not however recognized by the DSM, which is the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] which is pretty much the standard in the field and nor is the term used by mainstream psychotherapists. There are many techniques that can be used during this therapy including hypnosis, visualization, group therapy, even trance writing. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnosis Hypnosis] is one of the more common techniques that you may have heard of. Hypnosis is problematic because of suggestion and leading questions and confabulation that can happen so often when people are hypnotized, which can actually cause false memories that are all but indistinguishable from real memories. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_therapy Group therapy] can evolve quickly into an environment in which the creation and support of false memories are reinforced. Visualizations or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_imagery guided imagery] can also be used and they will often start with a real childhood memory, which is then distorted and added to causing the patient to believe horrendous things with no external corroboration. And the final one that I'm going to cover is this trance or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing automatic writing] which I hadn't been familiar with. This is actually used sometimes to supposedly recover these false memories. It generally involves writing quickly without conscious thought at all. So the idea is that the unconscious mind - the real inner you - is kind of like taking over, which can pull up these memories that you don't have conscious access to. Some people even believe that a spirit guide is actually guiding your hand, helping you get in touch with these memories that you've somehow lost. But of course I'm not surprised that there's no evidence at all that this technique has any therapeutic value at all.

R: There are a few famous, or semi-famous I guess, researchers who look into the idea of repressed memory and have become skeptics of it. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Pope Harrison Pope] and James Hudson are Harvard University psychiatrists and they published papers in the past claiming that there's no evidence for the idea of repressed memory. And in 2006 as a way to sort of prove their conclusions they held a contest in which they asked people to suggest any mention of repressed memory that occurred prior to 1800. Their point being that if it were a real phenomenon then it would have effected people prior to that date. And they claimed that of the hundred responses they received none of them qualified and therefore they proved their point. This was contested by Ross Cheit who is a political scientist at Brown University [who has [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory#Legal_issues won lawsuits] based on his own recovered memories]. He came up with a literary example in the form of a 1786 opera called Nina that apparently referenced repressed memory. The Harvard researchers admitted that he was correct and they gave him the $1000 prize they'd been offering. However they didn't issue any kind of formal retraction of their original article.

J: The repressed memory notion has even led to significant lawsuits. After the idea of recovered memories became popular, many people began suing those who supposedly were accused to abuse them. In the late 1990s the idea of recovered memories became discredited and was seen to be actually implanted false memories. People began to start suing their psychologists and psychiatrists for implanting those memories and breaking up their families and causing them all sorts of other problems in their lives. A significant shift happened where people were originally suing people that were supposedly abusing them and then it quickly shifted over to people suing those who actually implanted the false memories.

So there's three reasons why a recovered memory lawsuit is difficult to win today, which is very different than in the '80s. That is, first of all, the field of recovered memory therapy has been extremely discredited within the psychological community. So it's difficult to find a credible therapist to argue for its validity. Many people know that recovered memory therapy is actually implanted false memories so most juries won't believe it even if they do hear it and even when these cases are presented to them. And finally there's little evidence in a trial that comes down to whose memory is more accurate. So without physical evidence or witnesses there isn't much of a case and just on false memories alone people cannot win court cases anymore.

S: This entire episode has a lot of lessons in it. Bass and Davis were actually not experts in the field, they were not experts in memory or in therapy. They published the book to the public making the case for a very controversial notion without first passing their ideas through peer review, through the usual mechanisms of evaluating those ideas. Specifically they weren't tested in any way systematically with scientific evidence. So they essentially bypassed the scientific method which is supposed to be there as a filter for ideas, you know most new ideas like this are in fact wrong. So they did create a lot of harm by bypassing science and going straight to the public. It also reveals the notion that if you try to come up with the one answer for a wide variety of complex and different problems, then you're likely to again come up with a similar situation where you are proposing essentially a false answer. In medicine we call that problem "if your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail to you," so essentially what they were saying was that all of these diverse mental health issues are really at their root all repressed memories of sexual abuse in childhood.

Also many people have likened the repressed memory syndrome accusation as a modern day [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt witch hunt], and the book The Courage to Heal as being the equivalent of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum Malleus Maleficarum]. In essence what Bass and Davis were saying is that there can be this past event of abuse even in the absence of any evidence, even with the absence of a memory of the event itself. Essentially that is a witch hunt where using spectral evidence, repressed memories and using [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading special pleading] to explain away the complete and utter absence of any corroborating evidence. They also grossly underestimated the degree to which memory is malleable and subjective, the fact that it's so easy in fact to implant false memories, and the notion that when you end the effective confirmation bias, essentially they felt because you assume that, for example, somebody that comes in with depression had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, that if you start to dig for those memories that you would find them. They then assumed that because they found those repressed memories that confirmed their hypothesis when in fact they completely ignored the possibility that they were just manufacturing those memories. So they ignored a lot of basic scientific and medical protocols and completely ignored everything that we had learned up to that point about human memory and human psychology and launched into what turned out in retrospect to be a modern day witch hunt. These are lessons that are important to learn otherwise these types of episodes will just be repeated again.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 Navigation}}

5X5 Episode 111

2012-10-14T19:18:09Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{5X5 infobox
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 111
|Contents = Facilitated Communication
|episodeDate = 25 April 2012
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52012-04-25.mp3
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|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=41519.0
|}}
== Facilitated Communication ==
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5 and tonight we're talking about facilitated communication. This is a technique in which a facilitator physically helps a client to communicate. Either by holding their arm while they point at letters on a letter board or type on a keyboard, or perhaps point to pictures on a picture board. This technique has actually been quite controversial since its inception in the late 1970s in Australia, when [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Crossley Rosemary Crossley], a teacher at St. Nicholas Hospital, used this technique to communicate with children who were diagnosed with cerebral palsy. The technique was later introduced in the United States, mainly through Syracuse University and a practitioner, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Biklen Douglas Biklen]. And here is where the use of the technique became very problematic, because Biklen claimed that he was able to use this technique in order to communicate with children who had cognitive impairment and were uncommunicative or nonverbal, such as for example severely autistic children. The controversy stems from the question of whether or not the client or the child is the actual author of the communication or if it's the facilitator themselves. The technique became extremely popular among speech and language therapists and was widely used until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when scientific research demonstrated that, in most cases, the facilitator is the one doing the actual communication, not the client.

R: So, it's important to differentiate between facilitated communication that we're going to be talking about on this show, and facilitators who aid people in communicating, people who have severe physical limitations, but who are not necessarily severely ''cognitively'' impaired, that can be people with [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyotrophic_lateral_sclerosis ALS], cerebral palsy, locked-in syndrome, things like that. These people are perfectly intelligent, however are unable to communicate their thoughts due to their physical limitations, and often times they will require assistance to aid in their communication. There's a huge difference though between the people who are helping the physically impaired and those who are claiming to help those who are cognitively impaired.

B: Few would argue that the most likely explanation for facilitated communication is either outright fraud or the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_phenomenon ideomotor effect]. The ideomotor effect is the psychological phenomenon in which motor actions unconsciously follow one's expectations. Your body then can make non-reflexive movements without your explicit awareness that you're actually directing those movements. Many apparent paranormal phenomena are in fact the result of this effect, the most iconic of course being ouija boards and dowsing. With facilitated communication then, when a facilitator is supporting the hand or arm of the person they're trying to help communicate, they're unconsciously moving the hand to the desired locations. This does not mean that the ideomotor effect or conscious deception explains away all of facilitated communication, it only means that there are other, more realistic and mundane explanations for the claims of facilitated communication proponents, and that these possibilities need to be accounted for in any experimental design so that they can be ruled out. If they're not accounted for, then any experimental results are essentially worthless. In fact, once experiments testing facilitated communication are properly controlled for in this way, it invariably turns out that the facilitator all along was the author of the words, and no-one else.

S: Yeah, it's actually easy, if you properly design the study, to tell who is communicating. You simply give information only to the client, and then you ask a question of the client and see if the facilitator can produce that information. Also, there are many cases in which just observing the process of performing the facilitated communication makes it obvious ''who'' is doing the communicating. For example, in some cases, the client was not even looking at the keyboard or the letter board, and was apparently typing with one finger. That is simply an impossibility, nobody can single-finger type on a keyboard accurately. And yet the facilitator was intently looking at the keyboard, because, as you said, Bob, they were subconsciously, or unconsciously, directing their client's hand to the letters, and the communication was subconscious, rather than from their client.

E: Steve, you spoke earlier about the Australia case, but the United States has also seen its fair share of these cases as well that have gone through the court system. In 1992, the first court decisions in the United States involving allegations of sexual abuse, purportedly made via facilitated communication, did take place. Two New York judges made independent rulings that allegations made by facilitated communication could not be considered as evidence, ''because'' the validity of facilitated communication had not been established. In the first case, which was in Ulster County, there was a 16-year old autistic girl with no speech, and had allegedly accused her father – and her grandfathers – of sexual molestation, using facilitated communication, and both parents faced criminal charges. The father for the molestation, and the mother, for not reporting the father, and the case was before the court for over 10 months. Now, there was a slight problem with this case, in that the grandfathers had been dead many years, and the facilitator never bothered to ask about them. And there was otherwise no other physical evidence – or ''any'' kind of evidence – to support the allegations, so the judge threw it out, and basically said that the facilitated communicator lacked the credibility required to press any charges against the accused. One day later, there was another decision that came down, this time in Onondaga County, in which there was a 10-year-old Down syndrome girl said to have used facilitated communication to accuse her father of sexual molestation. And although this girl had some capacity to speak, the allegations were purportedly made only through the facilitator, and never through speech. The father was forced to move out of the family home, and faced a jail sentence if the allegations were found to be true. But again, there was no physical evidence of abuse, and the case was struck down.

S: Unfortunately, those are not isolated incidents, and despite the fact that facilitated communication has been ''utterly'' discredited scientifically, it is still in vogue – even to this day – for courtroom testimony.

J: And unfortunately, Steve, like so many other forms of pseudoscience, the web is a breeding ground for this kind of stuff, and it's alive and well there. I've found Universities that teach it, I've found many, many books about it, or ''teaching'' how to do it, forums, blogs, and of course websites. And like so many sources of information we find on the web, the problem is: trying to figure out what information is trustworthy, and what information is either made up, or is following the idea of facilitated communication with people who really aren't there.

S: Yeah, I mean facilitated communication really is a cruel hoax, even though it may be an inadvertent one. The facilitator is just as deceived as those that they are apparently communicating with. But, as with many things like this, science has given us the answer. You simply control for variables, and we can clearly demonstrate where the information is coming from. And in most cases, it's the facilitator. Also, many claims based upon facilitated communication are simply too extraordinary to believe. Proponents would have you believe that children who give every indication of being severely cognitively impaired, were not only of normal intelligence, but were able to learn how to read, sometimes many years ahead of their grade level, without ever actually being taught to read, they just absorbed it from their environment, and they went from never communicating, to communicating in very eloquent prose. Again, really defying common sense, although unfortunately fulfilling the desires of the therapists, and the parents, in many cases. So really there are many victims from facilitated communication. And it is shocking to me that, despite the fact that it's been so scientifically discredited, that it still persists, although it has been marginalized. It really is a shame that it has not been completely eradicated. And modern proponents really have no excuse, such as Syracuse University, that continues to promote it. They really have no excuse. The scientific data is absolutely there, and it is stubbornly clinging to pseudoscience that keeps it alive today.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 Navigation}}

{{5X5 categories
|Myths & Misconceptions = y
|Pseudoscience = y
}}

5X5 Episode 97

2012-10-14T19:02:35Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
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|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 97 
|Contents = Repressed Memories 
|episodeDate = 11th April 2012 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52010-12-20.mp3 
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=97
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,32509.0.html 
|}}
== Repressed Memories == 
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5X5 and tonight we're talking about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory Repressed Memory Syndrome], or as some call it, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome False Memory Syndrome].

R: Wait, I don't remember agreeing to this.

(Pained laughter from all.)

S: This is a controversy that started mainly in 1988 with the publication of the book [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_courage_to_heal The Courage to Heal] by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. The book alleges that as much as 45% of women were sexually abused as children but that most women have repressed this memory and it is now manifesting later in their life with psychological problems such as eating disorders, anxiety or depression. They therefore recommend pursuing the possibility of repressed memories of sexual abuse or other abuse in patients, especially women who present to therapists with these other problems. This has led to an explosion of such diagnoses by so-called repressed memory therapists over the ensuing years and the fiery controversy over whether or not repressed memories are real. There was no scientific evidence to back up Ellen Bass's and Laura Davis's claims at the time they made them and the research before and subsequently shows that repressed memory syndrome essentially doesn't exist and that in fact the process of therapy that repressed memory therapists undergo, if anything, creates false memories of the alleged abuse, thereby victimizing their clients and those who are falsely accused of having abused them.

E: The whole concept of repressed memories actually originated with [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud Sigmund Freud] in an essay from 1896 called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud's_seduction_theory#Freud.E2.80.99s_seduction_theory On the Aetiology of Hysteria]. Freud more or less stated that the whole issue about repressed memories during the clinical cases that he oversaw in the late 19th century inspired him to develop his psychological theories about the nature of unconscious mental processes. When Freud preformed those case studies on women who were victims of sexual abuse, he had concluded that when people experience trauma, a mechanism in the brain unconsciously represses this trauma from our awareness as a way for us to protect ourselves from those haunting experiences. He used the term repression to describe the way the emotionally painful events would be blocked out of our consciousness. Freud wound up abandoning this theory actually not long after he had first suggested it and in the early 20th century he replaced it with his concept of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego ego, superego and id].

B: There are therapies that are claimed to be tailored to specifically recover repressed memories as Steve alluded to earlier. This therapy is called, you guessed it, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered_memory_therapy Recovered Memory Therapy]. This term is not however recognized by the DSM, which is the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] which is pretty much the standard in the field and nor is the term used by mainstream psychotherapists. There are many techniques that can be used during this therapy including hypnosis, visualization, group therapy, even trance writing. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnosis Hypnosis] is one of the more common techniques that you may have heard of. Hypnosis is problematic because of suggestion and leading questions and confabulation that can happen so often when people are hypnotized, which can actually cause false memories that are all but indistinguishable from real memories. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_therapy Group therapy] can evolve quickly into an environment in which the creation and support of false memories are reinforced. Visualizations or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_imagery guided imagery] can also be used and they will often start with a real childhood memory, which is then distorted and added to causing the patient to believe horrendous things with no external corroboration. And the final one that I'm going to cover is this trance or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing automatic writing] which I hadn't been familiar with. This is actually used sometimes to supposedly recover these false memories. It generally involves writing quickly without conscious thought at all. So the idea is that the unconscious mind - the real inner you - is kind of like taking over, which can pull up these memories that you don't have conscious access to. Some people even believe that a spirit guide is actually guiding your hand, helping you get in touch with these memories that you've somehow lost. But of course I'm not surprised that there's no evidence at all that this technique has any therapeutic value at all.

R: There are a few famous, or semi-famous I guess, researchers who look into the idea of repressed memory and have become skeptics of it. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Pope Harrison Pope] and James Hudson are Harvard University psychiatrists and they published papers in the past claiming that there's no evidence for the idea of repressed memory. And in 2006 as a way to sort of prove their conclusions they held a contest in which they asked people to suggest any mention of repressed memory that occurred prior to 1800. Their point being that if it were a real phenomenon then it would have effected people prior to that date. And they claimed that of the hundred responses they received none of them qualified and therefore they proved their point. This was contested by Ross Cheit who is a political scientist at Brown University [who has [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory#Legal_issues won lawsuits] based on his own recovered memories]. He came up with a literary example in the form of a 1786 opera called Nina that apparently referenced repressed memory. The Harvard researchers admitted that he was correct and they gave him the $1000 prize they'd been offering. However they didn't issue any kind of formal retraction of their original article.

J: The repressed memory notion has even led to significant lawsuits. After the idea of recovered memories became popular, many people began suing those who supposedly were accused to abuse them. In the late 1990s the idea of recovered memories became discredited and was seen to be actually implanted false memories. People began to start suing their psychologists and psychiatrists for implanting those memories and breaking up their families and causing them all sorts of other problems in their lives. A significant shift happened where people were originally suing people that were supposedly abusing them and then it quickly shifted over to people suing those who actually implanted the false memories.

So there's three reasons why a recovered memory lawsuit is difficult to win today, which is very different than in the '80s. That is, first of all, the field of recovered memory therapy has been extremely discredited within the psychological community. So it's difficult to find a credible therapist to argue for its validity. Many people know that recovered memory therapy is actually implanted false memories so most juries won't believe it even if they do hear it and even when these cases are presented to them. And finally there's little evidence in a trial that comes down to whose memory is more accurate. So without physical evidence or witnesses there isn't much of a case and just on false memories alone people cannot win court cases anymore.

S: This entire episode has a lot of lessons in it. Bass and Davis were actually not experts in the field, they were not experts in memory or in therapy. They published the book to the public making the case for a very controversial notion without first passing their ideas through peer review, through the usual mechanisms of evaluating those ideas. Specifically they weren't tested in any way systematically with scientific evidence. So they essentially bypassed the scientific method which is supposed to be there as a filter for ideas, you know most new ideas like this are in fact wrong. So they did create a lot of harm by bypassing science and going straight to the public. It also reveals the notion that if you try to come up with the one answer for a wide variety of complex and different problems, then you're likely to again come up with a similar situation where you are proposing essentially a false answer. In medicine we call that problem "if your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail to you," so essentially what they were saying was that all of these diverse mental health issues are really at their root all repressed memories of sexual abuse in childhood.

Also many people have likened the repressed memory syndrome accusation as a modern day [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt witch hunt], and the book The Courage to Heal as being the equivalent of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum Malleus Maleficarum]. In essence what Bass and Davis were saying is that there can be this past event of abuse even in the absence of any evidence, even with the absence of a memory of the event itself. Essentially that is a witch hunt where using spectral evidence, repressed memories and using [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading special pleading] to explain away the complete and utter absence of any corroborating evidence. They also grossly underestimated the degree to which memory is malleable and subjective, the fact that it's so easy in fact to implant false memories, and the notion that when you end the effective confirmation bias, essentially they felt because you assume that, for example, somebody that comes in with depression had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, that if you start to dig for those memories that you would find them. They then assumed that because they found those repressed memories that confirmed their hypothesis when in fact they completely ignored the possibility that they were just manufacturing those memories. So they ignored a lot of basic scientific and medical protocols and completely ignored everything that we had learned up to that point about human memory and human psychology and launched into what turned out in retrospect to be a modern day witch hunt. These are lessons that are important to learn otherwise these types of episodes will just be repeated again.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 Navigation}}

5X5 Episode 53

2012-10-14T18:47:09Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
|verified = y
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 53
|Contents = Anecdotal Evidence
|episodeDate = 13th January 2009
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52009-01-13.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=53
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com//index.php/topic,17415.0.html
|}}

== Anecdotal Evidence ==
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide 5x5, five minutes with five skeptics, with Steve, Jay, Rebecca, Bob and Evan.

J: You may have heard this one from your friend, your neighbor, but I know a guy, who knew another guy who saw something that makes me ''very'' scared. Oh, it was on a Friday the 13th and suddenly, all of a sudden a scary ghost that crept up on him and threw hot goo all over my shoes, and then suddenly...

S: This is the SGU 5X5, and tonight we're talking about anecdotes. What are they? What are they good for? Anecdotes are basically stories. They are stories told by a person, or persons, without any documentation, without any careful observation. They are in fact defined as a casual observation that is simply reported. They are a favorite staple of belief in all kinds of unscientific ideas and dubious medical remedies, and other things that do not have solid scientific evidence to support them.

R: Remember that the plural of anecdote is not "evidence". Meaning that just because you have a lot of friends that say that "oh, homeopathy works", it doesn't necessarily ''mean'' it works.

B: And one of the reasons for that, is that anecdotal evidence is kind of a catch-all for many logical fallacies, including [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias conformation bias], incorrect cause and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc 'post-hoc ergo propter hoc'].

S: As well as memory fallacies. The fact that they're not carefully documented means that we're now relying upon somebody's memory. Which is likely to change over time, and in fact it's likely to change specifically in a way to give the story more meaning, while sacrificing factual accuracy.

B: It would be very common for a friend to tell you an anecdote about somebody that they know, and you have a relationship with that person where you trust them, or you've known them for a while, and it's very easy to believe a story that someone tells you, especially a compelling story, about someone that they know, and it lends credence to whatever it is that they're explaining to you. But unfortunately most of these stories are not accurate or based on anything real.

S: Right, as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer Michael Shermer] is fond of saying, "humans are a story-telling animal, we find stories very compelling, even though we shouldn't".

E: Anecdotes and testimonials are found quite often when people are discussing topics of medicine or medical care, and it's almost a red flag, in a sense. If you're coming across something that you're not quite certain about, and somebody is not presenting you with any real scientific evidence but instead they have a lot of anecdotes and testimonials to offer, your red flag should go off, and you should be very cautious about the claims.

R: Anecdotes can actually be the ''start'' of a good scientific process. Anecdotes are how we recognize that maybe there's something going on, so if you get a lot of anecdotes that say homeopathy works, then that means that the next step is testing it scientifically so that you can strip away all of the fallacies, all the problems that Bob alluded to earlier, and then see if there's actually something there. And I find that that's often a good way to deal with people who present anecdotes as evidence of things. Often those are kind of difficult to combat because they say "oh, but this happened to me, you can't prove that wrong, this worked for me". I think a nice way of getting around that is to suggest, well, let's start there and now let's explore it further.

S: Rebecca, you're absolutely right, and I do that as well, I say that an anecdote is a way to generate a hypothesis, but it's not a way to ''test'' a hypothesis, because it's such low quality evidence and it is subject to so many biases and fallacies. But sure, people have experiences, and a lot of remedies and scientific discoveries have been made by people just experiencing something. But of course for everyone that pans out, and turns out to be true, there's many many hundreds or whatever, that turn out ''not'' to be true, to be misleading. How do we know the difference? Well, by doing the rigorous scientific evidence, controlling for all the things that make anecdotal evidence unreliable and weak.

J: And you know, Steve, even after you've done rigorous research that has a scientific standard applied to it, even ''then'' you can't even trust all the data, there's analyzing of that data. You know, taking anecdotal evidence as worthwhile is very dangerous.

S: I also like to quote [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Beyerstein Barry Beyerstein], who said something that I think is absolutely correct. He said that anecdotal evidence leads one to conclusions that they wish to be true, not to conclusions that actually are true.

S: SGU 5x5 is a companion podcast to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, a weekly science podcast brought to you by the New England Skeptical Society in association with [http://skepchick.org skepchick.org]. For more information on this and other episodes, visit our website at [http://www.theskepticsguide.org www.theskepticsguide.org]. Music is provided by Jake Wilson.

{{5X5 Navigation}}

{{5X5 categories
|General Science = y
|Logic & Philosophy = y
|Myths & Misconceptions = y
}}

5X5 Episode 52

2012-10-14T18:22:34Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
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|Contents = Atlantis
|episodeDate = 6th January 2009
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|jay = y
|evan = y
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== Atlantis ==
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide 5x5, five minutes with five skeptics, with Steve, Jay, Rebecca, Bob and Evan.

S: This is the SGU five by five, and tonight we're talking about the mythical continent, or island, of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis Atlantis]. Belief in Atlantis as an actual place, a historical location, is actually fairly recent. But the story was originated by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato Plato], who discussed it in his [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_(dialogue) Timaeus] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critias_(dialogue) Critias], two of his dialogues. Atlantis, for Plato, was simply a literary device, an evil empire far away and long ago that fought a hypothetical battle against the virtuous and perfect Athenians. And it was simply a device to discuss the nature of the perfect society and virtuous society. It was never intended as a claim that it really existed in history.

R: But that didn't stop crazy people from thinking otherwise.

E: To this day. You have to liken it to, effectively, the story of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_wars Star Wars], which we're all familiar with. Like you said, a small band of rebels going up against the big, galactic empire for the sake of goodness versus evil. It's effectively the same story, and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Feder Kenny Feder] makes that analogy very well in his presentations and he's written a book on the subject as well. It's actually quite a perfect analogy. If you're putting stock in Atlantis, then you have to put also about as much stock in the fact that Star Wars actually happened a long time ago, far away.

B: On that note, Evan, the book by Ken Feder, a very good book, is called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frauds,_Myths,_and_Mysteries:_Science_and_Pseudoscience_in_Archaeology 'Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology'] by Ken Feder, as you said, and another very good skeptical treatment of this topic is called 'Imagining Atlantis' by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ellis_(biologist) Richard Ellis].

S: And Feder makes an excellent point in his book about Atlantis. He said that if Plato were making an historical claim, then there would have been some discussion of that amongst his peers. But none of the scholars of the time took any note of Plato talking about a mythical island and civilization that existed around 8,000 years prior to his time, or 9,000 BCE. You think there would have been some discussion about that, because that was quite a claim for somebody as prominent as Plato to have made. But none of his contemporaries took it that way, they understood it to be what it was.

J: Well actually Steve, there ''is'' no other account of Atlantis that predates Plato.

S: That's correct

J: So every account of Atlantis can only go back to Plato, and nothing was ever found before that. So I think it's safe to assume, not only did he create it, but other people at the time knew that it was a device that he was using, like you said, they didn't even bother getting into it. It was like us talking about an alien planet.

S: Right

E: The other thing that Plato did in order to tell his stories more effectively, he would borrow people or characters from different points in history and bring them together in an imaginary setting and have them discuss certain principles and certain ideas. There used to be a show on PBS called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meeting_of_Minds 'Meeting of minds'] in which, for example, they would have Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill to discuss a single concept. Well, you know, for goodness sake, these people never really got together.

S: Right, they're obviously hypothetical

R: What I find really interesting about Atlantis is that just about any other odd pseudoscience or weird theory usually is able to be connected back to it. A while back we talked about the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramids Bosnian pyramids], which this archeologist in Bosnia claimed to have found these pyramids buried under these gigantic hills. When, in fact, by all accounts it's really just a couple of hills, and this was reported all over the place in major news sources, but few of those sources actually bothered to mention that this archeologist's theory was that the pyramids were built by the people of Atlantis.

(laughter)

B: Kind of like a six degrees of Atlantis

R: Yeah, and it's also, you know, a lot of people talking about UFOs suggest "well, maybe they have something to do with Atlantis", or Atlantis can ''somehow'' be worked in to just about any theory.

S: Right, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Z._Knight J.Z Night] claims to channel the spirit of Ramtha, which she says is a spirit from Atlantis. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Cayce Edgar Cayce] claimed to have psychic knowledge of Atlantian texts and books. The theosophists believed that they had knowledge of Atlantis etc.
So, it is a mythology unto itself now, that has been elaborated over the years, including now ancient civilization, alien civilization, they had nuclear and advanced technology, etc.

J: Steve, would you like to talk to someone from Atlantis right now?

S: Do I have a choice?

J: It's up to you, I do happen to have-

R: (in bubbling gibberish) "No, you don't have a choice, helloo Steeeve"

(laughter)

S: The first serious investigator to actually take Plato's mythology of Atlantis as if it were history, was [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_L._Donnelly Ignatius Donnelly], who wrote the book [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis:_The_Antediluvian_World 'Atlantis, The Antediluvian World'] in 1882. He was not someone who was into every wacky paranormal idea, he likened it to the discovery of Troy, and the mentions of the city of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy Troy] by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer Homer]. It's a false analogy, of course, because it's different types of literature. But he said, thinking that Atlantis were real, that we're going to go out there and find it, and 50 years from now or 100 years from now you're going to walk into an archeological or historical museum and there will be artifacts from Atlantis on display for everyone to see. Of course, that never came to fruition.

J: You'd think, Steve, that before they went on an expedition like that they would do just a tiny bit of research.

S: The research was reading Plato. That was basically it, and taking it as historical fact But it led to nothing, so here we are, 120-something years later, and there's no museums filled with artifacts from Atlantis. But of course true-believers have their excuses: "Well that's because it's moved, it's no longer in the middle of the Atlantic where it was described". In fact, it keeps getting more and more remote, and recently, in fact, some Atlantis believers say that it is now underneath Antarctica. It's frozen under the ice. That's why no-one has found it.

E: That makes perfect sense.

S: And of course there was the recent 2005 Disney movie about Atlantis, where they added the extra little bit that the survivors of Atlantis peopled the new worlds. And they desperately tried to find an archeologist to give any kind of credence to their fairy-tale that they were telling. But for a pseudo-documentary, that was really just a thinly veiled promotional piece for the movie. They even asked Kenny Feder if he would do it, and he said "No, I'm not going to ''pretend'' like we don't know what the score is, there's no serious archeologist that will tell you that there is anything to Atlantis". But they found someone Kenny Feder nor any-one else had ever heard of, some obscure guy to say the 'canned' likes they wanted him to say.
The mythology of Atlantis has taken on a life of it's own, I think it's going to be with us now in popular culture indefinitely. But there is simply zero, nothing, to the notion that it is based, in any way, in reality.

S: SGU 5x5 is a companion podcast to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, a weekly science podcast brought to you by the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Skeptical_Society New England Skeptical Society] in association with [http://skepchick.org skepchick.org]. For more information on this and other episodes, visit our website at [http://www.theskepticsguide.org www.theskepticsguide.org]. Music is provided by Jake Wilson.

{{5X5 Navigation
|previous = 45
}}

{{5X5 categories
|Logic & Philosophy = y
|Myths & Misconceptions = y
}}

5X5 Episode 8

2012-10-14T17:57:38Z

Lion Tamarin:

5X5 Episode 2

2012-10-14T01:53:57Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
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|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 2
|Contents = Ghost Photographs
|episodeDate = 13th January 2008
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52008-01-13.mp3
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|}}

The SGU crew discovers a new form of photographic artifact mistaken for "ghost" photos.

== Ghost Photographs ==

{{5x5intro}}

S: Welcome to the SGU 5X5, five minutes with five skeptics. Today is January 13th 2008. This week we're talking about ghost photographs. Recently, the SGU was challenged with an anomalous photograph, and we did a little investigation. Bob, can you tell us about that?

B: Yeah, I found an email asking us to look at a couple of pictures that this guy Brian took, well, actually his eight-year-old son took them. He said he has no associations with any paranormal circles and doesn't want to be associated with them, so I instantly liked this guy. He sent us the pictures, essentially he gave us two pictures, one, a close-up of Brian's face with a rope-light streaking across the entire photograph, a green light, a little bit squiggly. The second picture was another picture of Brian driving with a somewhat lighter colored, thinner rope-light squiggling around on the driver's side window. So immediately I realized this must have been be some type of long exposure effect that caused this. We each came up with a bunch of different reasons why it probably was a long exposure. One of the crucial ones I came up with, I realized that digital pictures have meta-data that tells you what state the camera was in. So we looked at the meta-data and found that indeed there was a two second exposure on both of these pictures. Which to me was a smoking gun, that was the key element in these pictures, that it was a long exposure, and not just a quick shot, and that was it.

J: And typically, Bob, a lot of these anomalies come out from the flash, and when a flash is present a lot of these weird lighting effects are present.

B: Yeah, a lot of flashback is the cause of a lot of these anomalies, but this one, though, is not flashback, it had to be long-exposure-related, and it was. As a result of the blog though, a lot more details came out, and a lot of people had a lot of great insight that I didn't think of, and I think we pretty much nailed this whole thing due to a lot of the comments.

R: The odd thing about the long exposure is that nothing else in the photo looked blurry when you first look at the photo, right?

S: That's right, that was interesting. But eventually we put it together that this was a mode that some digital cameras have, it's called like a 'twilight' mode, or a 'night-time' mode, where it uses a flash, but then keeps the shutter open in order to expose the dark background, and it creates interesting effects. So if you unwittingly are in this mode, you'll take a flash picture which does keep everything sharp and in focus, and not blurred, and then you get the two-second exposure, and as you move the camera around, you get these streaks of light going around the film, so that creates this sort of two images on top of one another. One un-blurred, and then a blurred light source is whatever's in the view.

R: And the funny thing about it is that I think that when we all saw it was a two second exposure, we all thought "well, why is this guy writing in to us and lying about not staging this photo?". It just didn't make sense at all, 'cause he seemed like a perfectly normal and nice guy. And so, happily, it turns out he's a perfectly normal and nice guy who was not lying to us.

J: The clincher was that Mike actually duplicated the picture, almost identically. It's fantastic what he produced.

E: Now, what do you think, if he brought these pictures to a ghost society, any ghost society, can you imagine the feedback he would've gotten from them?

R: Ghosts

(laughter)

E: Ghosts left and right.

S: Well actually, I looked on, just searched for ghost photos, and of the first few that came up, many of them had these exact types of artifacts presented as ghost photographs.

J: What were they, ghost lights?

S: They presented them as 'streaks', actually, 'streaks' was the term they used.

J: Ghost streaks?

S: And they have all the features, the beading effect, multiple lights that are tracking with each other, so obviously due to movement of the camera itself. So they're just not aware of this artifact, they obviously didn't look too hard, it took us about a day to sort it out. And they're presenting them gullibly as ghost photographs.

E: Maybe we should forward these photographs to Joe Nickell and get his opinion, because if there's anyone's opinion I respect the most when it comes to these things, it would be Joe Nickell.

S: Well we can certainly make him aware of this, but I think we've totally nailed this mystery. I don't think there's anything left to really explain about it.

R: Yeah, I think the important thing is that now we've got it out there that this is a new artifact that's happening, and we're probably going to see a lot more ghost photos like this coming up now that this is out there.

S: Right. So add this to the list of artifacts that idiots mistake as ghosts

(laughter)

B: Right

S: Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you on the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe next week.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 Navigation}}

{{5X5 categories
|Paranormal = y
|Ghosts & Demons = y
}}

5X5 Episode 110

2012-10-14T01:26:52Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
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|Contents = Naturalistic Fallacy
|episodeDate = 11th April 2012
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|evan = y
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|}}
== Naturalistic Fallacy ==
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU five by five and tonight we're talking about the naturalistic fallacy. This is a logical fallacy that takes the form of assuming or claiming that something is better, superior in some way, because it is "natural". There are many problems with this line of reasoning. One is that it's very difficult to define what one means by the word natural. There's no real operational definition or sharp line of demarcation between what is natural and what is not natural. But more importantly just because, for example, a remedy is perceived as being natural that does not mean that it is magically safe and effective. Often the naturalistic fallacy is used instead of evidence, actual evidence, for safety and efficacy. This is rife, for example, in the herbal remedies market. Herbs are often thought of as being something other than drugs simply because they're "natural". Ignoring the fact that that's completely irrelevant, if an herb is taken it contains chemicals - that's a drug - herbs are in fact often used as drugs, the fact that they are considered to be natural is completely irrelevant to the chemicals that they contain and their action inside the body, and that is, I think, an excellent example of the naturalistic fallacy.

B: The naturalistic fallacy has two fundamental aspects to it. There's the appeal to nature that Steve just mentioned; natural things are fundamentally good, and unnatural things aren't. Related to this appeal to nature is the act of deriving and 'ought' from an 'is' This means that the premise of your argument describes what 'is', but the conclusion unfairly uses that to determine what 'ought' to be. A classic example is:
# All men are mortal.
# Socrates is a man.
# Therefore Socrates is a philosopher.
A reasonable argument can not add something entirely new in their argument, which is what essentially is being done when committing a naturalistic fallacy. There's no mention of philosophers in the premise, how then can a conclusion be derived about them. Philosopher David Hume first discussed this 'is-ought' fallacy back in the 1700s. He described a logical gap between 'is' statements and 'ought' statements. How do you connect descriptions of what 'is' - something that science is great at - with descriptions of what 'ought to be' - something best handled by ethics and aesthetics. This is not impossible to accomplish, but it has to be done carefully with a well thought out, reasoned and supported argument, something sorely lacking in most abusers of the naturalistic fallacy.

E: The argument that there's some sort of intrinsic virtue in things that are natural appears to a certain set of senses inside of us. So, we might picture in our mind this utopian nature scene with no human embellishments or infections, just the trees and the fields, the streams and the lakes, insects and birds, wild animals, wild flowers, and they all live in some sense of balance and harmony, so this is nature, right? Well what possible malignancies could there possibly be in such a paradise? Well, how about arsenic, for example? Arsenic is a naturally occurring chemical, when ingested by people it's a deadly poison, and it can be found in foods such as apricot pits, peach pits, apple seeds and cherry seed also contain certain amounts of cyanide, and in fact arsenic contamination of groundwater is a problem that affect millions of people across the world, but, it's all natural. And how about kidney beans or lima beans? If you consume as few as five of these uncooked beans, poisonous effects can being to occur. Some other natural toxins include certain varieties of algae, the algae is eaten by bottom feeding shellfish, and then we eat the shellfish, which people around the world make part of their regular diet. There are mycotoxins, which are toxins derived from mushrooms, and they infect plants and flowers and legumes, nuts, vegetables, you name it, practically anything we consume in nature, the mushrooms have an effect on. Venom from snakes, spiders, scorpions, are natural, oh and for the bee-string therapists out there? Honey bee stings release hormones that prompt other nearby bees to come along for the attack, ouch, and we can't forget out friend Naegleria fowleri, which is an amoeba which attacks the body through the nasal cavity, and it eats its way up to the brain, and these are naturally occurring organisms that thrive in ponds and other still bodies of water where people like to go swimming, say, on a hot summer day. Or, if you want to get really hardcore, let's come up with something called Uranium Therapy for people. You know, uranium is just about as natural as anything else on the planet, and it was Randi who succinctly encapsulated this aspect of the naturalistic fallacy, as only Randi can when he once said, "Bird shit and gravel are natural, but I won't eat them".

S: Yeah, basically, most stuff out there in nature is poisonous to some degree. I would not advise going out into the woods and eating a random plant. Chances are you're going to get an upset stomach at best, and may be ingesting a deadly poison at worst.

R: And of course, the naturalistic fallacy isn't just used for things that we ingest and alternative medicine, things like that. It's also often used in the case of arguing against certain social concerns like homosexuality. One common argument is that homosexuality is not natural and therefore it is wrong. This of course ignores the fact that there are plenty of animals that do engage in some kind of homosexual behavior. For instance, humans live in high rises, and no other animal does. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad or evil, and so it is with homosexuality.

J: I took this at a different angle, I wanted to talk about when people use the naturalistic fallacy in conversation and what they talk about and some of the mistakes that they make. So, you'll quite commonly hear people say that, "if it's natural, it's good." I hear this with the people I talk to at work all the time, "it's natural, it's natural", comes up in conversations. The fallacies commonly cited reason why people don't eat something like zero calorie sugar substitutes like Splenda or Equal, and I think you'd be surprised if you take a look at what those two products are made out of, how not dangerous they are. As a quick example, Splenda is made out of sucralose and is absolutely not dangerous at normal quantities, just like everything else. You could find the term "all natural" on packaging of food products, herbal remedies, even cleaning chemicals, and "all natural" is a nebulous term, but what most people think it means is that it's naturally occurring, or non-processed, created by nature, The fact is, and I think a lot of people would be surprised to find out, is that most of our fruits, vegetables and farm animals have been selectively bred for flavor and yield size for thousands of years, and I always bring this one up when discussing the naturalistic fallacy with people that I'm talking to, typically at work. I question you guys, is something still natural is mankind has selectively bred it to become something else? What's the difference between natural selection versus man-made selection?

S: Yeah, I mean that's a good point that I started out with, that is, that "natural" is a vague term, it doesn't really have any clear definition and therefore it's very difficult to apply in any kind of rational sense, but even if we did have a workable definition such as, "occurring in nature", why would something that occurs in nature be more likely to be safe and effective or to be non-toxic to humans? Nature doesn't care about us, we're just one species of ten million, there's no particular reason why something that is natural would not be harmful to us. In fact, some plants and animals specifically evolved things to be toxic to us, so it really fails at every level, but it is I think a testimony to, I think, the unbelievably effective marketing strategy and propaganda that it is almost taken as a given in our culture that something that is natural is better, despite the fact that there is simply no logic behind that at all.

{{5x5outro}}

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|Logic & Philosophy = y
}}

5X5 Episode 110

2012-10-14T01:25:17Z

Lion Tamarin:

{{Template:5X5 infobox
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 110
|Contents = Naturalistic Fallacy
|episodeDate = 11th April 2012
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
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|evan = y
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|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,41293.0.html
|}}
== Naturalistic Fallacy ==
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU five by five and tonight we're talking about the naturalistic fallacy. This is a logical fallacy that takes the form of assuming or claiming that something is better, superior in some way, because it is "natural". There are many problems with this line of reasoning. One is that it's very difficult to define what one means by the word natural. There's no real operational definition or sharp line of demarcation between what is natural and what is not natural. But more importantly just because, for example, a remedy is perceived as being natural that does not mean that it is magically safe and effective. Often the naturalistic fallacy is used instead of evidence, actual evidence, for safety and efficacy. This is rife, for example, in the herbal remedies market. Herbs are often thought of as being something other than drugs simply because they're "natural". Ignoring the fact that that's completely irrelevant, if an herb is taken it contains chemicals - that's a drug - herbs are in fact often used as drugs, the fact that they are considered to be natural is completely irrelevant to the chemicals that they contain and their action inside the body, and that is, I think, an excellent example of the naturalistic fallacy.

B: The naturalistic fallacy has two fundamental aspects to it. There's the appeal to nature that Steve just mentioned; natural things are fundamentally good, and unnatural things aren't. Related to this appeal to nature is the act of deriving and 'ought' from an 'is' This means that the premise of your argument describes what 'is', but the conclusion unfairly uses that to determine what 'ought' to be. A classic example is:
# All men are mortal.
# Socrates is a man.
# Therefore Socrates is a philosopher.
A reasonable argument can not add something entirely new in their argument, which is what essentially is being done when committing a naturalistic fallacy. There's no mention of philosophers in the premise, how then can a conclusion be derived about them. Philosopher David Hume first discussed this 'is-ought' fallacy back in the 1700s. He described a logical gap between 'is' statements and 'ought' statements. How do you connect descriptions of what 'is' - something that science is great at - with descriptions of what 'ought to be' - something best handled by ethics and aesthetics. This is not impossible to accomplish, but it has to be done carefully with a well thought out, reasoned and supported argument, something sorely lacking in most abusers of the naturalistic fallacy.

E: The argument that there's some sort of intrinsic virtue in things that are natural appears to a certain set of senses inside of us. So, we might picture in our mind this utopian nature scene with no human embellishments or infections, just the trees and the fields, the streams and the lakes, insects and birds, wild animals, wild flowers, and they all live in some sense of balance and harmony, so this is nature, right? Well what possible malignancies could there possibly be in such a paradise? Well, how about arsenic, for example? Arsenic is a naturally occurring chemical, when ingested by people it's a deadly poison, and it can be found in foods such as apricot pits, peach pits, apple seeds and cherry seed also contain certain amounts of cyanide, and in fact arsenic contamination of groundwater is a problem that affect millions of people across the world, but, it's all natural. And how about kidney beans or lima beans? If you consume as few as five of these uncooked beans, poisonous effects can being to occur. Some other natural toxins include certain varieties of algae, the algae is eaten by bottom feeding shellfish, and then we eat the shellfish, which people around the world make part of their regular diet. There are mycotoxins, which are toxins derived from mushrooms, and they infect plants and flowers and legumes, nuts, vegetables, you name it, practically anything we consume in nature, the mushrooms have an effect on. Venom from snakes, spiders, scorpions, are natural, oh and for the bee-string therapists out there? Honey bee stings release hormones that prompt other nearby bees to come along for the attack, ouch, and we can't forget out friend Naegleria fowleri, which is an amoeba which attacks the body through the nasal cavity, and it eats its way up to the brain, and these are naturally occurring organisms that thrive in ponds and other still bodies of water where people like to go swimming, say, on a hot summer day. Or, if you want to get really hardcore, let's come up with something called Uranium Therapy for people. You know, uranium is just about as natural as anything else on the planet, and it was Randi who succinctly encapsulated this aspect of the naturalistic fallacy, as only Randi can when he once said, "Bird shit and gravel are natural, but I won't eat them".

S: Yeah, basically, most stuff out there in nature is poisonous to some degree. I would not advise going out into the woods and eating a random plant. Chances are you're going to get an upset stomach at best, and may be ingesting a deadly poison at worst.

R: And of course, the naturalistic fallacy isn't just used for things that we ingest and alternative medicine, things like that. It's also often used in the case of arguing against certain social concerns like homosexuality. One common argument is that homosexuality is not natural and therefore it is wrong. This of course ignores the fact that there are plenty of animals that do engage in some kind of homosexual behavior. For instance, humans live in high rises, and no other animal does. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad or evil, and so it is with homosexuality.

J: I took this at a different angle, I wanted to talk about when people use the naturalistic fallacy in conversation and what they talk about and some of the mistakes that they make. So, you'll quite commonly hear people say that, "if it's natural, it's good." I hear this with the people I talk to at work all the time, "it's natural, it's natural", comes up in conversations. The fallacies commonly cited reason why people don't eat something like zero calorie sugar substitutes like Splenda or Equal, and I think you'd be surprised if you take a look at what those two products are made out of, how not dangerous they are. As a quick example, Splenda is made out of sucralose and is absolutely not dangerous at normal quantities, just like everything else. You could find the term "all natural" on packaging of food products, herbal remedies, even cleaning chemicals, and "all natural" is a nebulous term, but what most people think it means is that it's naturally occurring, or non-processed, created by nature, The fact is, and I think a lot of people would be surprised to find out, is that most of our fruits, vegetables and farm animals have been selectively bred for flavor and yield size for thousands of years, and I always bring this one up when discussing the naturalistic fallacy with people that I'm talking to, typically at work. I question you guys, is something still natural is mankind has selectively bred it to become something else? What's the difference between natural selection versus man-made selection?

S: Yeah, I mean that's a good point that I started out with, that is, that "natural" is a vague term, it doesn't really have any clear definition and therefore it's very difficult to apply in any kind of rational sense, but even if we did have a workable definition such as, "occurring in nature", why would something that occurs in nature be more likely to be safe and effective or to be non-toxic to humans? Nature doesn't care about us, we're just one species of ten million, there's no particular reason why something that is natural would not be harmful to us. In fact, some plants and animals specifically evolved things to be toxic to us, so it really fails at every level, but it is I think a testimony to, I think, the unbelievably effective marketing strategy and propaganda that it is almost taken as a given in our culture that something that is natural is better, despite the fact that there is simply no logic behind that at all.

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5X5 Episode 110

2012-10-14T01:24:27Z

Lion Tamarin: Naturalistic Fallacy

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|Contents = Naturalistic Fallacy
|episodeDate = 11th April 2012
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|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,41293.0.html
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== Naturalistic Fallacy ==
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU five by five and tonight we're talking about the naturalistic fallacy. This is a logical fallacy that takes the form of assuming or claiming that something is better, superior in some way, because it is "natural". There are many problems with this line of reasoning. One is that it's very difficult to define what one means by the word natural. There's no real operational definition or sharp line of demarcation between what is natural and what is not natural. But more importantly just because, for example, a remedy is perceived as being natural that does not mean that it is magically safe and effective. Often the naturalistic fallacy is used instead of evidence, actual evidence, for safety and efficacy. This is rife, for example, in the herbal remedies market. Herbs are often thought of as being something other than drugs simply because they're "natural". Ignoring the fact that that's completely irrelevant, if an herb is taken it contains chemicals - that's a drug - herbs are in fact often used as drugs, the fact that they are considered to be natural is completely irrelevant to the chemicals that they contain and their action inside the body, and that is, I think, an excellent example of the naturalistic fallacy.

B: The naturalistic fallacy has two fundamental aspects to it. There's the appeal to nature that Steve just mentioned; natural things are fundamentally good, and unnatural things aren't. Related to this appeal to nature is the act of deriving and 'ought' from an 'is' This means that the premise of your argument describes what 'is', but the conclusion unfairly uses that to determine what 'ought' to be. A classic example is:
# All men are mortal.
# Socrates is a man.
# Therefore Socrates is a philosopher.
A reasonable argument can not add something entirely new in their argument, which is what essentially is being done when committing a naturalistic fallacy. There's no mention of philosophers in the premise, how then can a conclusion be derived about them. Philosopher David Hume first discussed this 'is-ought' fallacy back in the 1700s. He described a logical gap between 'is' statements and 'ought' statements. How do you connect descriptions of what 'is' - something that science is great at - with descriptions of what 'ought to be' - something best handled by ethics and aesthetics. This is not impossible to accomplish, but it has to be done carefully with a well thought out, reasoned and supported argument, something sorely lacking in most abusers of the naturalistic fallacy.

E: The argument that there's some sort of intrinsic virtue in things that are natural appears to a certain set of senses inside of us. So, we might picture in our mind this utopian nature scene with no human embellishments or infections, just the trees and the fields, the streams and the lakes, insects and birds, wild animals, wild flowers, and they all live in some sense of balance and harmony, so this is nature, right? Well what possible malignancies could there possibly be in such a paradise? Well, how about arsenic, for example? Arsenic is a naturally occurring chemical, when ingested by people it's a deadly poison, and it can be found in foods such as apricot pits, peach pits, apple seeds and cherry seed also contain certain amounts of cyanide, and in fact arsenic contamination of groundwater is a problem that affect millions of people across the world, but, it's all natural. And how about kidney beans or lima beans? If you consume as few as five of these uncooked beans, poisonous effects can being to occur. Some other natural toxins include certain varieties of algae, the algae is eaten by bottom feeding shellfish, and then we eat the shellfish, which people around the world make part of their regular diet. There are mycotoxins, which are toxins derived from mushrooms, and they infect plants and flowers and legumes, nuts, vegetables, you name it, practically anything we consume in nature, the mushrooms have an effect on. Venom from snakes, spiders, scorpions, are natural, oh and for the bee-string therapists out there? Honey bee stings release hormones that prompt other nearby bees to come along for the attack, ouch, and we can't forget out friend Naegleria fowleri, which is an amoeba which attacks the body through the nasal cavity, and it eats its way up to the brain, and these are naturally occurring organisms that thrive in ponds and other still bodies of water where people like to go swimming, say, on a hot summer day. Or, if you want to get really hardcore, let's come up with something called Uranium Therapy for people. You know, uranium is just about as natural as anything else on the planet, and it was Randi who succinctly encapsulated this aspect of the naturalistic fallacy, as only Randi can when he once said, "Bird shit and gravel are natural, but I won't eat them".

S: Yeah, basically, most stuff out there in nature is poisonous to some degree. I would not advise going out into the woods and eating a random plant. Chances are you're going to get an upset stomach at best, and may be ingesting a deadly poison at worst.

R: And of course, the naturalistic fallacy isn't just used for things that we ingest and alternative medicine, things like that. It's also often used in the case of arguing against certain social concerns like homosexuality. One common argument is that homosexuality is not natural and therefore it is wrong. This of course ignores the fact that there are plenty of animals that do engage in some kind of homosexual behavior. For instance, humans live in high rises, and no other animal does. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad or evil, and so it is with homosexuality.

J: I took this at a different angle, I wanted to talk about when people use the naturalistic fallacy in conversation and what they talk about and some of the mistakes that they make. So, you'll quite commonly hear people say that, "if it's natural, it's good." I hear this with the people I talk to at work all the time, "it's natural, it's natural", comes up in conversations. The fallacies commonly cited reason why people don't eat something like zero calorie sugar substitutes like Splenda or Equal, and I think you'd be surprised if you take a look at what those two products are made out of, how not dangerous they are. As a quick example, Splenda is made out of sucralose and is absolutely not dangerous at normal quantities, just like everything else. You could find the term "all natural" on packaging of food products, herbal remedies, even cleaning chemicals, and "all natural" is a nebulous term, but what most people think it means is that it's naturally occurring, or non-processed, created by nature, The fact is, and I think a lot of people would be surprised to find out, is that most of our fruits, vegetables and farm animals have been selectively bred for flavor and yield size for thousands of years, and I always bring this one up when discussing the naturalistic fallacy with people that I'm talking to, typically at work. I question you guys, is something still natural is mankind has selectively bred it to become something else? What's the difference between natural selection versus man-made selection?

S: Yeah, I mean that's a good point that I started out with, that is, that "natural" is a vague term, it doesn't really have any clear definition and therefore it's very difficult to apply in any kind of rational sense, but even if we did have a workable definition such as, "occurring in nature", why would something that occurs in nature be more likely to be safe and effective or to be non-toxic to humans? Nature doesn't care about us, we're just one species of ten million, there's no particular reason why something that is natural would not be harmful to us. In fact, some plants and animals specifically evolved things to be toxic to us, so it really fails at every level, but it is I think a testimony to, I think, the unbelievably effective marketing strategy and propaganda that it is almost taken as a given in our culture that something that is natural is better, despite the fact that there is simply no logic behind that at all.

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