SGU Episode 864

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SGU Episode 864
January 30th 2022
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 863                      SGU 865
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration, and falsified data. Show me the research; show me the results; show me the conclusions; and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.
Bill Vaughan, American columnist
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Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, January 26^th, 2022 and this is your host, Steven Novella. (applause) Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening folks!

S: How's everyone this lovely Wednesday deep winter cold frigid day?

C: Oh no it's cold?

J: Oh god Cara.

E: Super cold.

J: It's one of those days Cara, you go outside for about 2 seconds and you're like oh my god it's cold.

S: Nope.

C: The high today was 72 I think in LA, so that's like 22 for all you Celsius listeners. Yeah, it was nice.

E: Yeah, -4 here, right now, -4 Celsius.

COVID-19 Updates

Florida's Surgeon General Nominee (1:01)

S: So get this, we retweeted this on our Twitter account, by the way if you don't follow us on Twitter, do. We do put some information there for you. We retweeted this thing. Ron DeSantis, he's the governor of Florida, he's nominee for surgeon general refused to answer four times, yes or no, do the Covid vaccines work. Wouldn't answer the question, yes or no.

B: What? He would not answer that?

E: How did he answer?

S: His first answer was, the question is a scientific one. That was the entirety of his answer.

E: Yeeeees...

C: Yeah, and you're a scientist or a physician or you should be if you're being nominated for this position.

S: He was pushed to answer yes or no, and his answer was 'A scientist who can answer any specific scientific questions'. So he's saying that he was a scientist who can answer any specific scientific questions. Go ahead, give me your questions, I just did, yes or no.

C: (laughs) Except that one.

S: He did say, reasonable effectiveness for the prevention of hospitalization and death and relatively low effectiveness for prevention. Which is not really true.

C: No it's not true at all.

S: Yeah.

B: So what role is is he trying to fill?

S: Would not, could not, just didn't feel comfortable saying yes, the vaccines work. Just did not feel comfortable saying that.

E: Interesting.

S: That's where we are. Politicized science.

B: What's he's gonna be, surgeon private?

(laughter)

J: All right so the bottom line is that he doesn't believe it or refuses to acknowledge it.

B: Or he's pandering.

E: Politically speaking he can't acknowledge it.

S: He did not feel comfortable saying no. Like it was politically incorrect to say yeah the vaccines work, they're effective, that was politically a no-go.

B: It's pathetic.

C: What goes on in the mind of somebody who hopefully, I mean he must know the truth, right?

S: Of course he does. He's a doctor, he knows.

C: Yeah like it must feel not good in his heart, you know to be sort of struggling with that.

B: Assumes he has one.

J: But Cara it shows you, in the order of importance, in certain people's minds─

B: Right, right, say it.

J: ─you know everybody has that politics is much more important than science. Unfortunately his paycheck is tied to him keeping his mouth shut.

S: The thing is, the surgeon general, a surgeon general should be like an apolitical position.

E: Correct.

C: Absolutely.

S: He's a science advisor.

C: Not just bipartisan, apolitical.

S: Apolitical, totally. We need those people in the government, people how can provide from a neutral, apolitical, non-ideological point of view. Here are the fact, this is what the experts say, this is what's true. So we can't even agree on what's true anymore, even when these are basic established facts. That's the problem.

C: Right. We can all point to outcome evidence, solid outcome evidence that's been reproduced, that we wish weren't the case, right? Like that doesn't align with something that we want to be true but the fact is, it's true and we have to be comfortable, we have to have the neuropsychological humility as we always talk about to say, I don't like it, but this is what the science shows.

E: Right.

S: Now at a recent, guys there was a recent anti vaccine rally in DC. And it was kind of all-purpose conspiracy rally, you know, even though─

C: Got some Q Anon thrown in?

S: ─ostensibly anti vaccine but everything was there, you know. Guess who was like one of the big─

E: Kennedy! Robert F. Kennedy.

S: ─yeah Robert F. Kennedy jr.

C: Of course.

B: He's been around?

J: Oh come on what's the matter with him Steve? (laughs)

E: Oh my god, vaccines causes autism right?

J: I know I know.

S: This guy is, again I'm trying to figure out what happened to this guy. He started out as an environmentalist and somehow he went down the rabbit hole of anti-vaccine and I suspect he is just completely buried in a process of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Now he's found so much evidence to confirm he's belief that he's done, he's just done. He said at the rally: 'if you take the vaccine you have a 25% increase change of dying over the next 6 months'.

E: What?

S: Where did that come from? Nowhere. Absolutely nowhere, but what he does, like, a lot of anti-vaxxers do, he does what we call dumpster diving in the vaers reporting, database.

E: Oh the vaers.

S: Which is just an open unfiltered you know voluntarily reporting system. It's not scientific information, you can basically, its a Rorschach test, you can see what you want there.

E: Sounds like can read anything into it.

S: Yeah. Meanwhile, the CDC data found in during October November, guess how much more likely were you to die from Covid if you were unvaccinated versus somebody who is fully vaccinated?

E: 18 times.

B: 20 times?

C: Probably 45 times.

S: 53 times. 53 times the risk of death, 53 times the risk of death, can you imagine?

B: Yeah but those are your facts.

C: (laughs)

S: Right, but if you can't trust, you can't trust the CDC, right, so you get up to make up your own facts by doing unscientific observations and a completely unscientific database.

E: It's like a flat-earther mentality.

S: Yeah totally.

E: They're so so steeped in it and they can never come out of it, they don't want to emerge from it, it is their reality and they're so comfortable in it, they'll never leave it, ever abandon it.

C: Problem is this is one of those situations in which reality not only does reality exist, reality has, it's violent in this situation.

J: It's pounding on the door, reality is that people are dying and tons of people are catching this virus and the vaccines are so unbelievably clearly benefits anybody who takes it. And if you turn a blind eye to that, you are intellectually compromised. On some level.

C: And you're harming public health.

Vaccination Good News (6:37)

S: Here's some good news. Couple of recent studies I wanna point out. One showed that if you either were infected with Covid and then later got vaccinated, or you were vaccinated and had a breakthrough infection you got this hybrid super immunity─

J: It's a hybrid.

S: ─with 10 times the antibodies as being vaccinated alone. Or being infected alone.

C: What?

B: What?

S: 10 times the antibodies.

C: So wait...

B: Jay man you're superman dude.

J: That's awesome. For how long?

S: We don't know that.

B: 5 minutes.

(laughter)

E: Yeah there's a half-life.

S: Time will tell. That's good in that with the spread of Omicron and with the spread of vaccines this is one of the paths that we can get to the pandemic burning itself out and just turning into another flu/cold sort of endemic respiratory virus. Now I do have to emphasize this doesn't mean like if you're fully vaccinated go out and get Covid, it doesn't mean that at all, the whole point, is to not get Covid. And getting Covid is a really terrible way of not getting Covid.

C: Right (laughs)

S: It's a really, it doesn't work.

C: By definition.

S: I really studied this extensively and I'm pretty sure that getting Covid is the worst way to avoid getting Covid.

B: But, but, that begs the question, how can you induce that super-immunity without getting Covid?

C: Boosters probably?

B: No, I doubt that.

S: The thing is, if you could fully boost it, you're fine. You have good effectiveness against even the new variant.s

B: But I want super immunity!

C: (laughs) Wear a mask?

B: I do! I want more!

S: It's still important to avoid Covid for a few reasons, first it's not a benign illness even if you are, if it's a breakthrough infection and you're vaccinated, you're much much better of being vaccinated but you can still get some annoying long Covid symptoms. I know people who have lost their taste and it's taking a long time to come back─

E: That sucks.

S: ─or it doesn't come back fully or the same it was before, like there's something off about it.

E: Frankly some people never had taste to begin with but go ahead.

S: That's true. But any case it's not so benign that you should seek it out, just for the extra immunity so that you don't get it. Again that doesn't even makes sense. And don't think that this is gonna help end the pandemic cause every infection is adding to the probability of more variants emerging.

C: Yes.

S: So just, still try not to get infected, wear a mask, social distance, avoid people who are known to be infected etc. Get fully boosted but if you do get it you're likely to have a very mild illness and it will give you enhanced immunity beyond just being vaccinated or just getting infected alone. The other bit of good news is that the Pfizer CEO just announced that they are ready with an Omicron version of their vaccine.

C: I'm so excited.

S: Will be released in March.

C: I wonder how long you would have had to wait.

S: Yeah that still remains to be seen.

B: So the next booster then, it will be the next booster.

S: Yeah next booster will cover Omicron.

C: Right. We were boosted, I was boosted in October, I want that Omicron booster gimme gimme. I'm feeling like by the day it's been too long you know I'm scared.

S: Well I think so boosting created higher antibody titers than just being fully vaccinated. Hopefully it will also produce longer immunity, which tends to happen, the more number of times you get boosted the longer lasting your immunity is. That's probably true. Again I'm hoping and I think this is reasonable that we'll settle into and annual Covid vaccine. With the flue vaccine. And they'll track the variants just like they tracked the variants with flu and that'll be, that's it. I'll be just one more flu-like, again this is what happens populations just build more and more and more immunity to an infection until it becomes like the cold or the flu, you know.

E Can they combine the two into one? The flu vaccination and the Covid vaccination?

C: Probably.

S: Theoretically. I don't know if they will.

C: It may not be worthwhile.

S: There may be technical reasons why they don't, in mRNA might need different preservatives, unless they make a mRNA flu vaccine that's compatible. But getting two jabs is no big deal, you go, here's your flu, here's your Covid. No big deal.

C: Yeah I got mine at the same time.

E: Yes, but wouldn't the rate be higher if it were a one shot as opposed to two for most, for people? I would think that's how the numbers would work out.

S: Yeah, if they can do it, they probably will, but I wouldn't count on that. Especially with the fact that there are different kinds of vaccines.

C: Don't like elderly or immunocompromised people often take a different flu shot.

S: There's a high dose.

C: Yeah there's like a high dose flu shot, and then there's...

S: There's the quadrivalent versus the trivalent, I always, when they ask me, I'm like give me the high dose quadrivalent please I want the whole full both [inaudible]

C: Why don't, that's a good idea, so we can just ask for the quadrivalent?

B: And sprinkles and [inaudible].

S: Because I'm a hospital, I don't know if it's because of a healthcare work, you probably can get it Cara, so because you're a health care worker you can get a high dose if you want like give it to me.

E: ♪♪You take the high dose, I take the low dose♪♪

C: Sure, I don't want the flu, flu is horrible.

S: They're both fine, it's just you know if I, I'll take the, I want the extra, I'll take it.

B: Fine shmine.

E: You look at the menu, I think I'll have the high dose today.

S: Well now they have the quadrivalent they basically just have, they permanently added the swine flu, the H1N1 it's not the permanent part of the flu vaccine.

E: That makes sense.

C: It just makes sense.

S: There's just gonna be more and more vaccines in our life that's gonna give us immunity against these you know increasing zoonotic infections and you know the anti-vaxxers man, they're not going away, we know they're not going anywhere. We've got to marginalize the hell out of them.

C: Make it like uncool.

S: This is our primary weapon, it's gotta be, oh you are anti-vaxxer, you're weird.

C: Right, exactly.

What’s the Word? (12:30)

• Allopatric

S: Cara, you're gonna do a What's the Word this week.

C: I am, it's been a bit, so it's time for a new What's the Word and this one is a little bit different than usual in that I found the word I liked, realized there's a bunch other versions sort of of it, or alternate forms, wanna dig in to all of them so I know we've recently been talking about evolution as in we're always are talking about evolution, one of our favorite topics on the show. And did you know that many evolutionists and ecologists actually look at speciation and categorize speciation differently based on different characteristics. Most of these categorical systems fall into five different types of speciation: allopatric, peripatric, parapatric, sympatric and artificial.

E: Not Saint Patrick.

C: Not Saint Patrick, yeah. So will start with artificial cause that not really etymologically interesting, at least not for this discussion. Artificial speciation it's just speciation made by human beings, right maybe in a lab we are inventing a new species in order to be able to utilize it for laboratory studies. We do this a lot with fruit flies and things like that, that's artificial speciation, we put that one on the shelf.

But the other four types all have the same suffix, patric, do we know that patric comes from?

E: Ireland.

C: But you're right, you're kind of on the right path, what do we think of when we think of patric? Paaater.

B: Father.

E: Oh, patronus, right.

C: Yes yes, so all these different patrics are referring to 'the fatherland' they're refereeing to the ecological geographic region where these organisms exist. And so allopatric speciation which is one of the most common, one of the ones that I think is the most recognizable for us because we think of Darwin's finches. It occurs when basically one group, one specie separates into two groups because of a physical barrier, geographic barrier, isolation. So a mountain, a river, an ocean. And when we look at the word allo-patric, well what does allo, the prefix mean? It comes from the original Greek and it means 'other'. And here's an interesting thing that I'm sure Steve you know and maybe many of the guys on the show know but I came to because I was not steeped in the skeptic dictionary the way you guys were for so long, when we hear the term allopathic. Allopathic medicine, which is an antiquated word and not a good word.

S: A derogatory.

C: A derogatory word. It was actually invented by Samuel Hahnemann─

E: Oh, homeopathy.

C: ─the inventor of homeopathy, yeah, so he coined the term allopatic to mean other medicine. Other.

J: Ooooh.

E: As in non-medicine.

C: As in non-medicine when really it is medicine.

S: It's more of it's like homeopathic is like working with the body and allopathic is medicine that works against the body. I think that was more the idea.

C: But the word allo.

S: It's from the outside, it's other, yeah.

C: Other, yeah, exactly, the other, the outside the kind of, so when we think of allopatric not allopathic but allopatric speciation it's when one group is othered form it, right? So you got this one group that splits off into two and they are othered from each other. Of course the classic example is Darwin's finches. this finch has this type of beak because it has this type of food source on this island. This finch has this other so they are now different species because of that.

S: Yeah so they're in different locations, I think is the simple way to put it. They evolved into different species because they were geographically separated. As opposed to─

C: As opposed to being together.

S: ─sympatric, they're in the same place, but just in different niches, right.

C: Right, but peripatric and parapatric are sort of in between. So peripatry, peri, the root for that meaning around, about or enclosing. And you know we've heard that with different scien peri whatever. And so peripartic is a situation where there are still physical barriers that make it hard for this groups to interbreed but one group is much smaller than another so you don't really see equal groups, you see the main species group and then you see the small offshoot. That's peripatric.

And parapatric which what does para mean, what's that route? This ones brutal it means besid, alongside, between, around, surrounding, adjacent, parallel, near, but also opposite, on the far side. This one's kinda frustrating because you can kinda use it a lot of different ways but parapatric speciation specifically is when the geographic area it's just so big that's it's hard for different groups to mate with one another, so there may not be a physical boundary, like a mountain range or a river. But it's just so far spread out, that even though they're technically are in the same like biome or the same ecological area, they're just not mating because they're physically far away from one another.

S: Just far away, that would be like orca in different oceans.

C: Exactly.

S: They're connected but they're just far away.

C: But they're just really far away. And then you mentioned Steve sort of the opposite of allopartic which is sympatric speciation and sympartic speciation is sort of controversial, like some scientists don't think this is a cause of speciation. They think there's other reasons behind why these species and these situations would have speciated. But the idea here is that there aren't any physical barriers, they're in close proximity to one another and the new species spontaneously emerges. Maybe because of different characteristics a different food source, different mating choices. And some researchers say no, we think there has to be boundary or a barrier or a physical reason and it could be that something happened a long time ago and they came back together or there's some other reason that they're now cohabitating, that's not the right word, occupying the same space that they're now sympatric. And sym of course comes from together, joint, right like sin or sym.

So yeah, this is one of those fun situations where the science makes sense, you see this a lot in anatomy, where you're like I get why that is called that, because that is the Latin or Greek root and that is a perfect...

S: Adrenol is on top of the renols.

C: Exactly like what an easy label to understand. I love it when it's like that. So this is a really interesting example of that but now you know five different sources of speciation: allopatric, peripatric, parapatric, sympatric and artificial. And if you can't remember which is which just think back to that root.

S: Cara I think of the sympatric as the snitches, maybe some of them just have stars upon tars, they don't mix with the other ones. You can think of it in terms of culture, there is assortative mating [inaudible] status, that's sympatric in a way. If it got to the point where it's like the Elois and the─

B: Morlocks?

C: I have no idea.

S: Morlocks, yeah the Morlocks and the Elois.

E: Time machine?

S: Yeah, that was kind of a commentary on the class society when they became so separated they actually became different species.

C: Right right.

S: The workers and the haves and the have nots.

C: And so that really is the question I think for a lot of ecologists, behaviorists, evolutionists, is there a cultural behavioral basically a choice and interest and attraction that can occur within a species that's in the same geographic region when they just say I would rather mate with this option and that is such a strong that ultimately leads to speciation. Some thinks that that's the case some think, no there's gotta be a different mechanism in play.

S: Yeah, I mean the reason to be skeptical of that is we know that even different species are gonna hook up.

C: Right.

B: Uh baby.

S: When humans and chimps divided into two different lines for millions of years there were some hanky-panky going on.

C: Oh for sure.

S: If that's the case why wouldn't the same species be willing to mate, you know, there has to be something. It does makes sense that there would need to be some kind of.

C: Something else is going on. Like maybe the case that it happened sure in individual pairs or like in a certain generation but think about how long it takes for speciation to occur in a sexually reproducing species.

S: For example Cara if you have like if one individual has a chromosomal mutation and they have enough close relatives with that mutation where they can create a genetically incompatible sub-population of their species. The only reason that they become different species is genetic incompatibility. Not distance. But then again we're introducing a new reason [inaudible]

C: Exactly then it's a mutation for sure.

S: All right, cool.

C: Yeah, fun one.

News Items

Carbon Signatures on Mars (21:29)

• Carbon Signatures and Life on Mars

S: So guys we're gonna have another, another discussion about, it there life on Mars? Which one of the big scientific questions of our age, if we eventually answer it in a positive then we'll have an answer. If it's negative it'll I think always be a question mark, it's always only as good as how deeply we've been able to look. But in any case, there's a new study which is once again compatible with the interpretation that at one time there was life o Mars. Doesn't have to be extant life. But of course compatible with is not the same as evidence for. because there are other interpretations. this one has to do with carbon. Going back now to the Curiosity rover, Curiosity rover is still working even though we have Perseverance up there. Curiosity rover concluded an analysis of martian rock, they basically pulverized the rock, heated it up to release gases and analyzed the gases looking for the carbon signature in those rocks. They looked at 24 different powdered rock samples including some that came from rock beds that are known to be ancient and that's kinda the point. You know they wanted to make sure they were looking at ancient rocks cause they wanna see if there's ancient life on Mars. That's what they're looking for. And they're looking for the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13.

Now I know you all you guys know what isotopes are. Isotopes are different versions of an element, an element is defined by how many protons it has. But an element can have different numbers of neutrons. So a carbon-12 would be a carbon with 6 protons and 6 neutrons, carbon-13 would be 6 protons and 7 neutrons. I know you guys know carbon-14 dating that involves a different isotope. Carbon-14 is not stable, it's made in the Earth's atmosphere because of cosmic rays hitting carbon in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide. Creates carbon-14, carbon-14 has a half life of over 5000 years. 5730 years to be precise. And so it decays into a nitrogen isotope and you can look at the ratio there for plants breeded in. Plants incorporate the carbon into their substance, we eat the plants and so the isotope ratio of C-14 to C-12 and 13 in our bodies tells us how long it's been since we've been metabolizing stuff, right? So if we died and 10 000 years goes by, the C-14 that we had incorporated will decay and the ratio of C-14 to C-12 were down. That's carbon dating.

But now what I'm talking about has nothing to do with any of that, that's nothing to do with carbon-14, that's to do with carbon-13 and carbon-12 both of which are stabilized isotopes, they do not decay. But there is a slight difference. Isotopes generally speaking are chemically identical, carbon is carbon. So carbon-12 and carbon-13 are chemically the same but they are a little different. What do you think the difference is?

E: The size and the number of neutrons.

B: Well the extra neutrons.

C: Yeah the reason it's 12 or 13.

S: Which makes it a little...

B: More massive.

S: More massive, right.

C: Ah, size.

E: Size!

S: C-13 is a little heavier than C-12 that means that when plants breathe in carbon dioxide from the air to incorporate, fix it into their sugars, they get a little bit more carbon-12 then carbon-13 cause it just moves into their pores a little bit easier, right? There's a ratio of C-12 to C-13 in the atmosphere and in the ocean which is about the same. The carbon cycle in the atmosphere is 98.8% C-12, 1.2% C-13. But the carbon in living things 99.2% C-12.

B: Yeah, but that's Earth, that's not Mars right?

S: Exactly, that's Earth, that is not Mars. Exactly correct. There is a carbon cycle on Earth and we can know if when we're looking at a ratio of C-12 to C-13, if that came from the atmosphere or the ocean. Or if it came from a living thing which includes fossil fuels, right fossil fuels also have a what they call a C-13 depleted ratio, there's a little bit less C-13, cause it's a little bit harder to get into plants just because it's a little bit slower moving. It's all physics, it's moving around more slowly so by chance alone C-12 just moving a little bit faster a little bit more energy is gonna get into the plant with slight advantage over the heavier C-13.

So on Earth it's easy to tell when life has been involved, cause if it's C-13 depleted if there's a higher ratio of C-12:C-13 than in the air then that that's because it's concentrated by a living process. Now we're trying to apply this to Mars. And as Bob pointed out, Mars ain't the Earth, we don't know what the carbon cycle is on Mars.

B: Oh, we don't?

S: If we knew what the carbon cycle was on Mars, then we could say what the ratio should be.

E: So but it might be the same, it may not be the same.

S: But it might be the same! So what they found in the ancient rocks, to put it this way, what they found in some of the samples had depleted C-13 ratios and they were all from the ancient rocks. I don't think all of the ancient rocks had depleted but all of the depleted samples were ancient. One of the possible processes that could deplete C-13 in the samples is life. Just lie on Earth. But there are two other processes that can also do it and this is the problem, right? If life were the only think that could do it, then we would be done. Then we will go yeah had to be little critters crawling around a billion years ago depleting the C-13 in these samples.

Another one is methane, if methane gets released into the atmosphere it gets broken down at ultraviolet light releasing carbon and that carbon will have a depleted C-13 ratio as well. Now on Earth most of our methane comes from life also methane is another signature of life and we've talked about this on Mars too. Hey, there's methane in that plume on Mars, but the question is, is it organic methane, is it coming from a living source or is it coming from a chemical process, cause chemical processes could make methane too. And so haven't ruled out that the methane that we're seeing in the martian atmosphere, we haven't ruled out that it could have chemical source. In addition that methane could be responsible for the depleted C-13 ratio in the soil if there were enough of it in the right place. We don't know but that's a possibility. The third possibility and this one seems really speculative to me, but they said if the, if our solar system passed through a molecular cloud containing carbon-12 sometime in the past, that could've incorporated into the soil the ancient soil on that time period in Mars.

E: Major cosmic contamination.

S: Cosmic contamination with C-12 might have affected the ratios.

E: Wow.

S: That you know, it could've happened. Those are the three possibilities: life, methane, molecular cloud from space. And because we don't understand the martian carbon cycle we can't say which one it is. However this is where the Perseverance probe comes in. Because now Curiosity is like, all right dude, we have C-13 depleted─

B: Take the baton.

S: ─in the rock samples here, now over to you Perseverance. What Perseverance is doing─

B: Persevering?

(laughter)

E: Hopefully.

S: Persevering, absolutely, you know that it's packaging up samples and preparing them for possible return to Earth with a later mission. Once we get those samples back on Earth then we can start to untangle the carbon cycle on Mars in more detail and also scientist can ask questions and propose hypothesis to try to tease apart which one of these three sources is responsible for the depleted carbon-13 ration on Mars. So it's too soon to declare that this is evidence for life as we know every time this has come up so far for an extra-terrestrial source of life, is it chemical or is it biological, it's turned out it's not biological. Again, so far, we know that the Venus thing that we talked about couple years ago was a bust.

E: Right.

S: You know evidence for mars it's tantalizing, we're still left with this tantalizing hint, that there could be signs of ancient life on Mars but nothing definitive. I also feel the same way about every time astronomers go there's something weird happening here, aliens could be one of many possible explanations but we always find a non-alien explanation. So far we've always found non-biological explanation but as we all know Mars is a great candidate for once having had life, it had liquid water on it's surface, in the ancient Mars before the atmosphere got stripped away by the solar wind cause it lacks magnetic field. But it's possible and this will give us another data point on how likely it is for life to arise. If life independently arose on Mars in the short period of time where it had liquid water then it tells us a lot about how likely it is and how common life is likely to be in the universe. So this is a question worth pursuing to the end, you know.

E: Get those samples home then, get'em.

S: These data points are coming very slowly, cause yeah, one of those samples gonna get back to Earth that's gonna be a long time, that like the next mission, hopefully. But it's good that NASA's prioritizing this and there may be some things that Perseverance could figure out in situ, like on Mars, with the instrument that it has there. But the real deep science is gonna happen when we get those samples back to Earth. So let's hope NASA can make that happen soon. But cool, I thought the whole carbon cycle thing was interesting.

B: Yeah.

E: Very interesting.

Schoolkids and Conspiracy Theories (31:51)

• Schoolkids Are Falling Victim to Disinformation and Conspiracy Fantasies

S: All right Jay, this is kind of a tricky topic, I read this whole article it goes pretty deep, you're gonna tell us about what to do about these crazy school kids today and all their conspiracy theories.

(laughter)

E: Get off my lawn!

J: Yeah so I read a really good article at Scientific American by Melinda Moyer. So the article's called: 'Schoolkids Are Falling Victim to Disinformation and Conspiracy Fantasies'. And it's a little alarming─

B: Why should they be any different?

J: ─especially conspiracy fantasies, I don't know. Today teachers are faced with students who deny basic facts of science and history. That's happening all across United States, probably, this is also probably a global phenomenon. But definitely happening in the United States. Over the past 20 years misinformation has been growing and it has become growing problem with students in particular. Now they're easy targets for fake news and misinformation because they're young and they simply lack the skills to assess the credibility of information. This is something that all of us has been working on most of our adult lives, it's not an easy thing to do. You know typically around the age of 14 students will show signs of believing in conspiracy theories. That's pretty young, you know I have a 9-year-old son.

S: Yeah, 14.

J: You know he's 5 years away from that. Ad that goes by in the blink of any eye, it is young. So let me give you a perfect example of what's going on. In 2016 Stanford University study that included 8000 students reveled that 80% of middle schoolers thought that a sponsored advertisement on a website was in fact a real news story. they couldn't see the difference, you know weren't able to detect the clues that are there to show you that it's an advertisement. You know it could be the word 'advertisement', right underneath it and they're just not seeing it. They also concluded that less than 20% of High School students questions falls claims on social media cites. Wow, you know just reading─

B: Less than 20.

J: ─and believing everything. So issues like this go all the way up to the college level by the way. It's not just in that age range. False information is commonly targeted at young users that in it of itself could be a long conversation. Now check this out guys. YouTube is what it's one of the most popular social media sites. Yey YouTube, right, YouTube's fun, I enjoy YouTube. Well it was found that search terms looking for legitimate information directed users in fact on YouTube to misinformation. So if you use YouTube, you know it recommends videos for you after you watch something and then a video stream will pop up and it will show you watch these, check out this stuff. The problem is, these recommendations typically lean the user towards more extreme and false content as it goes along. It get more extreme and you know more bullshit. So for example researchers tested the search term 'lunar eclipse' what would you guys think would show up in your YouTube if you search on 'lunar eclipse'?

S: Flat-Earthers.

B: Loony conspiracies.

E: I just wanna see lunar eclipses.

C: Exactly.

J: Exactly, right Evan, that's what I say.

E: That's all I want.

J: Somebody said it, the result show a video about flat Earth.

C: Ugh.

J: Doesn't even have anything to do with a lunar eclipse. One researcher said that YouTube is, and I quote: 'one of the most powerful radicalizing instrument of the 21^st century'. That's YouTube.

B: Yeah man, optimized rabbit holes.

J: I'm on YouTube every day, I use it all the time.

E: So what's the responsibility of YouTube to make their algorithm work better in a case like that?

J: Evan it is working the way they wanted to.

E: Oh, OK, if it by design then YouTube's evil, I get it.

C: Feature not a bug.

J: Of course it's by design. This is not by accident, this is all, I mean they put so much time and energy into fashioning the way that their algorithms work.

S: Yeah this is not a whoops, this is o look at this, radicalizing videos get more views, let's do that.

C: Right it's not about the fact that they are trying to radicalize people it's about the fact that people want to watch this, like this stuff compels more eyeballs. It works.

J: Exactly, exactly. So look, I'm not surprised, I thought that Facebook was more of a problem than YouTube I guess it's hard to even judge.

C: I think Facebook is more of a problem for older people. YouTube for younger people.

J: But it's good that social media is being researched I completely agree that we should be researching social media. And we should also be researching, we should quantify the effects that it has, right. We should have a better understanding this. What do we do in social media's wake? What are we gonna do about it? How do we deal with this? How do we educate people to handle what we're faced with right now? And this happens to be a very highly debated question.

B: There's nothing we can do.

J: Bob there is things that we can do.

B: Sure but we won't.

C: (laughs)

J: Well, OK, but that's a different thing.

S: That's a different questions.

J: but this is a very highly debated question among some researchers and educators. I say some obviously because we're talking about a slice of all the researchers and educators out there are actually paying attention to this. But the ones that are paying attention are very much involved in it. So well of course, I come out of a gate and say learning about critical thinking is key, right? Number 1, it's gotta be the most important thing here, you have to understand how to think and how to do the things that we talk about on the show in order to wade through the Internet. Schools could teach something called media literacy and some do. The goal here is to give students mental tools to identify fake or bad information. Now the scary thing is that some of this misinformation is coming from the parents themselves, right? It's coming from their families, who are also misinformed by fake news and social media sites.

C: Some of it's coming from the teachers Jay.

J: I know this is a very difficult thing to talk about because of how complex it is. And I'm trying to paint a picture here so we can dig in a little bit.

C: It's so sad.

J: Let me give you a few more things to think about, school seem to be the only place that most kids can learn about critical thinking, right? If there's any place that the average kid is gonna learn about critical thinking it's not gonna be at home, it's not gonna be in the ballpark, it's gonna be at the school. As most skeptics know, there are amazingly few classes that teach critical thinking. you know some teachers who have a love and understanding of critical thinking, yeah, they'll incorporate it into their classes. But that's rare, very rare. There are some resources on the web, absolutely. Some are actually very helpful like I like commonsense.org or commonsensemedia.org if you have children and you wanna know can I show my kid this particular this, commonsensemedia is great while commonsense.org has some really good resources there if you're curious go check it out. But even with these resources it's not even close to being enough.

We need critical thinking inserted into the common core at the right age range. Couple stats for you, in 2021 the US state of Illinois was the first to require high school students to take a media literacy class. Other states they have 'media literacy' laws but they're largely ineffective. Some for example require media literacy information to be put on their websites. Or the information to be made available to students whatever the hell that means. The quality of that media literacy and if it's even getting in front of the students of course is the big question mark here.

Overall Universities have a better track record of teaching media literacy but by the time the students get there it's already too late. Researchers who study issues like this typically don't agree on what should actually be taught to students learning media literacy. Some researchers believe students should focus on where the information is coming from. And other believe they should get their information from journalistic sources. The fact is that there is not a lot of data at all about what method is best here and that is one of the core problems. There's also something called news literacy, this focuses on the spread of conspiracies and students ability to identify real news from fake news. This focuses on reliability and credibility of news and online information. And again, the researchers have very different perspectives on how the skills should be thought.

To sum it up here the researchers and the educators all acknowledge that there isn't enough data to make a really science-based decision on how to move forward. What is the best method, what is the best information to teach. They don't know, nobody knows, everybody has their own opinions on what they think is the right way to do it. What the researchers are trying to do now, is get more information. As you know it takes a very long time to do it and it cost a lot of money. The majority of research that exists is been conducted on college students which really doesn't help the age range that we want which unfortunately that's just where the research has been conducted. Now after being involved with critical thinking for 30 years, right guys? 16 years co-hosting a podcast about critical thinking. Co-authoring a book about critical thinking. I think that this is actually a pretty clear situation. The students should be learning a broad spectrum of critical thinking skills. This is all my opinion. It should just be about media literacy or news literacy, that's like you know, it's too narrow. We've talked about developing a boloney detector in your mind, right? What is that boloneytector? It's actually having a foundational understanding of many critical thinking skill sets. Right? That's why we wrote the book. We had to put it all in one collection because all of it is kinda co-dependent n each other, you need this foundation of critical thinking. And I also detect that the researchers are so dependent on 'data and research' that they're missing the bigger picture. Which is, it's already out there, we already have the information, we already have the information on what students should be learning. I know that it hasn't been turned into classroom lessons and all of that, I mean some of it is out there and we haven't stitched it all together but come on, what is the actual question? They say that they don't have enough data. I think we have the data, we know exactly what people need to learn.

S: Well, all right but it is a reasonable point to say, do we have like scientific studies showing us that the outcomes actually work and that it is lacking. That's what's most concerning to me so first of all, I agree with you, saying does teaching media literacy work or what method or what method of teaching media literacy works the best is kind of already starting with the wrong premise, because I over the years, it's like saying how do we teach scientific literacy and does that work, does teaching scientific literacy keep people from believing a conspiracies. It has nothing to do with how you teach scientific literacy. it's that scientific literacy by itself is not enough. You need to teach scientific literacy and media literacy and critical thinking skills together and I do think that there's evidence to back that up. I don't think we can say that their point is not correct, they're getting more granular, they're saying not does teaching media literacy work but which method of teaching media literacy is better.

C: Right but not having that data shouldn't preclude you from teaching I think that's the real questions we should be doing it anyway and we should also be studying it.

S: We should be doing it and studying how to do it better.

J: Yeah I hate to think that they're being hung up you know they're kinda like...

S: I don't think so Jay, I don't think that's the case, I think it's just at the academic level they're doing what they should be doing, they're being skeptical and they're asking questions they're not making assumptions. it doesn't mean you do nothing in the meantime it's just like again with medicine, just because we don't know what the best treatment is doesn't mean we do nothing ant let the patient die. You go with the evidence you have.

J: Of course but Steve with critical thinking though are there really like unturned stones here? Like we do have our thumb on it, we know how to teach people critical thinking.

S: Yeah but they weren't even, Jay they weren't even talking about critical thinking, they were talking about media savvy. Media literacy. And that is distinct, they're distinct. Yes there's overlap, there's a lot of overlap but they are distinct subsets.

J: I know, you're right.

S: My problem with the whole approach was not that they were questioning which method of media literacy is most effective or more of a long-tern outcomes, that's great. My problem was they didn't even challenge the premise that media literacy is the problem and they didn't mention at all that you need to combine it with broaded critical thinking skills and scientific literacy.

C: Where's the conversation about basic philosophy and basic psychology curriculum. Like very few students have exposure to psychology or philosophy except when they get to college if they choose to major in it or to take those courses as part of their core curriculum. But you can get through a PHD having never taken a single psych cause and a single philosophy course. And these are I think vehicles for teaching critical thinking.

S: I agree though I kind of in my own categorization I include them under critical thinking. Understanding philosophical basis of science and understanding psychological basis of belief that's all of the broader, which again Jay, goes beyond media literacy. Which it has to be noted separately.

J: I know that media literacy is, it's a subset, right? It's kind of if we had a tree of critical thinking, media literacy is a leaf on a branch of that tree. Too small, it's too narrow. I think teaching people critical thinking, the foundational part of critical thinking it would give them such a boost up in so many different ways and so many different areas, you know the media literacy thing it's just a tiny part of this whole thing.

S: Oh I agree, I totally agree I see this the same as 30 years ago when and we fell into this we were talking about we have to teach scientific literacy and that's the answer to pseudoscience and conspiracies. No it's not true, it's a tiny slice. You have to combine all three together.

J: There are people who have philanthropic desires, right? If we threw a billion dollars at critical thinking how would you spend that and I would say first thing I would do is get a few lobbyists pushing this agenda because it's so important.

C: Where's Bill Gates!?

S: This doesn't happen at the federal level, it happens at the state level, you need 50 lobbyists. But in any case yes it's challenging we need to get it into the curriculum, how do you fundamentally change the curriculum? That is a hard generational battle. The best I think we could do our movement could do is to provide the resources ans much as possible to have lifelong education even outside the educational system as much as we can on YouTube on Facebook i adult learning scenerios. As a movement that's what we gonna do. I would like you asked previously how do we interface with the academics, I've been asking myself that question for 20 years. I think unfortunately our movement is looked on as a popular, like a popular movement and not academic and that's unfortunate.

C: Even though a huge percentage of us are academics.

S: Are academics, I know!

E: I know it's not, it's not correct.

C: But even you're right even with the academic circles it like oh, they do that skeptical work.

S: Yeah, I know.

C: It's not essential to the department.

S: I had somebody asked me the other day, just indecently from what they saw of me online 'so you investigate ghosts?' and I'm like oh total face [inaudible]. (laughter) I gave them the elevator pitch on like what I actually do but the idea that this point in skeptical career somebody could see my online persona and boil it down to 'you investigate ghosts' again just so disappointing. But that's the problem that we're dealing with, right?

J: Steve I get you, I see you, Steve I see you.

S: You see me Jay?

E: I see people. I see skeptics.

J: God help us. All right.

S: It's like no I investigate the people who investigate ghosts. As a way of teaching science and critical thinking blah blah blah but it was, yeah we still have a lot of work to do, still a lot work to do.

Peter Jackson and AI (48:42)

• How Peter Jackson Used Artificial Intelligence to Restore the Video & Audio Featured in The Beatles: Get Back

Human Remains Locator (1:09:28)

• 'The Human Remains Locator' -- Forensic investigators develop tools they say can find bodies

Who's That Noisy? (1:17:51)

New Noisy (1:21:29)

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

J: So, guys, if you think you know what that is or if you heard something cool this week, do me a favor: just take the moment right now and send me that information at wtn@theskepticsguide.org.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups

Email: The Effects of Climate Change (1:25:44)

_consider_using_block_quotes_for_emails_read_aloud_in_this_segment_ with_reduced_spacing_for_long_chunks –

Science or Fiction (1:37:33)

Answer	Item
Fiction	Regrown rat leg
Science	Independent echolocation evolution
Science	Laparoscopy via robot surgery

Host	Result
Steve	swept

Rogue	Guess
Cara	Regrown rat leg
Bob	Regrown rat leg
Jay	Regrown rat leg
Evan	Regrown rat leg

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Item #1: Researchers report they were able to successfully regrow a functional leg in a rat following treatment with a five-drug cocktail. Item #2: A new study of the neuroanatomy of bat hearing finds that bats fall into two groups with distinct anatomy for echolocation, suggesting that echolocation may have evolved independently in the two groups. Item #3: Scientists report the first successful laparoscopic operations, specifically intestine repair, performed entirely by a surgical robot without any human control.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:55:30)

I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration, and falsified data. Show me the research; show me the results; show me the conclusions; and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.
– Bill Vaughan (1915-1977), American columnist and author

Signoff/Announcements ()

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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Today I Learned

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