SGU Episode 80

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SGU Episode 80
January 31st 2007
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 79                      SGU 81
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
'I am not a fan of Sigmund Freud because his theories are not testicle.'
Richard Wiseman
Links
Download Podcast
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 31^st, 2007, and this is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society and joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Rebecca Watson...

R: Ahoy-hoy.

S: Perry DeAngelis...

P: Good evening.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Ladies and gentlemen, how are you all?

S: We have all the ropes in the house tonight. How's everyone doing?

R: Someone stepped on my foot.

J: Very good.

E: It was me, I'm sorry. I psychically stepped on your foot.

R: That's psychically hurt.

News Items

Randi takes on Sylvia (0:51)

• Petition to demand that Browne takes the Randi Challenge
  www.ipetitions.com/petition/cmonsylvia/index.html
  

S: So some quick follow up on Sylvia Brown, I know we've really been beating on her recently, but-

J: Never enough, Steve.

S: She is the psychic in the crosshairs this month.

P: Well deserved.

S: Well deserved, absolutely well deserved. Randi as we've discussed on the last couple of podcasts has altered the Randi challenge and he's going to focus his efforts on taking on high profile, people who are high profile on the media who are alleged psychics or whatever, and he definitely has his sights on Sylvia Brown. He was on CNN on the Anderson Cooper Show twice actually, right, in the last couple of weeks.

R: Yeah, Anderson Cooper had him on once and he was so awesome that he decided to have him back on again just the other night and they both kicked Sylvia Brown's publicist ass.

S: Right.

P: Thank you.

S: To talk some more about her recent failure and really her coldness and also we actually gave Randi an opportunity to explain what a cold reading was and it was good. It was actually a good experience.

E: You're saying he's no Larry King, this Anderson Cooper.

R: No, Anderson Cooper came out swinging, like from the very start he was very confrontational and very on the offense with Sylvia Brown's publicist.

P: Good.

R: Yeah, just ripped her to shreds. She tried to change the topic by mentioning that Randi was an atheist when she was backed into a corner and Anderson Cooper said that those were high school debating tactics and to get back to the topic. He's awesome.

P: Good for him.

R: Totally kicked her butt.

P: Maybe I'll watch a little CNN.

R: It would be nice to think that this is the beginning of the end for Sylvia.

B: It would be nice, but-

S: There is also a petition circulating basically to plead, is the word they used, with Sylvia Brown to take the million dollar challenge offered by the James Randi Educational Foundation. So this is the pressure that Randi and Jeff were talking to us about.

B: So they're starting it now before April 1st.

R: Well no, what happened was the petition is just an online petition by a bunch of people who wanted to do it and those are almost entirely ineffective, but they're fun to get everybody all riled up and the reason why Randi is on Anderson Cooper and all these other guys is because of the recent flub up with Sylvia saying that that kid was dead when he turned out to be alive. This is all just timing.

S: This is Sean Hornbeck.

R: Sean Hornbeck. Yeah. So it's all just a matter of timing. Come April 1st, it's going to be even bigger.

S: Yeah, the changes will be official, but they're definitely, they're just being opportunistic and striking at Sylvia basically when she's vulnerable.

R: But there are other things in the cards that I think are going to start April 1st. I'm very excited.

B: I really hope that he can embarrass them and really call them out because nobody is going to do this. I just hope that this tactic works even though he won't be testing anybody.

P: That clip of Sylvia Brown working over the Hornbeck's parents is disgusting. I don't know if you people have seen it. It's been on been on quite a lot recently.

R: It's really hard to watch.

E: Very hard to watch.

S: It is. We're linked to it. It's on YouTube. You can watch it there.

R: And let me once again plug my friend Robert's website, StopSylviaBrown.com.

S: Yep, he's doing yeoman's work.

P: That's right.

The Hobbit Returns (4:22)

• news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6311619.stm

S: Some hard science in the news just to follow up on a topic that we've discussed a couple of times on this show. You guys remember The Hobbit?

E: Oh, yeah. It's a book written by...

S: Homo floresiensis, which is a diminutive early human, which was discovered on an Indonesian island of Flores, was first discovered in 2003. And this has been the subject of quite a controversy, which is, I like scientific controversies because you really can learn how the scientific process unfolds, you see scientists going at it because it's hopefully evidence and logic driven. They don't just call each other names and point fingers.

R: There's some of that, though, too.

S: There's some of that, but in the end, the evidence wins the day. So the key controversy here is, is this specimen of this small human, is it an actual separate species that has a diminutive stature? I believe it was less than four feet tall, the individual skeleton that they found in 2003. Or is this just a homo sapiens, our species, who is short to begin with, and the modern people who live on that island are somewhat short statured, and also suffered from some congenital anomaly, specifically the one they're considering was microcephaly. So is this a diseased homo sapiens, or is it actually a separate species? And this debate has been really raging in the paleontological community. I've actually blogged about it a few weeks ago, too. It's been very interesting to follow. So now we have another salvo in this debate. Another team has used a computer model to compare regular humans, humans with microcephaly,the "hobbit skull", and also a dwarf, just to look at another, a homo sapiens that has a short stature because of a congenital anomaly. And they concluded that the skull comes from a different species, that it is not a human with microcephaly, based upon their computer modeling, based on looking at the volume of the skull and the size and shape of the brain.

P: It's a primate?

S: Yeah, it's definitely not just a primate. It's a hominid. It's either a homo sapiens or a very closely related species. So this new piece of evidence pushes it towards it being a separate species.

B: Steve, what they could do, though, now with this imaging of the brain case, apparently that from just the brain case imagery, they can determine some basic outlines of the structure of the brain. And using that as a comparison, they determined that there were structures in this brain, these hobbit's brains, that were quite different from somebody suffering from microcephaly.

S: That's right.

B: To me, that seems pretty darn definitive.

S: It's pretty good, but it's still a single specimen. It's still hard to draw completely firm conclusions from it. They got permission now, they recently got permission to go into the area where they found the skull to look for more fossil evidence. If they find two or three or four other well-preserved specimens with skulls and brain cases, that will end the debate, because you're not going to have a community of microcephalics. If this is a community and not an individual, there's no further debate on this issue. That will prove it's a separate species.

P: Tell the audience what that is, Steve, what's a microcephalic?

S: Microcephaly is a small brain, where you develop a small stature overall, and specifically a small brain.

E: I know some people like that.

S: We all do, Evan.

R: Yeah, take the easy joke.

B: One of the interesting things about this, I think, is that these hominids had, if they are a distinct species, during the course of evolution, their brain would have most likely reorganized itself to such a degree that even though it was a third of the size of a human brain, it was still, maybe you could say, roughly equivalent in terms of intelligence and tool-making, because they did find some artifacts with the fossil that they do have.

E: 18,000 years old? Is that how old it is?

S: Yes. Yeah.

B: So imagine a brain that's a third the size, but maybe potentially equivalent to humans, or I guess it's even possible that in some ways it might have been superior in terms of the reorganization might have made it more efficient or something like that.

S: Well in analyzing brain size, you have to note that brain size is proportional to body size, although that's not a linear relationship. There is a curve that you can develop for groups of animals, like mammals or primates or whatever, where the larger the animal, the larger the brain, even at the same level of intelligence, homo florensiensis, if it is a different species, falls significantly below that of humans, which is what led some to conclude that it was a microcephalic, because it was contemporary with modern humans but had a much smaller brain. It was small even for its small stature. But now what Dr. Falk, who did the new study, showed is that it has a configuration of a shape, if you will, that shares some features in common with homo sapiens, but does not share any features in common with microcephalics, and also has some unique features, some features unique to it, and that supports it being a related but different species to homo sapiens. It is also what led Dr. Falk to conclude, or to speculate, that it may have gained its superior or more intelligent intellectual function through greater efficiency and organization rather than just sheer size.

J: So are they officially calling them hobbits?

S: That's the media moniker. They're homo florensiensis, because they're from the island of Flores. The other last little tidbit is that this is probably an example of what's so called island dwarfism, that a lot of species that become isolated on small islands become very very small in stature, because it becomes an adaptive strategy for living with the limited resources on an island. And there are lots of examples of that. I remember just about four or five months ago they discovered an island species closely related to the apatosaurus, or classically has been called the brontosaurus, and it was a really really tiny version of it. It was like a little tiny brontosaurus, because that's just another example of island dwarfism. So that's probably, ultimately, what this is just an example of.

B: Yeah, there must be tremendous selective pressure for a species to get smaller and smaller if resources are so limited.

Questions and E-mails

The Whole God Thing (11:21)

I enjoy your podcast, and listen regularly. Other than Perry's persistently whiney complaints about things clearly over his head (though, I know, he's a 'personality'), your crew seems like a decent, balanced bunch. In particular, Steven's breadth and depth gives credibility to the whole affair.

Other than my observations of dubious merit, I do have a question: I have enjoyed riding the recent tidal wave of interest generated by Dawkin's 'God Delusion' and Harris' 'Letter To ...', and read both with nodding head. (I'm most of the way through Harris' 'The End of Faith', a great companion/compliment to 'The God Delusion', btw).

After reading Dawkin's book, though, I felt dissatisfied with his refutation of the ontological arguments for the existence of God. (E.G., the one that begins 'Can you imagine a being such that there is no greater being...He must be real b/c that's greater still' I spare you the full argument, as I trust you know it. If not, consult the text and/or the web). He essentially dismisses them as simply 'prestidigitation' without really going into adequate detail (from my point of view) as to why. Now, these arguments seem to lack common sense to me, but greater minds than mine - and, dare I say, Dawkin's - have wrestled at length with these constructions, including logician Bertrand Russell's formidable grey matter. I'd love a more complete exploration of them, and their weakness(es).

So, the question: Do you think you might pause your witty banter for sufficient time to tackle so weighty a topic, and provide a more compelling refutation of these 'God Proofs'?

(And, I trust you read my jibes as they were written: tongue planted firmly in cheek)

Cheers,

'Skip' Tickol
Albania


The ontological argument: www.philosophyofreligion.info/ontological.html

S: We're going to go on to your emails, because we're actually getting a steady flow of really interesting emails, and sometimes it's increasingly difficult to pick which ones to talk about, because there are so many great questions and great topics.

R: Here's a hint, it's usually the ones that are complimentary. Just saying.

S: Not always. In fact, the first one that has some mixed observations...

P: Come on, Steve, you've got to admit, there's a lot of vacuous and empty emails, too.

R: I like those.

S: One or two.

P: Come on!

S: In all seriousness, a lot of people write just to say that they like our show, and that's great, we appreciate that. Some of the questions are just people who are not aware that it's a topic we covered a year ago, and they're not aware of it. But most of the emails ask really good questions. So I'm actually quite impressed with the percentage of good questions. This first one comes from Skip Tickol, I think that's Tickol, T-I-C-K-O-L, from Albania. I think this is our first Albanian email. After some observations, he writes, "I have enjoyed writing the recent tidal wave of interest generated by Dawkins' God Delusion and Harris' Letters to a Christian Nation, and read both with nodding head. Most of the way through Harris' The End of Faith, a great companion compliment to the God Delusion. After reading Dawkins' book, though, I felt dissatisfied with his reputation of the ontological arguments for the existence of God." As an example, he says, "The one that begins, can you imagine a being such that there is no greater being? He must be real, because that's greater still. He goes on, I spare you the full argument as I trust you know it. If not, consult the text and or the web. He essentially dismisses them as simply prestidigitation, without really going into adequate detail as to why. Now, these arguments seem to lack common sense to me, but greater minds than mine, and I have wrestled at length with these constructions, including logician Bertrand Russell's formidable grey matter. I'd love a more complete exploration of them and their weaknesses." So the question, do you think you might pause your witty banter for sufficient time to tackle so weighty a topic, and provide a more compelling refutation of these God proofs?

R: Does that mean we can't be witty when we talk about it, because I was just unplugged right now?

E: Maybe if we talk about it with a British accent, it'll seem wittier.

S: We could kill two birds with one stone, and give a witty response to his answer. Witty but weighty. That'll be our new witty but weighty.

J: I like that.

R: I think that's our new slogan.

E: Very good.

S: Yes. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Witty but weighty.

P: I like that. That's good.

S: Just to tell you, the ontological argument is basically the argument that God must exist from a purely logical point of view. So rather than saying there's evidence that God exists, it says we can logically prove that God must exist. And there's a number of forms that this could take. The classic one that he's referring to is the argument that if you can imagine a being which is perfect, and part of perfection is existence, therefore that perfect being must exist. It is actually logically saying that if you can imagine it, it must exist. That's the argument. It's pretty thin. It's logically a pretty thin argument.

B: It's transparent.

S: It's the false premise that if you can imagine something, it must exist. In fact, it's been refuted by Thomas Aquinas. I mean, you're going back a long time. Classic theologians like Aquinas realized that the logic of this argument was wanting. More modern writers have refuted it by saying that you could basically use that same logical sequence to logic into existence an unlimited number of things, an infinite number of things.

B: How does an argument like that even come to existence?

R: Well, you conceive it and then it is.

P: I can understand how it comes to existence. I don't understand how it gains a foothold.

B: I mean, I've been looking at some of these ontological arguments and some of them you could see how somebody would entertain them. But that one, that's one of the ones I came across as like, well, what's going on with that?

S: It's really thin. I heard a quantum mechanics one. Since quantum mechanics "proves" that matter doesn't exist unless there's an observer, that the universe must have an observer in order to exist and that observer is therefore God. So quantum mechanics proves the existence-

B: Yeah, I have heard that one before.

S: -of God. And we've discussed at length why, again, that quantum mechanical premise is false.

J: It's still kind of creepy though if you think about it.

S: I think the reason why these types of arguments exist is because there are those who would like to prove their faith and you can either prove it through evidence, which is tough, or you can prove it by saying that that the God must exist in this universe. That's a logical imperative. There's the arguments of the prime movers are actually at least somewhat compelling and you have to get a little deep to realize that it's a regressive argument where every effect has a cause. So there's an infinite regression of causes through there must have been a prime cause, the one that started it all off, and that prime cause is God. There's a sequence there, but...

B: That one's called the cosmological argument.

S: Right, right.

R: Just to be thorough about the ontological argument, I just want to spell it out for people that it's not just if you can conceive it, it must therefore exist. I think to be specific, you should take it step by step so you can kind of see where it came from. The idea is, so God is a being that is the greatest possible thing. Something that exists in reality is greater than something that only exists in your mind. And since you already defined God as the greatest thing ever, and things that exist in reality are greater than things that exist in your mind, therefore God is a reality. It's wordplay as much as it is anything else, but that will hopefully make it a little clearer.

S: Yeah, it's the notion that there has to be something that is the greatest thing, and the greatest thing, because it's greater than everything else, it has to exist. Something that doesn't exist can't be greater than something that does exist. It's also closely related to the whole perfection thing, that something that is perfect has to exist.

R: Yeah, I think the primary problem with it is that you can't necessarily define something as being perfect, something as being the greatest thing ever.

S: Right, it still comes back to the assumption that it exists. I guess that makes it kind of a tautology. It's taking as its premise its conclusion.

B: Another point about this cosmological argument we're discussing, I found some interesting points from Brother Mark at the Church of Rationality website, an interesting website. He brought a point that I hadn't considered, that I guess is pretty obvious, that the premise of the cosmological argument is that every effect needs a cause, and you just follow that chain back, but it ends with something that causes an effect that doesn't need a cause. So they're kind of contradicting themselves. You need everything, every effect needs a cause, but then you've got to go back a certain distance and then stop, and then we don't need it for this special case. Why couldn't just the universe be the cause? Why choose a God?

S: The other solution is that there's an infinite regression, right? There doesn't have to be the uncaused cause. This entire discussion brings up somewhat of a deeper discussion, which is sort of always there in the background, and that is what is the relationship between the skeptical movement as a whole and questions of the existence of God or religion. I think that Dawkins' book and Harris really has reinvigorated this debate within the skeptical movement. I personally noticed at The Amazing Meeting 5 a couple weeks ago that the Dawkins effect, that those people within the skeptical movement that think that we really should be taking religion on head on were very energized by Dawkins and by his recent efforts.

E: When Shermer played that video clip, that two or three minute video clip of Dawkins, his presentation, it did, it stirred the audience.

S: Yeah, and this goes back a long time, and the base there, there were two camps. One camp that says that scientific skepticism is about, first and foremost, science and should restrict itself to testable claims, things that are within the realm of science. Claims that are faith-based, which actually really aren't claims, just faith, and the sociological aspects of that are really outside the realm of scientific skepticism. The other school of thought says that you can apply the same rules of logic and evidence and reason to any belief, no matter what it appears to be based upon, and that we shouldn't give religion a free ride or we shouldn't exempt religion from skeptical scrutiny. This is an ongoing fight that we've been involved with, as long as we've been involved with the skeptical movement. I don't think I've changed, ever changed a single person's mind on this discussion either. I think there's just two camps. They coexist, and I don't really see a lot of movement on either side. In the New England Skeptical Society, certainly, we want to restrict ourselves to testable claims approach, because really from a philosophical point of view, I don't think that, you can't apply rules of scientific inquiry to someone's personal arbitrary choice of faith. The only thing you could say about that is it's faith, and it's outside of the realm of science. I think that's a really important thing to be able to say about certain things. You have removed it from the realm of science. I also think that the debate gets incorrectly framed almost every single time as whether or not skeptics should take on "religion". I think that that's a very misleading framing of the debate, because we do take on religion whenever religion steps into the arena of science by making testable claims. Creationism, we're all over it. Scientology's psychiatry denial or their superpower business, we'll take that on. But somebody says, I'm a deist, I happen to hold out a personal faith in God without any evidence or logic to back it up, it's just a personal choice. What can you say about that from a scientific point of view? Good for you. That's a personal choice. It has nothing to do with science.

B: How many people actually say that, though?

S: I know people who did it. I think, interestingly, Hal Bidlack, who we interviewed at TAM5, and a piece of that was on last week's show, said that straight out. Martin Gardner was a deist. He wrote the original skeptical book. What was the name of his first book? Fads and Fallacies.

R: Fads and Fallacies in the name of science.

S: It's still a classic. He was a deist. The scientist who has been most effective in defending evolution from intelligent design, Kenneth Miller, I believe he's Catholic, isn't he?

B: He's good.

S: He's a really good scientist. That's the approach that we take. As somewhat of an extension of that, I think we also will defend intellectual integrity and the integrity of scholarship in a broader sense, because that is the environment in which science can thrive. In fact, science is dependent upon that environment. We'll defend the separation of church and state, and we'll defend integrity and truthfulness in reporting and representing historical accuracy. Things that are maybe not technically scientific, but they get to essentially good intellectual virtues of scholarship.

P: This has been the position of the NESS since Bob, Steve, and I found it in the middle of the 90s. We've never changed. We've always supported scientific skepticism.

J: I found that as time goes by, I find it less and less interesting to even get into religious discussions with people, because I feel like I have nothing to base my opinion on scientifically. I don't know if you guys experienced the same thing, but I don't even really want to discuss it if there isn't any logic behind it. I don't want to try to dissuade someone from their belief system. Like the attitude of the NESS has been from the beginning, like Perry said, as soon as it crosses the science threshold, then I feel like it's open game, then I can say something. And as time has gone by, I've learned very much that I don't want to disrespect people's religions. I don't even want to get into it. I don't want to talk about it.

S: We talked about this, I think, a few weeks ago about our personal journey to skepticism. For me personally, I have more apathy towards it than anything else, although I do find it very fascinating from a sociological and historical point of view. But I don't really care what people believe in their heart of hearts. That's not the point. What people believe is not important. It's the method that matters.

R: Jay, I don't really agree with your choice of words, though, about disrespecting a person's religion because I feel like way too often it's considered disrespect if I say that, say the Christian God probably doesn't exist. That's considered disrespectful, which I think is ludicrous, that a person can say to me that I'm going to hell, but I can't say that their God is imaginary.

B: Well, that's a Sam Harris point of view.

R: I strongly believe that as an atheist I need to be comfortable with the fact that I'm an atheist and if the topic of religion should come up, then I need to be comfortable saying, hey no, that's kind of all crap, sorry. That stuff doesn't exist. Do you have evidence for it? No.

J: That's kind of my point, though. First of all, I've never dissuaded or argued anybody out of, I love this quote, a position that they didn't intellectually get to that point in the first place. I've never been able to ever turn anybody around when it comes to their major belief, whatever their belief system is.

R: But that's not the purpose of it.

J: Then why go into it? If they're going to insult you, if they're going to insult your science, if that's the avenue that you're describing, if they're going to say you're going to hell or you're a damned person because of what you believe, they're already opening the door. Then go ahead and throw insults or do what you need to do.

R: See, you keep saying insults and disrespect and that's Christian thinking. I'll say that's theistic thinking as opposed to saying no, there's just no God. It just doesn't exist. That's not disrespectful to anyone. It's just the truth.

J: I guess what I'm saying is you're opening up a can of worms that is useless, in my opinion. That's why I feel this way.

R: How is it disrespectful?

J: It's disrespectful because there really is no other conclusion other than telling them what you believe in is BS.

S: Well, I think you guys are discussing two different things. Jay, you're focusing more on the practicality of the issue and saying there's just no point to it because you're never going to persuade anybody. Rebecca, what you're saying, which I completely, 100% agree with and I file this under intellectual integrity, is that there should be no such thing as blasphemy. Nothing is off the table. We should unashamedly support and celebrate a completely free exchange of ideas. That means we should be free to say that I don't believe in a deity for these reasons, whether they're philosophical or scientific or whatever. Politeness is really a lame excuse to try to enforce someone's personal taboos or blasphemy. It's really just a way of squelching the free exchange of ideas. I totally agree with you on that score. I agree with Dawkins and Harris on that score as well. It doesn't mean that it's a scientific issue though. Just to emphasize that, because I believe that and because I think philosophically I agree with Dawkins and Harris, I'm not saying that it's a bad thing or it's inappropriate for them to be doing what they're doing. I applaud it. It's just a different endeavor than promoting science, which is I think just a matter of emphasis and that's the emphasis that we've chosen for what we're doing.

E: You should be able to write a book called The Satanic Verses and not be hunted down by Muslims all over the world and assassinated.

S: That's right.

J: I agree with that thought as well. I'm just using anecdotal information here. Rebecca asked a question. The answer to the question was, I don't go there because I've learned that there's no use in going there.

S: My experience is different though because I think, Jay, it may just be the approach. Again, I wouldn't try to beat somebody's faith out of them because I agree. I don't think that you're ever going to do that. The evidence shows that when you try to do that, you actually reinforce their faith because you become the boogeyman that their faith needs in order to justify its own existence.

B: If you could put a nugget of critical thinking, something that will grow in time, it can't be a fast process. It's got to be a slow process for it to work.

S: I unashamedly and proudly tell people what I think and why and just plant a little seed and that's it. It doesn't have to be confrontational. It doesn't have to be insulting. It doesn't mean I think you're an idiot. It just means this is the approach that I take. These are the things that I value. This is why I believe what I believe and you just plant a seed and see what happens.

R: I agree that there's no point to arguing with someone and I agree with Steve about planting the seed, but I really just feel like the most important reason why we need to be open about how we view religion and the fact that, I'll speak personally, why I need to be open about the fact that I don't believe in any gods is because I'm trying to make a world where we base our decisions on rational critical thinking and I think that a key step to that is making it okay to be open about being an atheist and to show other people that it's okay about being an atheist. So it's not about arguing with them so much as it is letting them know that I'm an atheist, I'm not ashamed of it and other people shouldn't be ashamed of it either.

J: I like that thought too, Rebecca. I agree with that.

B: An atheism should not be the dirty word that it is, second only maybe to paedophilia. It's really a word that has such a visceral reaction among so many people.

S: Penn and Teller go out of their way to blaspheme and they do it deliberately, partly because it's entertaining, but they do it because they're trying to break down the taboo of blasphemy to say, listen, there shouldn't be anything that is considered that and that's great. Again, I applaud them to do it. They do it partly for the shock value, but they're trying to change the culture and sometimes the only way to change the culture is to offend and shock some people out of what they're locked into. Again, it's not what we do on this podcast, but I could still applaud the fact that other people do it.

B: I like the way Sam Harris described religion as a conversation stopper. You're having a conversation with somebody and they bring up their religious beliefs. It kind of just ends right there. You're not really allowed to go any deeper and you just have to respect their belief. You can't say anything negative about it because then you're disrespecting their belief and it just ends right there. Conversation stops.

E: It depends how confrontational you want to be and with whom at any given moment.

S: I would just advocate for finding a way to defend your beliefs without necessarily being perceived of as overly confrontational, unless you want to be, which is fine too, but just choose what you're comfortable with and do it.

P: Believe me, it is extremism that's the problem. I have been nauseated by the things that people of extreme faith say many, many times in my life, Muslims, evangelicals, all of them. And I have been nauseated by rabid atheists who I have encountered at, say, an atheist society, are just as fervent, just as bigoted, and just as loud-mouthed about their atheism as a fundamentalist. The problem is extremism. I think to be intellectually honest, one has to, in my opinion, has to say they're an agnostic.

S: That gets into a semantic. I agree with that, of course, but we can get bogged down in semantics with that. I agree, Perry, and that brings up a point I was going to make. I would just expand it a little bit. It is extremism, yes, but it's, I think, more generically just ideology. If you basically say, if you have an ideology that you adhere to, and that becomes your ideology, and it doesn't even have to be religion, which again is why I think that religion is kind of not the accurate way to state the whole problem. It's really the difference between ideology and reason, or ideology and science, and if you put an ideology ahead of evidence and logic and reason, that's the problem. That ideology does not have to be religious. It could be economic. It could be political. It could be sociological. It could be communism, or whatever, just some view of the world that you hold above evidence.

P: Right. Right.

E: Sacred cows.

P: Our discussion here was religion. That's why I used it, but absolutely.

S: Yeah, so I think that conceptually that's a better way of looking at it.

Difference between Religion and Cults (33:20)

Dr. Novella,

Hello I am a sophomore at Loyola University of Chicago. I love your show, but my attempts to get my fellow students into it are usually to no avail. When the panel talked about scientology, you spoke about it like it is a scam and nonsense. But what is the difference between scientology and any other religion? Cannot following Jesus and the Bible be just as 'crazy' as following L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics? And in terms of being a scam, how much money do Christians and Muslims spend on their church? I doubt any of you are too religious, but don't you think it is hypocritical for religious people to dismiss scientology, or for people to take some religions seriously while calling scientologists fools? Thank you, and will you write me a recommendation? (Joking)

Ross Donnelly
Chicago, United States

www.refocus.org/charcult.html
www.csj.org/infoserv_cult101/checklis.htm

S: Let me read the second email, which is also about religion, and I'm including it because it's playing off the first one. This one comes from Ross Donnelly from Chicago, and he writes, "Hello, I am a sophomore at Loyola University of Chicago. I love your show, but my attempts to get my fellow students into it are usually to no avail." Well, try harder, Ross. "When the panel talked about Scientology, you spoke about it like it is a scam and nonsense, but what is the difference between Scientology and any other religion?"

J: Oh, boy.

S: "You're not following Jesus and the Bible will be just as "crazy", as following L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics. And in terms of being a scam, how much money do Christians and Muslims spend on their church? I doubt any of you are too religious, but don't you think it is hypocritical for religious people to dismiss Scientology, or for people to take some religion seriously while calling Scientologists fools?"

R: Let's go to the sliding scale of insanity to show.

E: Remember how Randi answered this question, or a similar question to it?

S: What Evan's referring to is a few years ago, about five or six years ago, the New England Skeptical Society co-hosted a cult awareness conference with a new group that was called Cult Info, which then was renamed the Leo J. Ryan Society, which no longer exists, unfortunately. We actually locked in James Randi as the keynote speaker at that meeting, and it was a very good meeting. It was all about cult awareness, and Randi gave an excellent speech right up until the end when he said that, much like this email, that he doesn't see the difference between these so-called cults and mainstream religions, but what Randi was really saying, and this was clarified later, was that the details of the faith and the belief are no different, and irrelevant, and not what makes a cult a cult, but what I think Randi at the time didn't quite understand, but now I know he does, was that it's not the details of the belief that make a cult a cult and a religion a religion, it is their behavior. It is how they behave, and there are lots of excellent articles and books written about what the characteristics of a cult are. I have a couple that I'll link to, but just very briefly, to give you some of the highlights, I think the biggest one is deception. Cults usually are not upfront about what they really believe, whereas if you ask a Catholic priest what's Catholicism about, they're going to tell you right up front all of their innermost, biggest beliefs. We believe in the Trinity.

P: There's no secret part that you have to ride in order to find out about it.

S: In Scientology, you don't hear about Xenu for a long time, until you're tens of thousands of dollars into it. Cults tend to be very authoritarian. They tend to encourage isolation from society, and they use a number of mind control techniques, and there are a lot of details to all of this. Cults are totalitarian. They try to take over someone completely with deceptive and manipulative behavior.

P: The separation is physical, it's emotional, they do it with jargon. There's a lot of ways they separate you from your past life, and they vilify your past life, and non-believers, all non-believers, truly vilify them.

S: Having said that, to avoid the false dichotomy, it is not as if there are pristine religions and vile cults and nothing in between. There's a number of characteristics, and it's a continuum. The more cultish aspects a belief system has, the more of a cult it is. All religions are going to have some, and no cult is going to have all of them. You fall somewhere along that spectrum, but Scientology is pretty far down the road to being a cult. Now, it may be that over time, in 50 or 100 years, they may evolve more towards the mainstream religion end of the spectrum, and they might give up some of their more deceptive and totalitarian behaviors. We go after cults because they're deceptive, and again, that gets to more of the intellectual integrity thing, again, and because they often make testable claims. They step into our arena.

P: I'll tell you another thing. Scientologists had agents, if you will, at our cult awareness conference, trying to intimidate speakers and giving them whispering in their ears, giving them warnings, who were speaking against Scientology. Absolutely. The Catholic Church didn't do that.

B: None that you noticed, anyway.

S: I have to give you my favorite anecdote from that conference. A Scientologist walked up to our table, the skeptics table, it was me and Perry and Randi and a couple of other people, and started telling us about Dianetics, and we should just give it a try for two weeks and see how it will change our life. And Randi looked at the guy and said, I met L. Ron Hubbard on two occasions, both times he was drunk. He turned around and walked away.

B: Wow, guys. Awesome.

S: That was it. Case closed.

B: I met your God and he was inebriated.

TAM5 Interviews Part II (38:38)

TAM5 Interviews Part IIThese are interviews recorded during The Amazing Meeting 5 (January 18-21 2007). Included are highlights from the interviews. The full uncut interviews will be made available soon.

This week's interviews include:
- John Rennie, the Editor and Chief of Scientific American
- Teller, of the skeptical magician team Penn and Teller
- Jim Underdown of the Center for Inquiry West

S: Well, this week we continue with part two of our TAM5, the Amazing Meeting Five, interviews. This week we're going to include excerpts from our interview with John Rennie, the Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American Magazine, with Teller, the usually silent half of Penn and Teller, and with Jim Underdown of the Center for Inquiry West.

Interviews with John Rennie (39:13)

S: Well, we are here at TAM5 at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, and we are all having a great time. And who did we run in here, none other than John Rennie, the Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American Magazine. John, it's good to see you.

JR: Good to see you guys again.

B: Thanks for joining us, John.

JR: Thank you.

S: Now, John, you're here at the Amazing Meeting Five. You're giving a lecture on Saturday on science and the media. Why don't you tell us about that?

JR: Yeah, I'm part of a panel discussion that we're going to be having at the end of the day. We're talking broadly about science and the media, which obviously covers a lot of different areas. The media are certainly guilty of not always handling that subject very well. But a little before that, I'm also going to be talking more specifically about Scientific American and kind of its history, because over its 160-plus years, it's been involved a lot in skepticism and ghost-busting.

S: That's right.

JR: So I'm going to try to tell a few anecdotes about all of that, probably also read someexcerpts from some of the funnier mail that we've gotten over the years of people protesting one sort of thing.

S: You've given those lectures to our local society, our local group, and they're both educational and hilariously funny, so I'm looking forward to that. The Scientific American has a long history of being on the cutting edge of sort of promoting the public understanding of science, and I think you're one of the few magazines that's doing that that gets the whole role of scientific skepticism, that you actually have to take on the fringe science and the pseudoscience, and that tradition goes way back. In fact, it was Scientific American that sponsored the committee that Houdini was on to investigate seances in his time, isn't that correct?

JR: That's right. That was something that actually was a fun time. Back in the 1920s was a great era for Scientific American involved in skepticism, because it was simultaneously involved in putting together this investigative committee that was checking out claims made by various spiritualists. So you had some of the editors of the magazine and some other psychic investigators, but also Harry Houdini, who were also going around to different seances and checking these things, and in many cases obviously immediately finding the different kinds of tricks that the mediums were pulling. And then they were also involved in different kinds of checking out claims on medical quackery, in particular one very big scam from the 20s called the electronic reactions of Abrams, which was a huge, huge thing at that time.

S: Abrams' dynamizer.

JR: That's right, the dynamizer.

S: And then his follow-up, which was the oscilloclast.

JR: The oscilloclast, right.

B: Oh, he had a follow-up.

JR: Oh, yeah.

B: Oh, boy.

JR: The dynamizer was simply a device that by virtue of electronic waves was good for diagnosing what was wrong with you. But the oscilloclast, it's almost like it took it in reverse. It could reestablish the proper balance of your electromagnetic frequencies.

E: Is that magic word balance that creeps up?

JR: Yes. Yeah.

S: And of course, upon his death, they cracked open the black box and they were just filled with loose machine parts, so they weren't even doing what he said they were doing.

JR: Yeah. This was great. Albert Abrams, who had started off in life really as apparently a perfectly respectable neurologist, I think. It seems like sometime after his wife died back in the early 19-teens, he seemed to kind of skid off the rails. And he developed this system of diagnosing what was wrong with people and trying to treat it based on the idea of electromagnetic waves and vibrations of different kinds. But he had a great racket going because he would train people in his methods. And he was charging them like $200 ahead to do this. Now, in the 1920s, $200 is a lot of money. But also, everybody who was studying this, they had to sign a binding contract that under no circumstances would they ever try to open up these boxes, the acylaclasts or the dynamizers, and look inside.

J: It sounds like multilevel marketing.

JR: It was brilliant. And it was very successful with the public. And it's I mean, of course, the funny thing is we, of course, are awash with all sorts of different kinds of medical scams of our own these days. But we can look back at that time and say, what were these people thinking? After all, it's a guy attaches an electrode to somebody's head. He makes them face west. He's tapping on their abdomens. And then based on the kinds of readings he's getting off this radio-like gadget that he has and the sound of these taps that he's making against somebody's body, he presumably could diagnose something. That sounds preposterous. But, when you remember what the standard of medicine was like at that time medicine was still stumbling along. And a lot of people hated to go to doctors because it meant something painful. It meant that what the treatment could in many cases seem at least as bad as what the original problem was. There weren't that many decades past the time when the best way to treat a lot of things was a quick amputation. And anesthesia was fairly new. The germ theory of disease was still fairly new. None of this seemed all that outlandish to these people. And as a result, a lot of people in the general public were abandoning their AMA certified doctors and were going off to somebody who was promising that they could get this sort of easy, painless way of solving a problem.

S: But honestly, it's no more ridiculous than homeopathy or therapeutic touch. And in fact, radio frequency medicine is still around. I mean, that comes and goes over the years. So it's actually no, I don't think it's any more ridiculous than a lot of the alternative medicine scams that we've got around.

J: Plus today, though, people are more educated. There is more information that's readily available today. Back then, where would they turn? That was it, right?

JR: Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean the radio was a weird borderline magical device at that point. So you know, it really, it's understandable that the particulars of what was going on in this one, maybe it's easy for people to look back on now and say, well, it just seems like it was ridiculous. But honestly, you're exactly right. The ideas about radionics, this idea of reestablishing balance, and that will somehow make you healthy again. Balance involving adjusting some kind of factors in your body that can't actually be measured physically otherwise. Yeah, that's exactly the same philosophy of what we've got.

S: Now, getting back to science and the media, what do you see as the major challenges that Scientific American in particular is facing and just the media in general in terms of trying to promote the public understanding of science? Where do you see our role and our main challenges in that arena?

JR: I think there are, if only it were just one, it's a few different things, not all of which are entirely closely related. One of them has been the constant ongoing problem, which is that the science is, of course, just hard and the average person's scientific education can't keep pace with that level of progress. So that's just that, that it's fundamentally difficult to do that.

S: And that's going to get worse.

JR: And that is going to get worse. It's compounded by the fact that when, obviously, when you look at what's happened to the forms of media that have been most popular, the rise of the internet has been terrific for giving people, obviously, an opportunity to get into tremendous depth if they want to. But by and large, the types of media that people most like to consume, they like things that are relatively short form. They like things that often are that have sort of audiovisual components. Text can seem awfully, awfully old fashioned these days if it's just poor, boring old text, although that's a very efficient way to be taking in information. And the other problem is that there's somehow we've all kind of internalized the sense of we really want entertainment value to be there in almost everything that we're doing all the time. Now, there's nothing that says that it's impossible to bring that to discussions of science and explanations of new science. There are lots of people who are doing a great job with that all the time. But everybody is not going to be able to keep pace with that. And everybody in the public is not going to be taking care of it. So that's one big category. There's a different sort of political thing that worries me a lot. And then I think we've seen a lot of different instances of this. It goes back arguably for a few decades, but I think in the past few years we've seen more of it multiply, which is a sense that scientists are increasingly being portrayed to the public as just one more special interest group. And science is very often explicitly being presented as just another system of belief fundamentally no different from religion. I think the people who push this are sometimes pushing particular political agendas or larger philosophical agendas or whatever else. But aside from the merits or demerits of the specific sides they're taking in those cases, I think it's a very dangerous thing to undermine people's real understanding of what science is, that there is a real difference between what it means to know something scientifically and to know something in any other way. And I think that does a real disservice really to the culture, to the civilization.

S: Well, John, thank you so much for giving us your time. I really enjoyed speaking with you as always.

JR: Oh, I have a good time being with you guys.

S: It's a great pleasure. I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference. I'm looking forward to your talk on Saturday.

JR: Great. Thank you very much.

J: Thanks, John.

JR: Thank you.

S: Take care.

Interview with Teller (49:33)

S: We have with us now Teller of Penn and Teller.

T: Or so they say.

S: Or so they say. Thank you so much for giving us a few minutes. I know you guys are really busy and you're catching a plane after your...

T: I don't think the real Teller would talk.

S: That's true. That's true.

T: No. But I look a lot like him and people pick me out once in a while. So yeah, go ahead.

S: Right. So what you'll have to do is ensure a look-alike who actually will talk for us. So we're all great admirers of Penn and Teller and of your show Bullshit. I actually was on an episode, you probably don't remember, it was on the Ghost episode. The guy harvesting brains over there, the neurologist.

T: We got some whack jobs on there, not you, of course.

S: It's a wonderful show. I mean, we're happy that you guys are sort of bringing together entertainment and skepticism basically to a mass audience.

T: Well, to a new audience. I mean, I don't think skeptics have ever made it to the frat boy audience before, but I do believe that there are lots of people who sit around and just wait for the breasts in our show. They're there with their glass of beer and they just wait for the breasts and along the way, amazingly, they pick up a few interesting truths.

S: Right. They might learn something. They come for the broad, stay for the skepticism. And you guys incorporate a lot of skepticism into your magic act as well.

T: Our live show reflects exactly what we feel about the world and so there are things that are explicitly skeptical and things that are just sort of rude exclamations. Most of those, of course, come out of Penn because skepticism is an idea that lends itself more to the verbal than the non-verbal in many ways.

S: Right. Right. And just for some background, did you get into skepticism after getting into magic and being a stage magician?

T: I've always been extremely interested in the fraudulent spiritualism, which is redundant. There's the whole spiritualism movement and all of the tricks associated with that. That's something that grabbed me very early. If I had to grab a childhood magic book off the shelf, it would be Spooky Magic. I graduated from there to David P. Abbott's Behind the Scenes of the Mediums. So I had that background and, of course, what magician isn't an admirer of Houdini in some way, so we had that model. But we didn't really make the step until we got to know Randi.

S: Yeah. That was my next question. So Randi, because I have a close relationship with him.

T: Definitely the turning point. Randi was the embodiment of that kind of intelligence in a tremendously entertaining person. With this wonderful moral rightness about it, all coupled with a sense of humor, pretty irresistible.

S: Yeah. Absolutely. For a lot of people, Randi was the introduction to skepticism. It does take a figure or somebody who's popular who's out there, and I think you guys are that as well. Penn and Teller, now again, you have the audience, you're obviously, I think you're probably the best entertainers that we have as skeptics.

T: Well, thanks. There's some old academic said that the stage of romance must precede the stage of precision. And we're the romance part. We're the part that yells out motherfucking when we're offended by something. That's the romantic part. Legitimate people like you and Randi come in after us and clean up the shrapnel that we've left, but at the same time, make it more credible.

S: Right. So how much longer do you think Showtime is going to put up with your stuff?

T: I don't know. I'm stunned that they're still putting up with it now, but it happens to be one of, if not the most popular show on their little network, and we're the only show that ever gets nominated for Emmys and Writers Guild Awards.

E: So they'll look to hold on to you for quite some time.

T: Maybe. What makes for a television show that continues is completely baffling to me. I don't understand the industry at all, and I'm astonished that this has lasted as long as it had. I mean, the quality of the shows, not principally thanks to us, the quality of the shows is really high. We have a company in LA under Star Price, who's our producer and director out there, that is just immensely imaginative, thorough, passionate, because a lot of these people came off of shows that were unsolved mysteries type shows, so they have a lot of guilt that they're working out by doing our show. But even there our staff, we have members of the staff who will, they won't edit a particular show because they one of our editors refused to edit the Second Hand Smoke show that we did, which ultimately we found out there's a little more to Second Hand Smoke than we knew at the time, although we were making the point that all of this could be corrected without government intervention.

E: Right. Right.

S: Are there other topics that you guys covered where you felt later on the evidence maybe was put a different spin on?

T: A little bit, yeah. We found that pure willpower as a way to deal with obesity may not be as effective as we thought it was at the time, and I'm sure one of our goals is to make the very last show that we do the bullshit of bullshit, which we go, when we know we're canceled, we'll go back and do a whole show just correcting all of the mistakes we've made.

S: It's all the crap we screwed up, right? Yeah, we do that pretty much every week. Didn't quite get this right.

E: Well, look, I mean, but at least you admit it, you make corrections when you come across them.

T: We just sort of do what science would do, you know. The reason that you know science is right is because it's always changing.

S: Right.

T: If it stayed the same, it would be like the Bible, which I believe is riddled with errors.

E: Yeah.

R: Have you considered putting on your website something about the corrections that have been made since? Because I've heard a lot about the secondhand smoke thing, and it makes me angry because I don't want it to reflect badly on the show.

T: You know, that's what we're thinking about. The real point that we were making on secondhand smoke was that we really feel as though people should be able to have the freedom to do harm to themselves. And we don't want or use drugs recreational drugs, but we feel people should have the right to do that without any prohibition going on, and tobacco is the same thing. If people want to go to a smoky place and sit around and get lung cancer, that's none of my business. Let them do it.

S: Well, thank you so much, Teller, for giving us a few minutes of your time.

R: Yeah, thanks so much.

T: It's a pleasure. Nice to see you guys.

Interview with Jim Underdown (56:06)

S: Well, with us now is Jim Underdown, who is the executive director of the Center for Inquiry West. Jim, thanks for sitting with us at TAM 5.

JU: So glad to be here.

S: So what have you been busy with over at CFI West recently? At our group, we also do paranormal investigations in this group called the Independent Investigations Group. That group is in the process of a long battle with the California Board of Registered Nurses for allowing the teaching of a technique called therapeutic touch. Therapeutic touch, for those of you who don't know, is the manipulation of a supposed energy field over a person, which can realign their healthy sort of energy.

R: It's really one of the sexier pseudosciences.

JU: Well, it would be if they were actually touching you, but they don't...

R: Oh, wait, wait.

JU: They don't even touch you.

R: You're saying I should go get my money back?

JU: You should, yeah.

R: He's doing it all wrong.

JU: Well, maybe proximity doesn't...

J: Rebecca, later you and I will practice therapeutic punching, okay?

R: That sounds good.

JU: So it turns out that a registered nurse in California can take a class and be taught therapeutic touch for continuing education credits, and we think that's bad.

S: Yeah, and I know that Linda Rosa in Colorado has been fighting that fight in her region as well. And if you're coordinating with her, if you have been, you should be, because she's...

JU: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. She's been giving us some advice about what approach to take, and steered us towards some literature.

S: Yeah. For the listeners, Linda Rosa is a nurse who's the mother of Emily Rosa, who at 11 did the study which pretty much demonstrated quite elegantly that people who practice therapeutic touch can't feel anything. And when you take that piece away, there's really nothing left.

JU: Right. The practitioners couldn't even tell if there was a patient underneath their magical hand or not. They call me crazy, but I want my doctor to know if I'm in the room or not.

S: It helps.

JU: You would think.

R: So what exactly are you guys doing then to combat this stuff?

JU: So we've been hounding the Board of Nurses. We've been going to their meetings, we've been presenting information. They've so far been defending this practice. It's a big bureaucracy, and it's hard to get the rules changed, and the California code sort of allows for this. Yeah, we've been trying to go through proper channels, and if we get to the end of the road and they say, we're not going to do anything about this, then we'll go to the press and try to do it another way.

S: Yeah. That's been a very difficult battle.

JU: Right. And some of the people who started the companies that began teaching therapeutic touch were women. And it made them not only high status, but it made them rich. It's being taught all over the country, and these programs cost money.

S: Yeah. And that's why Linda Rosa is such a good person to spearhead this, because she's a woman and she's a nurse.

JU: Right.

S: As a male doctor, I'm not exactly the kind of person to say, hey, you've got to get rid of that pseudoscience in your profession. I mean, I do it because it's true, but they're not going to feel obliged really to listen to me.

JU: Right. And that's one of the things that we've found out is don't walk in there pointing to a bunch of doctors saying, the doctors say this is a bad thing to do, the nurses don't want to hear that. It's better to use other nurses.

E: To carry the message.

JU: Yeah. But they take pride in the high standards. I mean, they're well-educated people. So they don't want to be subject to any ridicule for doing something that may not line up with the science.

J: Jim, did you say before your organization does debunking in the style that the JRF does?

JU: We do investigations, and we have done pretesting for Randi's Million Dollar Prize. We had a guy fly out from Hawaii who was an alleged telepathic, and I told the guy before he bought a plane ticket to come to Los Angeles to give our test a try, and he wouldn't do it. And he went down in flames.

B: What do you think of the recent changes?

S: After he got to LA, he looked like that.

JU: After he went, yeah, we did a full test.

S: Not en route. Right.

JU: Oh yeah.

R: Metaphoric.

JU: Metaphorically.

S: I get it.

J: What do you think of the recent changes?

JU: I certainly understand Randi's thinking for why he's not going to test every yahoo who comes out of the woods, but we're still to the point where we only get a few of these inquiries a month, so we're still gaining experience, and we'll test just about anybody just for our own experience.

R: So for all the yahoos listening right now, you know who to call.

JU: Center for Inquiry West, even if you're a yahoo, we will test you.

S: Yeah. And Jim, thanks for sitting with us.

J: Thank you very much.

JU: Thanks for having me.

Science or Fiction ()

Question #1: New study shows that men enjoy romantic movies, so-called chick flicks almost as much as women.

Question #2: A recent study has found that the most unpleasant sound to humans is the sound of nails scratching across a blackboard.

Question #3: Researchers have witnessed free-ranging spider monkeys anointing themselves with crushed aromatic plants that they believe is used as a type of perfume.

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

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics and you at home to tell me which one is the fake. Is everyone ready?

R: Yes.

J: Be good. I'm ready.

E: Jay's not ready.

J: No, I'm ready now.

S: No theme this week, but these are actual recent science news stories, which I actually haven't done in a few weeks.

P: One of them is fake, right?

S: One of them is fake. The other two are real. Number one, a new study shows that men enjoy romantic movies, so-called chick flicks, almost as much as women. Item number two, a recent study has found that the most unpleasant sound to humans is actually the sound of nails scratching across a blackboard. And item number three, researchers have witnessed free-ranging spider monkeys anointing themselves with crushed aromatic plants that they believe is used as a type of perfume. Jay, start us out.

Jay's Response

J: Well, okay, one of these rings a bell, but I don't remember. That's part of my problem. And the first one hey, every guy's had a girl and they had to suffer through the chick flicks and you know what? Sometimes they're not so bad. Did I say that out loud?

R: I think you did.

J: No, it depends on what it is. If it was like Gigli or whatever that stupid movie is that JLo did, no, absolutely not.

R: Nobody liked that.

S: The muted heart.

J: I'm going to go, I don't even remember what you said about the spider monkeys, but I'm going to go with that one as the fake.

S: Okay, that they basically put perfume on themselves. All right, Evan.

Evan's Response

E: It seems reasonable to me that monkeys put perfume on themselves. It also seems reasonable about the guys and chick flicks. Well, actually that doesn't seem very reasonable, but I think that's the curveball. So therefore I'm going to say the fingernails on the blackboard. That one is false.

S: Okay, Perry.

Perry's Response

P: Yeah, monkeys clearly perfume themselves. It's one of their one of their higher order functions that they do, unlike birds, by the way, who always smell like bird shit.

R: Fact.

P: That's right. I would say nails on a blackboard. That's bad. And men, like chick flicks, I don't think so. Notting off, forget about it.

E: Notting Hill?

P: Yeah, that's clearly.

R: That's clever.

P: That's crap. Next.

S: All right. Bob.

Bob's Response

B: Let's see, men enjoying romantic movies. That just seems too easy. It seems too obvious. So I'm not going to choose that one.

E: That's what I thought.

B: That sounds totally plausible. I mean, if it increases your chances of being selected for some little monkey noogie, then sure. Why wouldn't there be some selective pressure for that? The nails one I thought I remembered reading something about that one a long time ago, but that actually being the...

J: Are they Sylvia Brown's nails?

B: Right. The most distasteful noise. But I'm going to go with that. The kid's dead. That might be the one. So nails on the board.

E: Yeah, Bob.

S: All right. Rebecca, straighten these guys out.

Rebecca's Response

R: I was going to go with the men and the chick flick thing, but then I realized that what you said was that men like chick flicks as much as women.

S: No, I said almost as much.

R: Almost as much? Which doesn't necessarily mean that women like them. It just means that they like them about the same as men.

P: What do they call them chick flick for?

R: I don't think anybody likes those things.

E: Oh, come on. They wouldn't make them if they didn't make money off of them. Someone likes them.

R: People go see them because the guys take the girls out to see them because they think that's what the girls want.

J: Come on, Rebecca. Everybody knows you like to look at chick flicks.

R: They think that's what they're supposed to want, too. This is my elaborate conspiracy theory because I don't think anybody could actually watch this. And yes, of course monkeys use perfume. Everybody knows that. So I'm going to go with nails on the chalkboard. But I think you're trying to fool us.

Steve Explains Item #1

J: So I remember reading the top ten, Steve the thing about the most annoying noises.

S: Yeah?

J: I just don't remember which one it was. I remember several of them.

S: But you don't remember which one it was. So Perry, you're the only one who chose the chick flicks as fake. That one is science.

R: My elaborate conspiracy theory is correct.

S: Actually, Rebecca, you are right for the wrong reason.

R: Story of my life.

S: It is in fact that women love chick flicks. Women love romantic movies on a scale of one to seven they rank their enjoyment of such movies as a six. Now it was expected that if you ask men and women, do men like chick flicks, they always say no. And they predict that the men would rank it very low, like a three. And it turns out that men actually rank it quite high, 4.8, almost as high as women.

B: Yeah, but are the women there when they rank it?

S: No, it's not a biased ranking. But here's what happens.

E: That's called the yes-deer factor.

S: Yes-deer. This is an interesting psychological phenomenon that is very common. All men think that all other men don't like chick flicks, but they do. They all think that, which is very common. Everyone thinks that they're the exception to the rule, but they're sure of the rule, even though no one actually behaves that way. Men like romantic movies, not quite as much as women, but almost as much as women.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: Who said they thought that the scratching across the blackboard was fiction?

P: What do you mean who said? Aren't you keeping track?

R: I said.

S: Rebecca, Evan and Bob?

E: Yes.

S: Okay, Rebecca, Evan, and Bob said that one was fake, and that one is fiction. Very well.

R: It's Sylvia Brown's voice, isn't it?

S: No, there was a study looking at the most horrible sound, and they had actual sounds. It was done on a website, and they had people rank which sounds they found the most unpleasant. Snails Against a Soundboard came in 16th out of the 34 sounds that they auditioned. They had 34 sounds, and it was 16th, right in the middle. Who wants to venture a guess as to what the number one was?

B: I know. Baby crying.

R: Celine Dion.

S: Baby crying was three.

J: Was it snoring, Steve?

R: Really?

S: Snoring did not make the article that I saw. Number one was the sound of vomiting.

J: I remember now.

R: Steve, do you know, was there a visual to go along with it, because I feel like a big part of the nails on the chalkboard is the visual of the nails.

J: Steve, am I missing something, or am I the only one that got it right this week?

S: No, Jay. Those three got it right.

R: You are kind of missing something.

J: I got it wrong?

S: That one is fake, and they said it was because it's not nails on a blackboard. It's vomiting.

J: All right. Jedi trick did not work. God damn it.

P: He fooled you, Jay, because he did the correct one second, so he fooled you.

R: He even fooled you after he gave the answers.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: So item number three, Jay, you thought that this one, the one about monkeys putting perfume on themselves was fake. That one is science, but I did word it very carefully. So researchers have witnessed free-ranging spider monkeys anointing themselves with crushed aromatic plants that they believe is used as a type of perfume. But that part, of course, is a little bit inferential. There are other reasons that an animal might be putting a scent on themselves.

B: Get the monkey smell off there.

S: They may be trying to conceal their own scent. Another possibility is that they may be using it as an insect repellent.

J: Oh, so I was kind of right.

S: Hang on.

R: And yet, kind of wrong.

S: There are reasons that the scientists believe that it's being used as for perfume because...

B: Because they get laid more often?

S: The male monkeys use it more than the female monkeys, and if it were an insect repellent or just a scent concealer, there shouldn't be a sexual difference between the two different kinds of monkeys. And in terms of when they do it, there were other details about it that made it suspicious that it was being used for social reasons. One of those social reasons may be to be attractive to the opposite sex, but there could be other social reasons as well.

J: Steve, were these male spider monkeys part of the chick flicks test? They watch chick flicks? Is that it?

E: Only when they're scratching their nails on a board.

S: They put the spider monkeys in a chair and they tape their eyes open and make them watch chick flicks.

P: Very well, little man.

E: Very ultra-violence.

S: A little bit of the ultra-romance.

P: Oh, man. For all you people were anally keeping track of our science fiction out there. Just make sure you write down that Jay got it wrong twice.

J: No, they don't. You don't understand. I'm very happy I got it wrong this week because I think I dipped below 20%.

S: That was Rebecca, Bob, and Evan who got it correct this week. Rebecca, I have yet to get you this year in 2007.

R: Yeah, I'm having a good year so far, aren't I?

S: You are. I'm working on it.

R: Good luck, man.

Skeptical Puzzle ()

This Weeks Puzzle

I came into being in the mid 19th century in Iowa
But I was only discovered a year later in New York
My fathers name was George
But the man who found me was my first cousin, once removed
I am larger than any person that has ever lived
Yet millions of people believe that others like me once flourished
People from far and wide would visit me
Theyd line up by the hundreds to get a glance at my visage
I was no great thinker, some thought I had rocks in my head
But I was gentle, firm, and thought provoking
I traveled the country and displayed my uniqueness to the masses
Though my star shone brightly, it faded quite fast
And a year or so later, I was little more than a joke
But before I was through, I had carved out my place in history
And solidified myself as one of the best known fakes of all time

Who am I?

Last Weeks Puzzle

If an insane person loses power, and decides that the only way to restore the power is to make a list, send it to God, then informs other people of this and apologizes to them for the power failure, what has this person actually experienced?

Answer: Alcoholics Anonymous, or a 12 step program
Winner: Iron Man from the message board

S: Evan, tell us last week's puzzle and winner.

E: Yes, so here's the puzzle from last week. If an insane person loses power and decides that the only way to restore the power is to make a list, send it to God, then informs other people of this and apologizes to them for the power failure, what has this person actually experienced? They have experienced the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-Step Program. And congratulations to Iron Man from the message boards.

P: That guy, we all love him.

J: Iron Man is great.

P: We love him, right? Iron Man, because he makes all these things on the forums. People who haven't seen it, go look. He has all kinds of Photoshop crazy pictures, some of them very humorous. The guy has way too much time on his hands.

J: Wait, wait, and also very timely point. I just put the new gallery up that has fan art, which is mostly his stuff. So if you want to see some quick pictures, go to the gallery.

P: It's insane. It's crazy.

E: It's good stuff. So congratulations, Iron Man. Well done. And now for this week's puzzle.

J: No, you're rapping this one.

E: Okay. I came into being in the mid-19th century in Iowa, but I was only discovered a year later in New York. My father's name was George, but the man who found me was my first cousin once removed. I am larger than any person that has ever lived, yet millions of people believe that others like me once flourished. People from far and wide would visit me. They'd line up by the hundreds to get a glance at my visage. I was no great thinker. Some thought I had rocks in my head, but I was gentle, firm, and thought-provoking. I traveled the country and displayed my uniqueness to the masses. Though my star shone brightly, it faded quite fast, and a year or so later, I was little more than a joke. Before I was through, I had carved out my place in history and solidified myself as one of the best-known fakes of all time. Who am I? Good luck, everyone.

S: Excellent. That was a bit long.

E: Some are long. Some are short. Hey, who's to say?

J: Evan, how long does it take you to come up with these?

S: Five, ten minutes?

E: It varies. That's right. It varies, either five or ten minutes.

Quote of the Week ()

'I am not a fan of Sigmund Freud because his theories are not testicle.'- Richard Wiseman

S: Rebecca, you had a quote from The Amazing Meeting Five that you'd like to share with us to close out the show.

R: Sure. My friend Richard Wiseman had a good one. He said, "I'm not really a big fan of Sigmund Freud because his theories aren't testicle."

S: He's a funny guy.

R: It works on a number of levels.

P: It's much better if you're bald and have an English accent.

J: I wonder if you know his first name.

R: Which I am, and I do, but I'm not sure.

S: Rebecca, do it in an English accent. Go ahead.

E: Yeah, yeah, do it.

R: No, I'm not going to.

E: Come on.

S: Well, thank you all for another fine show. Always a pleasure.

J: Thank you, Steve.

R: Thank you, Steve.

E: Thank you, Doctor, and all.

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. Please send us your questions, suggestions, and other feedback; you can use the "Contact Us" page on our website, or you can send us an email to info@theskepticsguide.org'. 'Theorem' is produced by Kineto and is used with permission.

References