SGU Episode 47

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SGU Episode 47
14th June 2006
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SGU 46                      SGU 48
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
ZM: Zachary Moore
Links
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SGU Podcast archive
Forum Discussion

Introduction

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, June 14^th 2006. This is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. With me tonight are Bob Novella

B: Hello!

S: Rebecca Watson

R: Hey everybody!

J: Jay Novella

J: Hey, hey, hey!

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, all my friends.

News Items

Motorola patents feng-shui device (00:38)

S: So have you guys heard about Motorola's new fancy device that they have just patented?

B: Yeaaah! Cool!

S: They have patented a feng shui device.

R: Oh my god! Are you serious?

S: It actually, it measures the feng-shuiness of your environment and tells you where you need to move your furniture and stuff.

J: How does it tell you where to move your furniture...what it what...

E: Whatever Motorola is doing it for, I'll do it for you at half price, whatever they're charging.

S: Right!

R: I have a very small studio apartment, I'm just wondering...there's really nowhere else for things to go.

E: You're thinking inside the box, Rebecca, you have to think outside the box.

B: Is feng shui THAT popular?

S: Oh, so, feng shui, for those in the audience who may not know what it is, is an eastern tradition where they basically, it's pure magical thinking. It's the notion that luck and health and money and things like these are forces and energies in your environment and they can either flow into your life, or into your house, or away from you according to how you might arrange your furniture.

J: Ancient Chinese secret...

S: Yeah, I mean, it's really...

J: Stupid, say it, it's stupid!

R: Hahaha

J: It's probably one of the dumbest things out there!

S: It is! It's one of the absolute dumbest things...it's pure magical thinking. There's just nothing else to say

J: Feng shui...Isn't one of the things that you can't sweep...you have to sweep everything to the center of a room, because you can't - you can't sweep anything outside the house.

E: There's no... there are no parameter.

B: That's part of it. It's a flow of energy, you know, you wanna have the flow of energy, you know, I guess, going in the right direction and stuff like that. The funny thing is, though, that this device, it doesn't, like, detect the qi, and determine the nature, the energy and where it's going, it uses, like, radio signals!

S: Yeah!

B: It says "Okay, here's where the radio signals are, so that, hopefully, that is correlated with positive Qi.

R: So wait, you are saying it doesn't even detect Qi?I mean...

E: God!

B: No!

E: There's Qi!

R: What a rinkball!

S: It says weak radio signals indicate positive Qi but strong signals means negative Qi. And I don't know...How did they figure that out?

B: Right! Not only that, so if you have positive Qi, then you have a bad connection to your cellphone.

S: Right!

R: That's not very lucky.

J: Wait, is Motorola ran by a bunch of retards?

S: I think they're ran by the same executives who were running Florsheim those numbers of years ago when they put out the magnetic insoles to help with the circulation in your feet. Remember that?

E: Of course!

R: I think they're ran by people who like to make a lot of money regardless of the consequences.

S: And who think that their average customer is a moron.

E: Yeah...californian crowd

B: They see a niche, they see a niche and they want it to happen and they were (?!)

S: Yeah, and they make stuff up: "Ah, we'll just mesure radio waves, because we can, and we'll call it Qi and we'll sell it! It's a feng shui device!"

R: Why not?

B: Wouldn't you think that feng shui purists would say: "Hey! That's not how that works!"

J: I'm sure they will, Bob!

S: Like there are feng shui purists. Bob, the people who are selling their services as feng shui consultants they're just making it up out of the top of their heads anyway, they don't agree with each other, they just give you completely different

J: No, no Steve!

R: There's a great episode of Bull$hit about that, actually, when they invited three different feng shui consultants and they each did entirely different set-ups for the houses.

B: Right, there are certain....

J: Right, there are things that are standard, there are things like facing

B: Right

J: Everything has to be lined up, I believe, to the north properly, or something along those lines.

R: But even then, they bend, they bend their own rules and they don't know...

B: True, there's a lot of differences between the various feng shui experts, but I'd think that all would agree that it's not radio signals.

R: I don't know, I mean, I think that they'll line up behind anything that they think will give them some shred of... ahm... legitimacy.

E: Well, my acupuncturist told me that...he must know!

J: Steve! I think this could be classified under those things that people think are fun, and maybe, at least in the United States.

S: I don't think people shell out five thousand dollars to a feng-chui expert because they think it's fun. I think that they might do it because they think it's a status symbol so they can say that they, whatever, that their house is feng shui.

E: Or when our governments waste our, waste our tax money by hiring feng shui experts to come in and tell them how to construct their, how to construct government buildings.

S: Yeah!

E: That's not funny at all...

J: Wait! That happens?

E: In Connecticut it happened.

S: Yeah.

R: Yes, it did.

E: It happened here in Hartford.

J: Oh my god!

S: They were embarrassed out of it ultimately, but they did spend tax payers money on a feng shui consultant.

B: Steve, they could say: "Yea, I'm Feng Shui 1.0 Compliant"

E: Ha ha ha.

J: I have to go shoot myself right now. I can't take that.

R: Hah

E: Well, don't do that Jay, stick around and listen to the next item.

J: I'll finish

R: Besides, you're gonna get, you're gonna get blood all over your carpet and that's not good for your Qi!

J: That's right! You're right! Thank you, Rebecca!

R: See?

J: You saved me again.

Larry Summer Followup (05:43)

S: Now, this is...Rebecca, you blogged about this recently. It's about the one year anniversary of the Larry Summers infamist - now infamist comment about women academics at Harvard.

R: Well, it's not the one year anniversary of the comment. The comment would have been back in January.

S: Is that right?

R: Uhm... Yeah, I think it was around like, January/February of 2005. We're actually at the one year mark of the creation of the department that he made to kind of, uhn, soothe over the hubbub, I think, uh, and it's specifically for, uh, increasing diversity among the Harvard faculty. So it's been about a year since that was setup. So they just did a report going over what they've accomplished over the past year.

J: So what did he say?

R: He was asked to give a speech explaining some of the current hypothesis concerning why there's not a high percentage of women in the upper echelons, specially when it comes to the sciences. And he went over a few different hypothesis, one of which was basically that women might just not have the same mental capabilities as men to do science.

S: Uhum.

R: And , of course, that pissed off a lot of people and there's a lot of bad publicity over it and it was about a year after that, it was back in February that he announced that he was going to resign his position. And he didn't say that it was specifically because of that

S: But that's what it was.

R: Speculations (then Jay cuts in)

J: Well, I'd like to as everyone's opinion, you know, is there any validity to that? Did anyone do a real study? I mean, what's the...what's the consensus here?

S: That's clearly a thorny issue, because it is so political, but, you know, I'm a neuroscientist, I have sort of some sense of what this literature shows and in my reading of that, in the last 20-30 years there have been quite a few studies comparing the, just if - if you just step back a minute and not think about any particular ability but just look at the male and female brains they definitely are different. They definitely function different. They're organized differently in a number of ways that have been clearly established. For example: The female brain is more bilaterally redundant than the male brain. Male functions, specially with language, tend to lateralize a lot more to one side when women will utilize both sides of their brain more.

J: So does that mean that women may be more adapt to language than men?

S: Well that's a, that is a possibility and there is some evidence to support that. So I think the thing that is interesting about this is partly, you know, how politicized it gets. There are those at one extreme who, who think that any suggestion that there is a difference between men and women, it makes you a fascist, and they really get very emotionally upset at just the suggestion of it. And I think that that is a very counter-productive end of the spectrum. Of course, at the other end of the spectrum there's some hold over sexism, you know, but I do think that is significantly on the wane, at least in our society. Obviously in other parts of the world they're very, very different. What this comes down to, I think that this is really what this Larry Summer comment comes down to is: in our present day society, how much of the differences of distribution of men and women in different professions is due to past or current prejudice, and how much of it is due to self sorting. Is how much is due to the fact that men and women may have different likes and dislikes, and may have different aptitudes statistically, and you have to remember that even a slight difference aptitude, ah, on average, which could mean that 98% of men and 98% of women are not any different for each other. But even if there's a slight, slight difference, then at the very top of ability, either there could be a huge representation of one over the other.

R: And then, Steve, it's not just,ahm, the option isn't just whether or not it's genetic, I mean, there's another option besides genetic, and bias...

B: Well, cultural!

R: Yea, there's just, just the fact that women could be raised from birth to just not be interested in science. I mean, it could be the way that they're being taught, the way that we're influenced

S: Sure.

J: I'm sure there has a part in it

R: I mean, there are millions of different, ah, possibilities, there and discounting any one just because someone thinks that it might be sexist, that's just...I mean, that's absurd! There shouldn't be any hypothesis that we dismiss out of hand without at least taking a look at.

S: Absolutely.

R:Ah

J: Did that guy, last year, like, say something very, ah, derogatory, and negative, did he say that women were not as intelligent as men, or was he talking about...

R: Not at all! No, you can see the, ahm, the whole speech he gave online, and I linked to it through my blog and I've posted about Summer a number of times, uhm, and if you read through his speech, I mean, it's not at all derogatory, and it certainly doesn't sound like he's coming from a sexist place.

S: No

R: It, it sounds like he's saying "people are researching the problem, and here are some of the theories they've got going." He's not saying that he subscribes to any one of them, he's just putting them out there, because that's what he was asked to do for his speech, and I think that that's, you know, and if-if people disagree with that hypothesis, I think that the correct response should never be "That' sexist, shut up", it should be "Here's why you're wrong..."

S: Uhum...

R: "Here's the evidence that says you're wrong"

S: Right, I agree, I agree.

R: And, I mean, if there's evidence that says it's not true then, you know, show the evidence, don't...

S: Right. It's interesting, I mean, I, you know, my personal opinion, you know, having looked at the evidence and thinking about this for a while, is that there are still some cultural and historical forces at work in terms of the penetration of males and females in different profession, but I think that we're moving towards a distribution that is more and more self selective. I think that, in our country, as women are more free to pursue the careers that they want, that they are winding up in careers that are more amenable to their desires, and their talents. For example: women are overtaking men in the healthcare profession. They have no problem penetrating any - any corner of the healthcare profession. There are other fields which, and the reason why I think that there is a huge genetical component to this is because when we see which fields women are not making gains in, like engineering, that tends to fit quite well with the basic neuroscience, which is showing that women don't like engineering. It's not that they're not necessarily good at it, they just really don't like it to the same degree that men do. So maybe it's not that surprising that they're not penetrating that - that field. From a practical point of view, what this means is, should we just make everything we can to make sure that both men and women are free to pursue whatever career that they want, or do we have to, at the top end, work from the top down to make the numbers look good? Do we have to, like, force women into fields that they're not going in to spontaneously, or have some kind of affirmative action to make the numbers look good?

J: Sounds like bossing to me

R: I don't think that you're gonna, you're gonna force women into position that way.

S: Well, the way you do that is with quotas. Right? So you set up quotas, so that, specially like, in the upper echelons of academia, to make sure that 50% of women are in, a, engineering departments.

J: Yeah

S: That's the - that's the practical point of view, and I think if you look at all the evidence, if you look at what's happened, it would probably be better to work from the bottom up to just make sure that there's no glass ceiling, that women do whatever they want.

J: Well, I'll speak for all software engineers out there: We want more women in the field.

R: Hah.

J: Absolutely.

R: Yea, good luck with that, Jay, Huh haha. And, and that's ah, pretty much what Harvard's new office is working on. Like, one of the mains things I noticed from the report they put out, they, they really seem to be focusing on improving the lifestyle of students and faculty who choose to have families, like, increase funding to child care, uh, facilities and child care scholarships and things like that.

S: Yeah, which is excellent. It's all excellent.

R: Definitely, 'cause I...speaking to women who are in academia, I hear that a lot, like, "you make a choice: either you're going to have a family and therefore go into private industry, or you're gonna go into academia and give up hopes of having a family.

S: Yea, definitely the plainfield needs to be leveled in terms of just, biological functions, absolutely.

R: Right. Women shouldn't have to make a choice when it comes to that.

S: Yeah, I do, although, one final comment is, I do find it a little ironic that, you know, while there's still so much concern about making sure that women have a fair shake in, in academia, if you look at the younger generations, women are kicking guys' butts at school. I mean, they are.

R: Indeed, they are.

S: They, the develop academic skills at a younger age, their temperament and what not, it seems to serve them better during their school years. Boys seem to have a shorter attention span and are more distractible, whatever.

R: Also boys are smelly and have germs.

B: Good touch.

S: You know, in thirty or forty years, you know, we may be, the roles may be totally reversed, we may be having to talk very seriously about how we could get more guys into academia.

R: Right.

S: But, we will see.

Stephen Hawking on Space Travel (16:00)

S: One final news item, and this is just a quick follow-up to last week's podcast. We had talked to Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer about manned space flight, and he was very much in favor of NASA funding manned space flight, as opposed to just robotic space exploration and his primary justification for that was that, you know, we need to pop, to uh, colonize other world, so we're not, so that we don't have all of our eggs in this one basket called Earth. But, by coincidence, Stephen Hawking has, I don't know if it was a lecture or an article that he wrote, but he has come out and very much in favor of manned space flight, and for the very same reason that Phil Plait cited, was that we need to colonize worlds other than the Earth. He writes that the survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe, because there is an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth. So I just thought that was interesting because it was, you know, right on the heels of last week's podcast where we made that point.

R: See Phil? Just as smart as

R&S: Steve Hawking

S: Right, absolutely.

R: Yeah.

Questions and e-mails (17:09)

S: Let's do a couple of e-mails and then we do have an interview this week. We have an interview with Zachary Moore who does the Evolution 101 podcast, we'll be getting to that in a moment. But first a few e-mails.

Consensus on Global Warming(17:20)

S: E-mail number 1 comes from Mark Goddard, uh, who simply gives his location as "The US", Mark writes:

I would like to inform Mr. Novella that consensus is not a scientific term. He should make his decisions based on evidence, rather than basing them on a consensus. I thought that's what skeptics were supposed to do. It would also serve Mr. Novella right to reacquaint himself with his list of logical fallacies, as argument for the existence and seriousness of anthropogenic global warming is clearly reliant on the argument from authority. He believes in global warming because there is a consensus. Real skeptics follow the evidence. I suggest that Steve do some actual research before reaching a conclusion, and if he finds some evidence to support his predetermined conclusion, then he should discuss that on the show. Evidence for or against the idea of global warming would be more informative than a broken-record repetition of "consensus, consensus, consensus..."

Well, thanks for writing the e-mail, Mark. We appreciate the question and the feedback. And this is - this is an excellent topic 'cus we deal with this issue quite a bit and it really gets to the heart, I think, of scientific skepticism. Ah, so, I do think that there's a difference between the argument from authority and having an appropriate level of respect for a consensus of a scientific opinion, because, you know, honestly, most of us, all we have in the areas outside of our, whatever, our narrow field of expertise, and if you're not a working scientist that's all areas of science, is a distillation from the consensus of scientific opinion. I think that if you think that your own personal reading of the evidence somehow supersedes that, that is, you know, incredibly arrogant. And actually at the same time, it's naive. I mean, it really means that you don't understand the - ah - the gulf that exists between, you know, the amount of information that we have as laypeople versus the amount of information that scientists at the cutting edge of any discipline have, so, to look at this another way when I am conveying a consensus of a scientific opinion I'm not saying that "this claim is true because there is a consensus", I'm saying there's a consensus because it's probably true. And the reason why I can say that, my, my, premise to this is that if you have a mature scientific discipline there has been, you know, decades of robust, transparent, open-debate about an issue, a specific question or a specific scientific discipline, and a fairly solid consensus emerges from the evidence and the research and the debate, that consensus is very reliable. It's not necessarily true, it can be wrong. Science is always tentative and contingent and amenable to revision if new evidence, or ways of thinking about things comes to light, but we can rely, to some degree on a hard earned, robust consensus of scientific opinion. At the very least, if you disagree with that consensus you better have a damned good reason for doing so. And rather - and just dismissing it as an argument from authority is not appropriate. And that is an actual abuse of that logical fallacy. Uh, I do think that when people get into trouble with the Argument from Authority is investing authority in an individual scientist. Any individual can be biased, quirky, can just be wrong for whatever reason, but when you have a community of scientist, you know, hammering out the issues over a long period of time there is some legitimate authority that you can invest in that.

J: So in other words, ah, the consensus here is that this guy is a jerk?

S: Hah. No, I think that, you know, this is a very common misunderstanding about the Argument from Authority, but then again, if you do take it to that extreme, to say that basically you can never refer to the scientific community, the opinion of either, uh, the scientific community as a whole or specific organizations that have, you know, panels of experts that have reviewed the evidence and come to some consensus opinion, if you just routinely dismiss all of those, then what do we have again to rely upon? Uh...again, I think that it's arrogant to think that as a layperson who hasn't spent a career, you know, studying this data who isn't intimately familiar with the technical literature, that your opinion somehow is, ah, can supersede those of scientists that breathe this data.

J: Well, he said that you have no evidence, Steve, he flat out said that you're just ...

S: Well, he did, he also made a few assumptions in his last paragraph there. He assumes that I have not done some research, again, on my level. Again, I'm not a cosm-climatologyst, this is not my area of expertise, and the farther away I get from my area of expertise the more I have to rely upon the consensus of scientific opinion, which I think is the appropriate thing to do. Uh, but he also made a lot of assumptions. That, that were not correct. I've actually been reading quite extensively about this, specially since it keeps coming up a lot as a topic on our show, so I'm trying to inform myself as best as I can about the actual issues about the Global Warming. And there is quite a lot of evidence for man-made Global Warming. There is - there is Global Warming in fact. There is increasing CO2 levels. There is a plausible connection between the two. There is a receding of the glaciers and, and uh..and the polar icecaps. These things are all, you know, being documented to an increasing level and every time skeptics say "Well, this data is, is not great and NASA puts up another satellite, or whatever, some new more sophisticated way of collecting the data is, is put out there, the data comes back even more in favour of man made global warming. So, the...the really...It really does seem to be converging on this consensus, but there's still, and I have said this before, there's still..uh... it seems a lot of legitimate uncertainty about the degree of the man made contribution to global warming, about how to extrapolate it to the future, uh, and about the degree to which this is, uh, more of a natural trend or warming trend that we're having. Uh, clearly there is some man-made global warming and even some of the hardest skeptics will admit that, it's...the debate really is about the relative contributions of man made versus, versus natural causes, and I, and I do admit that there is, of course, some degree of uncertainty there.

J: And I also have the sneaking suspicion that the writer of the e-mail doesn't agree with what you're conclusions are. I ...

S: Yea, I mean, usually when people start to get nasty with logical fallacies is because they don't...they don't accept the position that I'm taking. Nobody...nobody has chided me. Nobody from this, none of our listeners have, uh, chided me for, for example stating that greater than 98% of practicing scientists support evolution over creation. That's an argument from authority too. If you apply the criteria the same way. But it's more saying that "hey, there is a robust scientific consensus for the fact of evolution." Uh, and it's not an argument from authority to point that out.

B: I think that, that fallacy though, is definitely one of the ones that is most easily abused when trying to employ it.

S: Yeah, I agree.

B: People just throw it out there like "Oh, logical fallacy!", well, no, not really.

S: Yeah, Science has some legitimate authority to it. Because the method, the method works, the institutions basically work...Well, let's move on.

God and the Big Bang(25:01)

S: We do have another - and this is our second audio e-mail question. This one come from Joel Kerbrat whose, uh, cypher name is "Jokermage". So let's play his audio e-mail now:

Hello. I love the podcast. It's been really helpful and informative. I do have a quick question, or, well, I'm just trying to get your opinion on a particular argument I encounter a lot when I'm discussing the existence or non-existence of god. Uh, I'll be able to quote you the literal text of one of the people I was having this discussion with: "assuming that The Big Band Theory is in any way correct, and going back far enough, you come to a time when there was quite literally nothing. Where did this something which led to the creation of the universe come from from?" And from my perspective this would qualify as an argument from ingnorance. We don't know what happened before the Big Bang or before before the Big Bang so they always say "what's before that? What's before that?" and, honestly, we don't know or we're still looking there. And for some people the fact that we haven't reached that point yet, or may never reach that point says "oh, there must be a god there". Well, I'm just interested on what your guys' take is on this particular question..uhm...Thanks for your time! Bye!

S: Okay, well, thanks again Joel for sending us in that audio e-mail. This is a question that we deal with frequently. This is a good old god of the gaps argument. The idea that wherever there is a gap in our current scientific knowledge that is where God is. God caused that thing that we have not yet explained through naturalistic or scientific explanations.

R: I have when people do that, seriously! Because it's like you put a period at the end of a sentence and you just say "well, that's it! Everybody can just go home now, there's nothing more to see here" instead of trying to explore things further.

E: It's definitely lazy. If nothing else.

R & S: Yeah.

S: It is lazy. It is lazy.

J: Well, it's opportunistic as well. I mean, people are always looking for a way to prove god exists so, you know, like, that's the whole point to "god of the gaps". There's a gap there, ugh, science can't currently define what it is and they jump on it.

B: The problem is though that that little god of the gap might be around for quite some time.

S: Yeah! One might *something I didn't understand that Steve said*

B: That might be the last to go because we just can't know what happened before the Big Bang

S: Although if you recall a couple of weeks ago...

B: Yeah, yea, I still don't buy that.

S: Science or Fiction was inferring what happened before the Big Bang by the way the Universe looks today so there may be windows into that. It's hard to say, there's nothing that we can really extrapolate from current knowledge to know how we would even investigate what happened before the Big Bang or what caused it.

J: Why don't we just never talk about the Big Bang again, you know what I mean?

R: Ha ha ha ha. You know what? God did it. That was easy.

J: Yeah, fine. I'll give you that one, right?

B: Here's my big problem with finding out - trying to figure out what happened before the Big Bang: If the Big Bang created not only Space but Time, so there was no time, there was no space before the Big Bang, so before the Big Bang no space, no time...so how could you say "what happened before there was time when there was no time?

S: Well, what I'll say about that, Bob, is trying to grasp the Big Bang and the existence of the Universe in English, you know, in words evolved to describe our everyday world and they just are not up to the task. You don't have the language and therefore you don't have the concept to really even grasp that question. The only way we can really deal with it at this point in time is to do mathematical concepts so at some point we may be able to come up with some mathematical description of what happened "before" the Big Bang, although before is probably is probably not the right word, you know what I mean? Or the right concept.

R: But you know, we could talk about all day about the Big Bang but I think that the important thing to remember is that at one point we thought that god threw the sun across the sky is a chariot and if we had just stopped there and said "well, that's that" we wouldn't know jackshit today!

S: That's right.

R: But instead, you know, we moved forward and we put that idea aside in favor of scientific inquiry.

S: Right, and that's the most important point, I think, of all this, is that you shouldn't ever use the god of the gaps argument to end scientific inquiry.

R & J: Yeah

S: Well, let's go on to our interview.

Interview with Zachary Moore (29:42)

S: Joining us now is Zachary Moore. Zach! Welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

ZM: Hi! Thank you very much! Glad to be here.

R: Hey Zach!

S: Uh, Doctor Zach as he is sometimes called, is a fellow podcaster. He does the Evolution 101 Podcast which we've mentioned before on the show and is an excellent podcast. He is a PhD in molecular biology and also the author of a blog called The Writings of a Mad Scientist. Uh... He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in Pathobiology and Molecular Medicine at the University of Cincinnati and he's currently a graduate assistant. Is that still accurate?

ZM: Uh, post-doctoral assistant.

S: Post-doctoral assistant at the University of Cincinnati, in the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.

ZM: Actually it's...I'm now at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

S: Ah! Your website is not updated!

ZM: I just updated it the other day.

S: Okay!

ZM: I'm sorry about that.

S: So he's currently a post-graduate assistant at the University of Texas. So, Zachary, we've been listening to your Evolution 101 Podcast, they are excellent. How did you get interested in doing that?

ZM: Well, it's...ah, you know, I kinda fell into it and I never dreamed that it would get quite as popular as it has been. Uh..I don't know if you're familiar with uh... Reggie Finley, who also goes by the name The Infidel Guy. He's got a website called TheInfidelGuy.com and uh...he's had a number of guests on, uh, to talk about evolutionary theory and well, one of the ones that he had on several times was, uh I guess that you've also had was Massimo Pigliucci

S: Yes

ZM: And

S: MASSIMO! As we call him...

ZM: Massimo!, yeah, he's a great guy. Love his blog, actually. He's really funny. Ahh...Anyway, so he had some, ah, some interest among the people that listen to his show - he's got like a webcast - and they would like to see, like, a regular show that was within his sort of aegis that would just do evolution discussion and it was to be titled Evolution 101 and it was going to be once a week, an hour show that he would host and initially it was supposed to be Massimo primarily although what happened was that he got sort of tied up with a bunch of things and he couldn't commit the time and so he put the word out that if there was anybody else who would like to contribute to that, that he'd be happy to share it around, maybe have like a rotating guest host or something like that so I was kind of nominated/volunteered for it and I actually did the first episode of that, it was a two-hour long premier special and then Massimo did the next week and after that time Regie sort of ran out of the time on his own to do that extra show and so sort of languished for a couple months and people started talking again and they said "oh we'd really, we really loved that and it'd be nice to have something on a regular basis even if it's not that much" and I sort of joined the conversation not really volunteering to pick it up myself but I was just saying "yeah, it was a great idea, it was fun for me to do it, I really don't have the resources or equipment to run a webcast like that on my own." Just sort of throwing it out there I said, "I suppose I could do a podcast," or something like that and somebody said "well why don't you do that?" and I said, "well OK, I'll give it a try."

S: And the rest is history!

ZM: And the rest, as they say, is history! So I just, I just recorded the first one, just sort of on the fly and threw it out there and, and ahm... I think that it's up to like five thousand downloads by now.

J?: Excellent!

ZM: It's not a huge amount but uhm... you know, I guess it's okay for a small little thing that is just me doing it every Saturday morning in my pajamas and throwing it out there on the internet for people.

R: Wait, so you podcast wearing clothes? This is ...

ZM: I try to, yes.

J: Rebecca... likes to... She thinks it's funny to tell everyone that she does it topless.

ZM: Oh, okay

J: But she hasn't posted any pictures yet or anything, there's no proof.

ZM: Oh, be sure to post some, I'll appreciate that.

R: You know, a little mystery is always good.

ZM: Sure.

R: Maybe the pajamas then, I'll consider that.

S: Uhm, so you must have had an interest in evolution and evolution of science 'cause..

ZM: Yeah, I have. Yeah, uhm...it was, it's funny 'cause uhm it was never something that I really...Like when I was studying science it was always just sort of, you know...There... and I didn't really give much interest of the whole evolution/creation debate.

S: Uhum...

ZM: But the more I started doing things on the internet and the more I sort of realized how much bad information there is out there it started picking my interest more and more and I started reading some stuff like, you know, Richard Dawkins and other things like that.

S: Uhum

ZM: And really started getting interested in it..and I started spending a lot of time at TalkOrigins and I'm actually a moderator at a website for people who have left the Christian faith. It's called exchristian.net and uhm, I sort of specialize in the science part of that forum so I moderate a lot of the stuff that comes up about evolution, creationism...So I, I just sorta got used to thinking about that, and not being an expert, I mean I'm not an expert, I'm just I'm just some guy with a degree who nows where to look up the right stuff to find out the answers to these things. So anyway, that gave me a little bit of confidence to uh...to put together the podcast.

S: Yea, I mean I think it's interesting because for me the evolution-creation debate that was my gateway topic into skepticism in general, I mean, that was the first time I really got involved.

ZM: Yeah

S: In a pseudoscience and examining it uhm, even back in high school. And I've kept up with it ever since, even though, you know, like you, I'm in the medical field, you know, I don't have a degree in Evolutionary Biology

ZM: Yeah

S: I thought...And I don't know if it's because of the.. of creationism, but there seems to be a tremendous amount of high quality information available for the layperson on evolution in general and also on the evolution-creation debate, so it's one of those topics where if you really want to be an exceptionally well informed layperson you can be, I mean, the information is out there.

ZM: Right, it does take a bit of work, I mean, Dawkins is great, uh, but he can be thick for some people. The people I'm mostly trying to reach are people like, uh, like for example my mother, people who know nothing about science, you know, and tis was actually something, uh, some of the talent that I honed while I was coming up to the graduate school ranks, uh, I would, in an effort to be able to make my data accessible to the general audience whenever I would put together a presentation I would alway give it to my mother and if she could understand what I was saying I figured I could give the same talk to just about any audience without any problem and so I try to, sort of, distill concepts and make them accessible to like, really really average, you know, Joe on the street.

S: Uhum, and it is a great skill to have and it is a separate skill and not all scientists can do that. They may be brilliant in their area but they may not have that completely separate skill set that is needed to convey their discipline to the public at large.

ZM: Right, and most of the writing we do, and uh, you've published a couple of things, I looked over your brain paper, uh, the scientific writing is incredibly complex

S: Yeah

ZM: And is almost completely inaccessible. I showed one of my papers to my father-in-law and he looked at it said "I think there's two words in there that I understood"

R: haha

S: Hahh

R: I usually get in trouble getting passed the titles.

ZM: Hah, So, it's kind of like the opposite of the way I'm thinking normally, or when I'm in the lab, you know, is uhm... instead of making things as scientific precise as possible to sort of, not dumb it down, but sort of generalize things and try to find good analogies so that everybody can come to the same understanding

S: Yeah, and it's difficult to do that without, as you say, without dumbing int down. I mean, to...to convey, you know, the richness and the detail of the scientific theory but translate it in to terminology that - that a layperson can understand.

ZM: Right. And it's really hard to do that in ten minutes or less hah

S: Yeah

ZM: Which is what I try for, uh, talk... My cousin's experienced in the dramatic arts and he told me that after I've chosen a ten minute cut-off because uh, most people when they're trying to learn about something like that the ten minutes is ah...about as long as the average person can really commit to something like that, specially if it's complicated.

S: Yeah ... Ten minutes is reasonable, I mean, I've heard twenty minutes is really like, the upper limit of attention span. Like, if you're sitting in any lecture type of environment you can pay attention and process information for about twenty minutes, after that you're really not processing information anymore. Unless there is something dynamic about that. Then, which of course podcasts are not, they're passive, you're just sitting and listening to them.

ZM: Exaclty...

B: So Zach, will you now go to twenty minutes?

ZM: Well, you know, I do go over sometimes.

S: I think you can afford to, they're pretty - they're pretty quick.

J: You know, no matter how much you dumb it down though, uhm, a true creationist won't even take the time to try to understand evolution because they reject it.

S: Yeah

J: So you're not pitching this to - to true believers. You're pitching this to people who are either on the fence or don't really have an opinion

ZM: Absolutely! And I think most of the people just kind of fall because they can't really grasp evolution, it just seems too complex. Creationism, even though is, it does violate the simplicity Occam's razor it's just lil' bit more intuitive, you know? And that's kind of a problem. Science is very often, it's not intuitive. So hopefully the laypeople and most of the people that I talk to who are just, you know, just on the cusp of understanding, once they can really understand it then they're like "Oh, well of course that makes so much sense"

J: Yeah, I totally agree. Once you... That's how I feel about evolution. To me it makes much much more sense than anything else you can come up with.

ZM: Right

R: Zach, how do you feel about directly debating creationists?

ZM: Ah... Well, let's see, said that we shouldn't right? And Dawkins agreed with him so I don't wanna go against Dawkins, but uhm...

R: Wait, what kind of a critical thinker are you? authority

ZM: Ah... I don't know. I'm generally, you know generally I don't really have a problem with engaging in open discussion with anybody on any topic, so...there are some people that write in - they're usually not true believes I don't think, unless they're sort of couching things and like a third person like "Oh, my friend has this problem that" So probably

J: Yeah, I got this itch...

ZM: Yeah, so probably I don't really interact with too many true believers, but I do interact with a bunch of people that have honest questions, at least that's what they come across as.

J: Well, before you signed on Steve said that you used to get into a lot of fist fights over this, we wanna know if that's true.

R: Haha

ZM: Me?

J: I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding...

S: You do list on your interests... you list Jeet Kune Doo as one of your interests.

B: Jeet Kune DO!

S: Jeet Kune DO whatever...

B: Way of the Intercepting Fist. Is that..In what capacity is that? Do you actually study it or...

ZM: Ahm, I have, since I've been down in Texas I have. And I studied it when I was in Cincinnati. I'm a fairly big guy anyway so I don't really worry about stuff like that. It was a friend of mine got into it really seriously and, uhm, sort of convinced me to try it and I actually really liked it, it was a lot of fun

B: For those that don't know that's the style that Bruce Lee originated

ZM: Right, right it's actually a style per say and more of a philosophy of martial arts. And it was a lot of fun.

B: Exactly.

ZM: Uh, Dan Inosanto who's the guy that sort of runs the whole thing nowadays

B: Yeah! Did you meet - did you meet him?

ZM: Yeah! Yeah! He came to

B: OH wow! Awesome!

ZM: Yeah, and uhm, what's his philosophy? Oh, it's something along the lines of "learn what you like, absorb what is useful"

B: Yeah, that's pretty much Bruce Lee I think ...

ZM: So, uh, they teach a lot of different styles there and you sort of decide on your own what you're gonna specialize in. And I really liked Kali and

B: Yes!

ZM:

Science or Fiction (1:06:58)

Item #1: New study finds that in general people become progressively less happy as they get older. Item #2: Astronomers have discovered a giant intergalactic ball of hot gas - 100 million degrees and 3 million light years in diameter. Item #3: Robotics scientists have developed artificial sensors able to give robots touch sensation so discriminating they can discern Lincoln's image on a penny.

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society. For information on this and other podcasts, 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.