SGU Episode 68

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SGU Episode 68
8th November 2012
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SGU 67                      SGU 69
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
P: Perry DeAngelis
Quote of the Week
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
Carl Sagan
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Show Notes
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, November 8^th, 2006, and this is your host, Steven Novella, president of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Rebecca Watson...

R: Hello.

S: Perry DeAngelis...

P: Good evening.

S: ... and Jay Novella.

J: Yo-ho!

S: Good evening, everyone.

J: Steve, how are you tonight?

News Items

Kent Hovind Convicted of tax fraud (0:41)

Kent Hovind

S: Excellent. Better than Kent Hovind, that's for sure. You guys have heard about his woes.

P: He's got some legal issues.

J: Hey, come on. He's not guilty.

S: He's convicted, by definition he's guilty.

P: That's right.

R: Also considered a danger to the community, in case you didn't notice that.

S: He is a clear and present danger and a flight risk. For those of you who may not know, Kent Hovind is a prominent Young Earth creationist. So he thinks the entire universe was made a few thousand years ago.

P: Founder of Dino Land, is this?

S: Yep, he has the nickname of Dr. Dino because he has a fake Ph.D. from an unaccredited university.

R: Don't we all?

S: Christian education.

P: He's got that amusement park.

S: And he has that creationist amusement park. So he's about as nutty as they come in the creationist camp. As creationists are concerned, he is at the absurd end of the spectrum, which is saying something.

R: Kind of like the butt psychic that we were talking about last week, he is the bottom of the barrel.

S: The bottom of the barrel. But he's been very prominent going around debating evolutionists. He goes beyond just bread and butter creationism. He has some really outlandish theories about how to explain all of the geological formations that scientists say took millions of years. So he basically has this frozen comet theory, which is a way to explain the solar system and the geological formations on the Earth with one major catastrophe. So it's basically a return to sort of classic catastrophism where, again, it was thought that all of the features of the Earth could be explained by catastrophic events. And then that was replaced by the notion that, well, just ordinary everyday processes extrapolated over millions of years could explain things like the Grand Canyon. But of course, that runs contrary to the young Earth view of things. So he's trying to come up with these really far-fetched notions about these exploding comets and how that could explain everything like the Grand Canyon.

B: How does an exploding comet explain the Grand Canyon?

S: Well, it's really complicated.

J: Steve, he also offers a quarter million to anyone who can prove that evolution is the only possible way that life evolved or life exists on Earth.

S: It's a mockery of Randy's million-dollar psychic challenge, which many people have imitated that. But of course, his criteria are impossible to meet. It's like a single piece of evidence that proves evolution. It's just an impossible criteria. It's just a stunt.

B: This is the whole point.

S: It's an insincere stunt is what it is.

B: And if you want to take him up on that, you have to go to jail and visit him to do it.

S: That's right. He's been having some legal difficulties because he decided that he should not have to pay taxes. Now, you might think that he's basing this entirely on the fact that he is a minister and that he should be tax-exempt. It is largely based upon that. But in addition, he also has these beliefs that taxes are illegal, unconstitutional. There is a small group of people who think that...

P: Including Wesley Snipes.

S: Including Wesley Snipes that the government doesn't have the right to tax us.

P: Wesley Snipes, yeah, they're trying to hunt him down right now.

R: Really?

P: He's overseas.

R: You can't catch Wesley Snipes. Didn't they see the Fugitive part two? The dude is unstoppable.

J: When you say hunt, are you serious?

P: He cannot right now come back to the United States.

R: Tommy Lee Jones is dragging his ass down.

J: What a total loser.

P: He got involved with some people who convinced him that taxes were illegal. That was it. Stop paying taxes.

S: It's a deliberate political statement. He's not just trying to cheat on his taxes.

J: Yeah, because this country is run on snowflakes.

B: Back to Dr. Dino. This guy could face a maximum of 288 years in prison.

R: What are the chances that he's going to serve them all concurrently though?

J: Right in hell, buddy. That guy sucks. He's a total bozo.

B: Not only he sucks, his dance card is going to be filled every night.

J: Oh yeah, right?

P: Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

R: Right.

UFO Mockumentary (5:07)

• MediaSyndicate: Did Astronaut Cooper Know About a 1956 UFO Incident?

S: In other news, a filmmaker, R.J. Thomas, is producing a parody of the cheesy UFO documentaries from the 1970s and 80s called The Top-Secret UFO Project—I guess that's kind of a generic enough name. And... it seems as if this this going to be largely about the ideas of Gordon Cooper. Gordon Cooper was an astronaut in the U.S. space program, was the first person to orbit the Earth twice, and he was—he's a strong believer in UFOs. And he believed that he saw UFOs while in orbit. It's interesting; whenever you read a lot of the news articles about Cooper, he always... sort of prominently portray that he if anyone should know about UFOs, he would, 'cuz he's been in outer space.

J: Yeah, right.

S: It's a—it's kind of a lame argument from authority.

R: No, I mean, it's a good point; I've been to the beach, and that's why I'm technically a marine biologist.

S: That's right. And I know how to swim, so I'm an expert on the Loch Ness Monster.

R: There you go.

J: Steve, didn't he say on TV that all the astronauts are covering up sightings and government conspiracy garbage?

S: Yeah. Yeah. You have to believe in the government cover-up if you're a UFO aficionado these days. Those two things go hand in hand.

P: Yeah. Fits in nicely.

J: I think it's funny, though, that all the rigorous testing that they put them through; I know it's an immense amount of physical testing. It's also an enormous amount of emotional stress testing, and I'm sure that, to become an astronaut, you have to be fairly intelligent. But this guy's made it through all of those rigors and he still is a total baboon.

S: Well, since you bring it up, intelligence doesn't really correlate with belief in science over the pseudoscience. Actually, in general, greater intelligence positively correlates with belief in the supernatural or pseudoscience. So, more intelligent people are more likely to believe in things than UFOs [sic]

P: Why is that?

S: Well it's a very interesting question; I'm not sure it's been definitively answered. I think the reasonable speculation is that you have to have a certain amount of curiosity and thoughtfulness to even think about things like, "are we being visited by aliens?" I also think that getting a general education, getting a popular sort-of science education—it's just not enough these days. And in fact, until you really get to, like, a post-graduate expert level in some topic, the education that you get really won't prepare you to separate science from pseudoscience. Unless you have skeptical training; unless you know how to actually think about these things and become knowledgeable of the ways in which we deceive ourselves, the pitfalls of logic that we tend to fall into. So you could be extremely intelligent and still be a total credulous ass—

P: That's actually a good segue into our next story, Steve.

Bigfoot scientist (8:19)

S: That's true. Speaking of which, I'll take you up on that, Perry. So the next news item is about an academic who is a Bigfoot believer. This is a professor from Idaho, Jeffrey Meldrum. He holds a PhD in the anatomical sciences. So this is actually a PhD which is relevant to the, somewhat relevant to the topic at hand. And he is a believer in Sasquatch, the Bigfoot.

P: A big believer. As you said, Steve, he's a PhD and he is one of the foremost voices on Bigfoot. He brings a patina of science to the study of the Sasquatch, which has made him very famous in that community, as you might well imagine.

S: In any fringe community like that, if you have a real scientist who endorses your beliefs, I mean, they're celebrities. They're instant celebrities.

B: He's lionized by these guys.

P: Absolutely, yeah.

B: I mean, there's a quote here from this article, what really got him going. He discovered, it says here, a flat 15-inch footprint in the woods. And he said he thought initially that they were a hoax, but he noticed, locked joints and a narrow arch, traits he came to believe could only belong to Bigfoot. I mean, those are his great bits of evidence that got him started on this, the locked joints and a narrow arch? I mean, what?

P: From what I can tell, his main thing that he studies are these plaster casts. He has hundreds of them, of these footprints.

S: Right. And that's a classic example, logical fallacy-wise, of post-hoc reasoning. And it's basically what we call taking the evidence, comparing it to somebody shooting randomly at the side of a barn, and then going up to the bullet hole and drawing the target around the hole. So that's what he's doing. He's looking at this. It's not as if this has already been established as these features, the toe joints, as features which validate a legitimate footprint. After he saw these features, he decided afterwards, and this is with a post-hoc part, that this made it more realistic and more believable. So again, he's just drawing the target around whatever happened to be there.

R: Well, what if the footprints aren't able to be made by any other existing animal that we know of? I mean, that would be fair if he found a completely unique footprint and was trying to figure out what it belonged to.

B: Yeah, but does it belong to an actual animal or does it belong to a mold that somebody made and is trying to mimic it?

P: We've all seen the films of guys dressed in big feet running through the snow and making the footprints.

S: Another example of the post-hoc reasoning, another believer was very convinced by the fact that there were hairs embedded in the footprint. He said, well, how did those hairs get there?

B: He stepped on them?

S: Or somebody put them there. In a previous podcast, we spoke about the ridges, the dermal ridges. These dermal ridges can't be faked. And the guy said, well, I kind of just stuck my thumb in the mud and left the dermal ridges there. So it's like any magic trick. It's so simple and stupid and silly if you know how it's done. And again, that's the argument from ignorance, not knowing how the ridges got there, not knowing why this footprint has the features that it has. It leads to the conclusion that it must be genuine. It's like saying, I don't know how this magic trick is done. It must be real magic. It's the same sort of argument from ignorance. You need to have some sort of positive correlation. You need to establish independently that these features correlate with genuine footprints and not with hoaxed or faked footprints. But that's what doesn't exist. And that's where this guy's reasoning falls down, despite his study of anatomy.

J: You couldn't talk him out of this belief. You couldn't show him with any kind of research or science that he is drawing false conclusions.

P: Apparently he withstands the ridicule of his fellow academics at the university.

S: Which is quite significant.

P: They want to know if he's going to start sending Santa Claus next.

B: It's human psychology. He's so invested in this that he can't conceive of giving up this belief. When somebody's into it that much, they really can't psychologically handle going back.

S: He's a lot invested in this. I've never tried to talk him out of it, so I don't know. We can give him the benefit of the doubt. But it is certainly rare in our experience that somebody sees the light and will reverse themselves in such a controversial opinion. Speaking of the fellow scientists at his university, they are very, very critical of him. One of them quoted in this article, one of his colleagues called Martin Hackworth. He wrote, "Do I cringe when I see cable television Discovery Channel and I see Idaho State University Jeff Meldrum? Yes, I do", Hackworth said. He believes he's taken up the cause of people who have been shut out by the scientific community. He's lionized there. He's worshipped. He walks on water. It's embarrassing. His colleagues are just frankly embarrassed by it, and they shun him for that reason. However, I have to say, I think that we need to be careful not to criticize him for studying Bigfoot, because then you basically make it unacceptable for legitimate scientists to try to shine the light of science on these controversial claims. I could get criticized.

R: That's what I was trying to get at. If his actual claim was that Bigfoot exists, or is he just studying that?

P: Yes, he is a definite believer.

S: He says he is absolutely convinced that he exists. The evidence proves his existence. And that's my point. That should be criticized. His logic, his scholarship, his science. Not just the fact that he's studying this claim.

B: You could think he's wasting his time, but you can't really say...

P: Well, it also brings up the whole question of tenure. Once you're tenured, it's a very deep protection and hard to get around. I mean, the dean who runs the college that he's a part of, John Kajinsky, said he's a bona fide scientist. There's a quote. I think he helps this university. He provides a forum of open discussion and dissenting viewpoints that may not be popular with the scientific community, but that's what academics is all about, so says his dean. Okay but where do you draw the line?

S: I would say okay, but you can't give him a pass on the poor quality of his scholarship and science because he's studying something that's controversial or fringe. You have to hold him to the same standard, and when you do, his conclusions are bunk, and that's what needs to be criticized. That's an important distinction to make.

P: I agree. One last point about this particular guy is he got on the jacket of his new book, Sasquatch, Legend Meets Science, he got a blurb from Jane Goodall, who's a world famous authority on African chips, and a spokesman for Miss Goodall said, as a scientist, she's very curious and she keeps an open mind. She's fascinated by it.

R: She once said in an interview that she hopes that something like Bigfoot exists just because it's an exciting idea, but she's never said that there's any evidence to that fact. She said that there's no evidence to that. It's just something that she would like to believe.

B: Didn't she write the foreword to one of his books?

S: Yes.

R: Did she? I haven't read it.

S: Yes, that's correct.

B: She went down a couple of notches in my book.

S: I file it under just the naivete of working scientists who've never dealt with pseudoscience or the paranormal or the fringe. It's like, oh yeah, that's interesting. That wouldn't it be cool if there was something like a Sasquatch? They just have absolutely no idea of the horrifically terrible scholarship that's being done in these areas, and so they may naively appear to accept it or naively lend their imprimatur to these endeavors when they don't really intend to endorse pseudoscience. So I think she was probably just innocent in that regard.

P: I think we can conclude this with the concluding quote from this guy in the article. Is the theory of exploration dead? I'm not out to proselytize a bigfoot exists. I place legend under scrutiny and my conclusion is absolutely bigfoot exists. That's it.

S: He's not being coy.

B: What's his best evidence? He cites evidence of not only footprints but DNA and feces and hair. Well, maybe not DNA, but the article does mention hair and feces. But okay, you've got hair and feces. What does the DNA tell you? What's his smoking gun? It's not mentioned.

P: He doesn't have any. It says he hopes one day to bring back a bone or a tooth or some skin to silence stuffy academics.

R: But he doesn't have it yet.

B: But yet he still declares that Bigfoot absolutely exists. Without that evidence, he's still saying that, and to me that makes no sense.

S: He's making claims which overstep the evidence. That's a big no-no in science.

J: He's writing checks that his science can't cash.

S: Exactly. We'll leave it on that.

Learn While you Sleep (17:56)

MIT TechnologyReview: Learn While You Sleep

S: There's a study from German researchers. The title of this article I love is Learn While You Sleep, which is very misleading. But Bob, why don't you tell us about this?

B: Yeah, this is pretty interesting. As you said, Steve, a sleep research team in Germany has found that a specific type of memory can be improved if an electric current stimulates the brain during sleep. Jan Born of the University of Lubbock and his colleagues based their research on an accumulating body of evidence that one of the purposes or perhaps side effects of REM and non-REM sleep is to strengthen the neuronal connections involved in memory. Now REM sleep, I'm sure a lot of you know, REM sleep stands for rapid eye movement and it's characterized by vivid dreams, paralysis, and very active brain cortex. Non-REM is the 80% of the other parts of sleep that involves usually no dreams, a lot of body movement, you're tossing and turning and moving, and very slow synchronized waves that travel across the surface of the brain. Now relatively little is known about non-REM sleep. REM sleep gets all the press. It's the most interesting phase of sleep. You can make that argument. It's when you have dreams. So relatively there's not that much known about non-REM sleep, and it was his team's hypothesis that this stage served as a sort of covert replay of what was learned the previous day. So to test his hypothesis, he got 13 medical student volunteers, and he had them perform two different types of memory tasks, and this is key to his findings. One was learning a list of word pairs. This tests what's called declarative memory, which involves facts, memories that we're conscious of, things that you learn and memorize and can consciously recall it well. The other test was a finger tapping exercise, and that involves what's called procedural memory, and that includes motor skills, memories that involve the unconscious mind, if you will. They then put 13 electrodes on the 13 volunteers, and they stimulated their brains with a mild current. Nothing jolting enough to actually wake you up, and these people weren't even actually aware if they were being tested or not. And what they found was that the memories improved up to 8% only when the current applied matched the naturally occurring slow wave frequency of non-REM sleep. Also, only the fact-based memories improved, not the motor-based skills. They did not improve. So this suggests a link between non-REM sleep and fact-based or declarative memory, which I thought was very interesting. Now, a few people reviewed the work. Terry Sejnowski, professor head of computational neurobiology at the Salk Institute, and he said this study provides evidence that the link between sleep and memory is causal and may lead to a practical way to improve memory. A little more pessimistic is Robert Stickgold. He's a neurobiologist at Harvard. He does not foresee a future in which people can keep brain stimulators by their bedside tables. He concedes that the idea is way cool, but he suspects that evolution has already done a pretty good job of optimizing brain activity during sleep. Tweaking it further isn't going to do all that much good for you. Now, okay, fine. Why does he say that? How does he know tweaking it isn't going to do much? I mean, how do you know?

S: I think it's reasonable to be cautious in that regard. I mean, there's two things you derive from this. One is just what does it tell us about the neurology of sleep and memory. And that's very interesting. This is not the first study which has established a link between sleep and memory. It's pretty clearly established at this point that one of the functions of sleep is to consolidate, reinforce, strengthen what we experienced and learned the day before. If people get sleep deprived, that impairs their ability to learn and to remember things.

B: But yeah, but not only that. I mean, they've augmented memory. I mean, that's an interesting change.

S: It's true. You know, 8% is not dramatic and it may not be sustained. Yeah. We see these kind of small effects all the time and they don't always lead to something that has a specific clinical application that's going to make an actual functional or measurable difference. So that's why I think it's reasonable to be cautious before we start to extrapolate into actual applications.

B: I agree.

S: But we don't know. But we don't know at this point.

B: Right. It's just that one comment that evolution has already done a pretty good job of optimizing brain activity. I mean, that seemed to be going a little bit too farther than he should have gone. But still, it's interesting research and it elucidates more about memory and sleep.

S: Right.

R: I just enjoy his imagery of everybody having a brain stimulator next to their bed. I don't know if I have enough room in my nightstand.

B: You got other stimulators there, right?

S: The only other thing I wanted to note about this topic is that there is a lot of pseudoscience tapes and techniques and whatever basically trying to sell the notion that you can learn effortlessly while you're sleeping. And that has absolutely nothing to do with this science or these kinds of studies.

B: Absolutely.

S: And there is no evidence that your brain can absorb, process, and learn information while you're sleeping. So don't buy the tapes that promise to reorganize your brain waves and all that. That's all nonsense.

J: However, if you do want to increase your memory, you need to practice your memory.

S: Well, like everything else. If you use it, it will get better. You don't use it, it atrophies. One last news item before we move on to your emails.

Dolphin with Leg (23:17)

S: A dolphin was discovered that has the remains of what may be the remains of hind legs. Now, dolphins normally, they have their front flippers and they have their tail. The tail is an extension of evolved from what was their spine and their actual tail as a terrestrial animal. Their flippers are their forelimbs and they essentially lost their hind limbs. Although they do have these little pelvic structures which are probably the remnants of their hind limbs and is a good example of an evolutionary sort of residual structure. However, now they've discovered a dolphin that has hind flippers, which is an interesting piece of evolutionary evidence. It says a couple of things. One is that it reinforces this notion that single mutations can cause the appearance or disappearance of entire structures. Obviously, this dolphin did not have an entire set of mutations, all of which created the information for these hind flippers that do not exist in normal dolphins. Normal dolphins have the information in their DNA for these hind flippers. They're just turned off. This dolphin had a mutation that probably switched on the genes for the hind flippers and then he gets these relatively fully formed hind flippers.

R: The ramifications of this are terrifying. I mean, dolphins, as everyone knows, are the second most intelligent animals on the planet, just one step above humans. So now that they're going to have legs, I mean, that's scary. No, no, above. It goes mice, dolphins, humans. Come on, I'm not the nerdiest nerd here. You guys get that.

J: Steve, do you know if they x-ray the appendages?

S: I haven't seen any detailed anatomical analysis.

P: It said they're keeping them at the lab and they're going to be doing all sorts of tests, DNA.

S: DNA, yeah, obviously it would be useful. And there are other examples of this, of structures which can come out in single mutations. Gould wrote an excellent article about horses' toes and hens' teeth. Birds still have the genetic information to grow teeth. They're just turned off. And if you can figure out a way to switch them on, which researchers have done, then they'll grow teeth. Why would hens have the DNA for teeth if they didn't evolve from teeth?

B: Right, exactly. I mean, that's such a great bit of evidence right there.

P: I bet you Mr. Hovind would have an answer for that.

S: Oh, yeah. And horses, which evolved from many-toed mammals, eventually there are recidivistic or back mutations which can cause a horse to grow with a couple of extra toes coming out the back of his leg, somewhat formed. So again, there are genes which control the way things develop, and there are also genes that turn on and off entire coordinated suites of genes, which is really critical to understand that in order to understand how evolution progresses and also to understand a lot of the evidence that we can see in living animals for their evolutionary history. And this was an excellent example of it that I thought was worth talking about.

B: Steve, do you foresee a time in the future when our knowledge of genomes of animals and maybe even the proteomes I mean, imagine if we could actually examine all the DNA and say, all right, here's a DNA that codes for these non-existent structures that no longer exist and just get a huge dictionary of all these structures that just aren't expressed anymore. I mean, a huge list. I mean, wouldn't that be interesting to see that? Here's a tail, and here's the hind legs, and here's all this stuff that just aren't expressed anymore.

P: It is finite. I don't see why you couldn't do that, Bob.

S: It will definitely happen. It's just a matter of time.

B: It's another little bit of why is all this stuff here if they didn't evolve?

S: Imagine the day when we can make completely artificial genomes, but we could basically design a creature genetically from scratch.

R: The thing about turning on and off certain genomes is interesting because there's been a lot of study recently about animals that regenerate limbs, and I know that researchers are looking into finding the same gene in humans and hoping to turn that on so that we could do that.

B: Shouldn't we just be putting like $3 billion into that research? I mean, how awesome would that be?

J: Steve, do you know how the appendix is an organ that we don't need anymore? As you have heard people say, we evolved away from needing it, right? Are there any things in the brain that exist like that?

P: Well, we only use 10% of the brain, Jay, so. There's about 90% of it that we evolved beyond.

R: SOme of us.

B: Unless you know how to tap into it.

S: That's a good question. I'll have to think about that.

B: That is a good question.

S: Off the top of my head, I think the answer is no. There is no vestigial part of the brain that I can think of. There are parts of the brain that are redundant because you have it on two sides of the brain. So if you lose one, the other side can pretty well take over for it. But that's just because we have two hemispheres. Some of our abilities are lateralized and some are bilateral on both sides. So there is some redundancy, but there is no vestigial piece of the brain that I can think of.

B: It would make no sense, though, because the brain uses so much energy that it wouldn't make sense to have a part of it that sucks up so much energy that it just doesn't do anything. It's too easy to take that piece of the brain and have it rewire itself to do something else that you do need. Much more so than, say, an organ.

S: That's a really good point. The way the brain develops, it also develops with use. As you use your brain as it's developing, the brain develops stimulated by that use. For example, if you blindfolded an infant, and they actually used to do this in one eye or the other to try to fix a lazy eye, but if you did that and you deprived the brain of the visual feedback, well, the visual cortex would not get that feedback and wouldn't develop, and that tissue would just get co-opted for some other reason, for some other purpose. It wouldn't, "go to waste" or be vestigial.

J: So the brain is truly malleable.

S: Absolutely. It's called plasticity. And the plasticity is almost complete during the development phase. It means like 100% plasticity.

P: It's an astounding organ, that brain.

S: Absolutely. It is, incidentally, why our brain can contain more information than the genes that code for it. As the brain develops, it actually is increasing the amount of information that it contains in that process.

Questions and Emails

Edgar Cayce (30:32)

S: Well, let's move on to some of your questions and emails. The first one comes from Bart Farkas, from Cochrane, Alberta, in Canada. And Bart writes:

I listen to your podcast weekly, I am an active skeptic as you are.
Anyhow, I am wondering about this Edgar Cayce fellow. So many people point to him as being a true psychic, and the anecdotal claims seem impressive. He even seems to have not benefited financially from his abilities, which is also an interesting wrinkle.
That said, I don't believe it, I am just wondering who, if anyone, has completed any comprehensive skeptical review of Edgar Cayce's abilities/prophecies etc.?
What's your opinion on it?

Thanks and keep up the good work.

R: Everybody (chuckling) ...has debunked him.

P: Check the library.

S: Yeah, he's like Skepticism 101. All right, you're—

R: James Randi debunked him in Flim-Flam... one of his finest books.

S: The Skeptic Dictionary has a very thorough debunking of him on their website; we'll have the link to that. I found that to be pretty good. So, Edgar Cayce, who died in 1945, was a... trance psychic. He would go into—he was called "The Sleeping Prophet"—he would go into these trance-like states and he would just spout out random prophecies and his devoted listeners would write everything down. It was very Nostradamus-esque in that his statements were so vague that they could be applied to anything. But occasionally he would get more specific, and whenever he did, his predictions were completely worthless.

R: Really wrong. Like, my favorite is when he said, "1933 would be a very good year."

S: Right. (laughs)

R: It really was, for Hitler. (laughs) It was a great year for Hitler.

S: Had to be a good year for somebody.

P: How did our friend from Alberta, who's an active skeptic, come up with the idea that the guy's claims have validity?

R: Well, I think it's the sort of thing where the guy's been dead for so long that he's had plenty of time for people to forget all of the failures and remember the successes and blow them up. And if you look on his Wikipedia entry—I was just looking at this earlier today—it's outrageous. It was written by a true believer. And this is the sort of information that people are getting, sadly.

S: Well, we have to fix that.

R: So, yeah, actually, to all of our listeners, go to Wikipedia, look up Edgar Cayce, and start editing, 'cuz it's really bad.

S: He still has his devoted followers. That's why—

R: Yeah.

S: —it is as you say. So, one of my favorite predictions of his that did not come true—he predicted that in 1958, the United States would discover some sort of death ray that was used on Atlantis.

R: (laughing) Yeah, that's right.

J&P: What?

S: (laughing) Right; exactly.

R: Somebody suggested that this was supposed to be the invention of the laser. Because, you know, we all have death rays in our homes, reading our CDs and DVDs.

P: I mean, the death ray; OK, but Atlantis?

R&P: (laughs)

S: Cayce was a big fan of Atlantis; he expanded the mythology of Atlantis tremendously; he's the first one to come up with the energy crystals. Atlanteans somehow used their energy crystals to do stuff.

R: He claimed to be able to heal people, but he couldn't save at least two of his own family members who died—I think his brother and he had a newborn son who died.

S: Right, right.

R: So, not very successful.

S: A lot of his followers do a lot of ad-hoc justifications for his failures. Like, he and a dowser predicted that they were going to find buried treasure someplace and they went there and it wasn't there. So his followers said, "well, maybe the buried treasure was already dug up." Or—

B: There you go.

S: —"in the future, there will be buried treasure."

P: (laughs)

R: His sons even wrote a book all about his failed prophecies, essentially attempting to basically talk about what was just beyond his psychic reach. So they tried to actually turn it to their favor somehow.

S: Right.

R: The thing about Cayce—he was incredibly prolific in that he did just thousands and thousands of readings.

P: Why not?

R: Yeah. And more than you could possibly imagine; he spent all of his time doing readings. And so, with that vast amount of stuff, he was bound to churn out a few hits, you know. And so of course, that's what gets passed along and stays with us.

S: I like his snake-oil cures that he recommended. He was the first one, apparently, to recommend Laetrile for cancer. Laetrile, that wonder drug that's being suppressed by the evil medical establishment.

R: Isn't it arsenic or something?

S: Cyanide.

R: Cyanide; right.

S: He also would prescribe bedbug juice for "dropsy". Dropsy, that really terrible medical problem that still plagues us today.

B: What the hell's bedbug juice?

R: (laughing) And what's dropsy?

S: Right; exactly.

B: What's "prescribe" mean?

P: That mean you drop stuff all the time?

R: (laughs) Dropsy...

S: Don't listen to the anecdotal evidence; we'll give you links to detailed analyses of his so-called prophecies. He didn't do better than any other psychic who has ever lived.

Quantum Love - Question 1(35:47)

S: Question number two comes from Donovan Dillon, didn't give his location, and he writes, after some much-deserved praise, he asks two questions. Question number one.

I find that when I tell my girlfriend (from watching one too many documentaries) that love is nothing more than a series of hormones released, yada yada yada, that I don't get as much loving attention as when I keep it as this mystical wonderful thing. How do you, as skeptics, balance your science and skeptic backgrounds with the world around you that is full of things like Christmas Holidays, Love, Romance and all that jazz? Do you take it home with you, or leave it at work? Are their things that you keep mystical and don't challenge or is everything fair game?

S: Let's address this first question before I read the second question.

R: Donovan, Donovan, Donovan, that is so not the way to go about getting nookie, seriously.

S: (laughs)

R: You don't just say it's a bunch of hormones, you know.

B: Yeah, don't trivialise those things to your girlfriend. But also, I would disagree with his terminology. I don't see those things as mystical, they're not really mystical, they are explainable, so they're not...

S: Bob, I think that's his point though. He's saying as a skeptic we know these things are mystical, but that's not getting me any monkey love, when you pretend that they are mystical then the women, that loosens them up.

R: You see, no Donovan is going about this the wrong way, Donovan, I'm going to give you this gift, grab your pen.

J: Here we go, and something else...

R: Next time you're chilling on the couch with your girlfriend, I want you to turn to her and say, "baby, looking in your deep blue eyes stimulates the immediate response of my love-related neuro-physical systems, converging on the widespread regions of the chordate."

S: That does it every time.

R: Isn't that much better? (laughs)

B: Oooh. (laughter)

R: "Baby, you put the dope in dopamine." (laughter)

S: The dope in dopamine?

P: That's OK, that's OK.

R: See it's all about how you present it, Donovan, that's all it is.

S: Something about moanin' for serotonin? (laughter)

B: Oh, nice!

P: You could do that.

R: Well done, Steve.

B: Did you just think of that one?

S: I did, I did.

B: Oh, you... you must have prepared that one.

R: (laughing) He's been waiting to use that the past 10 years.

B: Oh man, good one.

S: The way I approach these issues, if you're hyper-reductionist about the state of reality and our existence in the universe, it's all about perspective. If you think we're just a speck of insignificance in this vast multiverse, it could be quite depressing. The fact is, we are humans, humans are what they are. There's nothing with embracing the human condition and human existence and we make our own meaning, whatever that is so you might as well view the world and the universe from a human perspective and embrace what we are. I love my daughters more than anything in the world, I have an incredible emotional reaction to them in many different ways that only another parent could really understand and I know full well that this is an evolved, biochemical reaction to induce me to pass my genes on to the next generation and nothing more, but it does not...

B: And to care for them.

S: Well yeah, to nurture the survival of my genetic progeny. But it doesn't matter, those emotions are still just as real to me, they're just as profound, it is part of what it is to be human and just embrace that and enjoy it and live and enjoy your life and the two things are not incompatible at all, sex is still sex, regardless of how and why it evolved, so I don't see the conflict there at all actually.

P: Right, absolutely.

J: Well, he might be coming more from the idea that he might be a little too robotic and stiff and his girlfriend is commenting on that, I think you've got to read between the lines here.

S: All right, I'll say something else, Carl Sagan made a comment once, I can't remember what the venue was, again if there's anybody who knows how to put awe in science, he did. He said about his wife, "of all the times and places, of all the billions of years and all the different, the vastness of the universe, that you and I came together at the same time is the greatest joy of my life," I'm hugely paraphrasing, but that's how he put it. So he made this notion of our place in the universe into a very romantic idea about he and his wife sharing this very, very narrow slice of reality together and how wonderful that was for him. So you could do it man, you could make the scientific skepticism work with romance or wonder.

R: You've just got to be smooth like Sagan.

S: He's smooth.

P: (laughs) It's like anything else, you just can't carry it to an excess, that's all.' Keep it in perspective.

J: Rebecca, I just came up with a career for you.' It's incredible. (laughter) You should become an instructor of romance to your posse. (Rebecca laughs)

S: Skeptical romance?

R: Yeah, dating advice, no, no, no see it's a good idea though because then people could write in and ask me relationship advice and I'll deliver it with the scientific skeptic spin.

S: There you go, a new career for you.

R: I like it (laughs).

Quantum Love - Question 2 (41:12)

S: Quickly, let's go on to his second question. His second question is this:

On your last episode, you had an interview with a very nice English chap

Yes, that was Richard Wiseman.

who had done some joint experiments with a woman and the woman got different results then he did. She explained her varying results as the result of the intention of the observer, that the observer predetermined the outcome, which sounds fairly hokey, I agree. Now, jump over to quantum mechanics, and I am not suggesting that this at proves the woman wasn't out of her tree, but what are your views on the experiments that have behavior of electrons being influenced by the observer?

And he references the double-slit experiments and gives a Wikipedia link.

R: Didn't we actually talk about this when we had Marilyn on? She brought up the quantum... bit.

S: Did she? I don't—this has come up before, I think, but—again, just very quickly, to shoot this down: The notion that the observer affects the outcome or that—in a quantum way, or that reality somehow doesn't exist until an observer observes it is really a complete mis-reading of quantum mechanics. And I was a little surprised that he referenced the double-slit experiments rather than some other more recent experiments, which I think are actually hokey. But, the double-slit experiments, very quickly—if you shine a light through a single slit, you get a pattern—just a single pattern on the wall. If you shine a light beam through two slits that are close together, you get an interference pattern. And this was the first piece of evidence that light actually behaves like a wave.

B: 'Cuz only waves can make an interference pattern.

S: Yeah. An interference pattern that is exactly like—literally like waves in water interfering with each other. The same thing. Any waves. These happen to be light waves. Prior to this, it was thought that light was basically a particle, which it is. The particle/wave duality of light.

B: Right.

S: So, the thing is, though, when you say "observer", what that really means—it's not that somebody—whatever's going on in the mind of the experimenter affects the outcome of the experiment; that's completely not true. All it means is that light is a wave until it has to interact with something, anything. When it interacts with something like the film you're using to record the pattern of light, then that forces it to—the probability wave to collapse to an actual particle and then interact with whatever it's interacting with. So, that's the phenomenon that we're talking about, in terms of quantum mechanics. That fundamental particles exist as a probability wave until they're forced to interact with their environment in any way. And of course, it's hard to keep them from interacting, you know; eventually, things are going to interact with other things, and they collapse. Whether or not there's any intelligent being present or not, looking or not looking. So, the whole observer phenomenon is a complete mis-interpretation of quantum mechanics.

B: Yeah, Steve; the way I see that—I think there's an emotional appeal for these people to think that you need an intelligence; that an intelligence or a mind is the key factor in collapsing the wave functions. And to me, that's equivalent to putting humans back on that pedestal that science threw us off of a long time ago. And the real culprit, as you said, was the decoherence, which is just the interaction with the environment; you don't need a mind in the loop is the bottom line.

S: That's right.

Distribution of Pseudoscience (44:29)

Hi there,

I've been listening to the podcast for about 15 episodes now, and I want to let you know that you're doing a great job. The issues are interesting and informative, the panel members are great at debunking the stuff that gets published in the mass and fringe media, and it's an entertaining show. I'm just a bit in the dark on the Rebecca-Jay animosity, but I guess not all topics need to be analysed on air ;-) As an Irish person who has lived in the US, UK and now Germany, I would particularly like to hear your thoughts on how cultural influences dictate credulous belief patterns. A particular example is the Intelligent Design debate, which seems to be a purely American phenomenon. Here in Europe the creationists are regarded as slightly barmy, but it seems that a large proportion of the US population takes it seriously. This is not to say that Europeans are more skeptical - I know plenty of Germans who believe in ghosts and other such nonsense, it's just different nonsense. It would interest to me to know if anyone has taken the trouble to map out the regional patterns followed by various religions and superstitions. I would expect that global acceptance of, say, quantum mechanics is more *uniformly* distributed throughout the globe than that of ouija boards, tarot cards, voodoo, ID etc. No doubt something to do with repeatability... A sober analysis of this data might convince some otherwise credulous people that their beliefs have rather shaky foundations? I'd love to hear your thoughts, keep up the good work.

Macartan Cassidy

Heidelberg, Germany

S: Let's go on to the next email. This one comes from McCartan Cassidy from Heidelberg, Germany, and he writes, "Hi there. I've been listening to the podcast for about 15 episodes now, and I want to let you know that you're doing a great job. The issues are interesting and informative. The panel members are great at debunking the stuff that gets published in the mass and fringe media. And it's an entertaining show. I'm just a bit in the dark on the Rebecca-Jay animosity, but I guess not all topics need to be analyzed on air."

J: What animosity?

S: Yeah, I think it's just a friendly banter, actually. There's no real.

J: We all love each other.

R: For certain definitions of the word love.

J: Group hug.

R: Don't touch me.

S: "As an Irish person who has lived in the US, UK, and now Germany, I would particularly like to hear your thoughts on how different cultural influences dictate credulous belief patterns. A particular example is the intelligent design debate, which seems to be a purely American phenomenon here in Europe the creationists are regarded as slightly barmy." Nice word. "But it seems that a large proportion of the US population takes it seriously. This is not to say that Europeans are more skeptical. I know plenty of Germans who believe in ghosts and other such nonsense. It's just different nonsense. It would interest me to know if anyone has taken the trouble to map out the regional patterns followed by various religions and superstitions. I would expect that global acceptance of, say, quantum mechanics is more uniformly distributed throughout the globe than that of Ouija boards, tarot cards, Voodoo ID, et cetera. No doubt something to do with repeatability. A sober analysis of this data might convince some otherwise credulous people that their beliefs have rather shaky foundations. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Keep up the good work." This is actually a really good idea. What he's basically saying is that if a belief is founded on reality, that that belief should exist throughout the scientific world. And the example that he gave was quantum mechanics. As we were just talking about, quantum mechanics is still, I think, poorly understood. But say pretty much scientists throughout the world accept the fact that DNA is the molecule that codes for genetic information. There's no pattern to that. Everyone accepts that. But if you go to a belief that's not founded in reality, that's founded rather on culture, on cultural traditions or cultural beliefs, should follow cultural patterns and not be evenly distributed. That is a very sound hypothesis. And what he's saying is that, therefore, it might be an independent line of debunking evidence, if you will. So let's say you take something like crop circles and say, is crop circles accepted throughout the world or only in, say, the English speaking part of the world where the cultures that are contiguous with where it originated in England? And in fact, that's what you find, as opposed to, say, legitimate scientific theory, which may spread regardless of cultural boundaries.

R: Steve, while I understand what he's proposing, I think that when you present it like that, it's going to be misunderstood as an appeal to popularity.

S: But I could see how that could be misinterpreted, but that's not what I think McCartan is saying. That's not what I'm saying or how I'm interpreting his suggestion. It's not that it's either universally accepted or not universally accepted. It's does it follow a cultural pattern or not?

R: Right. I understand what you're saying, but you're also talking about it as a way to inform the public. And that's where I think it kind of runs into problems.

S: Yeah, I don't necessarily think I think that it may be a little on the subtle side as in terms of using it as a mechanism for convincing the public. It's interesting academically or scientifically.

R: It is interesting academically.

P: Am I missing something or what about pseudoscientific beliefs that are universally accepted? How do they fit in?

S: Give me an example.

P: I don't know. UFOs? Ghosts?

S: Yeah, but if you look at all of those, those are not examples. And I think it's really interesting if you look at those things. It's hard. It might be hard for us to see this kind of have an American centric view of things. But when you look at all those issues like ghosts, ghosts are popular in Europe and in the colonies of Europe, but not in, say, other parts of the world like Asia or Russia or whatever.

P: But there's plenty of people in Asia that believe in ghosts. Spirits?

B: How do they manifest themselves?

S: Yeah, they manifest completely different. They manifest according to cultural traditions. Same thing with UFOs. Also, you can follow historically. You can start with like and I think crop circles is probably the best documented example of this. It started in the UK and it was just a UK phenomenon for a while. And then it spread to other English speaking worlds.

P: Crop circles is a much more limited belief.

S: And then it spread to other sort of more contiguous European countries. And it hasn't really penetrated into countries that are that are culturally disparate. Now, why would aliens choose to follow a cultural pattern like that when deciding where to start drawing scribbles in crops? Same thing as belief in UFOs. It started in one culture and spread to other cultures as opposed to, say, scientific ideas, which sometimes they get sort of discovered at the same time in different parts of the world. Once we get to the point where something is ripe for discovery, it may get discovered multiple times. Or once it gets published in the scientific literature and gets replicated, it pretty much becomes broadly accepted. So I think there's definitely something there. The difference between beliefs which are generated by evidence and logic versus beliefs which are cultural would follow different patterns.

P: The world is also getting smaller in a technological age where I can now know minutes after something happens in another part of the world I can know about it.

R: It is still, I think, interesting to follow things like if you just focus on aliens, you can trace how our perceptions of aliens have changed over time and in different cultures and how they tend to look a certain way depending upon the current culture. Yeah, and there are a lot of interesting things written on that, so I think it's kind of a similar idea.

J: Hey, Steve, do you think that his concept is worthy of a legitimate grant?

S: Well, I think it would be interesting maybe to pick something, and I think this has been done with certain things like crop circles and UFOs, or maybe pick a few scientific ideas and then try to trace their pattern of spread and pick a few paranormal ideas and trace their pattern of spread and see if you could come up with some differences in these patterns that are quantifiable or objectifiable. It would be interesting to do. It would be basically a sociological experiment.

R: You know, I think there's actually also a problem from the science side because you can look at something like evolution and say, well, it's not accepted in certain communities or HIV being a virus that leads to AIDS isn't accepted in certain cultures. Therefore, it's not a valid scientific theory, which isn't correct.

S: Yeah, but see, not the scientific community, though, but the scientific community accepts evolution and HIV is the cause of AIDS. Again, what you're just looking at is a popular denial of those sciences, which is just another form of pseudoscience, though.

R: Right. I see what you're saying. Okay.

Workplace Skepticism (51:52)

S: Let's do one more email, then we'll go on to Science or Fiction. This one comes from David Schroder from Pretoria, South Africa—I think this is our second South African email.

B: Does that rhyme with "chow-da"?

S: Well, he actually sent a pronunciation guide, and it's "Shrowda" is how... it's spelled S-C-H-R-O-D-E-R, but he said pronounced S-H-R-O-W-D-A. Shrowda.

B: I never would have guessed that pronunciation.

S: Yeah. Well, it's good that he sent it along.

B: Yep.

S: And he writes,

Good day all, I am a huge fan of your show, and feel that I am slowly obtaining a PhD in Scepticism.

Didn't we just end up with that?

After listening to each episode I discuss what I have learned with all my friends and family, so even though you may only have 8 000 or so people downloading your podcasts, your information does get out to at least 4 or 5 times that many people.

Well, I hope so.

First, for your amusement, here is a link to a supposed secret covenant that doctors like you, Steve, supposedly belong to. It is hilarious, but does make me wonder what these imbeciles can possibly come up with next.

I'll have the link to that—I'm not going to talk about it. I looked at it; I read through that link. It sounds like someone with like a paranoid schizophrenia just ranting about this. It really is just nonsense; it's not worth going into in detail; it's just a conspiracy theory paranoid—you know, stream of consciousness. On to his question; he writes,

On a recent episode you discussed how to deal with family members and friends that are either non-sceptics, or firmly believe in a pseudo-science. Thank you for dealing with this issue; your information was very valuable. Would it be possible for you to share your feelings about scepticism and dealing with scepticism within the workplace, and any experiences that you may have had? I work at a reputable book publisher, and one of my tasks is to evaluate new manuscripts that we receive. Sometimes, a superior will pass a manuscript on to me and ask for my opinion, and this puts me in a difficult situation when the manuscript I am supposed to evaluate concerns something pseudo-scientific.

He writes, just skipping down to the end,

Thank you very much for your show, and I hope that it will continue for many years to come. I will not send a marriage proposal to Rebecca, but I would like to tell her that I wish that there were more women like her in this world.

Regards,

David Schroder

R: Aww, that's nice. Thank you.

P: Very nice. Very nice.

S: So, I don't know about you guys—I mean, I certainly do confront this on a regular basis—

P: With your patients or your colleagues, Steve?

S: More with patients, occasionally with colleagues.

P: OK.

S: That non-scientific or non-skeptical beliefs creeping into the workplace, and do you—how do you deal with that? Personally, maybe it's a little bit easier for me than the rank-and-file skeptic, because I'm kind of out of the closet as a pretty hardened skeptic; it's hard for me to pretend otherwise. I feel that I have never had to apologize for my staunch defense of science or my stance that, especially within the context of medicine, that it should be based on sound solid scholarship and science. So I don't feel I ever have to be apologetic about that. What I do think is that you just—you should learn how to be pro-science and to state what you believe without being unnecessarily confrontational or critical and definitively avoid any kind of ad hominem or personal attacks.

P: Right. A little diplomacy.

S: Right. Right. But you don't have to pretend that it's OK with you; that pseudoscience is OK or that—

P: Right.

S: You can say, "listen, I believe in a scientific approach to these things; this is the information that I have. I understand there's a lot of sometimes misinformation about this", etc. You could do it in a very non-confrontational way and I think it works out fine.

R: Yeah. I work in an office and I have to pick my battles, 'cuz you know, sometimes I just can't be the person who constantly says, "well, you know that's crap, right?" Just today I overheard two women in my office talking about Airborne, the vitamins that you get that are supposed to cure the common cold, but they don't actually say that any more. And they were talking about how great it is and how they're going to go buy it and I'm just like, "you know"...

P: And you dove over there like a gazelle and set them straight; is that right?

R: (laughs) Ehhh, I let it go. (laughs) Like you know, there's really no point to that one. But when the email forwards come around, I am always the first to respond to all with the appropriate Snopes link and—

S: Right, right.

R: There's a running gag in my office that my word is "actually". The word "actually" is my word, because every time we're standing around in a group and somebody says something stupid, I always pop in, "actually..."

S: It's hard not to say that. I find myself saying that a lot as well.

R: 'Cuz it's the nicest way to start: "well, actually, you'd think that, wouldn't you, but..." (laughs)

J: I used to be... I used to look for the fight a lot more; I find lately that I've just learned to keep my mouth shut most of the time, because I found out that most people don't change their minds, that it's very hard to educate people that are true believers.

R: Yeah.

S: Well, if they're really hard true believers, yes. But you know what, Jay? What I found is that nobody ever tells you right at that moment that they've changed their mind. But what you find is that you've planted a seed of doubt or thought in them.

P: Absolutely.

S: And then down the road—it may even be months later, it germinated; whatever. You find that you actually had a tremendous influence on their beliefs. So don't give up because there's no immediate response.

P: They'll repeat something that you said and they won't even give you credit for it. It doesn't matter.

S: Right. They won't even realize it was you that said it. It just became part of their thinking about it now.

P: Right. You've given them the food for thought.

R: The important thing is to just not become the jerk that everybody doesn't want to talk to because you're always shooting them down. So that's why I pick my battles, because I know that—and it's kind of funny now, because when they talk around me, they do kind of watch themselves a little more, and some of them actually have changed their behaviors, in that they say, "hey, I heard this thing—oh, you know what? It's probably bunk. You're going to go to Snopes, aren't you? Hold on; let me check." And they'll go and they'll find out, and they'll be like, "yeah, OK." So that's kind of funny 'cuz they're doing it themselves, but it's mostly because I'm pretty easy-going about it, and I don't rub it in their faces when they're wrong, you know?

J: Yeah. You have to be careful because you could be stepping on someone's amazingly important belief system that they have, and... You know, David's situation, though—what I gleaned out of his letter to us was that, every once in a while, there might be a situation where a book comes across his desk that he really doesn't agree with or he finds flaws in the science, and if I was in his position, I would very much feel compelled to say something about... something that is written down like that that many, many people are going to digest—I would feel very strongly about correcting it; letting my boss know that I'm finding fault with it.

R: Right. And it depends on what his job is—

P: Well, exactly.

R: —and whether or not he can afford to lose it.

P: That's what I was thinking, Rebecca. And I don't know what his business is, so I don't know what mechanisms are in place for him to bring these things to light. You know, if it's his place—

R: It really depends; yeah.

P: —if anybody would listen, and how much he needs the job and so forth. You're right.

J: Well, I just... I would have a moral problem with letting a book go across my desk that I possibly could have prevented if it's filled with pseudoscience.

P: Mmm.

R: Speaking as someone who works in marketing, you get over it. (laughs) That was a joke. That was a joke.

J: You know what I would also do? Another thing I've found very entertaining was giving people cold readings.

S: Yes.

J: Using a technique like that as a way of not only entertaining your co-workers and family, but also at the same time educating them, showing them that you can fool them and you're definitely not a psychic.

B: Well, yeah; the one problem with that, though, is that they will believe you are psychic—some of them will, at least.

P: Course. "You don't know your own powers".

S: I... yeah, I wouldn't do it to a true believer, but I've done it to people who are just interested and not really familiar with what cold reading is, and they were otherwise scientific or smart people. And it works; you could do very, very simple cold readings and you could be very impressive. Like, "there's a woman in your life; her name begins with 'M'". "My girlfriend's name is Mary! How did you know that?" You know, it's very simple just to do a quick—sometimes a quickie demonstration is better than an hour-long lecture, so I've found that as well.

J: I told you that time, the girl at work. I was giving her a cold reading; she was buying it hook, line and sinker, and she's a total true believer. And then I said to her, "and you never told me about the secret" and she looked at me and went, "how did you know about that?" (laughter)

B: Oh, my God.

R: It's classic.

B: That would work on every human on the planet.

S: Right, right, yeah. Everyone has a secret.

Science or Fiction (1:00:41)

Item #1: Researchers have restored sight to blind mice by transplanting stem cells into their eyes. Item #2: Vaccination with embryonic stem cells has been shown to protect against lung cancer in mice. Item #3: Stem cells have been successfully used to reduce the effects of dwarfism by allowing for longer arm and leg bone growth. Item #4: Researchers are using autologous stem cell transplants to repair the damage of heart attacks and reduce heart failure.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Dwarfism
Science	Blind mice
Science	Lung cancer
Science	Heart attacks

Host	Result
Steve	sweep

Rogue	Guess
Perry	Lung cancer
Bob	Lung cancer
Rebecca	Lung cancer
Jay	Restored sight

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

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine, one fictitious. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. There is a theme for this week. The theme is stem cells. And actually, I also have four items this week instead of three. So three are genuine and one is fake. The first one, researchers have restored sight to blind mice by transplanting stem cells into their eyes. Item number two, vaccination with embryonic stem cells has been shown to protect against lung cancer in mice. Item number three, stem cells have been successfully used to reduce the effects of dwarfism by allowing for longer arm and leg bone growth. And item number four, researchers are using autologous stem cell transplants to repair the damage of heart attacks and reduce heart failure. Perry, why don't you go first?

Perry's Response

P: Okay. You know, without being specific, I may have read some of this. And I will simply say that I believe the second one, Steve, was what they do with the lungs?

S: Vaccination with embryonic stem cells has been shown to protect against lung cancer in mice.

P: Okay. I'll go with that one being fake. The other ones simply sound like more reasonable therapies.

S: Okay, Bob.

Bob's Response

B: All right. Heart failure, that one seems reasonable. Longer limb growth, that seems reasonable. One and two I'm having problems with. Protecting against lung cancer in mice. Well, first off, I mean, how do you get mice to smoke cigarettes? But I'm going to go with that one. That seems the least likely to me.

S: Okay, Rebecca.

Rebecca's Response

R: Yeah, that's the way I was leaning too. I hate to go with the crowd, but I'm going to go with the lung cancer thing as well.

S: All righty. Jay?

Jay's Response

J: I'll go with the restoring. No, it was just like they made them blind somehow? Give me a little bit more information.

R: They stabbed their little micey eyes out.

S: No, it was they did not physically destroy the eyes. But they had lost their sight and then they restored it by transplanting stem cells.

J: I'm going to go with that one as the false.

S: Okay.

B: Three of these are true.

S: Three of these are true.

Steve Explains Item #4

S: You all agree that using autologous stem cell transplants to repair the damage of heart attacks and reduce heart failure is true, and that is science. That one has been a bit out in the news.

P: Yeah, that's the one I was talking about.

S: Yeah, I'm not surprised you've heard about that one. It's also partly why I went to four, but there were just so many stem cell things in the news I wanted to get them all in there. So yes, that's true, and what they're doing is basically within a few hours of having a heart attack, they take your bone marrow and then inject it back into you. In the British articles, they always call injections jabs. Stem cell jabs for heart patients.

B: Oh my God, wow. I never heard of that one.

S: Yeah, that's what they call it. It's funny.

J: That's cool.

S: This has been human trials now.

B: What stage, Steve?

S: This is a recruit a hundred patients. That's what we call probably a phase two trial, which is you're actually looking for safety and effectiveness, but it's not probably big enough to get FDA approval.

B: Now, Steve, are they seeing a clear improvement or is it kind of borderline?

S: Yeah, well, we'll see. That's what they're looking for. The earlier studies showed some clear improvement. I mean, the stem cells become heart cells, and they actually improve the contractile force of the heart and reduce heart failure afterwards.

B: I remember now I read about an article and the benefits were just amazing. Not borderline at all. Clear, clear improvements, better than anything they've ever seen.

S: I think it's going to be one of the early applications of stem cells.

B: Awesome.

J: Steve, are these all embryonic stem cells?

S: These are not. These are not. These are taken from bone marrow of the person themselves. That's what autologous means. So they're not embryonic stem cells. This is being done in Barts Hospital in London.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: Let's talk about the blind mice. This one is also science.

B: The three?

S: This is number one.

R: No, the mice. Were they three?

S: I had to say blind mice. These are cell transplants, successfully restored vision to mice which had lost their sight, leading to hopes that this could be applied to humans.

J: So is it the retina? What do we talk about?

S: They had damage similar to retinal damage that is seen in certain medical conditions in humans. This was published in Nature, which is one of the most prestigious journals in science. It's a very, very significant study. This one they did do, they took cells from three to five day old mice. So not strictly embryonic, but in humans that's probably where we would get the source of similar cells. And then they injected them into the retinas of the mice that had the eye damage. And they became proto-receptors and started to actually function.

J: That is awesome.

R: I'm sure the mice are very appreciative.

B: Why isn't Bill Gates putting $10 billion into this stuff?

J: Why isn't George Bush putting $50 billion?

R: I don't think it's fair to criticize Bill Gates.

P: Bill's busy feeding the world.

R: Yeah, seriously.

S: Still a ways from human applications, but very, very promising.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: Let's go to number three next. Stem cells have been specially used to reduce the effects of dwarfism by allowing for longer arm and leg bone growth. That one is fiction.

R: I knew you sounded too proud.

S: That's fiction, yep. Actually, it took me a while. The first two or three things I thought of that were fictitious, there was too much published that was too close to it. So I had to drop them because it's being tried in so many different things. But this one, I couldn't find anything about this at all. So there's no studies that are looking specifically at this. The problem with dwarfism is that the ends of their bones fuse prematurely, and they stop growing at that point, and that's it. I mean, at this point, basically this shows over once the ends of the long bones fuse. You'd really have to get to them before that stage.

B: Well, there's mechanical interventions that you could do with them.

S: Stretching the bones and stuff.

B: And there's some incredible success stories with that. I mean, it's painful and nasty, but of course it doesn't include stem cells.

S: I think that's called the Ilizarov Technique. I'll have to look that up. But no stem cell treatments that I could find.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: Which means that number two is also science. Vaccination and embryonic stem cells have been shown to protect against lung cancer in mice.

B: I'm glad I was wrong on that one.

S: Yeah, this is interesting. It's really a different way of using these stem cells.

R: Did they give the mice tiny cigarettes?

S: No, they injected them with cancer cells. That's how you do that. Because that's a pretty high probability way of giving cancer. And they fought off these cancer cells, if better, if they had been vaccinated.

B: And in 20 years, they'll get to human trials and they'll know whether it works or not.

S: Right, right. Well, it may be a long way off.

R: So you got everybody.

S: Nobody got it right this week. This was a little bit tougher because there were four of them. But the vaccination one was very unusual, which is what caught my attention with that one.

R: Good job, Steve.

J: That was a good one, Steve. That was interesting. I actually liked having four of them.

B: I didn't.

P: Take it easy with that.

B: That lung cancer is a red herring. I should have realized it.

Skeptical Puzzle (1:08:34)

Perhaps it was Socrates

Or Plato, his pupil

One of their theories Appeared to be a scruple

Perhaps it was Hippocrates Or maybe by Homer

It may have looked like philosophy But it was a misnomer

More believers would follow Tolerant and exacting

Such a theory, so shallow They must have been acting

To the 21st century This belief still is held

In the face of integrity It flies un-repelled

What is it?

S: Well, Evan has a quick skeptical puzzle for us this week, which he recorded for us. Let's hear that now.

E: Perhaps it was Socrates Or Plato, his pupil One of their theories Appeared to be a scruple Perhaps it was Hippocrates Or maybe by Homer It may have looked like philosophy But it was a misnomer More believers would follow Tolerant and exacting Such a theory, so shallow They must have been acting To the 21st century This belief still is held In the face of integrity It flies un-repelled So what is it?

S: As always, we end with a skeptical quote of the week.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:09:12)

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

B: I have a quote from Carl Sagan that is very apropos to this podcast. "For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love."

P: Amen.

S: Well said.

J: That's good. Well said.

S: Thanks for joining me, everyone. Always a pleasure.

R: Thank you, Steve.

J: Have a good week.

Announcements (1:09:35)

S: Next week we have Seth Shostak on the show.

B: Cool. Awesome.

S: He's the SETI guy. He's an awesome guy. Looking forward to interviewing him. Please visit us on the forums. The numbers are growing every day. We have new people joining the forums. The discussions there are very lively and interesting, often delve much deeper into some of the topics that we bring up during the show. So take a look at it. Please continue-

P: Don't forget to write a review for us on iTunes.

S: Give us your kind reviews, if you will. Tell a friend about the podcast. Continue to spread the word. And keep sending us email. We appreciate the feedback, both positive and negative, and the questions are always the best part of the show, in my opinion. So keep them coming.

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