SGU Episode 907

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SGU Episode 907
November 26th 2022
Cichlids from the crater lake Xiloá in Nicaragua. A study team discovered fish in the crater lake in 2018 that resembled hybrids of the two cichlid species.
SGU 906                      SGU 908
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
Science and art can touch one another, like two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which is our human life, and that contact may be made across the borderline between the two respective domains.
M. C. Escher, Dutch graphic artist
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, SGU on Media Bias Chart

• Ad Fontes Media's "Media Bias Chart"
  

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

8.56 32.60 S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, November 15th, 2022. And this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,

B: hey everybody,

S: Cara Santa Maria,

C: howdy,

S: Jay Novella.

J: Hey, guys,

S: and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, everyone.

S: So guys, did you see this media bias chart on Facebook? You know we did, we were just talking about it. But only before we turned on the switch, Bob. It only counts if we turn on the switch. It's not real unless we're recording. Oh, I see. Clearly, according

44.44 49.96 E: to this chart that we wound up being a part of. Yeah, it's fine. So I do like these sort

49.96 90.24 S: of media bias charts. I look at them a lot. You know, hopefully the source is reliable. It basically says there's two axes left right is politically left right and then up down is some measure of quality, you know, objectivity or whatever. In this chart they have at the top, it's a little odd that you have the top is fact reporting. And then one notch below that is mostly analysis or or mix of fact reporting and analysis. So they're putting analysis inherently below fact. You know, I'm not sure I agree with that, but yeah, that is you keep going. Then it just straight up says opinion. Yeah, then it's opinion.

90.24 102.88 S: And then incomplete, unfair persuasion, propaganda, propaganda starts to hit and then contains misleading info and contains inaccurate fabricated fabricated info. Oh, my God, you're making

102.88 127.24 C: shit up. I get it, though, because if you look at the axis label, they're literally calling it news value and reliability. So it's true. Like the higher up on this axis, the more it's just straight reporting the news with no analysis whatsoever. This is what happened. And then down at the bottom, it's like, you know, completely fabricating stuff. Right. Yeah. It's fiction. Right. And then, of course, an op ed is going to be somewhere

127.24 148.96 S: in the middle. Yeah. But we're so we we're pretty high. They put us just a tad bit left of center, which OK. I mean, I don't necessarily agree with that, but I think reality is a little bit tad left of center. But to be honest with you, I know I stole that joke, but it works. I love the fact that Joe Rogan is like in his own little space way down in the middle.

148.96 154.38 E: Way down. He is. He's all alone straddling the depths into misleading information. He's

154.38 223.68 C: weirdly in the middle, which I am very question. I like question. He's dead center.

I don't get how he's dead center and right.

And my only idea and it's funny because lots of people are commenting that to like since when is Joe Rogan in the middle? Oh, they replied to this person who asked. So this is from the media company who produces Rogan himself has various political views, but his shows are mostly the guests talking about their views. So his ratings are guest dependent, making it both ballast, balanced bias and varying in reliability. So basically they're saying there's a ton of misleading claims and it and it's all over the show, but it's all over the place in terms of its partisanship because his guests are all over the place.

That kind of makes sense actually.

And I have a feeling they're looking at his whole back catalog, not just how his show is now because his political bent has changed a lot. But yeah, ours hasn't. Has it? I mean, I don't know. Were you guys would you say that we skew more left now than, you know, 15 years ago when the show started simply because the goalposts have moved in our in our like actual political discourse, like in the country?

223.68 240.40 S: It's hard. Obviously, it's hard for us to say that, you know, first of all, probably little, you know, I would say probably a little only because the center of gravity on the right has moved so far to the right that even if you're standing still, you're going to be holding shift left. You know what I mean?

240.40 244.50 E: As a result of the earth moves below your feet. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting

244.50 255.64 S: is just politically speaking, four of the five people on this show, and you can probably guess who that is, are 20 years ago would have described ourselves as right of center.

255.64 264.72 S: Interesting. And now we're basically left of center. And again, I think it's mainly because the right has moved so far to the right. Yeah, because you can't even define

264.72 275.64 J: moderate anywhere near the same way you could 15 years ago. I mean, Biden is actually a moderate if anything, you know, like 20 years ago, he what his politics are today would

275.64 286.80 C: have would have been moderate politics. And also, like all of this is within the context of the American lens. Because if you plucked any of this up and put it in other countries,

286.80 292.48 S: they would have wildly different rate. Center, center politics in America is right politics in Europe.

292.48 310.36 J: But I think the more important lens to look at a critical thinker or a skeptic would be that we are following whatever, whatever the evidence says, whatever the science of it says, that's where we're at. Right.

310.36 333.08 S: So yeah, we are we try to be nonpartisan as much as we can be. It's hard. It's really hard. It's very hard. But that's our goal. And we do our best. And, you know, we're pretty close to the middle. There's why I think that that's, you know, assuming this is a reasonable assessment, we struck pretty close to our goal. And we yeah, we we are overtly about analysis. That's what we do. Right. Which is why we're not

333.08 338.76 C: at the tippy tippy top, because the tippy top of the of the curve is straight fact reporting.

338.76 343.04 E: This is we're not we don't do that. We do critical thinking, critical thinking. It's inherently analysis.

343.04 353.36 B: Yeah, true. But but we do a lot of straight science reporting, though, where there's not, you know, necessarily a tremendous amount of like analysis.

353.36 363.16 E: And where are the where the science podcasts, though, on this on this grouping? Are we it? We might be the only because I'm looking at it. Let's see anyone else that they brought in for science on this.

363.16 386.70 C: A lot of these are actually political podcasts. Yeah. Which is kind of interesting. I don't know why. I guess that a bias. Well, no, I think it's probably because we are a science podcast, but we are covering science news very often. Yeah. So as opposed to just saying this is interesting science, it's like, right. You know, Reuters just reported that

386.70 394.80 E: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they could have put a race care. But they could have put 100 science podcasts in here. They chose us. I think it's probably just a function

394.80 421.44 C: of listenership, really. I think it's like this is an influence probably more than like some. I don't know. It would be it would be interesting to ask them, what were your parameters for inclusion? If I had to guess, it would be based on listenership. I'm happy to be here. And I think they pegged us pretty correctly. I agree. But I would like as Bob mentioned earlier, like, how do we climb even higher? I mean, but the truth is, climbing higher would mean just like straight reporting. Yeah. With no analysis. And that's not what we do.

421.44 430.76 S: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because we're doing more than, you know, giving our own analysis of science news. We are teaching how to think about it and how to think critically and putting

430.76 451.96 C: it into a skeptical context, you know. And it makes sense that we're higher up than the middle because the middle is sort of like or just below the middle or is that the actual middle is opinion. And that isn't what we do. Sometimes we offer our opinions, our informed opinions, but we are not an op-ed show. Exactly. Yeah. And our format is unique.

So that's true, too.

What's the Word? (7:33)

• Soundscape ecology: Geophony, Biophony, and Anthropophony

451.96 456.16 S: Yeah. All right. Well, Cara, you're going to start us off this week with a What's

456.16 492.20 C: the Word? Yeah. OK, so earlier today, I podcasted with a fascinating woman named Dr. Karen Bakker. And we were talking about she has a new book called The Sounds of Life, which is all about bioacoustics research. And as we were talking, this will be like out and actually will have already come out by the time this airs on Talk Nerdy. But as we were talking, she was using a bunch of terms that I had never heard before. And we dove deep into them and I was like, these would be perfect for What's the Word? So here they are. The first time or the first term that she used was geophony. Have you guys heard that word before? Geophony.

492.20 498.84 S: It's not geophony. Spelled the same way. But I had literally never heard this word before.

498.84 515.12 C: Yeah, I haven't heard it. It's novel to you guys, too, right? Yeah. And then related, biophony. And this one I'm having to guess because she didn't use it. But as I started to dig, I noticed that it was also related to the other two. Anthropophony or anthropophony.

515.12 523.16 C: I'm not sure like how you would and anthropophony. So geophony, biophony and the anthropophony.

523.16 550.84 C: If we were to guess the roots are pretty straightforward, right? The etymology of geophony would be you could break it up into geo and phony. When you hear geo you think earth earth. And when you when you think phony, baloney. Sound. Yeah. Same thing when we think of biophony bio life. Life. Right. And phony and then anthropophony or anthropophony. Anthro, human.

550.84 557.40 C: Human. Right. So what this is, it's part of a larger field called bio acoustics. Oh, yes.

557.40 566.76 C: Where they actually record the sounds of either the earth or all of the organisms on the earth.

566.76 665.32 C: Sometimes this is referred to as acoustic ecology, a soundscape ecology. And they can actually using different like AIs and different technological approaches, get a handle on the basically the health, the ecological health of a certain biome or of a certain area. And so you may be able to notice species die out, deforestation, habitat loss, things like that, because the soundscape of that region changes or it has holes in it. It's a fascinating field and we dug super, super deep into it in in this episode. But that's basically what these words are. The geophony is the sounds that are produced by a certain geographic or geological area. So like, like the seismic sounds that and when I say sounds, I think it's really important to, to note that we tend to think through our human lenses. So the concept of sound to us means things we can hear, but that's not what sound is. Sound is just the compression of waves, right? We have tools that can detect sounds that we can't physically detect. And there are a lot of organisms out there that can perceive sounds that we cannot perceive. So we actually have tools to be able to measure the quote sound of plates, tectonic plates, the sound of rocks, the sound of streams, the sound of things that are not alive. And then of course, there are the sounds of things that are alive plants, animals, microorganisms, and there is a collective sound that these things put off and it's absolutely fascinating. And we can use it to study ecology that way.

665.32 666.88 B: Cool. What about heliophony?

666.88 669.12 B: Heliophony? Would that be the sun?

669.12 670.12 C: Sound of the sun?

670.12 671.64 C: Yeah. I mean, can we measure that though?

671.64 672.64 C: Oh, yeah.

672.64 673.64 C: I don't know.

673.64 674.64 B: Absolutely.

674.64 675.64 B: Really?

675.64 678.08 B: Yeah, the reverberations within the sun, you can turn it into sound.

678.08 684.48 C: You can turn it into sound, but is it an actual sound wave that we're detecting? I don't think so. I think we're transducing it into...

684.48 685.48 C: Right.

685.48 690.96 C: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So that wouldn't be heliophony. We're actually talking about physical sound waves that we can measure.

690.96 694.40 S: But they do call it sun seismology, I think.

694.40 695.40 S: That would be something.

695.40 702.00 S: We talked about that before because they were able to do that to see the other side of the sun, see the side of the sun away from the earth.

702.00 712.20 B: Yeah, but what about the disturbances though that could be made in space gas? Like there's gas in space and then the compressions and rarefactions that are...

712.20 715.84 C: Well, yeah, like gravitational waves even, for example. We've converted that.

715.84 717.98 C: Right. I mean, that's kind of a sound.

717.98 734.44 C: It's kind of like a sound, but it's like on this cosmic scale. But I don't think... It is a gravitational wave. It's not a sound wave. We can transduce it into sound so that we can better make sense of it. But I do think that's a transduction. I think the wave itself is technically a gravitational wave.

734.44 749.12 C: But that's also a fun... I love diving into these construct taxonomy debates. And Bob, I think you're on to something. What's the difference between... At what point does something become sound? How small does the wave need to be?

749.12 756.92 B: Right. Or the process that creates the compressions and rarefactions within the medium, the media.

756.92 777.56 C: Yeah. It's an interesting scientific but also kind of philosophical question. Anyway, I was really enamored with this conversation and I learned a lot. It was just a field I'd never been exposed to really. And when she just said it so fast, she was like, well, and the geophony of whatever. And I was like, what?

777.56 779.12 C: Slow down. Did I hear you right?

779.12 811.36 C: So good. And so, anthropophony, that one's really hard for me to say, obviously would be the collective sounds that are created by people. And this whole discipline is only like a decade or two old. But there's just been a lot of really interesting research on how these basically human induced sounds, like the background hum of our machines, of our existence affects nature.

811.36 812.36 C: Yeah.

812.36 816.68 C: Like there's a lot of downstream effects of that that we just take for granted.

816.68 825.44 S: I know, yeah, the issue of the sound of boats interfering with whale song, whale navigation

825.44 885.16 C: is huge. Yeah, they're like those super obvious examples where we can be like, okay, the motor of the boat and then it travels through the water. And then of course, it's like screwing with like echolocation or screwing with whatever like sonar. But then we don't think about the fact that there's just this low level. And again, we can't always perceive these because sometimes they're above or below the frequencies that we can hear. But this low level background noise pollution, just like in the world, because humans are literally everywhere. And how does that affect all of the different organisms that actually utilize sound and almost every organisms, this I didn't know either, almost every organism utilizes sound waves in a similar way to how they do like chemo sensation. Like sound waves are a tool for so many organisms, whether they physically hear them the way we do, like with a cochlea in our ear, or whether they have hair cells on the outside of their bodies, they can, they can perceive sound waves and it affects them.

885.16 896.96 S: Yeah, hearing is different than detecting sound waves. That involves processing it into a sensory phenomenon. Right, right. All right. Thanks, Cara.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

(laughs) (laughter) (applause) [inaudible]

Artemis I Launch (14:55)

• Artemis I mission shares spectacular view of Earth after a historic launch

B: ... Scotty

E: (grunts, à la Tim "the Tool Man" Taylor)

Skin-Like Electronics (27:46)

• Skin-like electronics could monitor your health continuously

Homoploid Sympatric Speciation (41:14)

• New Method of Speciation

Lab Grown Blood (51:04)

• In world-first trial, lab-grown blood was just injected into two people

Water Meteorite (59:19)

• Winchcombe meteorite bolsters Earth water theory

Who's That Noisy? (1:07:55)

Answer to Noisy from Episode 501:

answer to 501's WTN from 2015

Answer to Noisy from Episode 999:

answer to another show's WTN from 2015

Answer to Noisy from Episode 999:

answer to another show's WTN from 2015

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Science or Fiction (1:19:56)

Theme: Turkeys Item #1: An adult wild turkey has between 5,000 and 6,000 feathers. Item #2: Only male turkeys gobble. Females can yelp, cluck, and purr, but they are unable to gobble. Item #3: The last common ancestor of chickens and turkeys lived 40 million years ago.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Only male turkeys gobble
Science	5,000-6,000 feathers
Science	Chicken turkey ancestor

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Evan	Only male turkeys gobble
Jay	Chicken turkey ancestor
Bob	Chicken turkey ancestor
Cara	Chicken turkey ancestor

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

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:30:56)

Science and art sometimes can touch one another, like two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which is our human life, and that contact may be made across the borderline between the two respective domains.
– M. C. Escher (1898-1972), Dutch graphic artist

Signoff

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

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

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Today I Learned

• Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference
• Fact/Description
• Fact/Description

References

Vocabulary