SGU Episode 55

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. This is your host, Steven Novella, president of the New England Skeptical Society. Today is Wednesday, Aug 9^{th, 2006. Joining me tonight, the skeptical rogues: Bob Novella...}

B: Happy 25^th birthday, PC!

S: Rebecca Watson...

R: Hello!

S: Evan Bernstein...

E: Hi everybody!

S: and Jay Novella...

J: Quite well this evening, top drawer!

R: What was that?

S: Bob, what was that geek reference you just gave us?

B: Today, well, the 12^th is the 25th anniversary of the modern personal computer released by IBM in '81.

James Randi's Birthday (00:50)

S: Well speaking of birthdays...

R: Ha!

S: August 7^th was the birthday of James Randi!

B: Hey!

R: Hey, happy birthday, Randi!

J: Happy birthday!

E: Happy birthday Mr. Randi!

S: Big happy birthday from all of us to James "The Amazing" Randi! (Even though he does not go by "The Amazing" anymore.) He has turned 78. 78 and still, still investigating...

J: Still kickin' hard!

S: Still kickin.

R: That's right.

S: Still promoting skepticism far and wide.

J: And Still doing it better than anybody else on the planet.

E: Good man.

S: He is. He is.

The Archimedes Palimpsest (01:20)

S: Now, Rebecca, you blogged this week about "The Archimedes Palimpsest". I have to say by the way: I love that word "palimpsest", I use it whenever I get a chance.

R: It's a good word, and usually you don't, you don't get a lot of chances to use it, so....

S: I know, when do you get a chance to say it? But what..

R: So you should work that in as much as humanly possibly during this ahh..

J: I admit that I have no idea what that word means.

R: Well, let me tell you. Laughs. Ahh, It is actually, It is a word that describes a process that monks used to do to old books, basically. They would take goat skins or... or whatever and scrape off the top layer of writing, cut the sheets in half, and turn them 90 degrees and bind them together again and write over top of them. And that way they could, they could reuse and recycle. See, they were very environmentally conscious. They ah...

E: Yeah, that's why they did it...

R: Yeah.

J: Monks did a lot of cool things to books. They also illuminated books, which, I didn't know what it was. I thought it was something else and then someone finally told me what it meant, and it's.. It's pretty cool... pretty cool thing. But, I thought illuminating a book meant that they kinda just added in artwork and stuff, but they actually... What does it actually mean? It means that they put in actual um...

S: It's those really fancy letters at the beginning of sentences.

J: Yeah.

R: Yeah.

S: And the word, the palimpsest, refers to any writing that is done over older writing. So sort of obscuring or wiping away the previous or older writing.

R: Right. And, so the Archimedes palimpsest, it came about when um, Archimedes wrote some... some stuff, obviously, and .... laughs I'm getting really technical so stay with me..

E: Mm hm.

R: The original scrolls of ah, papyrus that he used had been lost, but people over time copied them down, and handed them down, recopied them. Eventually someone ah, hand wrote a copy onto some goat skin ah, parchment, and assembled it into a book around, ah, I think about 1000 AD. And around 1200 AD, a Christian monk, basically turned it into the palimpsest. He hand wrote prayers over top of the Archimedes text. And therefore turning what was basically a science textbook into a religious textbook. Um so...

E: Hmm.

R: It doesn't get much better than that. That prayer book was then used for religious study for upwards of like 6 centuries. It managed to survive, possibly because it was turned into a prayer book. Um, that may have been, that may have saved it from burning over the years. And it wasn't until 1906, I believe, that the manuscript was discovered in a library, in a church library in Istanbul. A ah, researcher found it and recognized the faint lettering as that of Archimedes. And so he studied it, but he didn't really have a lot to work with, so I mean.. I don't think he really had more than a magnifying glass. And um, so eventually, he did what he could, but eventually the book was lost for another couple of decades. Um, at some point, someone took the book and added pictures to it and gold leaf portraits in order to hopefully improve the value they, they created this forgery, not, probably not even realizing the true worth of the book, ah, which was that Archimedes' text was hidden underneath. And, around the 1930's, a French collector of antiques found it again, bought it, kept it in his home for 7 decades. Eventually in the '90's, um in '91, I think, it showed up at a Christie's auction in Paris. And it ended up auctioning off for something like $2,000,000 to an anonymous person, who picked it up and donated it to a museum. The Walter's art museum in Baltimore Maryland, where finally, real researchers with real equipment have had a chance to examine it. So they have been doing that since 1998, and only very recently was it discovered that they could use um, certain ah, imaging techniques to scan the book, and make Archimedes' text actually glow, ah, so that it would show over top of the uh, monk's writings. And so that they can now finally begin to study it in full. It's an incredible journey that this book has undergone from, um, you're talking about 200 BC, up until last Friday, when they finally got a chance to, to see it in full.

S: Yeah, it's amazing.

B: Have they... Have they revealed what he wrote?

R: I don't think that that's been published yet. I think that they're...

S: Yeah, They're still, they're still working on it. I think it'll take a while to put it together and translate it... Just for some background Archimedes of Syracuse was a Greek mathematician, credited with revolutionizing geometry and even anticipating Calculus.

R: You may remember him from screaming "Eureka!"...

B: "Eureka!"

R: .... in the bathtub when he figured out buoyancy.

S: Right.

B: Now you know, maybe we would have known about this a long time ago if that monk from 600 years ago had just put a little post-it note inside that said "Hey, Archimedes wrote this underneath the religious text!"

R: Well, that's just it. That's.. that's the... It's kind of ironic, in that: If it had just remained as Archimedes' text, there is a very good chance that it would have been destroyed. We'll never know how many have been lost over the years, either through that or through burning, just being destroyed. But to have this one incredible treasure, that has gone through such an outrageous journey, to finally get here.

S: Well, we have Steve Salerno coming up on our show in just a little while. We interviewed him just about a year ago. He's coming back to give us an update on the self help movement, but before that let's do a few emails.

Email (07:45)

Email #1 (07:45)

S: First email comes from "Matt Bristol", uh, who gives his location just as "The USA".

E: Yeah!

S: And Matt writes...

E: Hah... Sorry...

S: "Is it possible to logically prove that if a statement about the existence of something is non-falsifiable, then the existence of such a thing is also not physically possible?" He asks a second question: "Another item: Science hasn't established a strong basis for every single action of every single person in the universe in every single moment. We all have to act before having a complete chain of reasoning based on perfect premises. This tragic in the case of politicians. Obviously, it is best to have as much reasoning as possible prior to acting. Do any of The Skeptics' Guide hosts think that they have an ultimate rational basis for any of their beliefs or actions? If so, I'd love to hear it." Well, let's get to the first question. The simple answer to the question "If something is non-falsifiable, does that mean that it is also impossible?" is basically what he is asking. And the short answer to that is "No". There are plenty of things which are, which are possible, there is nothing that makes them impossible, but it's simply ah, not amenable to testing. There is no way for us to know it.

J: Like the Big Bang, right?

S: Ah, well that, no, I would not include the Big Bang. The Big Bang...

B: Indirectly...

S: Yeah, you can infer the existence of the Big Bang, and inference is a perfectly legitimate method of science. One of my favorite examples, I think Carl Sagan came up with this example, is that perhaps every elementary particle in our universe is in and of itself a miniature universe, and perhaps our entire universe is simply an elementary particle in a far far grander universe. There is nothing that makes that impossible. That could be true. We'll simply will never know, because there is no way for us to possibly know that. And the number of such possibilities are limitless. So, the short answer to that question is "No". Regarding the second question: "Do we basically have an rational ultimate basis for any of our beliefs and actions?" I would have... I would say that the short answer to that one is "Yes", although there is a lot of complexity there. I mean so, it seems that the unstated major premise of the question is that unless you have a quote-unquote "strong basis for every single action of every single person in the universe at every single moment" that short of that infinite perfect knowledge, there is no reason, or there is no rational basis for any beliefs or actions. And I think that that is a false premise. You can base your knowledge on the evidence that is available. Ultimately everything is based upon certain assumptions but those assumptions can be reasonable. And you can acknowledge what the imitations and the assumptions are in your knowledge. I mean, that's how science works. Science does not deal with absolute metaphysical certitude. It's just the best approximation of the truth that we have so far using methods that are internally valid and are tested systematically against reality. So that it hopefully has some relationship to reality. And I think it's reasonable to call that "rational" even though it is not omniscient.

R: Well, I was a little confused by the question because of my first thought was, you know.. He's asking if I can name any action that I know I have a rational... rational reason for doing. And yeah! I mean, I have to pee so I go into the bathroom and I use the toilet.

S: Right haha.

E: Hot!

R: What's not rational about that?

J: Thank god!

R: Or I'm hungry so I have some chips. I don't, I don't understand... "any action"? I mean, of course you can have a rational basis for an action.

S: Yeah, and I don't know what he means by "ultimate basis". It's like, is he gonna question the very reality of hunger, of the need to pee, of...

R: Right..

S: ... really obvious simple mundane realities, you know I...

R: I mean if you want to be a ... get all s-, you know, solip-sist-ic... wow. Is that a word?

S: Solipsistic.

R: Can I say that? Yeah, there ya go...

S: I don't know, can you?

R: Hahaha!

J: How ya doin' there, boosey?

R: If you wanna do that, then, then, yeah you've got problems, but otherwise...

E: Is he suggesting that there might not be objective reality?

S: Perhaps.

J: I... I read that... This guy's... I read Matt's emails. I couldn't understand a word he was sayin'.

R: Well, you're not very bright though...

J: I couldn't understa- My brain does not go that deep. I can't go that far with it..

S: It sounds a little, It sounds a little postmodernist. You know, I am not sure that's where he is going, but the whole.. One of the points of postmodernism is this notion that: If you keep asking "well, what's the premise of a claim or of a belief, or of a piece of evidence?", and you keep going back, and back, and back, that everything that we believe in science ultimately just leads back to assumptions or first principals, and there is no ultimate objectivity to anything. Which, you know, has a certain truth to it, but then they conclude from that: therefore science has no special relationship to reality, or no validity. That it's really all just ultimately a subjective choice that people make. And that conclusion, I think, is false. I think it's obviously false. Again, if you use very very mundane examples: I can't prove the objective reality of the seat that I am sitting on, without referring ultimately to some assumption. But it is certainly reasonable and rational to behave as if the chair is real. Any any ultimate hypothesis or any ultimate view of the universe that does not include this chair being real are not falsifiable, and are therefore are really of no value.

Email #2 (13:53)

S: Let's move on to question number two. This one comes from "Mike Spalding". Also from the the United States. Mike writes: "During several shows you've discussed the need to regulate supplements. The problem seems to be that people use these in response to exaggerated claims by the manufacturers. But people often choose to buy items based on hype. That is their choice. People also do research, talk to their doctor, listen to skeptics when making a buying decision. Note the popularity of reviews, consumer's reports etc.. This is also their choice. The problem with regulation is not just that you restrict choice to the 'right choices', but that you actually kill lots more people. Not being able to use a drug that can save your life is the worst side effect of regulation." And then he says "for documentation".. he references an article which again of course will be ... on this email on the notes page. In that article is the claim... And this is why I wanted to come back to this issue, because he is now making some specific claims: that regulation... FDA regulation... Again, the Food and Drug Administration regulation of drugs in this country delays the entry into the market of newer drugs, and that people die who basically could have been saved by the earlier introduction of those drugs. So if a drug is delayed by 5 years, and that drug saves 10,000 people a year, the FDA killed 50,000 people.

R: Mmm..

S: ...is the express claim of that article. The flaw in that argument is that it's not counting all the people who die by drugs that are not safe getting to the market prematurely. So, if it takes 5 years after marketing or 10 years after marketing to figure out that a drug actually was killing people, and the review process would have prevented that drug from hitting the market, then that's lives saved. They're taking an equation but they are only counting one of the numbers. They are only counting the lives lost based upon the delay of entry of drugs to the market, but they are not counting the lives lost by the failure to prevent unsafe drugs form hitting the market. So it is completely invalid to make that argument. The other thing that we didn't talk about before that this article specifically states: They say why we don't need the FDA. And every one of the reasons is invalid in my opinion. Though I want to focus on one. They basically say that .... Consumer reports, and essentially independent consumer protection organizations and professional organizations could test the drugs to see that they are safe and effective, and that they would do a better job than the FDA does. And there are a couple of really good reasons to think that that is completely false. I think that that is basically a libertarian wishful thinking. Without really any basis in reality. And again, I have nothing against libertarianism as a philosophy, or politically, just I think it is starting with a position and making any claim that supports it, even if it makes no rational sense. So the problem with that is that, you know, research costs, even conservatively: tens of millions of dollars. To consumer reports, and independent organizations just simply do not have the resources to do that kind of research. And also it -- research requires the cooperation of multiple academic institutions and researchers. Again, it is not the kind of the thing that you know, a magazine is going to be able to do. It's not like testing toasters. You know..

R: Hmm..

S: ...or even cars. It's very complicated to do clinical research and there has to be some standardized... some standardization in terms of record keeping and procedures etc.. So, unfortunately, I don't think that anything other than a system such as the FDA would make that happen.

R: And Steve, I also really quick just wanted to address one other point that I saw on that site, which was that, they said that all the testing that the FDA makes the pharmaceutical companies go through ends up causing them to spend a lot of money which is making them jack up their prices making it too expensive for consumers. Which I am pretty sure is just false. Like, for instance, I looked up a few numbers and in 2004, pharmaceutical manufacturers spent about $800,000,000 on drug safety monitoring. Which is about 0.3% of sales...

S: Mmm hmm

R: ...to gain FDA approval. Point three percent. Compared to, in the same year they spent 15.6% of sales on research and development of new drugs, and they spend about 30% of sales just on promotion and marketing.

S: Right.

R: So I mean, we are talking a difference of billions of dollars. It's really a drop in the bucket for drug safety monitoring.

S: Right, but it is a lot of money. It is billions of dollars. The other thing is that the government... And other people have made this point: Why doesn't the FDA do the testing? Well that's not the kind of organization they are. But the... essentially you're gonna shift billions, tens of billions, or maybe even hundreds of billions of dollars worth of research onto someone else away from the drug company. The drug companies can afford it, because they are making a lot of money off of their drugs.

R: It's actually $800,000,000. Just to correct you. It's not billions on drug safety monitoring.

S: Yeah, but on research and development...

R: Oh, on research and development, yeah...

S: which is more what the point of the article was: that they need to be spending this money on research and development, not on jumping through the FDA's hoops. But, you know, a lot of research and development is doing the clinical trials to know what's save and what works. That's an important part of the whole process. Essentially you're gonna be shifting the cost of all that into a government bureaucracy, which is... You know, I'd rather have the free market do it, spend the money, invest the money and then make it back in sales. Obviously, there is a lot of controversy about the behavior of the pharmaceutical industry, but the bottom line is they're spending the money on research, and that system, I think, is better than having the government do it.

R: Although, don't the National Institutes of Health...

S: No..

R: ...aren't they government based?

S: Yes, they are, but they specifically do not fund drug studies. Because their policy is that it is the drug company's job to do that, so they will not do it. And there were a couple of points in this article that I actually agreed with. One was that the FDA gags companies from making claims about drugs that.. for which there is copious scientific evidence, but which hasn't been specifically FDA approved. And the example they gave was that of Aspirin preventing heart attacks and strokes. And you know what? Other people have leveled that criticism and I agree with that. I think that the FDA needs to loosen up the regulations, and I do think that what they probably should do is institute some kind of review process where they review -- they have experts review existing evidence and say "OK, It's alright now for the company to say that Aspirin prevents heart attacks." Everybody knows it. I mean it's been proven. It's very clearly established. They just haven't done it through an FDA, you know, application. They haven't gone through the specific regulatory steps that the FDA requires. And there's lots of other examples about drugs that can prevent certain kinds of cancer that basically are very -- have a very positive effect on promoting public health. I think that, you know, these gag restrictions have to be.. There has to be a process to lift them, and for the FDA to review this evidence. I think that is a legitimate criticism. And that's where I think the regulations are too strict.

Email #3 (21:27)

S: One more email this week. This one comes from "Nigel Whitehall" from Pennsylvania. And Nigel writes: "I have been avidly listening to your podcast for the past few months and it makes my time on the gym treadmill fly fast .. or fly past. I am curious if there has been anything that occurred in the past 30 to 40 years that a skeptic circa 1966 would have found hard to believe but has turned out to be fact or at least generally accepted as scientifically true." This is a question that I have actually thought about before. Specifically, "How are we doing?" You know, skeptics, we put our nickle down quite a bit. We say that something is likely to be true or likely not to be true based upon the preponderance of the evidence. And if you just look back historically at stands that skeptics have taken over the years, our critics would have you believe that we are standing in the way of progress, and poo-pooing ideas that later turn out to be true. But in fact, when you look back historically over organized skepticism, we pretty much have a nearly 100% hit rate. I mean, we are almost always right about the big issues. Now, I will -- for fairness, I'll say that that's partly because we are shooting fish in a barrel. Because a lot of the things that we attack are absurd. It's an easy call. We're often not taking close calls on legitimate scientific controversies, where it's more of a 50/50 deal. We're criticizing things that are -- it's an easy call to say that it's not true. I did put together a quick list of .. I wanted to find some pseudosciences that were around in 1966. One of the sources that I used was Martin Gardener's wonderful book "Fads and Fallacies". This was written in 1957, so it is a little bit before '66. Obviously, the issues that he dealt with in that book, one of the first books of the truly skeptical books, would be -- Obviously those were issues at that time. One thing that was interesting is how little the list has changed! That a lot of the things that he wrote about are issues that we're dealing with today. Here is a quick list of some from that book and others that were clearly around at that time: Homeopathy, Chiropractic, UFOs, alien abductions, ESP, Atlantis, the Bermuda triangle, pyramidology, the hollow earth, Velikovsky, Dynetics, perpetual motion machines, and Lysenkoism. Just a quick list. That same list is around today!

E: Oh yeah.

S: This is this... Maybe not Lysenkoism, but pretty much everything else.

R: Wait... is that turning into a wolf man?

E: Yes.

S: Was the Russian Geneticist who used ideas of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. That was his -- that's how he thought evolution worked. And...

R: Ah. Nothing to do with werewolves then.

S: Nah. That became the standard science of the Soviet Union. So ya know it was sort of was politics deciding what science was legitimate.

R: Ah.

S: So, none of the things that Gardener wrote about really 50, 40 so years, almost 50 years ago have gone away. These things are all still around. And in the last 50 years, none of these paranormal or fringe topics have gathered enough evidence to convince the scientific community that they're legitimate. You know, it's 50 years later and ESP is still bunk. There still are no museums with artifacts of Atlantis in it. Ah, no one has been able to show that pyramids have special power. Ah, you know, homeopathy still has not been proven legitimate scientifically.

J: (crying) That's not true!

B: Sorry Steve.

S: And this is, I think it was the 60's right? When the Hill case started the alien abduction phenomenon?

E: Betty Hill? Betty and Barney?

S: Betty and Barney Hill?

E: Yeah.

S: Yeah.

E: Yep, we also had the, ah ah the Pa -- what was it? The Patterson film was in the 60's.

S: Right the Bigfoot.

E: Bigfoot Bigfoot.

S: Add Bigfoot to the list.

E: Well, there was Ye -- You know, sure there was Yeti, and other you know, forms of Bigfoot.

S: The Loch Ness Monster goes back to the beginning ...

E: Yeah.

S: ...of the century. The 20th century. So...

R: I'd like to participate in this but I can't really remember back that far, 'cause ah... wasn't born... yet...

E: Yeeeah...

R: Sorry.

E: Okay.

S: Well, It's a little bit before our time too, although...

E: No excuse!

R: Oh, okay... sure...

S: But I would like to do is challenge our listeners to come up with something.. some claim or topic that skeptics were skeptical of in the 1960's that was later proven to be legitimate. And I'm not talking about the generic scientific skepticism that all new ideas garner. Um, like yeah sure plate tectonics was met with skepticism until it was proven, but only, you know, the normal standard type of skepticism that all new scientific ideas garner. I'm talking about you know, hard and fast skepticism where the idea was ridiculed as either paranormal or ridiculous or pseudo-scientific. So far I have yet to see any topic that started out in that category and then later became a legitimate science. But, if anyone out there can think of any one, any, any such topic, email it in, and we'll be happy to talk about it.

Interview with Steve Salerno (26:46)

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

Interview music

S: Joining us now is Steve Salerno. Steve, welcome back to the Skeptics' Guide!

SS: Thanks for having me back.

S: Steve is the author of "Sham: How the Self Help Movement Made America Helpless". He also writes a "Sham" blog and has written numerous articles for prominent magazines like the National Review. We'll have some links on our notes page, of course. This is Steve's second appearance on The Skeptic's Guide. You were actually on episode number 8, almost one year ago. So welcome back.