SGU Episode 84
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| SGU Episode 84 |
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| February 28th 2007 |
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| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
R: Rebecca Watson |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
P: Perry DeAngelis |
| Quote of the Week |
'If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.' |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| Forum Discussion |
Introduction
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, February 28th, 2007, 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 everyone.
S: Perry DeAngelis...
P: Right.
S: Jay Novella...
J: Hey guys.
S: ...and Evan Bernstein.
E: Howdy doo.
S: How is everyone this evening?
J: Good Steve.
P: Very good.
E: Just fine.
J: And how are you doctor?
S: I'm doing quite well, thank you. So we have a few news items this week, actually the biggest I think skeptical item in the news in the last few days is the James Cameron's announcement that-
P: Found Jesus' tomb.
S: -found the tomb of Jesus.
E: In the the Titanic.
S: We are going to be talking about that a little bit later in the show with our skeptical archaeologist, Ken Fader, so we'll get to that news item then.
P: I just heard a priest on TV say, not five minutes ago, I don't think this is a case of faith versus science, I think it's a case of faith versus bad science.
R: That's a good one.
P: Preacher, Catholic priest.
News Items
Update on Scientific Literacy in the US (1:18)
- Updated data presented at the AAAS: presszoom.com/story_124527.html
Advances in science education: researchnews.osu.edu/archive/goodclas.htm
S: Another item in the news that caught my attention this week, this is actually sent to me I think by a couple of listeners, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science who are having their, I guess their annual meeting in San Francisco. One of the presentations was regarding scientific literacy in the United States and comparing that to the rest of the world. And basically there's like good news and bad news. The good news is scientific literacy has increased in the United States from the late 1980s up from about 10% to about 25%. The bad news is...
R: We're all going to die in an Armageddon.
S: Scientific literacy is at 25%, which is still quite low. This is a study done by John Miller. His academic position is in regard to studying the public understanding of science, which is very interesting. And the threshold, one of the questions that always comes up when I see these studies is, what was their threshold for science, what does it mean to be scientifically literate? Because you could make the number be whatever you want, depending on where you set the threshold. What his threshold was somebody who could read a science story in a newspaper like the New York Times and understand it and basically follow it. It's still sort of a pseudo-quantitative. Basically enough information that you could follow a basic science news story in the lay press.
B: Also, Steve, he also said that to be classified as scientifically literate, Miller said that one must be able to understand approximately 20 of 31 scientific concepts and terms, similar like you said, found in New York Times and stuff like that. What I'd like to know is, well, I'd like to see that list of 31 scientific concepts just to get a handle on how difficult they are, and I'd like to take that test just to see where we rate.
S: Yeah, unfortunately, this was a presentation at a meeting, so there's nothing in print yet, but I'm sure we'll see that, and I agree with you. I definitely would like to see that. We've done the same thing ourselves. We've run these kind of scientific literacy tests of science school teachers, et cetera, but kind of things like it takes a year for the earth to go around the sun, really basic things. An atom or an electron is smaller than a molecule, very, very basic concepts in science. Miller has some good quotes in the article. He says, over recent decades, the number of public policy controversies that require some scientific or technical knowledge for effective participation has been increasing. And I agree, of course, this is why we do what we do, again, our primary mission as a group, not only for this podcast, but the New England Skeptical Society is a nonprofit educational organization, and our actual mission is to improve the public understanding of science. And it is absolutely critical and increasingly important because, especially in democracies where people actually make decisions about things, not only in the public arena, but also in the personal arena, medicine is becoming very complicated, and even just buying technology and supplements and et cetera. There's a lot of scientific decisions that people have to make for themselves personally and also for society in general, and that's just getting increasing and increasing. And if we don't make a huge effort, I think, to improve the public understanding of science, we're going to run into some serious social problems, and I think we already are.
P: And on top of that, you simply need the basic critical tools to filter out the BS.
S: Right. Yeah, it's actually...
P: On top of that.
S: And that brings up a good point, Perry. It's not just that science is getting more complicated. Its relevance in our lives is increasing. It's also that in the multimedia internet world, there's a lot of pseudoscience out there, and people need to separate out not only no science, they need to actually filter out the crap, filter out the pseudoscience, and of course, that's where we come in.
P: That's for sure.
J: Very happily.
S: A related story, also dealing with scientific literature, which I think is some very good news, this is a story comes from Columbus, Ohio. This is a professor of evolution ecology and organismal biology, Steve Rising, at Ohio State University, is using some new methods to teach science in his classroom. And this is excellent because it actually goes along with things that we've actually commented on before. He says instead of teaching cookbook style, teaching facts, or having kids follow practicums or lab exercises where they know what the result is going to be at the end, or they're just sort of going through the steps, he's recommending and implementing some open-ended, more real-life experiments where the students don't know what the outcome is going to be, and they sort of have the opportunity to take the experiment in some open-ended directions. And what he's finding is that this has significantly increased scientific literacy among those students. And that makes absolute sense. So it's not just teaching them facts, it's actually forcing them to think scientifically. How do we test stuff? How would you answer a scientific question? I was glad to see that that method, that sort of knowledge, is penetrating into the classroom. And it does dovetail with what Miller was saying in terms of what explains the increase in scientific literacy from 10% to 25% in the last 20 years or so. And he attributes that to college-level science courses, not happening in the public schools or in grade school and high school, but basically occurring at the college level. And it does seem that there is some good science being taught in college.
P: Why do you think we can't penetrate K through 12?
S: That's I could rant about that for a long time. I think that the education system...
P: Give it the broad strokes.
S: It's basically the education system is broken in a lot of ways. I think the people who are controlling how and what gets taught have some significant holes in their approach. And there isn't enough a connection at that level between actual practicing scientists and what's happening in the classroom. At the college level, you actually might get a practicing scientist teaching a course. It's very different.
E: Well, it's public school versus private school.
S: I don't know. No, I don't think so. I don't think that's what it is at all. I think it's high school and below versus college, again, because you have professors at college. In high school, you don't. And I think there's a disconnect between practicing science and the education infrastructure, the education culture.
E: What about private level private high schools?
S: I don't think that private high schools are really any better than public high schools when it comes to the quality of science that's being taught necessarily. Of course, I think that depends hugely on where you are.
R: Yeah, it definitely depends on the school. I think with private schools, particularly each one is very different.
S: Right. In this country, in the United States, a private school is very likely to be a Christian school and not really teach science very well. I think it might make a worse science education in a private school.
E: Well, what was your experience, Steve?
S: Bob and I both went to, and Jay, for a time, I don't think Jay, you didn't graduate from Canterbury, did you?
J: I went for two and a half years and I decided I needed to have sex with girls, so I left.
E: You were tired of the sausage fest.
S: We went to a Jesuit school, but Jesuit schools are very scholarly.
R: You know, deciding that you want to have sex with girls and actually having sex with girls are two very different concepts.
J: You know, I can rant about that for hours, but we'll get into that later.
P: Some of our premium content. Look for it.
S: Well, let's move on.
P: Please.
Recent Split for Humans and Chimps (8:55)
- sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/227/2
S: There is a chimpanzee update. You can't have enough of these.
P: Yes. Very important.
S: We probably should update it on the latest chimpanzee news. There are a couple of articles that do touch upon topics that we've discussed before that I'd like to get to. One was a recent study indicating that-
P: Is this the one where all the chimpanzees killed all the birds in the zoo?
S: No, no, no, Perry. That was the one that happened in Fantasyland.
R: Go stand in the corner with Jay.
P: It happens every time I play Zoo Tycoon. All right, go ahead.
S: A recent study published in the February issue of PLOS Genetics, that's the Public Library of Science, Genetics, a Danish postdoctoral researcher, Asger Hobalth, of North Carolina State University. They basically compared a lot of DNA, just to cut to it, between humans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans, just to see if they could figure out use some algorithms that have been used in the past and have been validated as a way of seeing from the genetic markers, how long in the past we've split apart. And the date that they come up with for the split between humans and chimps was 4.1 million years, plus or minus 400,000 years. And that's interesting because it's the most recent figure that any study has come up with so far. The more traditional figure is somewhere between five and seven million years. They did mention that this may have to do with what we reported on, actually I think just about a year ago, the evidence that suggests that human ancestors and chimp ancestors can continue to interbreed for a long time, maybe even a couple of million years after they started to split.
P: My first girlfriend is evidence of that.
S: Absolutely. Jay's entire love life is evidence of that. They did refer to that study and say that the reason for the younger date may in fact be due to genes that were shared between chimps and humans more recently, you know. So the split, as we discussed before, may not have been a one event with a clean total split between the two populations, one population that went on to become chimps and the other went on to become humans. They may have somewhat split but still shared genes for a while, and now we're seeing those shared genes in modern humans and modern chimps, and that's what's giving us that young date.
B: Now, Steve, according to the article, it said that the fossils indicate that the split was five and seven million years ago, and that these dates match up nicely with molecular studies. So what basically is happening here then is that they've updated, they've refined the molecular studies. Now they don't match with what the fossils indicate.
S: Yeah, but don't match means the difference between 4.1 and five million years, and the thing about the fossil record is that, for example, when you date a species, how do we know how long a species lived? When did it come into existence? When did it go extinct? Well, the oldest fossil find of that species is when it began, and the most recent fossil specimen of that species is when it went extinct. But those obviously are, they have to be underestimates, right?
B: Right.
S: I mean, it'd be unlikely that we actually found the very first specimen of a species. So there's got to be some error bars on either end of that range. So I think the fossil record, the timing, dating of the fossil record is always going to be a little more fuzzy, I think, than molecular evidence. The molecular dating is based upon the so-called molecular clock, and this is based upon the assumption that even though mutations occur somewhat randomly and at different rates in different genes, that if you average a large number of genes, you can get a fairly reliably average mutation rate. And therefore, if you count up a number of mutations between two species, you could say, how much time must have passed for them to accumulate that number of mutations. How much ticking of the molecular clock. And that's how they're using algorithms, that's how they come up with that time. But there's some assumptions in there as well. I think it's a pretty good ballpark figure. I think it's probably...
P: How do you date a fossil by what strata it's found in?
S: There's a lot of different dating methods, but it almost always has to be found in situ, in place in the soil, and then depending on what kind of soil it is found in, you may be able to date it. Sometimes it's the more rough dating method if you might date it by what fossils it's found with. I know, for example, just to give you one example, in Africa, there's tons of pig species, tons of pig ancestors that were rapidly evolving. So, if you find a few pig species in one strata, in one layer, you could say, yeah, so these pig species were alive in this fairly narrow window of time, and therefore all the other fossils that we find in this layer also come from that time. So sometimes it's dated by association, and sometimes it's dated directly by dating the soil that it's embedded in. But it depends on the location of the find. So you know, I don't know, to me it seems, this doesn't seem like a big deal, the fact that you've got 4.1 plus or minus 0.4 million years, and you know, around five or so million years for the fossil of it, and that's roughly, it's in the same ballpark.
P: Yeah.
Virgin Mary on Pizza Dish (14:18)
- abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=local&id=5063342
(Sent in by listener Howard Lewis)
S: All right, one more news item before we go on to emails, this is a quick one, this is just, I'd like to talk about these things when they crop up, and apparently the Virgin Mary, who's very busy, very busy appearing, making lots of appearances around the world, has made a recent appearance on-
E: The David Letterman Show.
S: -you might think that, but in this case she chose to appear on a pizza pan.
E: Mamma mia!
S: So of course we got the link in the picture on the notes page, but you know, it's the typical...
E: There she is.
J: Yeah, she showed up right next to two meatballs and a sausage, you know what I'm talking about?
S: It's a little stain on a pan, it's basically just a blob with something that could be a head and then something that could be a neckline, you know.
B: And apropos to the name of the school, which is Pew Elementary, this reeks of pareidolia.
R: Well done.
B: I mean, obviously this is a vague image. And you know, if this was real, okay, say the Virgin Mary decides I'm going to make an appearance, this time I'm going to pick a pizza plate, I mean, would it be a vague outline? I mean, wouldn't she decide on something with a little bit of higher resolution than this vague outline that could be anybody in a club type of thing?
P: It's not easy to carve in moots right? You just can't work miracles like the big guy, come on.
S: You can't rationalize miracles, Bob, you just can't do it.
J: This guy that showed up, I guess one of the worshippers showed up, and I love this quote, he said, "This is a sign that something in the world is going to happen. We don't know, but we have to keep our faith very, very strong on her."
S: Talk about open-ended criteria, something is going to happen. Sometime. So all we got to do is wait, wait until something that we could call something happens, and that will validate that prediction.
P: However, an hour later, when the cheese melted and it became Elvis, we ate it.
S: It's not cheese, it's just a little like a little burn stain on the bottom of a pan.
P: Oh, all right. Fine.
S: It's a pizza pan, Perry. It's not in a pizza.
P: Oh, I'm sorry. Does it really matter?
S: My morbid curiosity with this whole phenomenon is, what's the silliest thing that the Virgin Mary makes an appearance on?
J: Toast is pretty bad, Steve.
S: Toast, grilled cheese is one.
R: There's the dog butt one.
S: The dog butt is a good one. Tree trunks are common.
E: Tree trunks.
S: Rust stains. Perry, as we see, you and I went to that Mary sighting on a tree in, what was it? There's a group of people where that's their life. They just go from one Mary sighting to the next. They set up a little tent and they sell stuff or whatever. That's their life, is worshipping Mary sightings around the world.
J: If you look at the pizza pan, it looks like something else, too, and I want everyone to know.
S: You want to be more specific?
J: No, I don't want to say it. I just want to hear. We'll put it on the message board. I want to hear what people think. I know what I'm seeing.
P: You think this is one of those situations where the cook got mad at his wife and smacked her in the face with a pan and left an impression in it, like in the cartoons?
J: Well, if she was like 12 inches tall, maybe.
S: That's tiny. It is tiny.
P: I don't think this is the time to attack short people, Bob. I'm talking about science.
B: Vertically challenged, please. It makes you think, though, how many times in the past you got somebody cleaning a pizza plate or cleaning something and they're squinting and there's some weird image there and they scrub a little harder and they rub it away and bam, there's a whole siding that nobody will ever know about.
S: That's right.
B: I mean, it was terrible. What a waste.
J: You know, but she is appearing in food a lot, and you know what's funny?
P: Yes, she is.
J: It makes sense. It makes sense because food's prepared every day. It's a changing medium. You apply heat to food and there's burn stains and whatever. It does make sense.
S: It's little random splotches that we encounter on a daily basis.
B: They should make pizzas on that plate and sell the pizza for exorbitant sums.
P: That's true.
S: Holy pizza.
B: This pizza was made on the image of Mary.
P: Mary Mozzarella or something.
B: Oh, nice.
P: They should hire a girl to dress her up. Mary Mozzarella.
S: Highest pizza.
J: I'll take the large cheese. Hold the virgin.
B: All right, we're done.
S: Well, let's move on to your email.
E: Yeah, we were done about five minutes ago.
S: That's true.
E: With that one.
S: Not too soon.
Questions and E-mails
Negativity (18:50)
I just sampled a half-dozen of your podcasts.
Seems to me that you guys are doing more damage to your cause than good. Anyone checking out your podcasts, in order to find out more about relinquishing their burden of faith, hears nothing but insults, derision, and negativism.
Michael
San Diego, CA
S: The first one comes from Michael in San Diego, California. So we actually have had a few people have asked us how come all of our emails are always praising us and are we selecting the emails because we're choosing the people who are praising us. And we actually don't, to be honest with you. Most of our email does start out with some praise for the podcast, which we always appreciate it. But again, I think that the people who are bothering to download and listen to our show like it and are probably generally skeptical and like science shows. So if you don't like the show, it's not like you're going to tune it in on the radio randomly. So people who don't like this kind of show are not listening to it. So the bottom line is we really don't get that much negative email. We've had a few negative reviews on iTunes, but we don't really get that much negative email. But we did get one. I thought I would read it just for balance. So Michael writes, "I just sampled a half dozen of your podcasts. It seems to me that you guys are doing more damage to your cause than good. Anyone checking out your podcast in order to find out more about relinquishing their burden of faith hears nothing but insults, derision, and negativism." Now that is patently false.
R: Oh go to hell.
S: That is clearly not true. Because you will also hear a lot of bad jokes, immaturity, and sarcasm.
E: And sexual innuendo.
S: A lot of sarcasm.
J: If something religious comes up in the news, we'll talk about it and joke around. And I know on the heels of the whole Virgin Mary thing that we just did, this is funny, but I don't know. I don't think we focus on religion. And I don't focus on it. I focus on Scientology.
R: It's a little known fact that Jay is actually a fundamentalist Christian.
S: A little known fact.
E: You had me fooled.
S: It's actually I don't want to open up this whole can of worms again, but it actually is our stated position that we are not trying to relinquish anyone's burden of faith. That's actually not the mission of our show. It's to teach critical thinking and science. So that's false. Yeah, we've talked about this before, but we do come back to it every now and then. What is just the tone and editorial sort of policy of the podcast. We try to be positive about what's good about science and how cool certain things are and about the good and positive things about being skeptical and a good critical thinker. But also science itself has a very negative component to it because science isn't just about showing what's true. It's also about winnowing away what isn't true. And we do that as well. And we focus on a lot of the things that are really not true. I mean, the fringe claims are some things that are absurd or just silly. And we think it's appropriate at times to ridicule the ridiculous. So we will do that. We will indulge in a little bit of ridicule when we feel it's appropriate. Although we do try to focus on the claims and not the people. Unless the people are promoting the claim or are charlatans or are victimizing people. So if someone is a con artist or a fraud or they are really victimizing people or they're just a really negative influence in our society or culture, they deserve to be gone after. And we will go after the Sylvia Browns and the John Edwards and the Kevin Trudeaus of the world. We will do that.
P: We will crush them under our heel.
J: You have to really stretch to say that we're trying to dissuade people or help people relinquish their burden of faith to quote Michael. I don't think we're doing that at all.
P: I hope they listen to our podcast to relieve themselves of the burden of credulity.
S: Right.
P: Faith.
S: That's a good point. Let's go on. Email number two.
Vitamins Kill? (22:25)
I'm sure someone will probably already have read this link, or that others have sent it but you all definitely can't pass this one up.
www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,21302215-5006007,00.html
Aparently a Danish group studied 230,000 adults participating in other studies and found an increased risk of death from taking vitamins.
I have a few specific questions for the panel, if they can answer them.
1. Is a meta study of this kind valid for the kind of research that's being done?
2. Can you all (particularly Steven) find any information on the actual methodology and figure out if this was properly conducted?
3. If the study was properly conducted can we actually make any useful statements considering this increased risk was only about 5%? How does this risk increase compare to the error in the study?
I hope this makes for interesting discussion.
Anthony Petruccione
pronounced pe true see ooh knee
Amarillo, Texas
S: This one comes from Anthony Petrucione in Amarillo, Texas. And he writes, "I'm sure someone will probably already have read this link or that others have sent it, but you all definitely can't pass this one up." And he sent us a link. "Apparently a Danish group studied 230,000 adults participating in other studies and found an increased risk of death from taking vitamins. I have a few specific questions for the panel if they can answer them. One is a meta-study, meaning a meta-analysis, of this kind valid for the kind of research that's being done. Two, can you all find any information on the actual methodology and figure out if this was properly conducted? Three, if the study was properly conducted, can we actually make any useful statements considering this increased risk was only about 5%? How does this risk increase compared to the error in the study? I hope this makes for an interesting discussion." Well this is a very interesting topic and this is something that I've been following over the years actually. As evidence, actual high quality scientific evidence comes out for and against the use of vitamins for particular indications, I've been trying to keep careful track of that. And we've spoken a lot on this show before about supplements in general, that they're really not regulated in most of the world. Some countries do have better regulation than others, but largely the public is being sold supplements with very little science. The claims usually have a very poor relationship to actual evidence. And there's also the general assumption on the part of the public that vitamins can't hurt you, that they're completely safe, and that a lot of people think that if vitamins are good then more vitamins are better, etc. So this kind of information is very good because it does bring up the point that if something can help you then it can hurt you. If it's having a physiological effect in your body, then you cannot have the assumption that it can't possibly hurt you.
P: What are you talking about, ODing on a particular vitamin Steve?
S: First of all, there are some vitamins actually you can OD on them, you can get toxic doses of vitamins. Probably the worst one is vitamin A. You can get what's called hypervitamintosis A, which is a fancy way of saying you got too much vitamin A. And if you actually get vitamin A poisoning, which is a really interesting story, this is a little bit of an aside, but this happened to one of the expeditions to the Arctic where they resorted to eating polar bears and they actually ate their livers, which was a bad thing to do. Because vitamin A concentrates in the liver and carnivores eat livers, so they get a lot of vitamin A. So their livers really concentrate vitamin A. And the expedition ate the polar bear liver and several of them died from hypervitamintosis A, from too much vitamin A, and it causes like your flesh to melt off the bones and stuff, a really horrible way to die.
P: Pop a couple of vitamins.
R: Tell us again Steve.
S: But anyway, this is not talking about toxicity, this is just if people who are supplementing with vitamins, what was the risk of them dying? Let me address some of the specific questions here. What's the whole deal with a meta-analysis? Basically, a meta-analysis is when you take more than one study and you pool the data together. That's a meta-analysis. The strength of a meta-analysis is that you can look at a lot of data points, a lot of subjects. So here they had 230,000 adults. This is looking over many, many, many studies.
P: A lot of people.
S: There's a lot of people. The weakness is that there's a different protocol and methods used in each of the studies and it's hard to pool them together.
E: Steve, is there ever a case where they specifically design these studies to be combined later and then they build their criteria for the studies based on the fact that they are going to combine the results later?
S: Yes, sometimes that happens where you do have replications of studies where they try to stick to a certain protocol. And also as the technology, if you will, of doing a certain kind of clinical trial evolves, there will be a similar use of methods because they've been used before and they've been validated before. But there's always little differences between studies. So not all meta-analyses are created equal. Some are good, some are bad. And what generally makes a meta-analysis good is that it was very careful in picking studies that you could reasonably pool together. This study, actually, they looked at the data from a large number of studies and then they looked at the data from just the highest quality studies. So these are basically, here they were looking at clinical trials for anything, really. Just any clinical trial where there was careful tracking of mortality and whether or not somebody was taking vitamins, how many quality vitamins they were taking was tracked as part of the trial. They looked at the highest quality trials and those trials, if you pool the data in a meta-analysis, then the people who were taking supplements had a 5% increase in their death rate. Now 5% is not that big or impressive a number, but when you're talking about death, it actually is clinically, what we consider clinically significant. If you have a 5% increase in the death rate, that's significant. When I was talking about a 5% increase in the perception of pain or something benign like that, and you actually figure out what's the number of deaths, 5% of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, that's a lot of deaths. Actually, for some individual vitamins, it was actually higher. The number for vitamin A, for example, was up to like 15 or 16%, so it was higher for some specific vitamins. So the question is, was the methodology properly conducted? It was for a meta-analysis. I couldn't find any glaring holes in how they did the study. What useful statement can we make? Well, I think this kind of data is preliminary. I don't think we can make a definitive, say this is case closed, that vitamins hold an increased risk of mortality, but it is suggestive enough that it should certainly dispel any illusions that vitamins are always safe and can't possibly be negative. I think it points the way for some further research. I think what this indicates is that what we should do in response to this is do a prospective controlled trial where we actually look at ahead of time, it's designed to look at vitamin use and health outcomes, not just mortality, but a variety of reasonable health outcomes like heart attack, stroke, as well as death, and get some more definitive information about this. I think we just have to, hopefully we'll to some degree wake the public up out of the complacency that they've been lulled into by the supplement industry that vitamins can't possibly hurt you. Let's go on to the second email.
Angelic Harmony (29:14)
Hello from Nova Scotia,Canada
I discovered your podcasts a couple of months back and am now a dedicated listener. I look forward to every podcast. Your podcast dealing with 'angels singing' is not entirely false. The spirit world however is not involved. I have sung with many choirs and barbershop quartets throughout the past 30 years and have heard that 'angelic voice' many, many times. That 'voice' is exactly what my choirs and quartets would strive for. It results from the harmonic tones that are created when you have multiple voices singing. If all voices are in perfect pitch (in the case of four voices) a fifth voice will appear. This is noting more than an added harmonic which can be heard separate from the four notes. The point in singing in groups is to achieve or at least attempt to achieve perfect pitch and this will result is that added harmonic. This magical voice tells us we have done our job at least as far as pitch goes. So for the 'angels singing' , well lets just say that the 'real magic' comes form human vocal chords mixed with physics......and for me that is 'magical enough'. Hope this sheds some light on the matter.
Keep up the great work
Glenn Drodge
Canada, Nova Scotia
S: This one comes from Glenn Drodge from Nova Scotia, Canada.
E: Or the third email.
S: To the third email, right, you're right. I can count.
P: Will you please? One, two, three.
E: Sorry to get technical.
S: Glenn writes, "I discovered your podcast a couple of months back and am now a dedicated listener. I look forward to every podcast. Your podcast dealing with angels singing is not entirely false." That's good. It's good that we're not entirely false.
R: That's what we strive for, actually. Not entirely. I'm going to put that on a t-shirt.
S: Not entirely false.
R: Not entirely false.
S: "The spirit world, however, is not involved. I have sung with many choirs and barbershop quartets throughout the past 30 years and have heard that angelic voice many, many times. That voice, in quotes, is exactly what my choirs and quartets would strive for. It results from the harmonic tones that are created when you have multiple voices singing. If all voices are in perfect pitch, a fifth voice will appear. This is nothing more than an added harmonic, which can be heard separate from the four notes. The point in singing in groups is to achieve, or at least attempt to achieve, perfect pitch, and this will result in that added harmonic. This magical voice tells us we have done our job at least as far as pitch goes. So for the angels singing, well, let's just say that the real magic comes from human vocal cords mixed with physics, and for me that is magical enough. Hope this sheds some light on the matter. Keep up the good work, Glen." So this is a good point. We talked last week about the multiple recordings, which are alleged to be angels singing behind a choir singing in church. I don't know offhand, just from my listening of those, if this phenomenon that Glen is describing is actually responsible for any of those particular examples. There's one where that might be the case, but this is a very good point. So we talked about the fact that one of them may be a hoax, another one may have just been an artifact of recording over a prior recording of people singing, but this is another possible explanation that if you are actually achieving a harmonic from perfect pitch in choir, the harmonics may create the illusion, if you will, that there's more people actually singing than the number of people who are there. So that's a good point, and we appreciate you bringing that up.
J: I do think, though, the way that you described it last week was accurate, Steve. I think they did have poor recording equipment.
S: For that one case, yeah, for that one particular case where I said that was my leading hypothesis.
P: Weren't there instruments in things?
S: Yeah, in one there was instruments, which clearly, obviously, it's not just a harmonic. That was the one where I think it was an artifact of the recording. Well, let's go on to our interview with Ken Fader.
Interview with Ken Feder (32:00)
- Topic: The Tomb of Jesus: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/02/25/tomb_arc.html?category=archaeology&guid=20070225073000
Author: Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/076742722X/002-1805300-9476801?v=glance&n=283155
Feder obtained his B.A. in anthropology in 1973 from the State University of New York at Stonybrook. He obtained his M.A. in anthropology in 1975 from the University of Connecticut and his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1982. He has taught in the Department of Anthropology at Central Connecticut State University since 1977 where he is now a full professor. His primary research interests focus on the archaeology of the native peoples of New England and in the analysis of public perceptions about the human past. He is the founder and director of the Farmington River Archaeological Project, a long-term investigation of the prehistory of the Farmington River Valley. He is the author and co-author of several books including: Human Antiquity: An Introduction to Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (with Michael Park; now in its fourth edition); Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology (now in its fourth edition); A Village of Outcasts: Historical Archaeology and Documentary Research at the Lighthouse Site; and The Past In Perspective: An Introduction to Human Prehistory (in its third edition). He also is the co-editor of and contributor of two chapters to the most recent (seventh) edition of Field Methods In Archaeology; and he is the editor of Lessons From the Past: An Introductory Reader in Archaeology and co-editor (with David Poirier) of the book, Dangerous Places: Health and Safety in Archaeology. His latest book, Linking to the Past: A Brief Introduction to Archaeology has just been published by Oxford University Press. When he's not digging in the dirt or writing books, he likes to hang out with his one wife, two kids, and three cats.
S: Joining us now is Kenny Fader. Ken, welcome back to the Skeptics Guide.
KF: It's great to be here, Steve.
S: And Ken Fader is a professor of anthropology at Central Connecticut State University. We had him on our show last summer to talk about a lot of archaeological pseudoscience, and Ken agreed to come back on the show tonight with fairly short notice to talk about a topic that has been very much in the news in the last couple of days. Director James Cameron is directing a documentary where he claims that he and others have evidence that they have discovered the burial tomb of none other than Jesus Christ himself.
KF: The man.
S: The man. Jesus the man. So, Ken, give us an overview of this topic.
KF: Well when I started hearing about this, I immediately got, the red light goes off, right?
S: Yeah.
KF: You know, as a scientist, we all, and I'm sure you're in medical science, it's the same thing, that we have this process where there's peer review, where somebody comes up with an idea, a hypothesis, a new discovery, and the first thing you want to do is you want to run it by colleagues. You want your peers to look at it because the tendency, all of us have this tendency to fall in love with some new idea that comes into our minds. And we need people to sort of pull us back a little bit from that abyss and say, listen, you should be thinking about this. You haven't considered these other issues. You're wrong about this. You should do more homework. And before we go telling people that we've got anything important, anything brand new, we want to get some good feedback. And science by press conference really doesn't work as a result. So my first question when I hear this stuff is, why am I not reading about this in science or nature? Why am I not hearing of all the colleagues, the archaeological colleagues and historians and theologians who've looked at this stuff and it hasn't passed professional muster?
S: Yeah, that's a huge red flag when you bypass the peer review process and go straight to the public, whether it's in a book or, in this case, in a movie, always a red flag. You're absolutely right.
B: Yeah, but if you want to make money, I mean you don't go that route.
S: That's right.
KF: Well, there you go. In fact, when I was watching some of the announcements and reading some of the stuff, it was almost as if James Cameron knows that this is the way scientists are going to react, and he's counting on that reaction, that skeptical reaction, to get him more publicity. I'm sure he's a smart enough guy to know that, oh, this is going to drive historians and scientists crazy, so that's what I'm going to do, so they go crazy. They start talking about how this is not the way to do things, and that just makes it sound like we're trying to repress this great truth. So there's not very much that anybody knows about this stuff because they really haven't released very much information. They've shown some pictures, they've made some allusions to this being one of the greatest discoveries of all time. But folks have been making the greatest discovery of all time. They do it on a weekly basis. And in the past, it turns out that there's not so much to it. So I think that it is absolutely right for scientists and historians and for just the listening public to be pretty skeptical about this stuff because it certainly hasn't gone through the normal channels where the normal filters, where people figure out what they've done right and what they've done wrong.
S: Now, from my understanding, though, the actual archaeological find was quite some time ago, like 28 years ago or something.
B: 1980.
R: 1980.
S: 26 years ago. And this is like more of a reinterpretation of this archaeological find. Isn't that correct?
KF: Well, when I heard about this, the first thing that came to my mind was a discovery that was announced back in 2002 regarding another ossuary, another burial box, bone box, that was ostensibly the box that belonged to Jesus' brother. And in that case, it was supposed to be, this was found back in the 80s, and it was supposed to be the first archaeological artifact that actually would directly be related to this person, Jesus Christ.
S: This is the James ossuary. You got it. Right.
KF: And so when I first heard about this, I thought this is the same thing they were talking about that's been the box that's been sitting around since 1980 and was talked about in 2002. But I guess this is a completely different issue. That was revealed or discussed in 2002. That was another one of these instances in which they went right to the press, didn't go through any of the normal channels. The same kinds of things they were saying that they've been saying about this latest discovery they said back in 2002. Again, this is their shaking, this is going to change everything, this absolute proof that Jesus really existed, blah, blah, blah. And in that case, it became obvious very clearly that the whole thing had been a hoax. I mean, I can't really say much about this recent discovery because this recent announcement, because there's nothing really to comment on. They haven't said very much other than the fact that they've got these three burial boxes, and one's supposed to be Jesus, one's supposed to be Mary, and the other is supposed to be a son of the two of them.
R: I think they also have Mary Magdalene, don't they?
KF: Right, absolutely. Mary Magdalene. And a child who's supposed to belong to them. It's interesting. And the argument they've given though is that because the DNA, you keep seeing these headlines that DNA shows it's Jesus and Mary, when in fact all they've claimed is that the DNA from the Jesus box and the Mary box, they're not related to one another. Therefore, they probably were married to one another. I don't think they've said anything about the bones in the third box, which they are claiming to be the son of Jesus and Mary.
S: Yeah, you're right. The only DNA evidence I've seen so far is just that the DNA remnants, actually the bones have already been reburied, but the DNA fragments they scraped off the inside of the Jesus ossuary. And you compare that mitochondrally with the Mary Magdalene ossuary, they're not related. That's all the DNA evidence to show so far. Any comparison to the son.
KF: No, which is sort of interesting. The point here is that, yeah, again, we've got a second case in which stuff that was found a long time ago, nobody paid very much attention, and now suddenly has become the reinterpretation makes it the greatest discovery of all time. My suspicion is that pretty quickly, people who have an opportunity, people who are not in their little circle of researchers, other folks have an opportunity to look at the actual artifacts, to look at the DNA work, to look at the history behind the discovery and so on, that probably, my guess is that the same thing is going to happen here as happened back in 2002. Because in 2002, again, there was this little small group of experts who proclaimed that the box was genuine and that the inscription was genuine, the inscription bearing Jesus' name, just as we have here, again, a small circle of "experts" who have claimed that this thing is legitimate. But back in 2002, as soon as folks outside of that circle began looking at it more carefully, they determined pretty quickly that the thing was a hoax. In that case, the inscription itself turned out to be the fraud. The box was genuine. It wasn't old ossuary. It probably dated to the right period. And the inscription looked genuine because the inscription was a very good fake. And they showed that it was far more recent, that the inscription was a recent hoax, because in fact there was a patina over the entire box. It was a calcium carbonate that had arrived, that had developed over a couple of millennia. But when they looked very carefully at the inscription itself, the inscription actually cut through the patina. So the inscription had to have come much later. And then there was a fake patina actually had been added to the inscription, which, again, it was calcium carbonate, but apparently what somebody had done is they had ground up some chalky substance and dissolved it in a very, very hot water, and then placed that deep into the grooves made by the inscription. In fact, when it was initially looked at, people said, a couple scientists looked at the difference in the patina inside the inscription and the one that covered the box, so a scientist said that it certainly looked like the patina had been added much later and that it seems to have been made by grinding stuff up and putting it in boiling water. And then when they looked at the oxygen isotopes in the calcium carbonate in the inscription and compared to the one outside of the box, the proportion of O16 to O18 indicated very clearly that the patina on the box was genuine. It had been sitting there for a long time in a temperature that was probably what it would have been like in that crypt. But the temperature that the patina inside the inscription had been produced and the conditions had been far different, and in fact we're looking at temperatures in the pretty close to the point of water. So two separate analyses showed very clearly that that thing had been faked. Now we haven't had anybody look at the inscriptions on these boxes other than the people who are selling us books and showing us and promoting a television show.
B: Yeah, they did make a point of saying that they had four leading, how do you pronounce this word, epigraphers, four leading epigraphers look at it and they corroborated the ossuary inscriptions. Now what I'm taking from that though is that they don't go into much detail, but I think what they're doing is that the inscription looks good, the language is right, the method of carving is right, but they don't go into any detail about the first thing that I would think of, alright, are these forged inscriptions like happened in 2002? And there's no talk of that in any website that I went to. And they did mention a patina, but the context of the patina was that the James Ossuary, which disappeared soon after the tomb was opened in 1980, was recovered, I guess, in the early 2000s and they matched that patina to the one in the tomb and it matches, so it probably came from that tomb, but that's it, that's the end of the discussion for any patina, which I think is crucial for these inscriptions.
KF: In the 2002 case, it was an epigrapher who authenticated, who said, oh yeah, that's absolutely the right kind of writing for the period in question. Frank Cross, who is a very, very well-known epigrapher and semiticist at Harvard, he said after 2002, he looked at the inscription, he said at this point, because of computer technology, a teenager with a good scanner can produce an inscription on one of these old ossuaries that he could not prove was fake.
S: So that's not a good test, is the bottom line.
KF: Not at all. The language is right, but that's not that hard to fake.
S: So it seems like there are two layers here that we need to consider. One is, is the evidence as it is being presented legitimate or have any aspects of it been forged or faked or altered. Even if we take all the evidence at face value the other layer of controversy is how to interpret that evidence. That is what I think a lot of the current news reports, that's certainly what the Cameron documentary is focusing on, is a reinterpretation. And it seems that their core claim is a statistical one. What are the odds, basically, of finding a tomb that dates to the first century A.D. or A.C.E. and that contains a Jesus and a Mary who are not blood relatives and a child Judah. And I think it also says, it doesn't just say Jesus, it says Jesus son of Joseph. So you have that additional piece of information. So you have a Jesus who is a son of Joseph who is married to a Mary. What's the odds of that constellation of names occurring? Now initially the constellation of names was dismissed by the fact that those were all very common names in that location in that period of time. But it's actually the guy who's working with him on the project is not a scientist, he's an investigative journalist. Does anyone have his name in front of you?
KF: There's the Simcha guy, this is Rayleigh, but he's another Simcha-
S: Jacobovici. So he is saying that they had a statistical analysis done at the odds range from I think 600 to 1 at the low end and millions to 1 at the high end or whatever, that that constellation of names would occur. What I couldn't find though was that for just that tomb or finding any tomb with that constellation of names?
B: I think it was any tomb.
S: So if you found 600 tombs, you'd be bound to find 1?
B: Right, in that area within 2.5 miles I think they found many hundreds of tombs similar to that. But apparently they found 98 other tombs in which the name Jesus appears on 21 other ossuaries it says here. And Steve, you mentioned son of Joseph. Apparently, at least according to Kirby Anderson, the national director of probe ministries, he says that son of Joseph is a misnomer and that only outsiders would have mistakenly called him that and he was never referred by that name by any of his followers. So that's just another possibility, another thing that shows that it's possibly fake.
KF: You know the statistical argument, the same one was given in 2002 where again they said, well what are the odds of getting the Jesus name and the Joseph name together on the same ossuary? So I mean I think that all these statistical arguments evaporate entirely unless they can show conclusively that the inscriptions are genuine and that they actually were found in that tomb. And there again do we have accurate archaeological records showing that those 3 ossuaries actually came from the same tomb and then come from 3 different tombs and have been brought together and it's being said that they came from the same tomb, but we don't know that. A good archaeological excavation is going to have accurate documentation, thorough, obsessive documentation about where's the provenience of everything. And again, when you do science by press conference, you're not going to get that. But I think that it's a valid point to make that well it's better that they sell their books and show their TV show now before somebody comes up and asks these really embarrassing questions that they maybe can't answer.
R: Right, I mean you're dealing with a PR powerhouse. I mean this is the guy who made millions off of a movie that everybody already knew the ending to.
KF: Right, exactly.
S: Cameron is quoted by saying "It doesn't get bigger than this, we've done our homework, we've made the case, and now it's time for the debate to begin." Well, and what you're saying is the debate really should occur before these kind of things are presented to the world as plausible or factual.
KF: Oh, of course, of course.
S: Yeah, they're doing it backwards.
KF: And one of the things that people need to understand that I guess they don't is that if you are cherry picking your experts, that's not the way the scientific process works.
S: That's right.
KF: The idea, again, of peer review is that they send this stuff out to people who don't know you, who aren't working on the project, who have nothing invested in this project, emotionally or monetarily, and who in many cases are looking to find the mistakes. Well that's good, that's the way science is supposed to work. I want somebody to point out my errors before I actually publish something or make some claim. These guys are doing it exactly backwards I think I know why. I don't think that they're that confident that a random group of experts who are not associated with this project, I don't think they're convinced that those guys are going to come out and say, you know what, you've got what you say you've got.
S: The other point that I've read from an archaeologist, again, who's skeptical of this whole claim and for whom this is their area of expertise or interest, is that the Talpiot tomb, which is the name of the specific tomb, is a tomb of a middle class family living at that time and that it doesn't really fit with the story of someone who essentially had no ties in Jerusalem that basically came from Nazareth or from someplace else. Basically saying that Jesus and Mary wouldn't have been buried in a middle class plot in the middle of Jerusalem because that's not where their family had ties. So just making a historical argument that it doesn't make sense from a historical point of view. Of course, for me, the other thing that is interesting is what do we really know historically about the historical Jesus? We're sort of trying to judge the veracity of this based upon scripture, which is really not historical writing so much as religious writings.
R: That's why I think it's funny when they try to use the statistical claim to prove their point. What are the chances that the biblical Jesus existed? Do you want to figure out those statistics and then we can compare the two and use a little Occam's razor?
KF: There's an irony here too. Just yesterday in the parking lot of a little shopping plaza, a person I hadn't seen in years came over to me and said, Oh, how are you? Have you heard about this new discovery? What do you think of it? Do you think they've really found Jesus? She was very excited about this. This is a religious person. I didn't want to point out that the irony was that if in fact they've discovered what they say they have, then they've just disproven the resurrection because there are the bones of Jesus. He didn't get resurrected. His bones are in this box in a Jerusalem crypt. So the irony is what have they lost if in fact they've proven what they say they've proven? It's kind of interesting that that's sort of been shifted into the background and it's the greatest story ever told all over again.
B: But they would find a way around that to preserve-
S: Yeah, they would find a way around that, I agree. They would take the proof for what they could take out of it and then would explain away the inconsistency.
KF: Well, yes. It's religion after all.
S: It'll be interesting to follow this story as you say and see how they're going to deal with this. I think they may just dismiss the whole thing, which probably would be a better way to go for them if you think about it because you're right. It is a little hard to get around the whole resurrection thing.
KF: What little I have seen, it's just the stuff online is that the Christian community has come out to dispute this and say this can't possibly be because they see, if they think about it a little bit, they see the inconsistency here.
B: But couldn't he have ressurected and kind of just die later?
S: But that's not how the story goes. He was divine when he rose. He was not mortal and did not die again.
B: Somebody was claiming that when he did ascend, it was a spiritual ascension.
KF: I thought that in the New Testament, in all four of those books, when they entered the tomb, the grave wrappings, the bandages are there, but there's no body there.
S: Right, there's no body.
B: Some say the body was stolen and brought somewhere else.
S: The whole point is that the standard literal Christian interpretation is that there was no body there, which is incompatible with finding an ossuary with Jesus' bones in them.
KF: Exactly.
S: Ken, while we have you, there was another bit of archaeological news. I though we may chat with you as well. Apparently there have been reports about reinterpreting the Clovis data. Give us a quick primer on what is the Clovis settlement.
KF: The idea here is, when we try to assess the archaeology of the earliest Americans, it gets a little bit complicated. For a very long time, archaeologists were stuck at the first settlement of the New World maybe 3,000 or 4,000 years ago. There was a physical anthropologist at Harvard who, in looking at the bones that had been found in North America, looking at modern Native Americans, he felt there just wasn't enough difference in the old bones and new bones to warrant anything much more than a timeline that went back maybe 3,000 or 4,000 years. But then, in the 1920s and 1930s, people began finding these fluted points. These are beautifully flaked, bi-facially flaked, both faces, with a big channel flake, and these were found in association with animals that had been extinct for more than 10,000 years. That being the case, if these bones, and we actually had spear points stuck in the bones of bison and mastodons and mammoths, so clearly there had been people here at least as far back as the end of the Pleistocene, the end of the Ice Age, where this extinct species of bison and extinct mastodons and mammoths had walked the plains of North America. So that's when the Clovis, Clovis is named after a site in New Mexico where these, it's sort of the type site, where these particular spear point forms were first found and defined, and Clovis became sort of the bar right there. People came into North America, there was nobody here before, they came in maybe something like 12,000 years ago, spread fairly rapidly, but over a couple of millennia across the continent. Clovis or Clovis-like points had been found from Alaska to Florida, from Maine to the southern tip of California, and then even into Mexico and parts of South America. So whoever brought those things in there, there was a very efficient technology spread rapidly. There's no evidence of fluting, that this particular very unique style way of making stone tools, no evidence of that whatsoever in the old world. It's not in Siberia, it's not anywhere in Asia, nowhere else, just North America. So the idea was, the Americas were not populated, these guys walked across the Bering land bridge, pretty quickly developed and invented this new technology, were hugely successful, maybe so successful they contributed to the extinction of a large number of species at the very end of the Ice Age, sometime before 10,000 years ago, and that those people, as the large game animals became extinct, they developed new cultural adaptations, and in fact the modern Native Americans are the descendants of that initial small group of people who entered North America something like 12,000 years ago.
S: One quick question, does the modern used the fluting too or is that, the fluting dissapear?
KF: No, that actually did disappear. In standard dating, we look at the fluted point as being relatively short-lived, something 12,500 years ago, these are radiocarbon years, which is another complication here, to maybe 10,000 years ago. So a great stream of things, not very, very long-lived, but certainly long enough to get people from traveling slowly, expanding their population across the continent, a couple of millennia, two and a half millennia. What these guys are saying, Dennis Stanford, who's an archeologist and is one of the people, is the senior author of the article. He's always been a bit of a rebel about this stuff, and has always questioned that model, and in fact that model has largely been set aside by archeologists who recognize the importance of Clovis, but also recognize that there are a handful of sites in North America and South America that very clearly predate Clovis. So it's more complicated than simply a single group of people walking in North America 12,500 years ago and spreading like ripples across a pond, that there may have been several fits and starts, small groups of people came across the Bering land bridge at the inside, came across the Bering land bridge along the coast, and maybe hugged the coast and were able to jump all the way to South America in a very short period of time. The Monteverde site in South America and Chile is something like 13,000 years old. It's older than Clovis. It can't be derived from Clovis as a result. There are some sites in the East as well, but what these guys are saying, because they have in their mind this notion that America was at least thinly populated before Clovis, their idea here is that while Clovis comes in, or these people come in 12,500 years ago, 13,000 maybe, develop this new technology, and we don't have to wait for the people to slowly expand across North America. It's only the idea of Clovis points that can move a lot more quickly, because there are already people thinly dispersed across two continents. The problem, though, is what these guys have done is they have focused on Paleo-Indian sites, these ancient sites in the West, but the problem is we've got fluted points in Connecticut. We have fluted points in Maine that date to long after the period they say people are no longer making Clovis points. So in other words, their dates, their very narrow ranges, what they're saying is Clovis was very, very short-lived, 400 years maybe, but the problem with that is we have an archaeological site here in Connecticut with a radio carbon date, Clovis-like points that dates to 10,100 years ago, which is a couple of thousand years after these sites are dating in the West. So I don't understand really why they used a sample that was so small and so geographically restricted when they were talking about a technology that is spread across a continent and a half.
S: Interesting, so they were looking at a tiny slice of the data and it's not really compelling in your opinion.
KF: Yeah, it certainly is not compelling. Dennis Sanford's a really bright guy, but this has been his hobby horse for a long time, but I think that other archaeologists who respect him enormously, but they're probably going to say Dennis, this is a great idea, but you don't have the data to back up your idea. You're going to need a lot more work explaining a way of rationalizing the much younger dates for Clovis points that we find in places like Connecticut and Massachusetts and Maine.
S: Well, Ken, thank you so much for joining us again.
KF: You're certainly welcome, Steve.
S: It's always a pleasure talking with you.
R: Thanks, Ken.
KF: You betcha. Bye-bye.
R: Bye, Ken.
Science or Fiction (59:48)
Question #1: New study finds that seeing the colour red, even briefly, lowers performance on school tests.
Question #2: Clinical trials have begun on an artificial tooth that delivers drugs.
Question #3: Researchers have found that the ancient Greeks were far less athletic and physically fit than modern athletes.
Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious. And I challenge my panel of chimps, I mean skeptics, to figure out which one is the fake. And I encourage you all to play along. Are you ready?
J: Yes.
E: Yes.
S: I think this is going to be a little challenging this week. I'm just warning you.
P: Oh, good.
S: A little challenging. First one, new study finds that seeing the colour red even briefly lowers performance on school tests. Item number two, clinical trials have begun on an artificial tooth that delivers drugs. And item number three, researchers have found that the ancient Greeks were far less athletic and physically fit than modern athletes. Rebecca, go first this week.
Rebecca's Response
R: Oh, man. Okay. Seeing the colour red. You're saying the colour red lessons performance?
S: Yeah.
R: That kind of makes sense to me. The tooth that delivers drugs, that's like a dream come true, so that's fine. I think that's true.
E: You want it to be true.
R: Well, that's how I always pick. If I want it to be true, then I go with it.
E: The secret. That's the secret.
R: And the Greeks aren't as athletic as we originally thought.
S: Researchers have found that ancient Greeks were far less athletic and physically fit than modern athletes.
R: Actually, that sounds kind of true, too. Crap. Here's what I'm thinking. Red makes you more energetic. Red is exciting, so it should help you do better. Maybe. Yeah, I'm going to go with that one.
J: Are you a red-based person, is what you're saying?
R: My aura is actually red, and I do really well on tests.
S: Alright, Bob, you go.
Bob's Response
B: Greeks less fit. That seems pretty damn obvious to me, with all the training and tools that athletes dispose of these days.
P: Steroids, cheating.
B: Yeah, blood doping, all that. That seems so obvious that I might pick it just because of that, but I won't. Artificial tooth, I don't know, kind of weird. But seeing red, I agree with Rebecca. Seeing red heightens aggression, and I think that would improve performance. So the fact that it says lowest performance here I'm going to go with one as well.
S: OK, Perry?
Perry's Response
P: Yeah, the third one about the Greeks. That's clear, that's accurate. You know about the nutrition until about 1999. The second one, you say tooth, as in I chew with my tooth.
S: An artificial tooth, right.
P: That can deliver drugs, what's wrong with that? That's fine. The first one, we're not supposed to say I read that. I saw this in a movie. Remember they had the red car and all the bees flew over to it, one of them killer bee pictures? The whole aggression thing, remember that? But I digress, it's red.
S: That's the fake one? Okay, Evan?
Evan's Response
E: Sure, I'll lean over that side of the boat with the rest of my colleagues to help tip the ship.
R: Don't do that.
S: Jay, it's unanimous to you.
Jay's Response
J: I'm going to go with the Greek for the sole purpose of that's the only one that I didn't read this week. I do remember reading the other two, and I specifically remember one of them as absolutely being wrong. In other words, Rebecca, you are a loser.
S: Jay, you're saying that the Greeks one is the fake.
J: Yep, that's the fake.
Steve Explains Item #1
S: OK, so let's start, we'll take them in order, let's start with number one. Most of you, except Jay, think that new study finds that seeing the colour red even briefly lowers performance on school tests. You guys chose that as the fake, and that one is indeed science. That one is true.
E: Pure science.
P: Nonsense.
S: Research on the colour red shows a definite impact on achievement. The thinking here is not that the colour red causes excitement or increased alertness, that it actually is associated with stress. They did make this speculation that red is associated with failure and using red pens to mark your wrong answers and whatnot. They did four experiments. They demonstrated that even a brief perception of red caused subjects to score lower on IQ tests, so it actually lowered performance.
P: What does this have to do with bees?
R: That's a really good question, Perry.
S: Red does trigger their aggression.
P: Thank you.
S: So this is a psychological study they're trying to say that the environment can have effects on this kind of performance.
E: All right Jay, I'm rooting for you.
Steve Explains Item #2
S: Number two clinical trials have begun on an artificial tooth that deliver drugs. That one is science.
B: That's right. The boards are going to light up. I thought this one was the strangest one. You know why I remembered that one?
R: That's the only one I read.
J: It reminds me of Dune when they put that poison tooth.
R: I can't believe this turned into a nerd fest.
S: Basically putting these artificial molars in people that would slowly leech drugs into the bloodstream. There's a lot of demand for delivery systems that could release a slow controlled amount of drug in a very long period of time. For example in diabetics. Or for high blood pressure, for lot's of things.
R: I'd get one filled with Nyquil.
S: It's very interesting.
E: Mine's filled with vitamin A.
R: My throats feel a little scratchy so I'll just click.
Steve Explains Item #3
S: Which means that number three, research has found that the ancient Greeks were far less athletic and physically fit than modern athletes.
R: Is this the thing about them with the rowing?
S: Yes, with the rowing. The opposite is true.
R: I should have known that.
S: What they did, this is a very interesting study. There's a lot of assumptions here.
B: I don't believe it.
S: Not the most iron-clad study. What they did is they took what they consider to be reliable historical accounts in order to estimate... For example what they consider to be historical accurate account of a battle indicates that they sent a ship from point A to point B and they got there in a day. If you could calculate how fast and how continuously they must have been rowing in order to get the ship to travel that fast for that long. They know how many rowers were on the shift and when the shifts are. It turns out that the performance exceeds what even physically fit or even athletic people would be capable of doing today. They actually crewed a trireme with athletes and had them row to see what their endurance was. They did not perform as well as apparently the Greek rowers did according to this historical record. They concluded that they must have been in pretty good physical shape at that time.
E: Or the Greeks had minotaurs helping them row.
S: They did not account for the possibility of a mechanical minotaurs.
R: What? The minutaurs were not mechanical.
S: That's one of the weaknesses in the study, in fact they pointed out [inauduble].
P: In the Ray Harryhausen movie, they were in the Sinbad movies, it was mechanical.
S: In Sindbad they were mechanical.
S: It's kind of a clever little study.
R: Nerds.
P: You're a nerd.
S: We've never denied that we are complete and total geeks and nerds.
R: I know, but I just like to bring it up every now and again.
P: The problem with Ray Harryhausen movies, when he animated his models, there was no blur. That was the problem.
S: There was no blur?
P: No.
B: That's the classic problem with stop motion.
J: Can we stop avoiding the fact that I won and you lost?
S: Jay beat everybody this week, I am proud of you.
J: I promised the guys I was going to try harder, I'm reading the news a lot more.
R: That's so cute.
J: I'm very happy about this.
S: Actually, reading science news stories is a distinct advantage.
R: I pictured Jay in front of his computer tapping furiously, his brow all scrunched up. Reading science articles.
J: I was going to say that my tooth was going to be filled with Xanax, now I want it filled with science news.
S: Jay, you're a born-again scientist.
R: I protest this result, doping. Someone has filled Jay's tooth with science facts.
S: Let's get back to this for one minute. What I suspect is the people who were rowing on the ships in ancient Greece were probably in their 20s. They were really at their peak phisically for that time. They weren't 50 or 60. They probably spent their life rowing that damn ship. They were used to conditions that we are not used to in our pampered modern society.
B: That's the best thing I heard that could possibly explain that. I found that very hard to believe.
S: Congratulations, Jay.
R: Congratulations, Jay.
J: Thank you. Finally, a long-awaited victory.
Skeptical Puzzle (1:09:42)
This Week's Puzzle
I am holding five objects in my hand
All five objects are the same size and shape
Each object has a number of things on them
These things are all exactly the same
The first object has zero things
The seconds has four
The third has six
The fourth has four
The fifth has ten
What am I holding?
Last Week's Puzzle
Because I do not hope to know
This mystery at this late hour
Because I do not think
Because I shall not know
Once thought to fuel this power
Was alcohol, which I cannot drink
Because I can not know
Why it doesnt happen to tree or flower
Perhaps this bad habit is the link
Because I refuse to know
My impulsive human reaction seem dour
And whatever bits remain, boy, it sure does stink
What am I describing?
Answer: Spontaneous Human Combustion
Winner: Viking 054
S: Evan, can you quickly read last week's puzzle for us and then give us the answer?
E: Sure. Last week's puzzle. Because I do not hope to know this mystery at this late hour. Because I do not think. Because I shall not know once thought to fuel this power was alcohol, which I cannot drink. Because I can not know why it doesn't happen to tree or flower. Perhaps this bad habit is the link. Because I refuse to know my impulsive human reaction seem dour. And whatever bits remain, boy, it sure does stink. What am I describing in that poem? I am, in fact, describing spontaneous human combustion. Congratulations go out to Viking054. Sorry, I don't know your real name. He was the first one to guess that spontaneous human combustion was the answer. But it was in fact a guess. I throw some credit out to Tom, also known as Swag-O-Matic, on the boards.
R: Oh my God, that's a great name.
S: For being the one to recognize that I crafted this poem based on T.S. Eliot's poem called Ash Wednesday. The structure and so forth.
R: Oh, Ash.
E: Exactly.
R: I get it.
E: Ash, spontaneous human combustion.
J: But Evan, you said it's a timely puzzle. What was timely about it?
S: Because it was Ash Wednesday.
E: It was Ash Wednesday when we read it.
J: Evan, I've got to tell you, that was a really hard puzzle.
E: A lot of people had a good time with it. Trying to make heads or tails with it.
J: I couldn't come up with anything.
E: A lot of free time spent by some of you people trying to work that one out.
P: God bless you.
S: Evan, give us the new one this week.
E: All right, here we go. I am holding five objects in my hand. All five objects are the same size and shape. Each object has a number of things on them. These things are all exactly the same. The first object has zero things. The seconds has four. The third has six. The fourth has four. The fifth has ten. What am I holding? Good luck, everyone.
S: Good job Evan.
E: Enjoy.
Quote of the Week (1:11:58)
'If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.' - J. A. Wheeler
S: Well, that brings us down just to the quote of the week. Bob, what's your quote of the week?
B: I found an intriguing one from J.A. Wheeler. I like this one. American theoretical physicist. If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.
S: Or you haven't been looking well enough.
R: Or you don't live near Jay.
E: Or you haven't been reading oour forums.
S: Just a couple of announcements about the podcast. Jay has been working very diligently.
P: Jay who?
S: Jay, that guy who occasionally joins us on this show. In updating the website. I have put together the first installment of the Skeptics Guide Uncut. Jay already has it totally going on the website. Jay did a lot of actual research to find out how we could best make this content available to you. As we discussed last month, we have a lot of extra content that we don't have room for in our weekly regular podcast. Plus, we've had a lot of requests for some special things like a blooper reel or things like that. Or for uncut interviews. Sometimes we might record a very long interview and then cut it down for the podcast. So we decided that we were going to make some of this extra or so-called premium content available on a paper download basis. So we're going to call it the Skeptics Guide Uncut. The first installment is available. This is the Uncut interview from TAM5 with John Rennie, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, and Phil Plait, the bad astronomer. It's a one-hour podcast total. It has about 40 minutes of brand new material in it. We include the whole interview, including the bits that we use already.
P: It's uncut, baby. We tell it like it is. It's raw.
E: Uncensored. Skeptics gone wild.
S: You can't get this on iTunes. You can only get it directly from our website. If you go to, go to the homepage and you'll see a link there at the bottom for premium content. If you click that link, it takes you to a page where you can see the first instalment, the Skeptics Guide Uncut number one, and there's a button where you can purchase that for download. The price is $1.99, which is sort of the standard price for these single downloads. The NESS is a non-profit organization. We figured this would be a good way to get donations and to help support our activity. This does take a lot of time and work and a lot of high-end equipment to produce this high-quality podcast each week. The more resources we have, the more we can do. We want to make sure that we always have the resources to keep the podcast coming and to improve the quality. We appreciate it. This is a way to get extra content and support the NESS at the same time.
P: Unchained. Unedited. Uncut.
S: Some of the future episodes may include some of the more R-rated material that we did not include in our regular podcast.
R: Let's be honest. Some of it is X-rated.
S: The Christopher Hitchens interview in particular. Keep an eye out for that one.
E: You guys will want that one.
S: Please go to the homepage, download the uncut versions, and give a little donation to the NESS. Thank you, Jay, for all the hard work you put into making that happen.
R: Thank Jay.
E: Yeah Jay.
J: I'd like to say it was my pleasure, but it was a big pain in the ass. I want to thank everyone that gave feedback about how we should be delivering the content. I appreciate everyone just putting in their two cents and giving me some direction. Just so everyone knows, we are going through PayPal. Most everyone asked for that. Easy checkout. If anybody has any questions or problems, just give me an email from the site.
S: I just want to point out, there shouldn't be any concern about this, but just to allay the inkling of any fear, we have absolutely no plans to stop doing our weekly free podcast. The Skeptics Guide to the Universe is still the core of what we do. This is just extra content that we're making available. We're not going to charge forever for our core podcast. That's a pledge. Also, I'll remind everyone again to dig our podcast. Jay has added on the homepage the button at the bottom. Dig is one of several popular sites where you can vote for your favorite content on the web. You can vote for the Skeptics Guide as a podcast. You can also vote or dig for specific episodes. This helps us out by spreading the word. If we get enough digs, enough votes, then that will raise our profile on that website and put our podcast in front of a lot more eyes, a lot more people. Please take the time to do that. We would really appreciate that.
P: You really have to ask yourself, why wouldn't I do this? Of course you would.
S: It would just take a moment and I could help spread skepticism, do my little part, to make the world a slightly more skeptical place. There are other ones that are popular that we'll be adding over time. If you have any suggestions for any aggregators or any of this web content voting sites like Digg, we know about Delicious, we'll probably add that one eventually, then let us know. Any ideas you have for how we can help spread our podcast and spread the word on the internet, we're all ears. Let us know. Thanks again for joining me, everyone.
R: Thank you Steve.
J: Thank you Steve.
E: Thanks Steve.
R: Good times.
S: Always a pleasure.
P: Thanks to the Rogues.
S: Always good to be surrounded by my little rogues.
J: My little rogues.
E: Very well, little rogues.
J: That's a good quote.
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.
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