SGU Episode 94

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SGU Episode 94
May 9th 2007
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 93                      SGU 95
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
'The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious...the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.'
Albert Einstein
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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, May 9^th, 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: Helo all.

S: Perry DeAngelis...

P: Hello.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening everyone. Do you want to know what happened on this day in 1950?

J: Sure.

C: More than anything.

J: Anything but a stupid holiday.

E: Yeah, it is not a holiday. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

J: What do you got?

E: ne Mr. L. Ron Hubbard publishes his book on Dianetics entitled Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health.

R: Surely a date that will live in infamy.

J: I saw that on the boards.

P: Here, here.

E: So there you go today.

J: Somebody posted on the boards that you have to read the very first page of that. He said it's the funniest read.

P: Was he drunk when he published it? Probably.

B: He was drunk when he wrote it.

P: That's the same thing.

J: Perry, that book is written on a drunken stupor, I'm sure.

P: Yeah, you can tell.

J: And then I'm going to write about aliens.

E: No one will believe this. Everyone will have a good laugh.

News Items

The Encyclopedia of Life (1:29)

• www.eol.org/

S: So a few news items this week. We do have an interview with Barry Beierstein, a skeptical psychologist and psychopharmacologist coming up later on in the show. But first a few-

J: Yeah, a super nice guy.

S: Very nice guy. First a few news items. I noticed that a new website was begun, which is a very ambitious project. It's called the Encyclopedia of Life, EOL.org.

P: Another grandiose.

S: Another grandiose, but very cool. And I mention this just because we've talked a lot about what a tremendous scientific and cultural resource is the internet. And this is a good example of, I think, one of the best uses of it. Basically what they are putting together is an online free access resource that is an encyclopedia of every living thing. Everything. Every species that is known. Ultimately the encyclopedia will serve as an online reference source and database for 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet, as well as those later discovered and described.

B: 1.8, Steve?

S: 1.8 million species. That's what this is. I'm reading off their website, that are named and known. They also said when that is done, then they'll start working their way back through extinct species. They said, for example, if we don't include dinosaurs, we'll miss the eight-year-old boy demographic.

E: That's true.

R: That's a pretty cool idea. I worry, though, about exactly how they're going to go about doing it. Like if they're going to go like a Wikipedia sort of approach, which would not be necessarily the best.

J: I thought that's the way they described it, Steve. Do you remember?

R: Well, I don't think they have anything set down in stone yet. I think they're still working out all of the finer points. Or if they're not working it out, then they just haven't announced it yet, as far as I've seen.

S: Well, what they're saying now is that it is a collaborative effort. The tens of thousands of people with expertise around the world and their predecessors are responsible.

R: Yeah. So what does that mean, though? Who's going to be-

P: Wikipedia.

S: They're going to have a steering committee that will be responsible for practical accountability, they say. I'm sure it will evolve. It says, who will be doing the writing? Unlike conventional encyclopedias, where an editorial team sits down and writes the entries, the encyclopedia will be developed by bringing together content from a wide variety of sources, whatever that means. But they said the material will be authenticated by scientists. So it sounds like a Wikipedia with authentication by scientists.

E: Cryptozoologists will have something to, I'm sure, add to the fray here.

R: Yeah, I'm wondering how long before Bigfoot is in there.

P: Are there still print encyclopedias out there?

S: I heard legend about them.

P: I mean, I'm curious.

J: I'm sure there is, Perry.

P: Britannica's still making a book?

S: I once saw a nightstand that was made out of a bunch of Encyclopedia Britannica's.

R: That's cool.

J: This encyclopedia of life is the absolute perfect example of why the internet is a fantastic tool.

R: You mean besides porn?

J: Yeah. Well, everything is sub-porn, right? Everything is below porn. But while looking over the site, I'm looking at the delivery. It's so accessible to everyone. It's just a brilliant, brilliant reason for the internet to exist. This is it in its highest form. This is what people should be doing for the internet.

S: It really is showing how the internet is becoming the repository of the collective human knowledge of our civilization. It's cool. And we're living through it.

P: There's also a lot of shit on the internet.

S: That's true. That's true.

P: I just thought I'd mention that.

S: Thanks, Perry.

P: You're welcome.

S: You never miss that particular angle of a story.

J: Perry, you got some sites you want to recommend? What's going on?

P: They are legion.

Nanotech Spidy Suit (5:16)

• www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=1836.php

S: Bob, you sent me this next one. You begged me to put this one in. Spider-Man suit based on nanotechnology. Why don't you tell us about that?

B: I didn't really beg.

S: You were down on your knees.

B: Don't even go there. Don't even go there. It just seemed appropriate considering the release of Spider-Man 3. The gist of it was an upcoming paper in the Journal of Physics, Condensed Matter. Nicola Pugno, professor of structural engineering at Polytechnic University in Turin, Italy, discusses a process he's working on for yet another novel application of carbon nanotubes. Now, for anyone who hasn't heard about carbon nanotubes, they're an allotrope of carbon along with their more familiar cousins, diamond and graphite and at least five others. They consist of a cylindrical arrangement of carbon atoms that have many useful attributes potentially applicable to many fields of science.

J: Bob, what's an allotrope?

B: It's a stable configuration of carbon atoms, basically.

J: You're not talking about a molecule, right?

B: No, it's still a carbon atom, but you arrange them in this way and you get diamond. Another way, it's graphite. Another way, you've got carbon nanotubes. But it's all carbon atoms, it's all carbon atoms. Now, what Pugno was working on is a process to turn nanotubes into a super adhesive material which can be used to create a Spiderman-like suit that would allow most anyone to climb pretty much anything. The technique behind the stickiness is based on the gecko, the tropical lizard called the gecko. They have a famous ability to walk up trees on walls, so they can even hang from the ceiling by one toe. And for years, scientists have been kind of studying this ability. Geckos don't use some kind of excreted super glue. They rely on a rather obscure attraction between molecules called van der Waals forces or it's also called London forces. These forces occur because the orbiting electrons create a transient electric attraction between molecules. It's kind of a weird way. It's difficult to kind of put this into words. The force itself can be rather technical. That's kind of like an overview of what the force is.

P: How come I can't hang from the ceiling by my toe?

B: Well, I'll tell you, it all goes down to the hairs on the gecko's feet. They've got these super fine hairs on their feet called setae. Each hair then branches into a thousand finer hairs that are narrower than the wavelength of visible light. So it's the molecules at the end of these hairs that take advantage of these van der Waals forces and can feel this attraction. Now, the attraction by itself is pretty tiny, but when you've got millions of hairs taking advantage of it, it turns to quite a force. So what Nicola Pugno was proposing is that using these nanotubes, using nanotubes in this hierarchical structure where each nanotube then branches into multiple finer nanotubes, using that idea based on the gecko, this is what he would bond. I assume he would bond these nanotubes to this suit that would then produce a Spider-Man suit.

J: How does a gecko release, you know?

B: It's unusual. You would think if it sticks so well, how do they release it? What they've got to do is you've got to kind of peel the foot away. You've got to kind of roll it. So they have a very unusual release method that their foot is designed to just kind of like not pull off, not pull straight off, but kind of peel off from one side. It just kind of peels it off.

R: So it's like Velcro.

S: It's like Velcro that would work on anything, basically.

B: Yeah, you're right. It's easier to pull it that way than straight off. That's where it gets its strength. Perpendicular force.

S: But the suit's not going to shoot webs out of the wrists, though.

B: Well he also came up with a plan for using the nanotubes to create these invisible, super strong fibers as well.

P: Is there anything that nanotubes can do?

R: Do they give you Spidey sense as well?

P: I'm just curious.

B: No, they're still working on that.

J: It's funny. They're going to make this suit and some guy is going to be like just so revved. You know, like, oh my God, I'm Spider-Man. And the guy is going to freaking slip and fall like 50 feet and kill himself like in two seconds.

S: You can definitely see that happening. But I have to say talking about carbon nanotubes, everything I've been reading about it, it does sound like the new super material of tomorrow. I mean, the potential seems so incredible. I mean, who knows what will be realized.

R: I think we should throw billions of dollars at it.

S: Absolutely.

B: Absolutely. Does that even need to be said?

E: Trillions of dollars.

R: It didn't need to be said, but I said it anyway.

B: Okay, thank you. Somebody had to say it.

S: The free market will do it. We don't need to.

P: I'm sorry. Bob, if you gather enough nanotubes together and bunch them together, could you drink like chocolate milk through them?

B: You could, but it would take about 20 years to drink a thimble full of it. Take a while.

P: What the f— But I mean, Bob, and a little slightly more serious question, is it actually a tube like a straw, or is it a string?

B: Absolutely.

S: Yes, it's a tube.

P: So it is hollow in the center.

B: Absolutely.

P: Wow. That's pretty amazing.

B: No, that's for one type of nanotube. There's another type of nanotube that's kind of like a nested tube. It's one tube inside of another. And apparently, I just today ran across some new evolution of the carbon nanotubes. They're calling them nanobuds that might actually be even better than nanotubes for some of these applications. So it's just a huge field that's opening wide.

S: It's like plastic. It's like what plastic and what modern society, this is going to do maybe over the next 50 years. We'll see. But it really seems to be heading that way.

B: We'll see.

Bigfoot Endangered (10:59)

• news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070502/wl_canada_afp/canadauspoliticsanimaloffbeat_070502173737
  
  

S: The next news item, this is kind of our silly news item of the week. We always have one of those.

P: What did we just do?

R: We were just talking about Spider-Man, right?

S: Spider-Man nanotechnology is serious business.

R: Okay, just checking.

B: Hey, Van der Waals forces.

E: Just ask the goblin.

S: The Canadian MP, Mike Lake, has called for Bigfoot to be protected under Canada's Species at Risk Act. So he wants Bigfoot to be listed as an endangered species along with whooping cranes, blue whales, and red mulberry trees.

E: Oh, he's crazy. Whooping cranes? Come on.

S: By goodness.

J: I mean, where do we even begin with something like this?

S: Where do we even begin? I know. He says, the debate over Bigfoot's existence is moot in the circumstance of their tenuous hold on merely existing. What does that even mean? I mean, whether or not they exist is not relevant. Their hold on reality is certainly tenuous.

P: What it means is that guy is fired. That's what it means. You fired. Out.

E: Either that or he's the next prime minister.

B: Guys, my favorite quote. He said, when I get species protection for them nationwide, I will make my findings public and I will take this out of the realm of mythology. Now, isn't that taking the cart before the horse there a little bit? I mean, doesn't he know that if he actually produced the proof, then maybe he could get the protection he's looking for?

J: He's waving it as a carrot.

B: Exactly. And they even mention what his proof actually was.

R: Maybe it's a Bigfoot carcass and he's worried he's going to be prosecuted under his own new law. He's waiting for some sort of grand treatment.

S: But just to be clear, you were quoting just there Todd Standing, who's a Bigfoot researcher, not the member of parliament, Mike Lake.

B: Okay.

P: That's important.

S: He's the one who said, I will make my findings public. He said, Bigfoot is real. That's a researcher who's saying that he's got the secret evidence that Bigfoot is real.

J: Yeah, he said he has 12 seconds. He has 12 seconds of Bigfoot roaming Canadian Western Rocky Mountains.

P: You guys think he found another foot in a garbage can?

E: Oh, yeah.

P: He might have. He might have.

B: Imagine the best 12 seconds of footage you could imagine and still wouldn't be good enough.

J: To think that grown people sit around their living rooms and they talk about Bigfoot.

S: Here's one question I had. Let's say we list Bigfoot as endangered. Then what? What do we do about it?

E: Then we grant money.

P: Yeah, of course. Exactly. Then you start pouring money in.

S: To do what?

P: That's exactly right, Evan.

B: Then he would put his video on YouTube and we'd all finally believe it because he would have the ultimate proof.

S: But I mean, are people hunting Bigfeet? Are we taking away their natural habitat? I mean, what do we do differently?

E: It goes to a fund so that these cryptozoologists can take that money and study the phenomenon.

S: Is this a backdoor way of funding Sasquatch research?

E: Sure.

P: Plus, you've got to hang signs. No Sasquatch hunting. You've got to find all kinds of things I could think of to do.

J: I have an official skeptics guide announcement. Ready?

S: Yes.

J: This is addressed to the guy, Mike Lake, who wants this done. Mike, grow the fuck up.

P: You can't say that.

R: I think that your announcement might need to be censored.

E: I can't accept grow up.

P: You can't say that.

Vegan Parents Convicted (14:39)

• www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8P102RO0&show_article=1
  
  www.ajc.com/metro/content/printedition/2007/05/03/metvegan0503a.html
  

S: Another item that is a bit controversial. Parents were convicted of murder for allowing their six-week-old child to starve to death. Apparently, they were feeding the child who was born at home.

P: In a bathtub.

S: It was born at home in a bathtub. They were feeding it since birth for the six weeks of its life. They were feeding it a diet of apple juice and soy milk.

P: Soy milk, which had a warning on it not to be used for infants.

S: Right. Apparently, the parents were trying to maintain a vegan lifestyle. They were trying to maintain a vegan lifestyle with their baby. The baby starved to death. It lost weight, withered away, and then eventually died.

J: That's horrible.

S: All these cases, you try to maybe derive some kind of lessons from them. But the bottom line is they're always messy. Because there's always lots of other mitigating details about the case. What I found interesting in reading about it is that the parents were convicted for murder. And the prosecutors made the case that they deliberately killed their baby. Their infant. Not that the baby died of their stupidity and neglect. Not that it was that would have been negligent manslaughter or something of that equivalent. So the prosecutors actually made the case that it was deliberate murder.

J: That's ridiculous.

S: And I couldn't find anything convincing to make me think that that was actually the case.

R: There is something compelling for that case, obviously.

B: The baby died.

R: And the baby died. And the fact that the couple, they weren't feeding the baby a vegan diet, first of all. They were not feeding the baby. And that is the primary reason why the baby died.

P: I absolutely agree with Rebecca. They had a medical examiner, a nutritionist, doctors from the hospital, which by the way was across the street. And they said the child was not just fed the wrong diet. It wasn't fed. It was underfed drastically. And the guy wouldn't take the baby to the hospital or any doctors because he was worried about germs. He was afraid to go places.

R: You know, after reading everything that's been, all the different articles on it, it seems to me that, this is pure conjecture, but it seems to me that they had a baby. They didn't want the baby anymore. They came up with an idea to kill the baby and blame it on a vegan lifestyle that they previously hadn't ever told anyone about. They became vegans to pass off the death of this child.

B: Did they ever hear of adoption?

R: Not at all.

P: Well, I mean, again, that's pure conjecture because according to the grandmother, the guy had all kinds of crazy ideas. I think it's implied anyway by her that they were vegans for some time. That's implied by the mother of the father of the child.

S: So there are basically two interpretations here. We don't know what the right interpretation is. We didn't hear the testimony that the jury did. One is that this is all just a cover or a defense, but the fact is they fed the baby too little and maybe it was a deliberate attempt at getting rid of it. And that's what the conviction was. So that's what the jury ultimately decided.

P: It's interesting to note there were four vegetarians on the jury. Perhaps not vegans, but vegetarians.

S: The other interpretation is that Jade Sanders and Lamont Thomas, they're just dumb and have a lot of quacky beliefs or quirky beliefs. And not necessarily that just being a vegan is itself quirky or nonsensical. It's just that their individual beliefs were bizarre. It was beyond just being a vegan. They also had this really silly fear of hospitals and doctors. They had the baby at home. You watch a kid lose weight and waste away over six weeks and do not seek medical attention at any time. That's either a really bizarre belief system or deliberate.

R: I can't even think of a belief system that would encompass feeding a child soy milk and apple juice until it dies. And not even enough to let it survive. There's really no belief system that would encompass something like that.

S: I'm talking about their individual beliefs. And maybe they thought that this is what it meant to be vegan. And to be clear, you're right, this is not what a vegan would do. I think they would feed them soy formula, and formula that's intended for an infant or whatever.

P: For vegan children who survive.

R: Yeah, in fact, I don't know many six-week-old children that are fed T-bones. It's pretty okay to have a vegan baby and raise it in a healthy manner.

S: It's either breast milk or formula for the first year. That's it, right?

R: The reason why there was a bit of a discussion about whether we should even talk about it is because I just don't see how this is a case for a skeptical discussion.

S: Well, the speculation, if you read a lot of the comments on the news articles, there's lots of speculation. Not only just the issue of was it deliberate or was it just their own stupidity, but if it weren't deliberate, what is it about the thinking in these people that led them to this? I think there are some very irrational components to their thinking. Again, we don't know exactly what they were thinking, we're just inferring this from the stories that we have, that either they had a morbid fear of mainstream medicine and hospitals and doctors, and perhaps also they had some bizarre ideas about what was healthy to feed an infant, and they didn't seek proper advice, they didn't seek proper information, and it led them to decisions which were horrendous. This is, again, under the assumption that it was not intentional, but just stupid on their part.

R: I understand what you're saying there, but that's a ton of assumptions to make on something we don't really have all the facts on, when we've got a case that has been made and a jury has made up their mind.

P: What do you make of the fact that the first time they actually took the baby to see a doctor was on April 25th, 2004, after the kid was dead? That's the first time they brought it to see a doctor.

R: I think that all fits in with the idea that they deliberately did not want this child and murdered it.

J: Steve and I and Bob were discussing this last week, about how parenthood today it's a right, but we were like, you know what, it should be a privilege.

S: You were saying that, Jay, we were not saying that, you were saying it.

J: The world is going to disagree with me, but I cannot swallow this type of negligence. If these people murdered their baby, that's one thing, but if they were so stupid that their child died because they just simply didn't feed it, these people are...

P: Well, they weren't convicted of stupidity, they were convicted of murder. And are going to jail for life. For life. Both of them.

S: That's right.

Dr. Novella appears on Beyond Reality radio (21:33)

• Dr. Novella appeared on the Beyond Reality radio show with Jason and Grant to discuss skepticism and demonic possession.
  http://www.planetparanormal.com/podcast/index.php?id=315

S: One quick announcement, more of a news item. I'm going to be on the Beyond Reality radio show this Saturday, so this will be just right as this podcast is being uploaded. This is Saturday, May 12th, at 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

P Have you done this show already, Steve?

S: No, it's going to be live. It'll be live, and you can listen to it live. I think it's also then recorded as a podcast that you can then download after the fact and listen to it as well. Now, this is a Beyond Reality radio with Jason and Grant, and these are the guys who do the Ghost Hunters on the SyFy channel. But the radio show is new. They've only had a couple of episodes out. I think this is like the third or fourth one that I'll be on. We're going to be on discussing demonology with John Zafis. You guys know who that is?

E: I think I do.

S: He's the Warrens' nephew, Ed and Lorraine Warren's nephew. Got into ghost hunting with Ed and Lorraine Warren and then went on to a career in demonology. So it should be a lively discussion.

P: Did he badmouth him after he went on to his own career, Steve?

S: I don't know.

P: Like everyone else?

S: I don't know. Maybe not, because it was family.

J: Steve, have you met him through the Warrens?

S: No, I don't think I've ever met him.

R: How about a quick recap on who the Warrens are for new listeners?

S: Yeah, I guess you're right. Ed and Lorraine Warren are probably one of the most, if not the most, famous ghost hunters.

P: Well, were, Steve.

S: Well, Lorraine is still around. Ed passed away, what, one or two years ago?

R: Just last year, wasn't it?

S: Yeah, just last year. I know we announced it on this podcast. It's been since we've been doing the podcast. They're Connecticut-based and operated throughout New England. They were most famous, I think, for the Amityville Horror that they investigated, which they endorsed to their discredit. So they were basically gullible ghost hunters. They spawned hundreds, I think is not an exaggeration, of spinoff ghost hunting groups throughout Connecticut and New England. I mean, you can't swing a dead cat in Connecticut without hitting a ghost hunter who was formerly affiliated with the Warrens. So we'll see how that goes on Saturday. It's possible that this may become a long-term relationship if this works out well. We'll see how it goes.

J: Steve, you're going head-to-head with him?

S: Yeah.

B: I can't wait for that.

S: Should be fun. Well, let's move on to your emails and questions.

Questions and E-mails

Corrections and Clarifications (23:54)

1) Re: Georgetown Guyana is in South America, no Africa

2) Deaths due to the European Witch Hunts
www.gendercide.org/case_witchhunts.html

3) Still more on the Reichstag Fire
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/05/skepticism_undermined_by_insufficient_kn_1.php#more

4) Electromagnetic Sensitivity

S: First, a number of corrections and clarifications from last week's show. I have to say, just as a pathetic excuse, last week, as I mentioned at the time, actually, I had just gotten off the train from the AAN meeting and we had to record the show a day late. It was right after I got home. I didn't spend as much time as I usually do prepping the show. And a higher-than-average number of factual errors managed to creep into the show last week. Actually, it was totally due to the fact that Perry wasn't around to keep us straight.

R: No doubt.

P: Amen.

S: But the first one is just a straight-up factual error. We talked about the old woman who was lynched for being a vampire in Georgetown, Guyana. And I mentioned that it was in Africa. In fact, Guyana is in South America. I think I was confusing it with Ghana, G-H-A-N-A, which is in Africa. But the story took place in Guyana, G-U-Y-A-N-A.

J: Because you were smoking ganja, Steve? What's going on?

R: Good one, Jay.

S: Also during that piece, we talked about witch hunts. And we talked about the European witch hunts, which is actually the biggest, longest-sustained witch hunt. In fact, there were many, many deaths. I think I threw out the figure that there were millions of deaths due to the European witch hunts. There's actually a little bit of a back story to that, too. At the AAN meeting, which was in Boston, I took a day trip with my family to Salem. And I did the Salem Witch Museum.

J: Was it scary?

S: No. My daughters didn't think it was scary.

P: No, it's a total tourist trap.

S: Yeah, it is.

P: There's no fear left up in Salem, believe me.

S: It was historical. It was the history of the witch hunts. Part of the presentation, I think this was the live tour part, they talked about the other witch hunts, including the European witch hunts. And I think that that figure stuck in my head from that experience. Although I couldn't find that information on their website to verify that I heard it and remembered it correctly. But that's where I remembered that from, just recently. But it turns out that, actually, for some time, there was this popular belief that there were millions of people killed in the European witch hunts. Figures up to 9 million were quoted by some. Although, usually, to exaggerate the severity of the witch hunts, to make a political point or a social point. It turns out that more modern estimates range from about 40,000 or 50,000 at the low end to about 100,000 at the upper end. So that's still a lot of people-

E: Mostly women, Steve.

S: It was 80% women, 20% men.

P: Well, Steve, I remember reading a piece with you several years ago about the Malleus Maleficarum.

S: Yes, that's the book that started it all.

P: Yeah, the instruction book for the Inquisitors and witch hunters and so forth. And that had a range as wide as 600,000 to 9 million. I mean, that's a big range. That's as much as they can narrow it down, at least at this date.

S: Well, now I think it's actually been down even further from about 40,000 to 100,000 now is the range that modern historians are putting onto it. There's actually four. So number three is, this is more of an extension than a correction. We talked about the Reichstag fire two weeks ago and the fact that some 9-11 conspiracy theorists say that just as Hitler burned the Reichstag in order to solidify his power and take away the civil liberties in Germany at the time, Bush pulled off 9-11 in order to justify going to war with Afghanistan and Iraq. And we talked about how silly that is and how poor the comparison was. And then last week, we read an email from a German listener who told us that, in fact, it was well known at the time that the person convicted for doing the fire didn't do it and that it was pulled off by Hitler's guys and therefore they didn't pull off the conspiracy. Well, it was pointed out today in Orak's blog, Respectful Insolence, and he wrote a very nice blog, something which I'll link to in our notes page, that, in fact, modern historians think that Hitler's people, the Nazis, did not burn the Reichstag, that it was actually done by a communist, which is what Hitler said, and that it was just a fortuitous event, fortuitous for Hitler, and he immediately seized upon it opportunistically in order to then advance his agenda, basically create a hysterical fear of communists and use that to essentially take away all the civil liberties in Germany, which then later became sort of the standard under the Nazi rule. So, in fact, and Orak makes the point that that is actually the most damning point to make about that as a poor historical example of 9-11, that, in fact, Hitler used that event but didn't do it, and that sort of reinforces the logical fallacy of, I think it's called, qui bono, who benefits, saying that if somebody benefited from an event, they must have caused it. Well, Hitler benefited from that event, but that doesn't mean he caused it, and, in fact, he probably didn't, just like George Bush may have enacted agendas based upon 9-11. That doesn't mean he caused 9-11.

P: I mean, I have read and heard on a thousand documentaries that it was Hitler's people that brought it on.

S: Yeah and I think it's still a little controversial, although Orak makes his case, and he cites some very responsible historians. I did a lot of reading on the internet. Again, I'm not a historian or an expert on Nazi Germany, but a lot of sites either don't mention it at all, they just say this is what happened. They don't mention the controversy. Some historians believe that it was pulled off by Hitler's people, although Orak says that those were less credible, and that the most credible direct eyewitness accounts say that it probably was just this lone guy, a lone nut communist, who was basically trying to trigger a communist uprising against Hitler and the Nazis.

P: That's good work, Boynt.

S: Yeah, and then it backfired because it was used to sort of say, see, we have to root out the communists from Germany. So it's interesting. And of course, if true, Orak is correct, that is the best point to make about that historical event and why it is such a poor analogy to 9-11. There's also other historical events that 9-11 conspiracy theorists point to. In fact, some of them have the gall to point to Pearl Harbor, saying that historians think that FDR knew about it, that we knew about the Japanese attack and let it happen so that it could justify our entry into World War II. That's generally considered by historians to be an absurd position. And some also point to the Maine, the blowing up of the Maine, which got us into the Spanish-American War.

P: Remember the Maine.

S: Remember the Maine. And in fact, it was immediately blamed by the press, actually. This is interesting. There are two disanalogies. One is that it wasn't the government that blamed the explosion of the Maine on the Spanish. It was the press. And the government in fact did not go there, not blame it on the Spanish. And in fact, right now, the best historical evidence that we have suggests that it was probably an accidental explosion. They hit a mine or there was some coal dust blew up or something. Not that we did it. It wasn't done by the United States. The Spanish didn't do it, and the press was wrong to blame the Spanish. And it did foment our entry into the Spanish-American War, but it wasn't a conspiracy carried out or a quote-unquote false flag operation. So all of the historical examples that the 9-11 truth has thrown at us as examples of previous false flag operations actually have these significant disanalogies. None of them were actually conspiracies carried out by the government in order to advance an agenda. So they're all disanalogies.

J: Steve, even if there was an exact analogy that was very, very similar, so what?

S: You could even, as we mentioned, acknowledge that maybe somebody would carry out a false flag operation, even though you can't point to an actual legitimate historical example. But the ultimate disanalogy is in the scope of the conspiracy. It still says nothing about the ability for the government to carry out an operation of the size and complexity of 9-11 and keep it secret without any evidence coming to light or falling into the hands of Bush's numerous ideological and political enemies. So that's the ultimate disanalogy as well. The last bit, this is just an extension. Last week we talked about an email discussing electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome. I talked about, generically, how these syndromes come into being. In the brief time I had to do research before last show, I couldn't find any published studies on it. Now I've had another week to do more research and I've also had some emails point to me in some good directions. I wasn't using the best terms in the initial searches that I did because I think I was searching under electromagnetic sensitivity. In fact, the proper term is electromagnetic hypersensitivity. And when you search under that term, you do pull up some published studies. So there are actually a number of published studies. There's around 30 or so looking at whether or not this thing actually exists. Basically, if you look at all of the studies that have been published, they're almost all completely negative. And the ones that are weakly positive or have some positive results have some significant limitations to them. So, again, the overall pattern of the research is what you would expect to find from a phenomenon that doesn't exist. There's not just an absence of evidence for this. The evidence that we have is actually negative. It says that it probably doesn't exist.

J: Do you think that woman, she's actually experiencing what she says, though?

S: The woman that was referenced in the article that we talked about last week who believes that she has this syndrome, EHS, electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome. I think she has symptoms. These people have real symptoms. The question is that the symptoms are coming from something else that is yet to be diagnosed, and they're settling prematurely on a false diagnosis. Or the symptoms are based upon either anxiety or depression. Or they may be more generic symptoms, the kind of symptoms that most people would develop with time. Or they may have some real, just undiagnosed syndrome, but this is offered, or whatever. They settle upon this, and they're compelled by the nonspecific symptoms. Symptoms that don't really go very far to establishing a specific diagnosis.

Evolution Challenge (35:49)

Hello All, just as Randi has his million dollar challenge, it appears that the Creationist now have theres; Robert Comfort, the minister in the video with Kirk Cameron who use a banana to disprove atheism, have offered $10,000 to anyone that can prove a transition from one species to another.

Any takers?

Greg Lloyd
West Chester, OH US

www.intelligentdesignversusevolution.com/

S: The next email comes from Greg Lloyd, and he writes, Hello all, just as Randy has his million-dollar challenge, it appears that the creationists now have theirs. Robert Comfort, I think it's Ray Comfort. Ray Comfort, the minister in the video with Kirk Cameron, who uses a banana to disprove atheism, has offered $10,000 to anyone that can prove a transition from one species to another. Any takers? From Greg Lloyd in Westchester, Ohio, U.S.

E: $10,000.

S: This is a totally insincere, fake offer. This is not legitimate at all.

J: The goalposts will move every time you come up with something.

S: He doesn't have to move the goalpost. The goalpost is so far out in left field, to mix my sports metaphors, that it's worthless. Let me read the offer. The $10,000 offer, a transitional form, or a missing link, is an example of one species evolving into another species. Excited scientists thought they had found one when they discovered Archaeopteryx. The fossil led to the theory that the dinosaurs did not become extinct, but rather all turned into birds. Yeah, they all turned into birds.

E: That's exactly what we're saying.

S: This guy's ignorance of evolution is astounding. The Field Museum in Chicago displayed what was believed to be an Archaeopteryx fossil on October 19, 1997. It was hailed as Archaeopteryx, the bird that rocked the world. However, Dr. Alan Fiducia, that guy's name always comes up, evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina, said paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earthbound feather dinosaur, but it's not. It is a bird, a perching bird, and no amount of paleobabble is going to change that. It's from Science, February 5, 1993. Now this guy, Fiducia, just for a little background, he has an alternate fossil early bird lineage that he's pushing, and it's basically totally dead in the water. That's why this guy's citing a 14 year old quote. So here's my challenge. I will give $10,000 to the person to the first person who can prove to me that they have found a genuine living transitional form. And then in quotes, he explains what he means by that. A lizard that produced a bird, or a dog that produced kittens, or a sheep that produced a chicken, or even an Archaeopteryx dinosaur that produced a bird.

R: So prove my outrageous straw man win money.

S: Species do not cross no matter how long you leave them. The whole of creation is proof that evolution is truly a fairy tale for grown-ups. Oh my. This is a monument to this guy's own ignorance. So yeah, you hit the nail on the head, Rebecca. This is just a ginormous straw man. No biologist, no thinking person, nobody, I would say, I think I could say, thinks that evolution happened by dogs giving birth to kittens, or even worse, sheep giving birth to a chicken. That's absurd out of his face.

B: It makes so little sense. I mean, he says, show me a dog that produced kittens, but wouldn't that be missing the one thing he's looking for? A transitional form? You know, where's the half cat? Where's the half dog?

S: That's what he's saying. He's not even transitional. You got your two end points,

B: but there's nothing in the middle.

S: What if I came to him with a dog and kittens, and said, alright, this dog gave birth to these kittens. Give me the $10,000. I mean, anyway, so...

R: And I think this is a good time to mention that Ray Comfort and his lapdog, Kirk Cameron, got their keisters handed to them by the Rational Response Squad just the other day on Nightline in a debate where they tried to prove that God was real without using the Bible, which required them to use the Bible repeatedly. It was amusing.

B: Oh, I want to see that.

S: These guys are so dumb that it's actually a good thing for us because they're out there representing the creationists, and they're not good at it. They're really dumb. You know, they're not like...Gish had his shtick down there, Dwayne Gish. He's a good debater. He had the Gish gallop going. He was a problem. These guys are really bad. They're really bad at presenting the creationists' side. This guy's website, it's a joke. I mean, if you wanted to lampoon the creationists to try to make them look stupid, you couldn't do better than these guys.

R: Oh, yeah. And for those who haven't connected the dots, he's also the banana guy and the peanut butter guy.

P: They have a Steve Hill to climb. Give him a break.

S: I actually sent them an email. I sent them an email from their website and asked them a couple of questions. I do a science podcast. I just have a couple questions about your challenge. They haven't answered yet. We'll see. If they give an answer, I'll let you know. Basically, part one was asking, so what are the actual criteria for winning? And second, why do you think this is relevant when no scientist ever said that this is in fact what happens?

J: Steve, what's the point? Why are they doing this?

S: It's a stunt. We got a $10,000 offer and no scientist can match it. That's all. It's just a rhetorical stunt to feed their believers, their followers. Let's go on to our interview.

Interview with Barry Beyerstein (40:07)

• www.sfu.ca/psyc/faculty/beyerstein/
  
  Barry Beyerstein is Professor of Psychology and a member of the Brain Behaviour Laboratory at Simon Fraser University. A native of Edmonton, Alberta, he received his bachelor's degree from Simon Fraser University and a Ph.D. in Experimental and Biological Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Beyerstein's research has involved many areas related to his primary scholarly interests: brain mechanisms of perception and consciousness and the effects of drugs on the brain and mind. He also has interests in the sense of smell and its lesser-known contributions to human cognition and emotion. His work in these areas and his interest in the philosophy and history of science have also led him to be skeptical of many occult and New Age claims. This has prompted him to investigate the scientific status of many questionable products in the areas of medical and psychological treatment, as well as a number of dubious self-improvement techniques. In these pursuits, Dr. Beyerstein serves as chair of the Society of B. C. Skeptics and he is a Fellow and a member of the Executive Council of the Committee of Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) (Formally the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal - CSICOP). Headquartered in New York, CSI promotes scientific critiques of occult and pseudoscientific claims in the media, in academe, and in the marketplace. Dr. Beyerstein is on the editorial board of CSI's journal, The Skeptical Inquirer. He was also an elected to the Council for Scientific Medicine, a US organization that provides critiques of unscientific and fraudulent health products. He is a founding member of Canadians for Rational Health policy and a Contributing Editor of the journal, The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine. He has published in these areas himself and is a frequent commentator on such topics on TV and Radio and in the print media.
  

S: Joining us now is Dr. Barry Beierstein. Barry, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

BB: Well, thanks very much. Lovely to be here.

S: Barry is a professor of psychology, a member of the Brain Behavior Laboratory at the Simon Fraser University. He's also a native of Edmonton, Alberta, so he's joining us from Canada. He also is an executive member of CSI, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, formerly CSICOP, and you're a contributing editor on the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine. I'm also an associate editor on the same journal, so we've worked together on that project. In our discussions before the show, Barry, over email, you mentioned that you were involved in some projects with some students involving herbalism. Can you tell us about that?

BB: Yes. Well we've long felt that people who sell these things, and you know yourself, not all of them are bad, not all of them are worthless, not all of them are dangerous, but the trouble is, I think, that most of the people who sell them don't know which ones are safe and effective and which ones are dangerous and which ones are just worthless placebos. And so, what we did was mounted a bit of a sting operation where we sent some students out to a variety of places that sell herbs, and I'm sorry to say that one group of them were registered pharmacists. These were duly registered pharmacies that were selling these things too, and they just asked some questions about, and we, in particular, were interested in Cava Cava, because that was a cause celebre at the time, and our ethics review board refused us permission to go completely anonymously, and in a way it was a good thing, because if they said the things that they said to our students after they identified themselves as students looking for information on herbs, you can perhaps imagine what they might have said if they thought these were just ordinary customers that were coming to buy, and some of the things they said were pretty outrageous and dangerous, and we sort of expected that from the vitamin stores and the herb sellers and the traditional Chinese medicine people, but we were kind of shocked with some of the things that the registered pharmacists would say too.

S: I have nothing against pharmacists and pharmacology. By the way, I didn't mention it, but you're a psychopharmacologist, right?

BB: That's right, yeah.

S: So you have some expertise in pharmacology. I have found, just as a practicing clinical physician, that a lot of professionals who are not MDs have felt a little bit empowered by the alternative medicine movement to do therapeutic modalities on their own initiative without a physician. So in other words, nurses could do therapeutic touch without a physician's order or oversight, so they like it for that reason. And pharmacologists who are otherwise, or pharmacists who are otherwise certainly legitimate professionals, now with herbalism, hey, they can practice herbalism without just following the orders of a physician or other oversight. So do you think that that is part of the lore, that why some pharmacists are falling into that?

BB: Oh, sure. I mean, this is a huge moneymaker, as you know. In fact, a lot of the big herb companies are actually owned by the big pharmaceutical companies. They don't advertise the fact, but it's a huge moneymaker. And as you know, in the United States and here in Canada, too, the people who sell these things have been very successful in getting laws passed to their benefit that treat these things as foods, not as drugs. And of course, they make drug-like health claims about these things, about their safety and about their efficacy and what they'll work for and that sort of thing. And yet, they don't have to pass the same stringent rules of safety and effectiveness that pharmaceuticals do. And I think that's outrageous.

S: Right. And it sounds like what you found is that they indeed were using them as drugs. They were making claims for them as drugs.

BB: Absolutely. Health Canada here ostensibly regulates these things, used to be fairly stringent about not letting herb sellers make actual medical claims for particular diseases and particular effectiveness with symptoms and things like that. But that has largely been diluted to the point. And even if the law were more stringent than it was, people pretty well ignore it. And what our students found was that these people were quite willing to make medical diagnoses, medical recommendations and to recommend herbs for medical conditions. And that's what kind of shocked us.

S: Right. So, in order to get their favorable legislation through, they say what they have to say. And they basically present it as these are used as supplements and they don't make medical claims, etc. But in practice, all that goes out the window. Once they have the green light to sell these things, they're practicing medicine without a license. That's the bottom line.

BB: That's right. And I know lots of people in the regulatory industries and regulatory agencies in the U.S. and Canada and I have very high respect for them. These are people of knowledge and integrity, but they're just absolutely swamped. The volume of this sort of thing, they can't watch everything that comes into the country. And that's another big problem, the amount of adulteration from offshore, things that are mislabeled or contain pharmaceutical ingredients that are not listed and are not legal to sell without a prescription and contamination and adulteration, both in the growing and in the preparation and storage stages and things like that. I mean, people just are not aware of how much of a risk they're taking when they put their health in the hands of these people that sell these things.

S: That's right. By the way, I mean, this is just out so you probably haven't seen this, but there was an article published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings that this surveyed people's use of herbs, and just to see how many people were following the current evidence-based guidelines. And what they found was that basically two thirds of people who purchased herbs or used herbs were treating medical conditions and were outside of the evidence-based guidelines, which is pretty bad, and that's basically in line with what you're saying. So, again, this was published just this week.

BB: Oh, great. Well, I haven't seen that, but I will surely look it up because it's important. And the other offshoot of that, of course, that you know very well is that a lot of people use these things and they're slightly embarrassed by it, or they think their family physician or specialist, for that matter, will be disapproving, and so they use these things themselves, and then they don't tell their doctors. And, of course, many of these herbs will interact with pharmaceuticals that they've been legitimately prescribed by their doctors, or in many cases, the enzymes that break down the active ingredients of the herbs are the same ones that detoxify the prescription drugs they're taking, and if the doctor doesn't know that, of course, some fairly serious interactions or overdoses of that sort can occur.

S: Yeah, I think the prior survey showed only about 20% report their supplements to their physicians because they don't think that they're drugs, but the bottom line is that what you're saying is herbs are drugs. That's the bottom line.

BB: Absolutely. If they are biologically active and they're capable of interacting with body systems and affect symptoms, well then, yes, of course. And you know that a huge number of drugs that have been purified and are used every day in scientific medicine came out of a herbal background. It's just that there's nothing like it. There are many, many, many plants that have very useful and even safe, effective ingredients in them. It's just that we know what those ingredients are. We can purify them. We know the doses to take, and we can regulate the doses, which, of course, is very hard to do in the kind of administrations and we teas and things that herbs are generally consumed in. And so I'm not hostile to these things at all. In fact, I teach a big section on ethnopharmacology in my drugs course that I teach at the University. And it's just that I want these things to be pure and I want them to be tested under proper blinded, randomized clinical control trials and if they pass for, first of all, safety and then effectiveness, well then I have no quarrel at all with them.

S: Barry, what are the regulations with regard to herbal supplements in Canada? We've talked a lot on our podcast about the regulations in the United States.

BB: Or lack thereof.

S: Or lack thereof. The DSHEA, so-called Supplement Health and Education.

BB: Yes, exactly.

S: What does Canada have?

BB: Very similar kind of thing, I'm sorry to say. The Health Protection Branch of Health Canada used to be very stringent about these things and our former Minister of Health a couple of ministries ago was kind of a new agey, touchy-feely sort of guy and he thought that these things should be more available and, of course, there was an ethnic aspect to all of this too and a lot of ethnic communities that were important in the Canadian political context were also putting pressure on their elected representatives and so on to legalize and deregulate these things. The people who put a lot of money into advertising and marketing these things were very generous with their campaign contributions. The bottom line is that, I'm sorry to say, we're not better off here than you are in the USA. There is an Office of Natural Health Products but it's run by a naturopath and I've written stuff you probably know from articles we've written for Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine that they believe an awful lot of pseudo-scientific stuff and he's the director of the whole thing and a lot of the people who sit on the regulatory board have direct conflicts of interest. They're involved in selling and marketing these kinds of things and if there were a parallel thing like that where the big pharmaceutical companies had huge influence directly on regulatory boards that oversaw their sales people would be up in arms but they don't seem to think this is such a bad idea, I'm sorry to say.

S: It's interesting how the promoters of herbs and also alternative medicine in general have been so successful in creating a double standard for themselves and you're absolutely right. There's a lot of legitimate scandals in this country about the pharmaceutical industry having too much influence over the FDA for example and yet here you go, you've got the wolf in charge of the hen house where all of the CAM regulations are all proponents people with clear conflicts of interest are put in charge and there's no outcry about that. There's this incredible double standard.

BB: Exactly.

J: Hey Barry, do you have any drugs in particular that you have a personal problem with or that exceptionally upset you? Herbs.

S: What are the worst ones?

BB: That's a difficult question. Ginseng is one that worries me because for instance it can cause real problems with people with diabetes for instance. It is so ingrained in the culture that everybody thinks of it as totally innocuous and it's got digitalis-like substances in it that people with heart conditions shouldn't mess with. It has so many different ingredients in it that there are probably a lot of people who shouldn't use it, certainly not without strict medical supervision and I'm not quite sure what a trained medical doctor would prescribe it for but that's one that comes to mind that worries me. Kava, we looked at works in the brain on the same receptors that the benzodiazepines do and so what worries me there is that it's interactive with all kinds of sedatives and with ethyl alcohol and again, people don't know what they're taking and they don't know what they ought not to take with it and kava I think is in fact probably one of the safer and one of the perhaps even more useful herbs if it were taken in the right doses at the right times and not in conjunction with other things but that's what we found in our surveys was that people weren't getting those cautions and recommendations and people just have this scary notion that if anything is natural, it's safe and I point out to them that tobacco is a natural substance and some of the most virulent poisons known to human society are the mycotoxins that come out of mushrooms and things like that so there's no guarantee that anything that's natural is necessarily going to be safe and yet people have this very starry-eyed romantic view that these things can't harm them and of course they can.

J: I bet you hear a lot but Barry, it's natural!

BB: Oh absolutely! Germs and viruses and prions and so on, they're all natural too but I don't think I want any of them in my body if I can keep them out.

S: So let's just switch gears here a little bit, Barry. You actually were invited to China to look at traditional Chinese medicine. Can you give us a summary of what you found?

BB: Yeah, in fact the report of what we saw Wallace Sampson, who of course is the founding editor of Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine and Andy Skolnick who's a well-known science writer and I were asked to go and visit several of these sites and we actually wrote up our experiences in the Skeptical Inquirer. Basically we were treated extremely well. These people really wanted to show us everything and but I'm sorry to say that the practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine in China are not as well integrated with the scientific community as they claim and we often hear here in the West and in fact we were the guests of the China Association for Science and Technology, sort of like the AAAS in China and what they really wanted us to see was that these people really are standing alone much more than we tend to think of and that the vast majority of medicine in China is of scientific sort. It's not Western, it's just scientific medicine and they do it as well and thoroughly as we do or anybody else does and again for historical reasons, political reasons, I do have a parallel traditional system but it's relatively small. We were told something like maybe at most 20% of medical care comes through the traditional system and of course where that came from was after the revolution there were only a few thousand Western trained doctors in all of China which was already 600 million people at that time if I remember correctly and they had to do something and so the barefoot doctor tradition got started and they did some really good things in public health and improving the potability of drinking water and perinatal nutrition and obstetrics and things that didn't require a lot of high tech machinery and drugs and so on but at the same time they just didn't have the money, they didn't have the training, they didn't have anything to get full-fledged scientific medicine out to everybody and so they kind of concocted this fiction that Chinese medicine was not only as good but it was even better and it was a badge of political reliability to prefer it. Well of course we now know that Chairman Mao and all the cadres of the Communist Party and all the bigwigs of the military and so on, they never used traditional Chinese medicine at all because they had the best that money could buy but they couldn't afford to give that to everybody and so they spread this notion that acupuncture was as good as chemical analgesia and stuff that just was never true but became very popular here.

S: It was all propaganda.

BB: Absolutely, yeah and it succeeded very well.

S: But it sounds like from what you're saying that traditional Chinese medicine in China is on the wane and they are instituting scientific medicine as much as they can afford.

BB: I think that's a very apt way of putting it that there are a number of Chinese academics who are speaking out now and I must say that's still some danger to themselves. I mean they're not going to be purged like they were during the Cultural Revolution but we were talking earlier about well placed allies of the alternative medicine movement in the US and Canada. Well same thing there that a lot of the people who promote traditional Chinese medicine are well placed and well protected in their political system as well and so these academic critics, I've been back to China a number of times and they don't really need us. They understand as well as we do what the problem is but they do kind of need our support and that's really what people like me have done.

S: Just to shift gears a little bit again still more to your psychology work. As a skeptical psychologist, one of the things that you've contributed to the skeptical movement is a study of how people are deceived. Why is it that we tend to arrive at conclusions which are false or the product of as you say self-deception and wishful thinking. Let's talk about that for a minute. Have you done studies in that specific area?

BB: Well I've stolen most of them. My mentors in this are my fellow psychologist James Alcock from Toronto and Ray Hyman from the University of Oregon who really are experts in that area of it. I certainly have read a lot and if I've contributed anything I've tried to bring the knowledge that's been accumulating in areas like cognitive psychology and social psychology to bear on this problem that we've talked about already in this discussion. If it were just the case that foolish, ill-educated, low IQ people bought into outrageous ideas that don't work and are even harmful, that would be too bad but that wouldn't require any explanation. That's what you would expect. Survey after survey shows is that when it comes to belief in all kinds of things that the best scientific evidence we have say are dubious at best if not outright disproven and that a lot of the people who believe in these things are not ill-educated, they're not foolish, they're not particularly gullible, certainly not stupid and that's where we need to find some kind of explanation that there have to be some kind of psychological payoffs that make people kind of willfully blind to evidence that argues against their pat hypotheses and things that affect their self-esteem and things that are central to their world view and that sort of thing. They're their basic philosophy and there's a lot of stuff in those areas of psychology that can be used to try to explain in this and other areas why people who aren't incapable of understanding these things and wouldn't make the same mistakes in other areas will make real serious bloopers in areas that have these kind of payoffs for them or they have to protect because they're part of their self-image and things like that and so there is quite a lot of psychology out there. I can't take credit for having discovered it but maybe I've at least picked a useful bit of it to try to explain some of these phenomena that we're faced with all the time.

S: So do you think it's mainly the motivation to believe that overwhelms their logic?

BB: I think that's a big part of it, that critical thinking and logical thinking is not our default mode so to speak. What cognitive psychologists and people studying the brain have come to realize is that we didn't evolve to be logic textbooks by any means. We evolved kind of quick and dirty thinking methods that get things more or less right most of the time and that in our evolutionary past that was probably more advantageous than really careful parsing of data and making decisions by strictly logical rules and things like that and so those things work well enough in a lot of situations but they also lead us down the garden path in a lot of areas especially where there are those emotional things we were talking about or these payoffs for believing and so on and so what we say is that our brains are capable of learning logic and we're capable of critical thinking and that sort of thing but it's a learned add-on. It's something you have to be taught. It's something you have to practice and maybe more than anything else you have to learn to take your lumps because if you apply that kind of critical thinking to your own beliefs it's not always all that nice an experience. None of us likes to have our cherished beliefs questioned and when we do various psychological defense mechanisms kick in to try to defend them and so the critical thinker first of all has to learn how to do these things and then develop a big enough commitment to finding the truth that they're willing to do the sometimes unpleasant job of pricking their own beliefs as well as somebody else's.

S: Right. It's easy to criticize other people's beliefs.

BB: Oh yeah.

S: It's hard when it's your own.

BB: Yeah. Absolutely.

S: Is there one heuristic or fallibility that you find is fairly dominant in leading people astray? I know that's probably an impossible question to answer but what would you say?

BB: I do have a candidate for that and it's the ubiquitous tendency to mistake correlation for causation. That our brains are superb correlation detectors and we find patterns and things. Sometimes they're real and sometimes we impose them on random input and one of the first things that we have to learn as critical thinkers is to not fall into the very easy almost natural trap of thinking that just because two things go together that one necessarily caused the other. I took that herb and my pain went away so the herb must have done it but the logical structure of that argument is exactly the same as I danced and I danced and it rained therefore rain dances must control the weather and when you put it that way everybody will say oh yeah of course but when it comes to I had a backache and so I went to the chiropractor and I got better I say well but how do you know you wouldn't have got better just without doing it or with doing something else or whatever. This idea of a control group you know if I could snap my fingers and make one universal change in the way people think about stuff that would probably be it. Because the lowly control group is the most important innovation in trying to tease apart what is really causal and what's merely co-extensive or correlational.

S: All right well Barry thanks again for joining us.

BB: Okay great well nice job I hope your project continues to thrive.

S: Thank you very much we look forward to having you back sometime.

P: Good night.

BB: Bye bye. Good talking to you.

Science or Fiction (1:04:19)

Question #1: The Rover Spirit has discovered evidence of recent (meaning less than a few million years) volcanic activity on Mars. Question #2: Meteorologists have published a paper showing how global warming will shorten the length of the day. Question #3: Astronomers have discovered an extrasolar planet with a surface temperature of 3700 degrees F (for comparison Mercury gets up to 800 degrees, and Venus gets to 900 degrees)

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 then I challenge you all as well as my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. This week we have another theme. The theme is planetology.

J: Oh boy.

S: It's about planets. Ready? Item number one. The rover Spirit has discovered evidence of recent, meaning less than a few million years, volcanic activity on Mars. Item number two. Meteorologists have published a paper showing how global warming will shorten the length of the day. Shorten the length of an Earth day. And item number three. Astronomers have discovered an extrasolar planet with a surface temperature of 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit and for comparison, Mercury's surface temperature gets up to about 800 degrees and Venus gets up to about 900 degrees. Jay, why don't you go first?

J: The rover Spirit discovered evidence of recent volcanic activity. I have things that I could say right now but I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what to say about that one. Meteorologists have published a paper showing how global warming... Steve, I'm going to select the one about the volcanic activity on Mars as the fake. That's the fake.

S: How come?

J: Well, because if there was volcanic activity on Mars that recently, there would be more obvious signs of it on the planet.

S: Alright, Bob, go next.

B: This one was tricky. Three, the 3,700 degree planet. I'm going to go with that one.

S: You mean you think that's real or that's fake?

B: I think that is real. That is real. Number two, this one initially seemed completely implausible to me. Shorting the day, that has to do with the Earth's rotation. At first, I couldn't really think of a way that the Earth's rotation would be affected by global warming. But if you consider that somehow the melting of the ice caps kind of redistribute the mass around the Earth, it could impact the spin of the Earth which would, of course, affect the length of our day. Even we can measure spin changes and rotation changes in nanoseconds. So even a minor change, that's plausible, I guess, now that I think about it. Number one, evidence that volcanic activity on Mars. I'm surprised... I think I would have come across that. That's fairly big news. I did not see it. So that's less plausible than the others. So I'm going to go with one, the volcanic activity on Mars.

S: Okay, Rebecca?

R: I'm going to go against the grain. I think that there's no such thing as a 3,700 degree planet, because that's just ridiculous.

S: It's just too damn hot.

R: It's too damn hot.

S: Okay, Evan?

E: Yes, I have to agree with Rebecca, that there is no such thing as a extrasolar 3,700 degree Fahrenheit planet, at least that we've discovered yet.

S: Okay, Perry?

P: Well, this one was very tough. You know, they all seem fake. They all seem like fiction. I mean, the first one, the rover Spirit has discovered. Hello, skeptics? Don't believe in spirits. The second one, meteorologists have published paper on global warming, blah, blah, blah. You know, meteorologists? I don't think so. And finally, the last one I went with that one, because that's really really hot.

S: Do you think that was the fake?

J: Big and hot, just like you, Perry.

P: That's a fake one, yeah. 3,700 degrees. It's too hot.

B: I mean, water would be almost boiling.

P: Almost.

R: You'd have to wear sunscreen everywhere.

S: Okay. So we got Bob and Jay on the recent volcanic activity on Mars and everyone else on the really hot planet, which means you all agree that meteorologists have published a paper showing how global warming will shorten the length of the day. You all think that that's real. Bob, you actually hit that one on the head. What they calculated is that the change in global temperatures can redistribute the water on the planet, actually will make it so that there's more water towards the poles and that just like a skater pulling their arms in, that will cause the equator to come in a little bit.

B: Conservation of angular momentum.

S: Because of conservation of angular momentum make the planet spin up a little bit faster which will shorten the day by a little bit.

R: No!

S: By how much, you might ask?

J: Seconds, right?

S: So this is Felix Landerer of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany and this is published in the Mars 20th Journal Geophysical Research and he thinks that the day will decrease by 0.12 thousandths of a second. So watch out for that.

P: Another horror of global warming.

R: You know, I could stand the death of polar bears.

J: Imagine you wake up and the day is shorter.

S: What will you do with your watch? Let's go to number one. Bob and Jay, you thought that the rover Spirit finds evidence of recent volcanic activity on Mars. You thought that was fiction and in fact that one is fiction. That is the fiction. Correct. But this is based on a real story. The rover Spirit did find evidence of Martian volcanic activity, however it's billions of years old. Not millions, so it's ancient, not recent. Mars's crust completely solidified a long time ago and there is definitely evidence of volcanic activity on Mars like volcanoes. But none of them are active. There is no active or recent volcanism on Mars. So they found what they call pyroclastic flows.

B: They are cool.

S: Which means that number three, they discovered an extrasolar planet with a surface temperature of 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit is science. And this was pretty extraordinary. Actually I didn't know how tough that one would be because I wasn't sure if you guys would realize how absolutely extraordinary this is. It is astounding. In fact they're having a hard time understanding how the planet could be so hot.

B: How close is it to its planet?

S: Like many of the extrasolar planets, this one is both big and close to its star. The planet is HD 149026b and it is simply the most exotic, bizarre planet says Harrington who is involved in the research. So they basically said the high heat would make the planet grow slightly so it would look like an ember in space absorbing all incoming light and glowing a dull red.

B: A glowing planet?

J: Hey, what do you think it is?

S: I'm sorry, the planet would glow slightly. They said in order to be this hot it would have to absorb almost all of the light falling on it which means it would have to be it would have to be absolutely black, black, black.

B: Low albedo.

S: And it would have to radiate only in the infrared. So it would basically absorb all light, it would radiate infrared and it would glow so it would be black but with a slightly glowing dull red. So this planet is off the temperature scale we expect for planets so we don't really understand what's going on.

J: They say it's off the hizzy?

S: Yeah, it's off the hizzy. They've only measured the surface temperature of a few planets. Of all the planets they've discovered 230 extrasolar planets but this is only the fourth where we know it's temperature. So it's kind of amazing that the fourth one would be so far out of the range that we know how to explain that we're comfortable. So either that's a somewhat big coincidence. It's not cosmological, not huge out of 230 but it's either quite a coincidence or maybe we're going to find a lot of really more interesting stuff when we start looking closer at these extrasolar planets.

B: And to put it into perspective, lava is 2000 degrees. So this is almost twice as hot as what's required to melt lots of different types of rocks.

S: Yeah. It's real hot. It's outside the comfort zone.

E: It could melt steel.

S: It could melt steel. Don't get crazy, Evan.

J: Fire can't melt steel.

P: They're going to say they poured lava on the World Trade Center. Stupid.

S: Alright, well, well done, Bob and Jay.

Skeptical Puzzle (1:13:29)

This Week's Puzzle

In a skeptical context, if I've been cut up and cured, what has happened to me?


Last Week's Puzzle

This is a guest puzzle this week from Chris Lamb of the UK:

Centuries ago,
A labored magician's trick,
I'm king I had to know,
And sent my wise men quick,
Her hair was not concealed,
They believed but never thought,
And later was revealed,
This fraud was at my fort.

Answer: Mary Tofts
Winner: Adam Price, Seattle

S: Evan, tell us last week's puzzle, please.

E: Centuries ago, a labored magician's trick. I'm a king. I had to know and sent my wise men quick. Her hair was not concealed. They believed but never thought. And later was revealed, this fraud was at my fort. And the answer is Mary Tofts. Mary Tofts.

S: Mary who?

E: T-O-F-T-S. A maidservant from Godalming, England in 1726. She became the subject of considerable controversy when she hoaxed doctors into believing that she had given birth to at least 16 rabbits. Uh-huh.

P: Transitional species. $10,000, please. Thank you.

J: So what did she get out of doing that? What was the point to it?

S: Life wasn't quite so boring for her.

P: They fed her?

S: Couple hundred years later, jerks like us are talking about her?

E: Has to do with a miscarriage she had, apparently.

P: Did anyone get that?

E: Yes, actually.

J: Evan, is that where the Easter Bunny came from?

E: No. Oh, God, no. Easter Bunny came from Easter Island. We all know that.

S: Everyone knows that.

E: Congratulations, Adam Price from Seattle.

S: Ooh, a real name.

E: Yeah. Not a name like a planet somewhere.

J: That's just his board's name. His real name is McPhilly Switz, you know.

S: 1-2-7. Okay. Okay, well, good job, Adam. What's the puzzle for this week?

E: We have a nice short puzzle for everyone this week. Here we go. In a skeptical context, if I've been cut up and cured, what has happened to me?

S: So you're saying surgery is not the answer.

E: Correct. Think skeptical, folks. That's the trick.

P: Let's not give hints away.

E: Good luck, everyone.

S: I have a surgeon friend who likes to say the only way to heal is with steel.

P: That's right.

J: Oh, my God, does he say it like that Steve?

R: Sounds like a surgeon.

E: I know a chiropractor who says the only way to heal is to steal. So you might have been off to something.

P: Evan, you are clever.

R: I see what you did there.

E: Yeah, well, I have my moments.

P: You're a card.

J: Perry knows how to deal a meal.

R: Can we move on?

P: Your humor is much too sophisticated.

R: We need a ctrl+Z for this podcast.

Quote of the Week (1:16:09)

'The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious...the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.'- Albert Einstein

S: Bob, what's the quote of the week?

B: I have a quote from Albert Einstein. The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious, the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

J: He didn't say that.

S: Did you validate that source, Bob?

B: Uh...

P: You're fired.

B: Define validate.

P: Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be taking over the quotes next week.

S: Perry, are you going to take over the quotes?

P: I'll take it over.

S: Perry will do a stint from now on. We'll spread it around. That was a good quote, Bob.

P: Very good.

S: Well, thanks, everyone, for joining me again.

R: Thank you, Steve.

E: I like joining you.

B: Good episode.

J: So smart.

R: A hoot and a holler.

S: Stop sucking up, Jay.

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. Please send us your questions, suggestions, and other feedback; you can use the "Contact Us" page on our website, or you can send us an email to info@theskepticsguide.org'. 'Theorem' is produced by Kineto and is used with permission.

References