Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Friday, August 31, 2018

Parsing the Drake Equation

The Drake Equation is one of those curiosities that is looked upon as valid science by some and as pointless speculation by others.  Here's what it looks like:


Math-phobes, fear not; it's not as hard as it looks.  The idea, which was dreamed up by cosmologist Frank Drake back in 1961, is that you can estimate the number of civilizations in the universe with whom communication might be possible (Nb) by multiplying the probabilities of seven other independent variables, to wit:
R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the fraction of those stars with planets whose planets are in the habitable zone
fl = the fraction of planets in the habitable zone that develop life
fi = the fraction of those planets which eventually develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of those planets with intelligent life whose inhabitants develop the capability of communicating over interstellar distances
L = the average lifetime of those civilizations
Some of those (such as R*) are considered to be understood well enough that we can make a fairly sure estimate of its magnitude.  Others -- such as fp and ne -- were complete guesses in Drake's time.  How many stars had planets?  Could be nearly 100%, or it could be the Solar System was some incredibly fortunate fluke, and we're one of the only planetary systems in existence.  But now, with improvements in the techniques for surveying stars, we're finding planets everywhere we look -- most stars seem to have planets, and some research published just last month by a team of astronomers at the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) has shown that planets could form stable orbits in multiple-star systems, something previously thought extremely unlikely.

That they can do so is fortunate not only for alien intelligence enthusiasts like myself -- as much as half of all stars are thought to be part of multiple-star systems -- but for this guy:


So the estimates keep being revised upward.  The one we still have no real idea about is L -- how long civilizations tend to last.  Carl Sagan, when he described the Drake Equation in his amazing series Cosmos, was pessimistic -- many civilizations, he suggested, lasted long enough to develop weapons of mass destruction, then proceed to blow themselves to smithereens.

But the fact is, we just don't know about L.  But one that was complete speculation -- fl, the fraction of planets in the habitable zone that develop life -- just got a bit of a boost from a study done at the University of Bristol (England).  The researchers, Holly C. Betts, Mark N. Puttick, James W. Clark, Tom A. Williams, Philip C. J. Donoghue, and Davide Pisani, published their results in Nature: Ecology and Evolution last week in a paper titled "Integrated Genomic and Fossil Evidence Illuminates Life's Early Evolution and Eukaryote Origin."  And one of the points the team makes is that once the Earth's surface had cooled sufficiently that water was able to exist in liquid form, life appeared in a relative flash -- while it was still being clobbered every other day by meteorites.

The authors write:
Establishing a unified timescale for the early evolution of Earth and life is challenging and mired in controversy because of the paucity of fossil evidence, the difficulty of interpreting it and dispute over the deepest branching relationships in the tree of life.  Surprisingly, it remains perhaps the only episode in the history of life where literal interpretations of the fossil record hold sway, revised with every new discovery and reinterpretation.  We derive a timescale of life, combining a reappraisal of the fossil material with new molecular clock analyses.  We find the last universal common ancestor of cellular life to have predated the end of late heavy bombardment (>3.9 billion years ago (Ga)).
Besides being of obvious interest to evolutionary geneticists, this should get astronomers' blood pumping; it implies that life originated on Earth when the conditions were still nothing short of hostile, with the corollary that once a planet has conditions that allow liquid water, life probably follows soon thereafter.

The implication being that it's likely that every planet with water that sits in its star's habitable zone has some form of life.

So understandably enough, I think this is way cool.  It doesn't give us any information about the remaining variables we have little information about, especially fi, fc, and L.  There's no particular reason to believe that intelligence is a necessary outcome of evolution; it's tempting to think that the process always drives organisms to be bigger, better, stronger, and smarter, but that's not supported by the evidence.  After all, it bears remembering that by far the dominant life-forms on Earth right now, both in terms of biodiversity and overall numbers, are... insects.

It might be that intelligence sufficient to communicate over interstellar distances is a very uncommon occurrence, which leads to the most likely scenario (in my opinion) being plentiful planets with huge diversity of life, but few that have anything like us.

Still, the galaxy is a big place, with billions of stars, so even if it's unlikely, intelligent life probably exists somewhere.  Which segues into tomorrow's post, which is about the Fermi Paradox.  When told about the Drake Equation, physicist Enrico Fermi famously shrugged his shoulders and said, "Then where is everybody?"

Tomorrow we'll look at a few possible answers -- some of which are considerably more cheerful than others.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from one of my favorite thinkers -- Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke has made several documentaries, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and After the Warming -- the last-mentioned an absolutely prescient investigation into climate change that came out in 1991 and predicted damn near everything that would happen, climate-wise, in the twenty-seven years since then.

I'm going to go back to Burke's first really popular book, the one that was the genesis of the TV series of the same name -- Connections.  In this book, he looks at how one invention, one happenstance occurrence, one accidental discovery, leads to another, and finally results in something earthshattering.  (One of my favorites is how the technology of hand-weaving led to the invention of the computer.)  It's simply great fun to watch how Burke's mind works -- each of his little filigrees is only a few pages long, but you'll learn some fascinating ins and outs of history as he takes you on these journeys.  It's an absolutely delightful read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]




Thursday, August 30, 2018

Going to the source

One of the hardest things for skeptics to fight is the tendency by some people to swallow any damnfool thing they happen to see online.

I had credited this tendency to gullibility.  If you see a catchy meme implying that if you drink a liter of vinegar a day, your arthritis will be cured ("Doctors hate this!  Get well with this ONE WEIRD TRICK!"), and think it sounds plausible, it's just because you don't have the background in science (or logic) to sift fact from fiction.

It turns out, the truth is apparently more complex than this.

According to a trio of psychologists working at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the problem isn't that silly ideas sound plausible to some people; it's that their mindset causes them to weight all information sources equally -- that one guy's blog is just as reliable as a scientific paper written by experts in the field.

(And yes, I'm fully aware of the irony of One Guy writing that in his blog.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Karen Thibaut, Belmans in labo, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The paper, "Using Power as a Negative Cue: How Conspiracy Mentality Affects Epistemic Trust in Sources of Historical Knowledge," was written by Roland Imhoff, Pia Lamberty, and Olivier Klein, and appeared in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin a couple of months ago.  The authors write:
Classical theories of attitude change point to the positive effect of source expertise on perceived source credibility persuasion, but there is an ongoing societal debate on the increase in anti-elitist sentiments and conspiracy theories regarding the allegedly untrustworthy power elite.  In one correlational and three experimental studies, we tested the novel idea that people who endorse a conspiratorial mind-set (conspiracy mentality) indeed exhibit markedly different reactions to cues of epistemic authoritativeness than those who do not: Whereas the perceived credibility of powerful sources decreased with the recipients’ conspiracy mentality, that of powerless sources increased independent of and incremental to other biases, such as the need to see the ingroup in particularly positive light.  The discussion raises the question whether a certain extent of source-based bias is necessary for the social fabric of a highly complex society.
So people with a "conspiracy mentality" fall for conspiracies not because they're ignorant or gullible, but because their innate distrust of authority figures causes them to trust everyone equally -- they often frame it as being "open-minded" or "unbiased" -- regardless of what the credentials, background, expertise, or (even) sanity of the source.

In an interview in PsyPost, study co-author Roland Imhoff explained the angle they took on this perplexing social issue:
The very idea for the study was born in a joint discussion with my co-author Olivier Klein at a conference of social psychological representations of history.  We were listening to talks about all kinds of construals, biases and narratives about what happened in the ancient or not so ancient past.   Having the public debate about ‘alternative facts’ from after Trump’s inauguration still in the back of our minds, we wondered: how do we even know what we know, how do we know who to trust when it comes to events we all have not experienced in first person? 
While previous research had insisted that this is predominantly a question of trusting ingroup sources (i.e., my government, my national education institutions), we had a lingering suspicion that people who endorse conspiracy theories might have a different system of epistemic trust: not trusting those who are in power (and allegedly corrupt).
Which points out a problem I'd always found baffling -- why, to many people, is "being an intellectual elite" a bad thing?  It was one of the (many) epithets I heard hurled at Barack Obama -- that being Harvard-educated, he couldn't possibly care about, or even be aware, of the problems of ordinary middle-class America.  Conversely, this card was played the other way by George W. Bush.  He was a "regular guy," the type of fellow you could enjoy having a beer with on Saturday night and discussing the latest sports statistics.

And my thought was: don't you want our leaders to be smarter than you are?  I mean, seriously.  I know that I and the guys I have a beer with on Saturday night aren't qualified to run the country.  (And to my bar buddies, no disrespect intended.)  There's no way in hell I'm smart enough to be president.  One of the things I want in the people we elect to office is that they are smart -- smart enough to make good decisions based on actual factual knowledge.

That, apparently, is not the norm, which the election of Donald Trump -- clearly one of the least-qualified people ever to hold the highest office in the land -- illustrated with painful clarity.  But it wasn't only a flip of the middle finger at the Coastal Elites that got him there.  The study by Imhoff et al. suggests that it was because of a pervasive tendency to treat all sources of information as if they were equal.

"[T]he data consistently suggests [people with a conspiracy mentality] just ignore source characteristics," Imhoff said.  "To them a web blog is as trustworthy as an Oxford scholar.  As we have formulated, they have terminated the social contract of epistemic trust, that we should believe official sources more than unofficial ones."

I blame part of this on people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and (of course) Alex Jones, who have gone out of their way for years to convince everyone that the powers-that-be are lying to you about everything.  Now, the powers-that-be do lie sometimes.  Also, being an Oxford scholar is no guarantee against being wrong.  But if you cherry-pick your examples, and then act as if those instances of error or dishonesty are not only universal, but are deliberate attempts to hoodwink the public for nefarious purposes -- you've set up a vicious cycle where the more facts and evidence you throw at people, the less they trust you.

As I've pointed out before: if you can teach people to disbelieve the hard data, it's Game Over.  After that, you can convince them of anything.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from one of my favorite thinkers -- Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke has made several documentaries, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and After the Warming -- the last-mentioned an absolutely prescient investigation into climate change that came out in 1991 and predicted damn near everything that would happen, climate-wise, in the twenty-seven years since then.

I'm going to go back to Burke's first really popular book, the one that was the genesis of the TV series of the same name -- Connections.  In this book, he looks at how one invention, one happenstance occurrence, one accidental discovery, leads to another, and finally results in something earthshattering.  (One of my favorites is how the technology of hand-weaving led to the invention of the computer.)  It's simply great fun to watch how Burke's mind works -- each of his little filigrees is only a few pages long, but you'll learn some fascinating ins and outs of history as he takes you on these journeys.  It's an absolutely delightful read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]




Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Duppy freestyle

Life isn't always smooth sailing, for me or for anyone else, but I'm thankful that I've never had to deal with a "duppy."

If you don't know what a duppy is, well, neither did I before yesterday.  Turns out it's a malevolent spirit of Jamaican origin.  After doing a bit of research, I found that the name comes from the Ga language of Ghana, where adope means "a spirit that appears in the shape of a dwarf."  In the tradition of Obeah -- a West Indian folk religion, originally of West African origin -- humans are born with two souls, a good one and a bad one.  When you die, your good soul goes to heaven to be judged, and the bad one stays in your coffin for three days, at which point it dies.  But if in those three days proper precautions aren't taken, the bad soul will escape and become a duppy, and go around causing problems.

The problem is, I couldn't find anywhere that told me what the proper precautions were.  So that's unfortunate.  I mean, they shouldn't be coy about this stuff, or we'll have the bad souls of Grandma Bertha and Great-Uncle Edmund and everyone else wandering about making people's lives miserable.

And heaven knows we wouldn't want that.

Woodcut of an "Obeah Man" from the journal Folk-Lore: A Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution & Custom, volume 4. 1893.  Published in London by the Folk-lore Society.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

There are other kinds of duppies, though, as if one kind weren't enough.  There's one called the "Rolling Calf," which is a calf that rolls (thus the name) because its body is completely wrapped up with chains.  How that helps it roll I'm not sure, but you can see how that would make other sorts of movement pretty much out of the question.  There's also the "Three-Footed Horse" (once again, self-explanatory), and "Old Higue," a vampiric spirit that looks like a sweet little old lady by day, and a loathsome bloodsucking hag at night.

I think this might well explain the personality of my seventh-grade English teacher.  There always did seem to be something kind of cunning behind her smile.

The reason all this comes up is an article that appeared in The Jamaica Star a couple of weeks ago about an elderly husband and wife in St. Andrew, Jamaica, who say they're being tormented by a duppy.  The author of the article, Simone Morgan Lindo, seems to take the whole thing seriously, and quotes the old lady, Eulalee Mills, extensively.  Here's what Mills had to say.  (Note: the newspaper quoted her in Jamaican patois; I'm merely copying it here.  I say that so I don't have to write [sic] every other word.)
I was in my room and I had some things on my microwave and I just see the dem fly off.  I took them up back and pack them up but as me turn and a go in the next room, me hear the same tings dem drop off again...  The next day everything start fling from my chest of drawers and tings just start throw from all over the room.  Everything up in the air, all me medication and me blood pressure machine deh all over the place and tings just start 'lick' me inna me back and all over mi body.  Me and me husband stand up in our room and all things from the kitchen a sail come in come lick we.
So that's pretty scary.  Her husband Milford, though, was not about to let some disembodied spirit throw around their belongings.
As soon as me rebuke the 'spirit' and stepped out the room, it start act up back again and start sail tings...  I know dem spirits deh can't trouble me, enuh, because me is one of God's bad man, so me a go continue rebuke them.  The rest a people dem in the house no have the spiritual power to fight dem, but me nah stop until me house get calm back.
Which is pretty damn brave.  I know I'm a skeptic and all, but I have to say, if I was sitting in my house minding my own business and my blood pressure medication suddenly started flying through the air, rebuking would kind of be the last thing I would think of.  I think my more likely response would be to piss my pants and then have a stroke.  Because I may be a rationalist, but I'm also a big fat coward.

Interestingly, the Mills' neighbors aren't quite so certain Milford Mills is on the right side of things.  One neighbor, who didn't want to be named, said that Mills was a practitioner of Obeah who was just getting what he deserved.  Another said that (s)he had seen a female spirit walking in the Mills' yard at night, and it was the ghost of a woman with whom Milford Mills had an illicit relationship.

I hope the whole thing settles down soon, not only so Eulalee and Milford get the calm they want, but because bad stuff happens when superstitious people are feeling threatened.  If the neighbors start thinking Milford and his wife are a danger to the safety of the community, they might take matters into their own hands.  Just last year, it was reported that a bunch of homeless children in Uige, Angola were tortured -- and some were killed -- because the locals had become convinced they were witches.  That sort of thing appears to be fairly common in the world, which I find appalling.

But so far, no one's bothered the Mills, and there were no more recent reports of their belongings being thrown about.  So that's all good.  As for me, if there are duppies around here, I'd be much obliged if they'd stay out of my house.  My housekeeping skills are already such that they could be summed up by the statement, "There appears to have been a struggle."  The last thing I need is a ghost adding to the chaos.

******************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from one of my favorite thinkers -- Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke has made several documentaries, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and After the Warming -- the last-mentioned an absolutely prescient investigation into climate change that came out in 1991 and predicted damn near everything that would happen, climate-wise, in the twenty-seven years since then.

I'm going to go back to Burke's first really popular book, the one that was the genesis of the TV series of the same name -- Connections.  In this book, he looks at how one invention, one happenstance occurrence, one accidental discovery, leads to another, and finally results in something earthshattering.  (One of my favorites is how the technology of hand-weaving led to the invention of the computer.)  It's simply great fun to watch how Burke's mind works -- each of his little filigrees is only a few pages long, but you'll learn some fascinating ins and outs of history as he takes you on these journeys.  It's an absolutely delightful read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]




Tuesday, August 28, 2018

What we've got here is a failure to replicate

I frequently post about new scientific discoveries, and having a fascination for neuroscience and psychology, a good many of them have to do with how the human brain works.  Connecting behavior to the underlying brain structure is not easy -- but with the advent of the fMRI, we've begun to make some forays into trying to elucidate how the brain's architecture is connected to neural function, and how neural function is connected to higher-order phenomena like memory, learning, instinct, language, and socialization.

Whenever I post about science I try my hardest to use sources that are from reputable journals such as Science and Nature -- and flag the ones that aren't as speculative.  The reason those gold-standard journals are considered so reliable is because of a rigorous process of peer review, wherein scientists in the field sift through papers with a fine-toothed comb, demanding revisions on anything questionable -- or sometimes rejecting the paper out of hand if it doesn't meet the benchmark.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

That's why a paper published in -- you guessed it -- Nature had me picking my jaw up off the floor.  A team of psychologists and social scientists, led by Colin Camerer of Caltech, took 21 psychological studies that had been published either in Nature or in Science and didn't just review them carefully, but tried to replicate their results.

Only 13 of them turned out to be replicable.

This is a serious problem.  I know that scientists are fallible just like the rest of us, but this to me doesn't sound like ordinary fallibility, it sounds like outright sloppiness, both on the part of the researchers and on the part of the reviewers.  I mean, if you can't trust Nature and Science, who can you trust?

Anna Dreber, of the Stockholm School of Economics, who co-authored the study, was unequivocal about its import.  "A false positive result can make other researchers, and the original researcher, spend lots of time and energy and money on results that turn out not to hold," she said.  "And that's kind of wasteful for resources and inefficient, so the sooner we find out that a result doesn't hold, the better."

Brian Nosek, of the University of Virginia, was also part of the team that did the study, and he thought that the pattern they found went beyond the "publish-or-perish" attitude that a lot of institutions have.  "Some people have hypothesized that, because they're the most prominent outlets they'd have the highest rigor," Nosek said.  "Others have hypothesized that the most prestigious outlets are also the ones that are most likely to select for very 'sexy' findings, and so may be actually less reproducible."

One heartening thing is that as part of the study, the researchers asked four hundred scientists in the field who were not involved with the study to take a look at the 21 papers in question, and make their best assessment as to whether it would pass replication or not.  And the scientists' guesses were usually correct.

So why, then, did eight flawed, non-replicable studies get past the review boards of the two most prestigious science journals in the world?  "The likelihood that a finding will replicate or not is one part of what a reviewer would consider," Nosek said.  "But other things might influence the decision to publish.  It may be that this finding isn't likely to be true, but if it is true, it is super important, so we do want to publish it because we want to get it into the conversation."

Well, okay, but how often are these questionably-correct but "super important" findings labeled as such?  It's rare to find a paper where there's any degree of doubt expressed for the main gist (although many of them do have sections on the limitations of the research, or questions that are still unanswered).  And it's understandable why.  If I were on a review board, I'd definitely look askance at a paper that made a claim and then admitted the results of the research might well be a fluke.

So this is kind of troubling.  It's encouraging that at least the inquiry is being made; identifying that a process is flawed is the first step toward fixing it.  As for me, I'm going to have to be a little more careful with my immediate trust of psychological research just because it was published in Nature or Science.

"The way to get ahead and get a job and get tenure is to publish lots and lots of papers," said Will Gervais of the University of Kentucky, who was one of the researchers whose study failed replication.  "And it's hard to do that if you are able run fewer studies, but in the end I think that's the way to go — to slow down our science and be more rigorous up front."

******************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from one of my favorite thinkers -- Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke has made several documentaries, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and After the Warming -- the last-mentioned an absolutely prescient investigation into climate change that came out in 1991 and predicted damn near everything that would happen, climate-wise, in the twenty-seven years since then.

I'm going to go back to Burke's first really popular book, the one that was the genesis of the TV series of the same name -- Connections.  In this book, he looks at how one invention, one happenstance occurrence, one accidental discovery, leads to another, and finally results in something earthshattering.  (One of my favorites is how the technology of hand-weaving led to the invention of the computer.)  It's simply great fun to watch how Burke's mind works -- each of his little filigrees is only a few pages long, but you'll learn some fascinating ins and outs of history as he takes you on these journeys.  It's an absolutely delightful read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]




Monday, August 27, 2018

From the mailbag

Being a blogger means I get some interesting emails.

A lot of them, as you undoubtedly know if you read Skeptophilia frequently, are recommendations for future posts.  I appreciate these tremendously, even the ones of the "I think you're wrong and here's a link proving it" type.  Hey, if I wasn't willing to reconsider topics, and admit when I was wrong, I'd be a poor excuse for a skeptic.  So don't stop sending suggestions, and don't stop reading carefully so someone's keeping me honest.

Then there are the emails telling me what readers think of me.  Laudatory ones are lovely, of course, but I find the hate mail rather interesting.  Most of it seems to be generated because of my general disdain for pseudoscience -- by which I mean practices like astrology, homeopathy, auras, and (most) psychic/paranormal investigation.  (I emphasize the word most because there are groups that approach it the right way.  A good example is the UK-based Society for Psychical Research, which looks at such claims with a skeptical eye, and is perfectly willing to call out hoaxers when it's merited.)

Then there are the religious ones.  I got an interesting one in this category day before yesterday, and that's what spurred me to write this post.  I call it "interesting" not because I think the writer was right -- about pretty much anything (s)he said -- but because it brings up a few stereotypes that are all too common.  So here's the email in its entirety, with some interjected responses from me.
Dear Mr. Skeptic Atheist, 
I'm going to identify myself right away as a Christian.  I always have been and I always will be.  I know you'd like to talk me out of it, but it wouldn't succeed.
Well, you started off on the wrong foot.  I have no interest whatsoever in "talking you out of" Christianity or any other viewpoint you might have on which we disagree.  I'm a firm believer in something my mom taught me when I was little -- "my rights end where your nose begins."  So you can believe in God, you can believe in Allah, you can believe in Zeus.  Hell, you can believe that the universe is controlled by a Giant Green Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy if you want.

I do, however, object when religion (or any other framework for belief) starts impinging on the rights of non-adherents.  An example is the virulently anti-LGBTQ stance of a lot of evangelicals.  You have every right to refrain from same-sex encounters yourself if you think they're sinful or repugnant.  What I won't stand by silently for is when you say, "I belong to the Church of XYZ, so you should be punished for being gay," or "I have a right to discriminate against you because my religion says I should."

Beyond that, I'm not trying to talk anyone out of, or into, anything.  I state my opinions -- rather strongly at times, I'll admit -- but I have the same right to do that as you do, and I have no more right to compel you than you do me.
I don't know why you feel like you have to trumpet your hate for Christians the way you do.  It isn't right. 
Asking me "why I hate Christians" is a little like asking "when did you stop beating your wife?"  In point of fact, I don't hate Christians.  I may disagree with them, but that's not the same thing.  And I'm happy to say that I am friends with people of a great many religions, and every gradation of faith, questioning, doubt, and disbelief, and honestly, we all get along pretty well.


Because I went to high school in rural southern Louisiana, you might imagine that I know a good many devout people -- and you'd be right.  Because of the wonders of Facebook, a lot of my classmates have kept in touch, and (surprise!) I can't remember any of us saying to another, "I don't like you any more because your religious views are different from mine."  Mostly what we do is argue about stuff like whose grandma had the best gumbo recipe.
And what made you hate God?  God shows nothing but love for his people, he wants the best for all of us, and you return nothing but spite.  Try looking at His creations without the fire in your eyes and you might be surprised.
Once again, I don't hate God, I just don't think he exists.  Which is hardly the same thing.  At the same point, being a skeptic (as I mentioned before), I'm perfectly open to being convinced, if anyone has credible evidence that I'm wrong.  (You may recall Bill Nye's comment during the infamous Bill Nye/Ken Ham evolution/creation debate that Bill was asked what would it take to convince him he was wrong, and he said, "One piece of evidence that couldn't be explained another way."  That's how I feel about pretty much everything.)

So if you have some evidence, let's hear it.  I promise I won't burn you up with the fire in my eyes.
The worst part is you're a teacher.  So you're influencing a whole generation of children who look up to you, inducing them to abandon God and putting them in danger of hell.  I can't think of anything worse.
This part made me think of how the author of this email must picture my classes.  What, do you believe that I run into my classroom every day, yelling maniacally, "THERE IS NO GOD!  WORSHIP SATAN!  BOW DOWN TO EVIL!  HA HA!" or something?  Let me tell you, with all of the actual science I have to cover, I simply don't have time to indoctrinate my students in Satan worship.

In fact, every once in a while -- this comes up most often in my Critical Thinking classes, although the question is sometimes raised when we're studying evolution in my biology classes -- some student will ask me if I'm religious.  My usual response is, "My own religious beliefs aren't relevant here."  I mean, given that my background is in evolutionary genetics, it's a pretty shrewd guess that I'm not a fundamentalist.  But other than that, I suspect the majority of my students don't have a clue about my own beliefs or lack thereof.

And that's exactly how it should be.
It's not too late for you.  You can still dedicate your life to Jesus.  The lost lamb can be found.  But not if you persist in your hateful, God-denying ways.  I'm asking you to repent and beg forgiveness, for your own sake. 
I will be praying for you daily that you will come back to your Creator rather than having to face him at the End of Days and be cast away in despair.
Well, I suppose that's all nice enough.  I'm not a big believer in prayer, myself, but I'll never turn away well-wishes in whatever form they may take.  And it's nice to know you don't want me to burn for eternity.  (And I have actually gotten emails of the "When you die I'm going to laugh because I'll know you're being tortured in hell" variety.  But they're not very common, which is rather heartening.)

The email wasn't signed.  It just sort of ended there, without a "have a nice day" or anything.  Although I can see that given what went before, that'd be a little ironic.

Anyhow, I suppose it could be worse.  At least there were no death threats.  And like I said, the writer seemed to be coming from a generally compassionate point of view, even if his/her interpretation of my beliefs was a few degrees off of due north.  So keep those cards and letters comin', although I'd prefer it if the "burn in hell unbeliever" and "I'm going to track you down and kill you" people would find another hobby.

Oh, and it was my grandma.  My grandma clearly had the best gumbo recipe.  Thanks for asking.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from one of my favorite thinkers -- Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke has made several documentaries, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and After the Warming -- the last-mentioned an absolutely prescient investigation into climate change that came out in 1991 and predicted damn near everything that would happen, climate-wise, in the twenty-seven years since then.

I'm going to go back to Burke's first really popular book, the one that was the genesis of the TV series of the same name -- Connections.  In this book, he looks at how one invention, one happenstance occurrence, one accidental discovery, leads to another, and finally results in something earthshattering.  (One of my favorites is how the technology of hand-weaving led to the invention of the computer.)  It's simply great fun to watch how Burke's mind works -- each of his little filigrees is only a few pages long, but you'll learn some fascinating ins and outs of history as he takes you on these journeys.  It's an absolutely delightful read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]




Saturday, August 25, 2018

Cart both before and after the horse

Let's end the week on a happy, if surreal, note with a new experiment in quantum physics that calls into question the arrow of time.

The "arrow of time" has bedeviled physicists for decades -- why time only flows one direction, while in the three spatial dimensions you can move any way you like (up/down, backwards/forwards, right/left).  But with time, there's only one way.

Forward.

The causality chain -- that events in the past cause the ones in the future -- certainly seems rock-solid.  It's hard to imagine it going the other way, Geordi LaForge's weekly rips in the space/time continuum notwithstanding.  Although I must admit I riffed on the idea myself in my short story "Retrograde," about a woman who perceives time running backwards.  It's going to be in a short story collection I'm releasing next year, but you can read it for free on my fiction blog.

But in real life, we take the arrow of time for granted.  It's why no one was especially surprised when Stephen Hawking threw a champagne party in 2009 for time travelers, but mailed the invitations after the event was over... and no one showed up.

In any case, the arrow of time and causality chains would seem to make it certain that if there are two events, A and B, either A preceded B, A followed B, or they occurred at the same time.  (I'm ignoring the wackiness introduced by relativistic effects; here, we're simplifying matters by saying the observation and both events occurred in the same frame of reference.)

So far, so good, right?  The order of two events is a sure thing.

An experiment performed at the University of Queensland (Australia) has just proven that to be wrong.

In a paper called "Indefinite Causal Order in a Quantum Switch" that appeared last week in Physical Review Letters, by Kaumudbikash Goswami, Christina Giarmatzi, Michael Kewming, Fabio Costa, Cyril Branciard, and Andrew G. White, we find out about research that blows away causality by creating a device where a beam of light undergoes two operations -- but in our choices of A following B or B following A, what actually happens is...

... both.

[Image is in the Public Domain}

The setup is technical and far beyond my powers to explain in a way that would satisfy a physicist, but the bare bones are as follows.

Light has a property called polarization.  In effect, that means it vibrates in a particular plane.  As an analogy, think of someone holding a long spring, with the other end tied to a post.  The person is jiggling it to create a wave in the spring.  Are they waving it up and down?  Side to side?  Diagonally?

That's polarization in a nutshell.

(An interesting side-note: this is why polarized sunglasses work.  Light reflecting off a surface gets polarized in the horizontal direction, so if you have a material that blocks horizontally-polarized light, it significantly reduces glare.)

Anyhow, what Goswami et al. did was to rig up a device wherein a horizontally-polarized photon goes down a path where it experiences A before B, while a vertically-polarized one a path where it experiences B before A.  But here's where it gets loony; because of a phenomenon called quantum superposition, in which a photon can be in effect polarized in both directions at the same time, when you pass it through the device, event A happens before event B, and B happens before A, to the same photon at the same time.

Okay, I know that sounds impossible.  But in the quantum realm, seriously weird stuff happens.  It's counterintuitive -- even the eminent Nobel laureate Niels Bohr said, "[T]hose who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it."  Thus we have not only loopy ideas like Schrödinger's Cat, but experimentally-verified claims such as entanglement (what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance"), an electron being in two places at once, and the fuzziness of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (that the more you know about an object's velocity, the less you know about its position -- and vice versa).

Which is a deliberate setup for my favorite joke of all time.  Ready?

Schrödinger and Heisenberg are going down the highway in Schrödinger's car, Heisenberg at the wheel, and a cop pulls them over.

"Buddy," the cop says, "do you know how fast you were going?"

Heisenberg says, "No idea.  But I can tell you exactly where I was."

The cop says, "Okay, if you're gonna be a smartass, I'm gonna search your car."  When the cop opens the trunk, there's a dead cat inside.

The cop says, "Did you know there's a dead cat in your trunk?"

Schrödinger says, "Well, there is now."

Ba-dump-bump-kssh.  Ah, nerd humor is a wonderful thing.

But I digress.

As impossible as quantum mechanics sounds, it seems to be true.  John Horgan, in his book The End of Science, writes, "Physicists do not believe quantum mechanics because it explains the world, but because it predicts the outcome of experiments with almost miraculous accuracy.  Theorists kept predicting new particles and other phenomena, and experiments kept bearing out those predictions."

Which is a nicer way of saying that if your common sense rebels when you hear this stuff, sucks to be you.

So as bizarre as it is, we're forced to the conclusion that the universe is a far weirder place than we thought.  Myself, I think it's kind of cool.  Despite my B.S. in physics -- and let me tell you, I was no great shakes as a physics student, and I'm convinced some of my professors passed me just so I wouldn't have to retake their courses -- my mind is overwhelmed with awe every time I read about this stuff.  I wonder, though, if it's even possible for the human mind to truly conceptualize how quantum mechanics works; we are so locked into our ordinary, classical, three-dimensional world, where first you turn the key in the ignition and then your car starts, we're completely at sea even trying to think about the fact that on some level, we can't take any of those things for granted.

So this is looking like opening up a whole new area of study.  Very exciting stuff.  And it may be naive of me, but I'm still hoping it's going to lead to a time machine.

First thing I'm going to do is crash Stephen Hawking's party, temporal paradox or no.  It may cause the universe to end, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]





Friday, August 24, 2018

Apathy, voting, and the lesser of evils

In further evidence that we've been transported from 2018 back to 1830, the Republican nominee for the North Carolina General Assembly (House District 48) has said -- direct quote -- that "God is a racist and a white supremacist."

His name is Russell Walker, and the only heartening thing about this story is that when his claims went public the North Carolina Republican Party immediately withdrew their support for him.  "Based on recent behavior and previous statements, the North Carolina Republican Party is unable and unwilling to support the Republican nominated candidate for North Carolina House District 48," GOP chairman Robin Hayes said in a statement Tuesday.  "The NCGOP along with our local parties in Hoke, Scotland and Robeson Counties will be spending our time and resources supporting Republican candidates that better reflect the values of our party."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ardfern, Stamp Out Racism, Belfast, August 2010, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But I do mean that is the only heartening thing.  Walker beat his competitor, John Imaratto, carrying 65% of the vote in his district.  And it's not like the claims about the man are new, or that he's kept them under wraps, or anything.  (So the Republican Party's sudden disavowal of Walker has an unpleasant tang of "we knew all along, but once it became public knowledge and started to reflect poorly on us, we had to say we were against him.")  He runs a website that is rife with white supremacist ideology, wherein we can read passages like the following:
  • What is wrong with being a white supremacist?  God is a racist and a white supremacist.  Someone or group has to be supreme and that group is the whites of the world... someone or something has to be inferior...  In all history in sub-Saharan Africa, no two-story building or a waterproof boat was ever made.
  • God made the races and he is the greatest racist ever.
  • Jews are not Semitic they are Satanic as they are all descended from Satan.
  • MLK wanted to destroy the Caucasian race through mixing and integration.  He was an agent of Satan.
So yeah.  It's not like we're talking about subtle stuff, here.  Oh, and if we needed more, Walker's also an anti-vaxxer, too.  On his campaign website, he says that he is "convinced that vaccinations, especially for young children, create a favorable climate for Autism."

I find it profoundly baffling that here in the 21st century anyone can make statements like this without being shouted down, much less that someone like him could win the fucking nomination.  Look, I know that being a white guy, I'm bound to be less aware of racism than someone who has to deal with it day in, day out.  But for cryin' in the sink, I thought we'd come further than this.  Are we really in a place where 65% of the voters in a state district look at a man like this and think, "Yup, that's who I want to represent my views in the Assembly"?

Walker is facing Garland Pierce, an African American minister, in the general election in November.  Pierce is the incumbent, which makes me hopeful that Walker won't win.  But this is not the only race that's got some seriously eyebrow-raising candidates.  Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera is running in Florida to replace outgoing Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in the 27th Congressional District, and... she says she's been on an alien spaceship.  And that the aliens have contacted her multiple times during her life.  

"I went in," Rodriguez Aguilera told a reporter for The Miami Herald.  "There were some round seats that were there, and some quartz rocks that controlled the ship — not like airplanes."

Oh, and we have five convicted criminals running for Congress, too.  Those are:
  • Don Blankenship of West Virginia (convicted of conspiracy to evade safety laws, resulting in the deaths of 29 coal miners)
  • Michael Grimm of New York (convicted of tax evasion)
  • David Alcorn of New Mexico (convicted of stalking)
  • Greg Gianforte of Montana (convicted of misdemeanor assault)
  • Joe Arpaio of Arizona (convicted of contempt of court; should also have been convicted of being a complete asshole, but unfortunately that's not illegal in the United States)
C'mon, people, is this really the best you can do?

At this point, I can't give up on politics entirely, as much as I'd like to; I've never liked discussions over politics, because half of them seem to be about things that appear to me to be blitheringly obvious (like whether LGBTQ people should have the same rights as everyone else) and the other half about things that are completely unsolvable (like trying to balance the federal budget to everyone's satisfaction).

But I've been drawn into writing about politics because apathy seems to me to be completely unconscionable.  I still find it beyond appalling that 43% of Americans didn't vote in the 2016 presidential election.  That's 65 million people who went, "Meh," and stayed home.

And look where that's gotten us.

If we don't want idiots and crazy people running the show, we have got to table our apathy and get involved.  Political races should never require a choice between the lesser of evils.  Look, I don't care if you agree with me on how to govern the country, but I sincerely hope you agree that we want the best people we can find to be in charge.  If you differ from me on issues of policy, that's fine.  That, we can discuss.

But if you support a crazed white supremacist, or a delusional woman who thinks she's in contact with aliens, or a convicted criminal for public office -- I don't think we have any common ground whatsoever.


Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article178813586.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article213937944.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article213937944.html#storylink=cpy
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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]





Thursday, August 23, 2018

The grand plan

When I'm teaching the unit on evolution in my biology classes, one of the hardest ideas to expunge from my students' brains is that evolution is goal-oriented.

Take, for example, the worn-out example, used in every seventh-grade life science textbook, about giraffes' long necks.  Why do they have these outlandish proportions?

So they can reach food higher up in trees, of course.

The subtle error here is that it implies that a bunch of short-necked giraffes were standing around on the African savanna, looking longingly up at the tempting foliage higher up, and one said, "Dude.  It'd be nice if we could reach higher, don't you think?"  And another said, "Well, we're kinda screwed, because we're short.  But if we had longer-necked kids, that'd be cool, yeah?"

The other giraffes agreed, and lo, they had long-necked kids.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Universalwin1222, Lamarckian inheritance- Giraffes, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Okay, I'm oversimplifying, here, but the gist is correct.  The assumption of goal-orientation puts the cart before the horse; that there was some sort of end product evolution had in mind, so organisms headed that way.  Of course, the truth is both simpler and more complex.  What Darwin actually said was that organisms vary from some other cause (being pre-Mendel, he didn't know about genes and mutations), and the environment selects the ones that work the best.  The others die off, taking their deleterious genes with them.

No goal necessary.

The ultimate in goal-orientation, of course, is strict creationism, which posits a designer who created everything as it currently is.  The immediate problem with this -- besides the fact that there's no evidence for it whatsoever -- is that there are a lot of things that seem, well, poorly designed.  The creationists are fond of trotting out some examples of complex structures that work pretty well (such as the eye) and conveniently ignore some examples of seriously poor design (such as the male urinary/reproductive system, which routes the urethra through the prostate gland, making a lot of older guys seriously unhappy).

All of this goal-orientation is known to philosophers as "teleological thinking" -- the attribution of a final cause or goal in natural processes.  And just last week, a paper came out of some research in France that suggests teleological thinking as a commonality between creationism... and conspiracy theories.

The study, done by Pascal Wagner-Egger, Sylvain Delouvée, Nicolas Gauvrit, and Sebastian Dieguez, found an interesting set of correspondences:
Although teleological thinking has long been banned from scientific reasoning, it persists in childhood cognition, as well as in adult intuitions and beliefs.  Noting similarities between creationism (the belief that life on Earth was purposefully created by a supernatural agent) and conspiracism, we sought to investigate whether teleological thinking could underlie and associate both types of beliefs. First, we sought to establish whether teleological thinking, classically associated with creationism, was also related to conspiracist beliefs. College students filled a questionnaire including teleological claims and conspiracist statements, as well as measures of analytical thinking, esoteric and magical beliefs, and a randomness perception task.  Promiscuous teleology — the tendency to ascribe function and a final cause to nonintentional natural facts and events — was significantly... correlated with conspiracist beliefs scales.  In addition, teleological thinking was negatively related to analytical thinking, and positively to esoteric beliefs, which in turn were both related to acceptance of conspiracist beliefs.
The results are perhaps not terribly surprising, although I don't know if anyone previously has linked them this way.  Both creationism and conspiracy theories imply a belief in a Grand Plan -- benevolent in the case of creationism, malevolent in the case of conspiracy theories.  Adherents to either tend to be repelled by the idea of chaos, that things just happen because they happen.  (Thus "even when bad things happen, God has a plan" from the former, and the steadfast refusal by the latter to believe that any unpleasant event might just be random bad luck.)

I'd add one more piece to this, however, and that's the determination by both to avoid or explain away facts that contradict their favorite model of how the universe works.  Of course, that unites them with some other groups that aren't necessarily thinking teleologically, such as the anti-vaxxers.

Although the anti-vaxxers tend to believe that there's a huge coverup by "Big Pharma" of the horrific side effects of vaccination, so maybe there's some overlap there, too.

Anyhow, I thought the whole thing was interesting.  And it does bear mention that the students who are the most repelled by evolution for non-religious reasons tend to be the ones who hate the idea that so much of the world could be the result of randomness.  How can the biodiversity on the Earth, with all of its "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" (to quote Darwin), be produced by chance mutations?

Of course, the universe is not compelled to be organized in such a way that it makes you comfortable.  The evidence is very much in favor of the idea that mutations plus selection have generated all of the life forms you see around you.  And since selection is a "whatever works" sort of process, it's unsurprising that sometimes it creates designs of dubious logic -- such as the urethra/prostate situation I mentioned above, which a friend of mine calls "routing a sewer pipe through a playground."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]