Psychic genomics

Before I start today's post, allow me to begin with a disclaimer: I am not claiming psychic abilities are impossible.  I am not hostile to any attempts to demonstrate their existence scientifically.  In fact, I would love it if all of the claims were true, because it would be wonderful fun to telekinetically control Tucker Carlson while he's on the air and make him unable to do anything but sing the theme song to SpongeBob SquarePants over and over, or put a deadly and horrific curse on Mitch McConnell so that he suddenly develops a soul or something.

But as my grandma was fond of saying, wishin' don't make it so.  In science the usual progression of things is (1) produce unequivocal evidence that the phenomenon you've observed actually exists, (2) find correlations between that phenomenon and whatever you believe is causing it, and (3) show that those correlations actually do represent causation.

Polish "psychic" Stanisława Tomczyk levitating a pair of scissors, which totally wasn't connected to her fingers by a piece of thread or anything (ca. 1909) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Unfortunately, a lot of psychic researchers get the whole thing backwards, which is a little maddening.  Take the story I read yesterday in Mystery Wire about some research by the rather notorious Dean Radin, who has been for decades trying to put psychic stuff unequivocally on a scientific footing.  While, like I said, I have no problem with this as a general goal, much about what Radin does sounds an awful lot like assuming your conclusion and then casting about for incidental evidence to support what you already believed was true.

Turns out Radin was the co-author of a paper in Elsevier called "Genetics of Psychic Ability: A Pilot Case-Control Exome Sequencing Study," that basically looked at genome sequencing people who self-reported a family history of psychic abilities and compared those sequences to people who self-reported no psychic abilities in their family heritage.  And they found differences.

That, unfortunately, constitutes about the sum total of their findings, but Radin et al. proceeded to crow that they'd found a genetic basis for psychic ability.  But amongst the (many) problems, here are a few that jump out right away:

• Out of a sample size of 1,000, only thirteen people reported a family history of psychic stuff.  They then had to actively look for thirteen people who didn't, to use as a control.  This seems like an awfully small sample size from which to draw such a profound conclusion.
• There was no indication that they ruled out other reasons for the similarities.  Given that claims of psychic abilities have at least some tendency to be culture-dependent, isn't it at least possible that the common gene sequences they found were due to similar ethnic background?
• More reputable crowd-based human genomic studies -- such as the one being conducted by 23 & Me -- are still hesitant to assume the commonalities and differences they find in the DNA are causative of phenotype.  Due to the phenomenon of pleiotropy (one gene, many effects) and complicating factors like epigenetics, the most I've seen them say is that (after hundreds of thousands of sequences analyzed) "you have a higher than average likelihood of having trait X."  (Such as when I was told that I am likely to have hair that photo-bleaches in the sun -- which turns out to be true.)
• From their study, they concluded that being genetically psychic is the "wild type" and that we non-psychics are the mutants.  Why, with a grand total of 26 people to compare, they decided this I can't tell, and that's even after reading the actual paper.  Seems to me it's more along the lines of "the modern scientific approach has blunted our perception of the mystical oneness of reality that we once had in the past" stuff that you hear so often from these types.
• As I mentioned earlier, there has yet to be any sort of scientifically admissible evidence that psychic abilities exist, so looking for an underlying cause seems to be a tad premature.

Then, unfortunately, Radin launches off into the ionosphere during an interview with Mystery Wire's writer George Knapp.  He describes another "experiment" (I hesitate even to dignify it by that name) in which a supposed double-blind experiment showed that people who drank tea that had been blessed felt happier than ones who had drunk unblessed tea.  As if this weren't enough, Radin comes up with an inadvertently hilarious explanation:

So we used a little plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, which is in the mustard family.  So it’s got [sic] a little weed.  And a little weed is interesting because its genome was sequenced before the human genome.  And it turns out that like most living creatures around the world have very similar DNA.  [sic again]  So if this plant has a disease that’s genetically based it has an analogue in humans.  [Nota bene: This is where I started laughing.]  So the plants are used for studying genetic diseases without using humans for it.  [NB:  No, they're not.]  So, it also turns out that there are various mutations that are understood about this plant.  And in particular, all living systems on earth have a protein called cryptochrome.  So cryptochrome is interesting because it is a protein that is thought to have quantum properties.  [NB: All molecules have quantum properties.  That's kind of what "quantum property" means -- the behavior of matter and energy on extremely small scales.]  So we thought, okay, let’s get an Arabidopsis plant, that is a particular mutation where it overexpresses cryptochrome, so when there’s blue light on it, the cryptochrome is activated, it overexpresses, it grows more.  So we thought, well, maybe that would be an interesting target, to use for intention, because we think there may be a relationship between observing quantum systems, in this case of protein, and the response to that system.  So again, under double blind conditions, the Buddhist monks have treated water, they have the same water that is not treated, the seeds are grown into two water mediums.  And then there’s a variety of different measures you can take.  One of which is called a hypocotyl.  So the hypocotyl is the point where the stem begins from the seed up to the beginning of the leaves.  So if it’s short and fat, it means that it’s a healthy plant, because it’s not using all of its energy to try to reach the surface or turn upside down or something.  So short fat hypocotyl, we did nine repetitions of the experiment and got extremely significant differences, terms of magnitude is only a matter of a couple of millimeters. [sic]  But so many experiments in such precise results, we can tell there was a really significant difference in growth, better growth with the treated water or the blessed water.

Yeesh.  A hypocotyl a "couple of millimeters" longer constitutes "extremely significant results"?  That rule out all other possible factors, including natural variability and the difficulty of measuring the stem of a small plant to millimeter accuracy?

And as an aside, beginning every other sentence with the word "So" is almost as annoying as the people who use "like" as, like, a punctuation in, like, every, like, thing they say.  What it does not do is make you come across as an articulate intellectual.

Anyhow, I encourage you to read the Mystery Wire article, and (especially) the original paper, which is helpfully included therein.  See if you think I'm being unwarrantedly harsh.  And it's not that I expect scientists -- or anyone, really -- to be completely unbiased; they obviously can't start out from the standpoint that all possible explanations are on equal footing, and they understandably have at least some intellectual and emotional investment in showing their own hypotheses to be correct.

But to say this study lacks dispassionate objectivity is a colossal understatement.  I do have respect for people who investigate fringe phenomena from a scientific standpoint -- the work of the Society for Psychical Research in the UK comes to mind -- but unfortunately, this one ain't it.

So back to the drawing board.  I guess I'll have to keep waiting for McConnell's soul to appear and for Carlson to humiliate himself completely in front of millions of viewers.  Pity, that.

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Author Michael Pollan became famous for two books in the early 2000s, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which looked at the complex relationships between humans and the various species that we have domesticated over the past few millennia.

More recently, Pollan has become interested in one particular facet of this relationship -- our use of psychotropic substances, most of which come from plants, to alter our moods and perceptions.  In How to Change Your Mind, he considered the promise of psychedelic drugs (such as ketamine and psilocybin) to treat medication-resistant depression; in this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week, This is Your Mind on Plants, he looks at another aspect, which is our strange attitude toward three different plant-produced chemicals: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Pollan writes about the long history of our use of these three chemicals, the plants that produce them (poppies, tea and coffee, and the peyote cactus, respectively), and -- most interestingly -- the disparate attitudes of the law toward them.  Why, for example, is a brew containing caffeine available for sale with no restrictions, but a brew containing opium a federal crime?  (I know the physiological effects differ; but the answer is more complex than that, and has a fascinating and convoluted history.)

Pollan's lucid, engaging writing style places a lens on this long relationship, and considers not only its backstory but how our attitudes have little to do with the reality of what the use of the plants do.  It's another chapter in his ongoing study of our relationship to what we put in our bodies -- and how those things change how we think, act, and feel.

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Sunspots and earthquakes

I'm going to start out with a quote from the brilliant Randall Munroe, whose comic strip xkcd is rightly beloved by science nerds and tech geeks the world over.  (Go into any college science building, and check out the professors' office doors.  You'll find as many xkcd comic strips as you did ones from The Far Side twenty years ago.)

The quote is:  "Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing, 'Look over there!'"

The reason this comes up is because of a recent paper in Nature Scientific Reports called, "On the Correlation Between Solar Activity and Large Earthquakes Worldwide."  The authors, Vito Marchitelli and Paolo Harabaglia (of the Università della Basilicata of Potenza, Italy), and Claudia Troise and Giuseppe De Natale (of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia of Naples) investigated a claim that was first made over a century and a half ago; that there is a connection between solar activity and earthquake frequency.

The first scientist who noticed this was the Swiss astronomer Rudolf Wolf, who also noted the 11.1 year cyclicity of sunspot frequency.  Sunspots are basically solar storms, regions where there is such a high concentration of magnetic flux lines that it inhibits convection and generates a region that is a little cooler and darker than the surrounding parts.  (A sunspot's darkness is relative; isolated from the rest of the bright disk of the Sun, a sunspot would have about the same luminosity as the full Moon, and would glow bright orange.)

Sunspots are also connected to some of the most violent activity our Sun engages in; solar flares, prominences, coronal loops, and coronal mass ejections.  Each of these is basically a different kind of enormous explosion on the Sun's surface, and results in a huge increase in the subatomic particle flux surging outward into the Solar System.  Our atmosphere protects us from some of that bombardment, but it's detectable on the Earth's surface not only with sensitive instruments but because it triggers the brilliant and gorgeous auroras near the poles.

It's not without its hazards, however.  Large events such as coronal mass ejections can damage or disable satellites, and because of the charged nature of the particles, can induce electrical activity in wires and potentially knock out the terrestrial electrical grid.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

But Marchitelli et al. found -- or, rather, confirmed Wolf's claim -- that there is a correlation between sunspot activity and earthquake frequency.  So how the hell could that work?

First, let's rule out that it's some kind of spurious correlation, such as the wonderful discovery by Tyler Vigen that per capita cheese consumption year-by-year correlates almost perfectly with the number of people who died from becoming tangled in their bedsheets.  Of course, you can correlate almost anything with anything else if you cherry-pick your data carefully enough; and there are statistical methods to catch out that sort of thing.  Here, an application of those statistical methods to the sunspot/earthquake correlation led to a vanishingly small -- less than 0.00001 -- chance that what they were looking at was not meaningful.

So what's going on here?  Turns out the likeliest explanation has to do with the induction of electrical activity I referenced earlier.  And this is where I had to stifle a chuckle.

If you read my piece "Vanished into the Wilderness" only a couple of days ago, you may remember that one of the goofy explanations proffered for unexplained disappearances of hikers is "the piezoelectric properties of granite."  Piezoelectricity is the property of certain substances to develop a charge if they're put under pressure; it's been thoroughly studied and in fact has a multitude of uses in technology, including push-start ignition on propane grills, the timekeeping device inside a quartz watch, and amplification pickups in electric guitars.

The key to how this could trigger earthquakes has to do with the fact that the piezoelectric effect works both ways; pressing on a piezoelectric substance induces a charge, and charging it induces a change in shape (altering the pressure).  So what Marchitelli et al. suspect is going on here is that the dramatic increase in charged particle flux striking the Earth during a peak time of sunspot activity is creating a piezoelectric change in the pressure of the rocks the particles are passing through -- generating a tension that makes it more likely for a stressed fault to rupture.

What's fun about all this is that not only do we have a correlation, but we have a possible mechanism explaining it.  That's often the problem; there might be odd correlations out there, but absent a plausible mechanism, chances are we're looking at something like Tyler Vigen's discovery that the number of letters in the winning word of the Scripps National Spelling Bee correlates with the number of people worldwide who are killed yearly by venomous spiders.  Here, we are looking at a meaningful correlation.

It also shows that we're being affected by forces of which the average person is entirely unaware.  Which is kind of cool but kind of scary.  It makes me wonder what other things are happening out there that are exerting influences on the world around us in strange and subtle ways.

For what it's worth, I still think that astrology, with all its alleged correspondences between the positions of the planets and stars and people's personalities and fates, is bunk.  And even if piezoelectricity might explain the connection between sunspots and earthquakes, I maintain that it doesn't have a damn thing to do with hikers disappearing.

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Humans have always looked up to the skies.  Art from millennia ago record the positions of the stars and planets -- and one-off astronomical events like comets, eclipses, and supernovas.

And our livelihoods were once tied to those observations.  Calendars based on star positions gave the ancient Egyptians the knowledge of when to expect the Nile River to flood, allowing them to prepare to utilize every drop of that precious water in a climate where rain was rare indeed.  When to plant, when to harvest, when to start storing food -- all were directed from above.

As Carl Sagan so evocatively put it, "It is no wonder that our ancestors worshiped the stars.  For we are their children."

In her new book The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars, scientist and author Jo Marchant looks at this connection through history, from the time of the Lascaux Cave Paintings to the building of Stonehenge to the medieval attempts to impose a "perfect" mathematics on the movement of heavenly objects to today's cutting edge astronomy and astrophysics.  In a journey through history and prehistory, she tells the very human story of our attempts to comprehend what is happening in the skies over our heads -- and how our mechanized lives today have disconnected us from this deep and fundamental understanding.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

When the volcano blows

A recommendation for bloggers and other commentators: if you are going to write about science, make sure you understand the damn science.  And for readers: make sure you find out about the writer's biases.

This comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia called, "Why Volcanic Eruptions and Earthquakes are Increasing."  The whole thing pivots on the scary idea that the Earth is becoming more tectonically active, which certainly would have a major impact on humanity.  But let us begin with the most pressing question, which is: are volcanic eruptions and earthquakes increasing?

Mt. Nyiragongo, Democratic Republic of Congo [Image licensed under the Creative Commons MONUSCO/Neil Wetmore, An aerial view of the towering volcanic peak of Mt. Nyiragongo, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The answer appears to be "no."  According to the site Volcano World, maintained by the geology department of Oregon State University, there is no evidence that there's more seismic or volcanic activity lately.  Not even a slow overall increase over the past few thousand years.  The appearance that there's more rumbling going on, they say, is due to two things:

1. The Earth is being more intensively monitored now than any other time in its history, so we're more aware of even small events than we would have been.  This information then gets relayed all over the globe, increasing laypeople's awareness of what's going on.
2. Because of the increase in human population, the impact of these events has become much greater.  To use the example from the site, if the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland had occurred in 1500, it's doubtful that it would have bothered -- or even been noticed by -- anyone but the Icelanders.

So we start out with a problem, which is that the central claim appears to be incorrect.  And in fact, if you're talking about violent eruptions, what we're seeing from Kilauea in the last few days is peanuts compared to the eruptions of Krakatoa, Tambora,and Toba in the Indonesian archipelago (respectively in 1883, 1815, and about 75,000 years ago) and the Lake Taupo (New Zealand) eruption in 180 C. E.  And even those pale by comparison to the events that formed the Columbia River Flood Basalts, the Deccan Traps, and the Siberian Traps, the latter of which spewed out 4 million cubic kilometers of lava, an amount that beggars belief, and which is believed to have played a role in the Permian-Triassic Extinction that wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.

But never mind all that.  The next thing the authors throw out is their explanation for this increase (which, recall, isn't occurring anyhow).  And the answer is: cosmic rays.

My first inclination was to guffaw at this, but then I decided to do some research (always a good idea, especially when there's the likelihood of rejecting an idea solely because "it seems wrong").  And I found that there is a (scientific) claim out there that the timing of volcanic eruptions is correlated with sunspot minimums, because those are correlated with a higher cosmic ray flux.  The paper in question is "Explosive Volcanic Eruptions Triggered by Cosmic Rays: Volcano as a Bubble Chamber," by Toshikazu Ebisuzaki, Hiroko Miyahara, Ryuho Kataoka, Tatsuhiko Sato, and Yasuhiro Ishimine, of the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute and the University of Tokyo, which appeared in Gondwana Research back in 2011.  What the scientists propose is that for silica-rich volcanoes, the magma can become superheated, and a cosmic ray could act to trigger nucleation -- quick, explosive liquefaction.

But here's the problem.  The Ebisuzaki et al. study only looked at eleven volcanoes, all in Japan, which already seems like a pretty small sample size.  They found that nine of the volcanoes erupted during a solar minimum, and the other two nearer to a solar maximum.  But without even trying hard I went through some eruption records back to 1700 (the cutoff for their study) and found twelve more stratovolcano eruptions (volcanoes with explosive, silica-rich magma) -- Pinatubo (1991), Mount St. Helens (1980), Novarupta (1912), Santa Maria (1902), Mount Pelée (1902), Krakatoa (1883), Tambora (1815), and La Soufrière (1718, 1812, 1902, 1971, and 1979).  Of those, eight occurred during solar maximums; only two (Novarupta and the 1971 eruption of La Soufrière) were during a clear minimum.  Two eruptions, Tambora and the 1812 eruption of La Soufrière, occurred during a local maximum in the middle of a thirty-year period of overall low sunspot activity (the "Dalton Minimum").  So let's not count those in either column.

So with my additions, that brings us up to twenty-one eruptions -- eleven during minimums, and ten during maximums.

In other words, random chance -- no connection to sunspot activity whatsoever.

Now, I'm neither a geologist nor a statistician, and if there's something wrong with my reasoning, I'm happy to correct it.  But I haven't even hit the punchline yet: the whole thing winds its way around to the claim that the Earth isn't actually warming, it's cooling.

So we're back in climate change denial la-la land, which I should have realized the moment I read them quoting Roy W. Spencer, a meteorologist who is on the advisory board of the denialist, pro-fossil-fuels Heartland Institute.  The site Skeptical Science takes Spencer's claims apart one at a time, and with far more authority than I can wield, so I suggest perusing the site.

Anyhow, the original claim looks like bullshit to me, and yet another example of someone with an ax to grind cherry-picking data that supports what they would very much like to be true.  In any case, I think we can rest assured that the cosmic rays aren't going to cause volcanoes to erupt, and that volcanic eruptions in any case have been pretty frequent occurrences throughout Earth's history.  Me, I'm more worried about the fact that we're still burning fossil fuels like mad despite a near-universal scientific consensus that what we're doing is going to jeopardize the long-term habitability of the planet.  And that seems to me more important than fretting about sunspots and cosmic rays.

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This week's book recommendation is a brilliant overview of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly.  If you're interested in critical thinking, it's a must-read; and even folks well-versed in the ins and outs of skepticism will learn something from Dobelli's crystal-clear prose.

SATs, STDs, and school prayer

Yesterday, we saw one example of mistaking correlation for causation -- that being a skeptic (or materialist, or rationalist) is why two prominent skeptics had apparent serious moral lapses.  Today, we'll look at a second -- a group that is claiming that the elimination of school prayer is why student SAT scores have dropped in the United States.

The American Family Association of Kentucky currently has a petition out asking people to vote on whether or not prayer should be allowed in public schools.  First, we have the following photograph, to put us all in the right frame of mind:

And then, there's the meat of the argument, if I can dignify it with that term:

Prayer was in our schools for over 200 years before the anti-God forces took it out in 1962. After prayer was removed from our schools, teen pregnancy went up 500%, STD’s went up 226%, violent crime went up 500% and SAT scores went down for 18 years in a row, opening the door for the AIDS epidemic and the drug culture.

WE NEED PRAYER BACK IN SCHOOLS!

We need to do this, the author of the petition (Frank Simon) says, in order to "return God's protection to America."

Wow.  Where do I start?

First off, if someone is claiming that two things are not only correlated, but exist in a causative relationship, the first thing to do is to determine if there really is even a correlation.  So I looked up the Commonwealth Foundation's breakdown of SAT results state by state.  If god really does care about SAT scores, to the point where he awards the best scores not to the kids that are the smartest or the hardest working but to the kids who pray the most, there should be a correlation between the most religious states and the highest scores, right?  Interestingly, in three states that are pretty solidly Christian -- Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana -- only 4%, 8%, and 9% of qualified high school students even took the SATs last year, although admittedly the average scores of the students who did take it land those states solidly in the middle of the pack.  And I guess even god can't give you good scores on an exam you didn't take.

So what about teen pregnancy?  Once again, if you think the spread of atheism has caused this supposed 500% increase in teen pregnancy, you should see the godly states having lower rates than the ungodly ones, right?  So I looked at the National Campaign to End Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy's page on state data, and guess where Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi fell?  14th, 8th, and 2nd worst (i.e. highest teen pregnancy rates) overall.  Other states in the top ten were Tennessee, Georgia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, also so-called "Bible-Belt" states.

Hmm.  I guess that when it comes to preventing teen pregnancy, sex education and availability of birth control work better than praying.  Whoda thought?

And because I'm nothing if not thorough, I decided to check STD rates state-by-state, so I went to the Center for Disease Control's Data Atlas, and guess where the most new cases of STDs in 2012 were?  Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.  In that order.

Well, well.

I think what bothers me most about this, though, is the way these people are framing this as a religious freedom issue -- the subtitle on the petition page says, "Restore Student Religious Liberty."  One of my first mentors, when I started teaching, was a wonderful science teacher who was also a devout Christian.  I was discussing religion with him one day, and he said something that was very interesting.  "I never bring up religion in class," he said.  "My own beliefs are irrelevant in the classroom.  But more than that; teachers need to keep in mind that they are talking to captive audiences made up of kids of diverse backgrounds and beliefs.  Because of that, you have to be extremely careful when discussing anything that has bearing on political or religious issues.  The best teachers challenge all of their students, not just the ones they disagree with."

So, the bottom line is, students are free to pray in their churches.  They are also free to pray, silently, during class, or any other time during the day.  (I suspect a lot of prayer goes on prior to my administering exams.)  On the other hand, it is not ethical for teachers or administrators to lead prayers in public schools.  At that point, it is no longer an issue of religious liberty, it is an issue of forced proselytization.  And that, actually, is the opposite of liberty.

Red shirts and widow ghosts

One of the best arguments against superstitions is how variable they are across cultures.  For example, if a rabbit's foot is lucky for anyone except the rabbit, it shouldn't matter if you're from the southeastern United States (where the superstition seems to be the most common).  Rabbits were lucky animals in some cultures -- but not among British sailors, for whom a rabbit dashing on board would prevent a ship from sailing that day.

Throwing a pinch of spilled salt over your shoulder originated with the Romans.  In traditional Chinese folklore, you'll ruin your family's prosperity if you build your house facing north.  In Jamaica, you shouldn't feed a child cooked chicken before (s)he can talk, or the child will be mute.  In Spain, you should eat twelve grapes at midnight on New Year's Eve -- one month of good luck will follow for each grape you've eaten.

And so on.

None of these superstitions are known in cultures other than the one where they originated -- which should indicate that they are nothing but folk legends, with no basis whatsoever in truth.

Which brings us to Tha Sawang, Thailand, where there have been some unexplained deaths of young men -- caused, the locals say, by a "widow ghost" who is strangling them as they sleep.  [Source]

Now first, it needs to be established that there actually is a pattern of young men dying, here.  And it appears that there is; Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome has been known in Southeast Asia since 1977, where it was first observed amongst the Hmong of Laos.  It has since been recorded in Thailand, mostly in populations of Laotian ancestry, and the cause has been identified as a gene that results in cardiac fibrillation during sleep (called "Brugada syndrome").

But knowing the scientific explanation for something doesn't usually stop the superstitious from clinging to their own answer, and the "widow ghost" idea has been spreading.  As has the solution.  How do you keep away a "widow ghost?"  Simple, the people of Tha Sawang say.

Hang up a red shirt in front of your house.

 

Red shirts, they say, repel the evil spirit, because red is a lucky color.

I find this particularly amusing, given the fact that in certain other circumstances, a red shirt has quite the opposite meaning:

 "So, men, you've been selected for a mission on which you're all going to die horribly.  But I want you know that as your captain, I'm proud of the sacrifice you're about to make."

The downside of some superstitions, of course, is that it prevents people from seeking rational answers (and potentially solutions) to their problems.  In the case of SUNDS/Brugada syndrome, it's especially problematic, since the fibrillation strikes young men who previously showed no sign of disease -- fostering the belief that the deaths are due to some random, unseen force, and giving credence to the superstition.  In point of fact, there's no good medical answer to SUNDS yet, short of hooking every young male in northern Thailand to a heart monitor every night, so the "widow ghost"/red shirt response is going to be hard to combat.

It's easy to laugh at all this, but the fact is, we're all subject to such phenomena as correlation/causation error, where we use the fact that two things happened simultaneously (e.g. wearing a particular t-shirt and your favorite sports team making an unexpected win) with the first causing the second.  It's especially prevalent where we don't understand what the cause of the second event actually was, and most common of all where education in science is lacking.  Put those three things together, and you'll usually end up with a long list of items or actions that are considered lucky -- and an equally long list of unlucky ones.

That said, there are superstitions that persist even amongst rational, well-educated people, who presumably should know better -- something I find frankly mystifying.

So I'll wrap up here, because I'm almost out of time, and have to get myself ready for school.  Got my clothes all picked out.  No red anywhere.  So if I suddenly drop dead today, just blame the "widow ghost" paying a visit to upstate New York.

Correlation, intelligence, and politics

Everyone loves a good correlation.  Our brains are outstanding pattern-finders; we are very good at picking patterns out of the sensory input that bombards us constantly, so good that we sometimes invent patterns where there is nothing there but some random array (numerology and pareidolia are two excellent examples of this).

There's a second problem, though, and that is that although our brains are pretty good at finding patterns, they're not nearly as good at determining what those patterns mean.  Presented with a correlation, we're quick to assume that there's a causation present -- especially if the relationship seems to support something we already thought was true.

Take, for example, the following table, that has been making the rounds of liberal websites this week:

The statistics given -- the percent of adults 25 years or older who have a college degree -- correlates strongly with which of the two presidential candidates the state went for.  The states with the highest percentage of college graduates went for Obama; the ones with the lowest went for Romney.  And of course, the crowing on the liberal websites was loud and long, and mostly to the effect of "Ha!  We're smarter!  We knew it!"

The problem is, is this really what this table shows?  What we have here is a correlation; that Democrats actually are smarter, or that being smarter caused you to vote Democrat, very much remains to be seen.  I can think of three other explanations for the data without even trying hard.  (1) A college education is also correlated to having a higher-paying, more stable job; the message about Obama being weak on jobs resonated more with the people with fewer marketable credentials.  (2)  The lack of diplomas from colleges, and tendency to vote Republican, in the right hand list are both caused by a second factor; a higher adherence to evangelical religion in those states.  (3) Going to college brainwashes you into becoming a Democrat; colleges are frequently accused of being hotbeds of liberalism.

Which is it?  Or is it something different still?  I think you can see that establishing what caused the pattern is a lot harder than seeing the pattern in the first place.  But when someone finds a pattern that seems to suggest something we already believed, it's easier just to jump to a causation when one has yet to be established.  (Especially when the conclusion is, "Boy, aren't we smart?"  Psychological studies have been done that have shown that nearly everyone thinks (s)he is above average in intelligence, something that has been nicknamed the Lake Wobegon Effect.)

Now, to be sure, patterns like this certainly do demand an explanation; saying "correlation does not imply causation" and then forthwith giving up thinking is lazy.  Something is going on here that needs explaining.  And as Daniel Engber, in his wonderful piece "The Internet Blowhard's Favorite Phrase," put it, "Correlation does not imply causation, but it sure as hell provides a hint."  Whatever the reason behind the pattern in the table -- whether it is true that Democrats, on average, are smarter than Republicans, or one of my three alternate explanations is correct, or that some combination of those reasons is responsible, or that it is caused by something else entirely -- it certainly is a question that should be of interest to sociologists and political scientists.  What it is not is a reason for the liberals to go "Woo hoo!" and then stop thinking.

Because, of course, that one is not the only correlation that is out there.  How about this one, that made the rounds after the 2008 election:

Yes, the red state/blue state split correlates almost perfectly with another statistic, the number of breweries per capita.  I can see it now -- conservatives claiming that the election was invalid, that people who voted for Obama in the blue states actually meant to vote for Romney but screwed up their ballots because they were drunk.