Should've seen that coming

Self-proclaimed psychics hated James Randi, the venerable debunker of all things paranormal, who died in October 2020 at the honorable age of 92.  On one hand, it's obvious why; he loathed charlatans, especially those who in plying their trade rip off the gullible to the tune of thousands of dollars.  But honestly, there's a way in which Randi shouldn't have been so detested by the psychics.  After all, he wasn't saying, "Your claim is false and you're lying," he said, "Show me under controlled conditions that you can do what you say you can do."  Which you'd think is fair enough.  Given how many people out there claim to have paranormal abilities, it seems like at least one or two of them would have made a credible case (especially since the James Randi Foundation was offering a million dollar prize for the first person who could succeed).

But no.  Not one single person ever met the minimum criteria for scientifically-admissible evidence; in fact, very few psychics even took the bait.  A few of them said they wouldn't put themselves in the situation of having to demonstrate their ability in a situation where Randi's "atmosphere of suspicion and distrust" would interfere with the psychic resonant energy fields (or whatever), but most of them wisely decided to stay silent on the matter and ignore the challenge completely.

And it worked.  Being a psychic is as lucrative as ever.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gunnshots (Don), Psychic reading, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Of course, since what the psychics do is make predictions, we don't even need Randi's method to check and see if there's anything to their claims; we can merely look back at the yearly predictions, and see what percentage of them were correct -- and if that hit rate exceeds what we'd expect from pure chance.

Which is exactly what a group of skeptics in Australia did.  The Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project, which just announced their results last week, analyzed 3,800 predictions made in the past twenty years by 207 self-styled psychics, and put each into one of five categories:

• Expected (such as Simon Turnbull's prediction in 2000 that "one area that is going to do fantastic stuff is the internet, specifically areas like shopping.")
• Too vague to call (such as Sarah Yip's statement in October 2020, "Who will win the U.S. election? … the numerology shows that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden have a chance of winning the next U.S. presidential election.  It is still up to the people to decide.")
• Unknown/unverifiable (the smallest category, comprising only a little over two percent of the candidate claims)
• Correct
• Flat-out wrong (my favorite of those is Sarah Kulkens's 2007 claim that "Using anti-gravity to lift heavy objects will become a reality instead of a dream.")

The results are interesting, to say the least.  The "flat-out wrong" category amounted to 53% of the total, which doesn't seem too bad until you look only at the claims that were either verifiable and correct, or verifiable and wrong -- at which point the "wrong" category balloons to 83%.

Not a very impressive showing.

This gets even worse when you consider the major world events that every one of the 207 psychics involved in the study missed entirely.  These included:

• the 9/11 attacks
• the 2003 burn-up on reentry of the space shuttle Columbia
• the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed over 200,000 people
• the 2011 Fukushima earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster
• Notre Dame Cathedral burning down in 2019
• the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic

You'd think that events of this magnitude would have caused at least a small disturbance in The Force, or whatever the hell they claim is happening, but no.  The psychics were as caught off guard as the rest of us.

I'm all for keeping an open mind about things, but at some point you have to conclude that a complete absence of hard evidence means there's nothing there to see.  On one hand, I understand why people want psychic abilities to be real; it gives some kind of plan or pattern to what seems otherwise like a chaos-riddled reality.  But as my grandma used to tell me, "Wishin' don't make it so."  I've never found that the universe is under any obligation to conform to what I'd like to be true.

Or, as science writer and novelist Ann Druyan said, much more eloquently:

[Science] is a never-ending lesson in humility.  The vastness of the universe—and love, the thing that makes the vastness bearable—is out of reach to the arrogant.  This cosmos only fully admits those who listen carefully for the inner voice reminding us to remember we might be wrong.  What’s real must matter more to us than what we wish to believe.  But how do we tell the difference?

I know a way to part the curtains of darkness that prevent us from having a complete experience of nature.  Here it is, the basic rules of the road for science: Test ideas by experiment and observation.  Build on those ideas that pass the test.  Reject the ones that fail.  Follow the evidence wherever it leads.  And question everything, including authority.

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A spoon full of embarrassment

Of all the unpleasant feelings in the world, I think I hate humiliation the most.

I once said that I would rather be physically beaten than humiliated.  I can't even handle watching when other people embarrass themselves, which is why I kind of hate most sitcoms.  I mean, sometimes it can be undeniably funny, like my friend's experience at a restaurant:

Server:  What would you like?

My friend:  I'd like the fried chicken half, please.

Server:  What side?

My friend (uncertainly):  Um, I don't know... Left, I guess.

Server:

My friend:

Server:  Ma'am, I meant which side order would you like with your dinner.

My friend: *resolves never to set foot in that restaurant again*

But even in situations like that, I totally understand my friend's reaction of never wanting to see that server again.  In her place, I'd be absolutely certain that the server would see me across the street or something, and elbow her friends and say, "Hey, look!  It's left chicken guy!"

So I can barely even imagine what it must be like to humiliate yourself while being watched by millions.  This is what happened in 1973 to self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller, who was invited to demonstrate his supposed abilities on the Johnny Carson Show.  Before his TV career, Carson had been a professional stage magician, so he knew how easy it is to fool people -- and he knew all the tricks a faker would use to hoodwink his audience.

Uri Geller in 2009 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dmitry Rozhkov, Uri Geller in Russia2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

He set Geller up with props like the ones he used in his "psychic demonstrations" -- and wouldn't let Geller use his own props, nor handle the ones Carson provided before the show.  The result was twenty minutes of the most cringeworthy television I've ever seen, as Geller failed over and over, blaming whatever he could think of -- Carson's disbelief, the hostile atmosphere, the response of the audience.  He finally settled on "I'm not feeling strong tonight."

Here's a clip of the incident, if you can stand to watch it.

Every time I think of Geller, I always am baffled by why this single experience didn't lead him to vanish entirely.  If something like that happened to me, I'd probably change my name and consider plastic surgery.  But no -- after a brief time when he seemed set back by his catastrophic performance with Carson, he bounced back and became more popular than ever.

So this is two things I don't get, combined into one; how Geller didn't retreat in disarray, and how anyone continued to believe that what he does is anything more than a clever magic trick.  But neither happened.  In fact, the reason this comes up today is because a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that Geller is still at it, almost fifty years later, this time with a pronouncement warning NASA to get ready, because we're going to have an alien invasion soon.

The most amusing part of it is the reason he thinks we're due for ET to land; the discovery of a peculiar radio source that pulsates -- but (compared to other pulsating radio sources) with a verrrrrry long period.  This source flashes on and off every twenty minutes; a more ordinary pulsar flashes on twenty times a second.  So far, astronomers are still trying to figure out a natural phenomenon that could cause this really slow pulsation rate, but at present all they have are guesses.

But here's the funny part, apropos of Geller; he claims that this radio source is the signal that the aliens are about to land.  Unfortunately, this runs head-first into the fact that the anomalous astronomical object is four thousand light years away.  Which means that if the aliens were sending that signal toward Earth, it was intended for the Sumerians.

Be that as it may, Geller said we better get ready.  "A team mapping radio waves in the universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before," Geller posted on Instagram.  "No doubt in my mind that this is connected to alien intelligence way way superior than ours.  Start deciphering their messages!  They are preparing us for a mass landing soon!  #nasa #hoova #spectra #spectra #aliens."

I'm curious about what he thinks we should ready ourselves.  I mean, what's he personally going to do to save humanity from the aliens?  Bend a spoon at them?

Anyhow, I guess not everyone overreacts to being humiliated the way I do.  Probably a good thing, that; one of my many faults is taking myself way too seriously.  But really.  How does Geller do it?  To me that's more impressive than any of his alleged psychic talents.  He should bill himself as The Amazing Impervious Man, or something.

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It's obvious to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I'm fascinated with geology and paleontology.  That's why this week's book-of-the-week is brand new: Thomas Halliday's Otherlands: A Journey Through Extinct Worlds.

Halliday takes us to sixteen different bygone worlds -- each one represented by a fossil site, from our ancestral australopithecenes in what is now Tanzania to the Precambrian Ediacaran seas, filled with animals that are nothing short of bizarre.  (One, in fact, is so weird-looking it was christened Hallucigenia.)  Halliday doesn't just tell us about the fossils, though; he recreates in words what the place would have looked like back when those animals and plants were alive, giving a rich perspective on just how much the Earth has changed over its history -- and how fragile the web of life is.

It's a beautiful and eye-opening book -- if you love thinking about prehistory, you need a copy of Otherlands.

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

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!]