Scooting past the reviewers

If there's one piece of advice I have for anyone trying to stay informed, it is: check your sources.

Unfortunately, these days, that takes more than just a quick look, or a recommendation from someone with authority.  After all, just two days ago Donald Trump tweeted that Fox News wasn't right-wing enough for him, that all of his faithful MAGA followers should troop on over to OANN (One America News Network),  that it was the only news source that was "fair and balanced."  Of course, this was transparent enough; in Trump-speak, "fair and balanced" means "willing to kiss Trump's ass on a daily basis."  OANN is a far-right outlet allied to sites like Breitbart -- and let's face it, anything to the right of Fox News isn't even within hailing distance of unbiased.

So "sounds like a reliable source" is itself unreliable.  As an example, take the paper that appeared last week, authored by Mathieu Edouard Rebeaud (University of Lausanne), Valentin Ruggeri (University of Grenoble), Michaël Rochoy (University of Lille). and Florian Cova (University of Geneva).  I won't tell you the title, but leap right in with an excerpt:

As the number of push-scooters has been rising in France, so has the number of push-scooters accidents.  Some of these accidents have proven to be deadly and previous YouTube™ and Dropbox© studies have warned against the deadly potential of push-scooters [1].  For a comparison, only three Chinese people had died from the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 at the end of 2019 [2].  It is therefore important to reflect on the use of push-scooters through an accurate and ethical cost-benefit analysis.

Use and promotion of push-scooters have been advocated on the basis that they would contribute to the reduction and slowing of global warming.  In fact, the French scientific elite has been working on the subject and has recently argued that there was no proof of global warming, as he could not see the ice cap melt on his computer [3].  So, even if global warming was real, there are serious reasons to think that France is not affected, as global warming clearly stopped at the closed border [4].  Unfortunately, the debate is being polluted by bots, trolls and so-called experts funded by Big Trottinette to spread misinformation. Indeed, an independent study (in press on the third author’s Google Drive®) found a positive correlation between experts’ positive advocacy of push-scooters and the amount of money they received from Decathlon® (r = 3.14).  The fact that push-scooters are now a ‘generic’ means of locomotion that can be produced by anyone for a cheap price might lead people to the conclusion that no private interest is involved, but we’re not fooled, we know the truth [5].  So, it is important to diminish the increasing number of push-scooter drivers who are sacrificed on a daily basis.

The authors then go on to show that the way to combat the deadly push-scooter accident surge is through doses of hydroxychloroquine, which also shows promise in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  (Well, most of their research supported this.  They didn't have so much luck with Study 2.  "Study 2 was excluded from analysis and from this paper," the authors write, "as it did not provide informative results (i.e. the results we wanted)."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alex Genz, Female rider on Egret One eScooter, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Also notable is that besides the four actual authors, there are also additional co-authors listed as belonging to places like "The Institute of Quick and Dirty Science of Neuneuchâtel, Switzerland" and the "Institute of Chiropteran Studies of East Timor," and one is called a "General Practitioner and Independent Seeker of Science" from Ankh-Morpork, France.

You may be thinking that this must have appeared in some kind of science spoof site like the brilliant Journal of Irreproducible Results.

You may be wrong.

This paper, titled, "SARS-CoV-2 Was Unexpectedly Deadlier than Push-scooters: Could Hydroxychloroquine be the Unique Solution?", was published in the Asian Journal of Medicine and Health.

(If you want to read it -- which I highly recommend -- you should do it soon.  My guess is that it'll be taken down before long.)

Sounds like a legitimate source, doesn't it?  You might be clued in that something was wrong if you noticed that the paper was submitted on July 24, accepted on August 11, and published on August 15 -- I say that notwithstanding the obviously goofy content from the title on, because most of the papers in the AJMH aren't blatantly off.  But if you look at stuff like this -- dates that make it clear that there was zero peer review involved -- there's no doubt left that this is one of those predatory pay-to-play journals, that will publish damn near anything if you give 'em some money.

Which, of course, was the point of the Rebeaud et al. paper.  It wasn't just to give us all a good laugh -- although it did that as well -- it was to shed some light on the way that predatory journals muddy the waters for everyone.

So back to where we started: CHECK.  YOUR.  SOURCES.  Which doesn't just mean a cursory "okay, it's a 'journal of medicine and health,' it must be reliable."  Take five minutes to do a quick search to see if there are any reviews or commentary on the journal itself.  The best thing is to find good sources that you know you can always rely on -- top-flight research journals like Science, Nature, Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and PLOS-One, to name five -- as well as research-for-the-layperson journals like Scientific American and Discover.

If you get outside of those realms, though, caveat lector.  You never know what kind of lunacy you'll find, up to and including recommendations for taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent push-scooter accidents.

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Fan of true crime stories?  This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is for you.

In The Poisoner's Handbook:Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum, you'll find out about how forensic science got off the ground -- through the efforts of two scientists, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler, who took on the corruption-ridden law enforcement offices of Tammany Hall in order to stop people from literally getting away with murder.

In a book that reads more like a crime thriller than it does history, Blum takes us along with Norris and Gettler as they turned crime detection into a true science, resulting in hundreds of people being brought to justice for what would otherwise have been unsolved murders.  In Blum's hands, it's a fast, brilliant read -- if you're a fan of CSI, Forensics Files, and Bones, get a copy of The Poisoner's Handbook, you won't be able to put it down.

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

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!]

Transwarp nonsense

In today's science news, we have a paper called "Rapid Genetic and Developmental Morphological Changes from Extreme Celerity," from the American Research Journal of Biosciences, by Lewis Zimmerman et al., which describes some unexpected consequences to living beings who are accelerated rapidly.

Turns out that the results are nothing short of terrifying.  Traveling at extreme accelerations and velocities triggers a parallel acceleration in mutations within the test subjects' DNA.  In other words, evolution speeds up, with a resulting change in their physical forms.  If they then reproduce (which they did), their offspring maintain those altered traits, and end up looking nothing like the original organisms did.

I hope by this point you're saying, "Hang on a moment..."  Some of my fellow Trekkies might be adding, "Wasn't that the plot of the Star Trek Voyager episode 'Threshold,' wherein Captain Janeway and Tom Paris are exposed to "transwarp" speeds (higher than Warp 10), and mutate into slimy-looking half-human/half-tadpoles, proceed to have some hot sex that I don't even want to think about, and generate several very skeevy looking babies?  Which they decide to abandon on a jungle planet after an 'antiproton beam' returns their DNA (and their bodies) to human form, instead of doing what an antiproton beam would actually do, namely making them explode in a burst of gamma rays?"

If that's what you said, you're exactly correct, and that resemblance is no coincidence.  Zimmerman wrote up his scholarly paper based on the plot of the Voyager episode, listing himself and six Starfleet officers as the authors, and submitted it to ten journals that had the reputation of being "predatory" -- i.e., pay-to-play.  It was rejected six times, but four journals accepted it, and one -- the aforementioned American Research Journal of Biosciences -- actually published it.

I bring all this up for two reasons.

First, in the current atmosphere of distrust by laypeople of scientists and science in general, we seriously don't need this.  Given that we have a president and a significant slice of his administration who doubt the existence of climate change (although I'm fully aware that there's a money motive for this disbelief, further confounding matters), the last thing we want is some journal whose editorial board -- if it even exists -- accepting bullshit articles that are recycled plots from Star Trek.

Paris and Janeway's bouncing baby tadpoles

Second, this is a bit of a caveat to anyone who is her/himself engaged in academic pursuits to be very, very careful of source reliability.  It used to be, back in the Middle Ages when I was in graduate school, that all you had to do was make sure that the journal you were referencing looked as if it were requiring things like peer review and explicit publication of conflicts of interest.  Later on, as long as the website address said ".edu" or ".org," they probably were okay.

Now?  Just having a fancy name like "American Research Journal of Biosciences" is no guarantee of reliability.  You can't just download a pdf of an academic paper, give a quick look to its source listings and citations, and assume it's reasonably valid.  Because what Zimmerman's little prank shows is that predatory journals don't give a rat's ass what they publish, as long as the authors are willing to pay for the privilege.  And the vast majority of them aren't going to be blitheringly obvious fakes like the "Extreme Celerity" paper was.  Most of them are likely to be papers that were rejected during peer review for things like design flaws, inappropriate controls, or more subtle problems such as "p-hacking" -- things you might not notice at a quick read.

It's sad, but the problem isn't going away.  As soon as there's a lucrative market for something like pay-to-play academic publishing, it's going to continue to churn out trash.  What Zimmerman's paper shows is that you can't simply assume that if something's in a journal, it made it through peer review.  The truth is that there are hundreds of predatory journals out there, and it's incumbent upon anyone using scientific research, or even reading it, to make certain what you're looking at has been through a rigorous vetting process before reaching print.

Kind of a shame, really, and not just from the standpoint of muddying the waters of scientific research.  I've been hoping for faster-than-light travel ever since I was a kid watching Lost in Space.  Hell, I'd take Warp 1, much less Warp 10.  I'm not eager to be turned into a slimy tadpole creature, but if I could visit other star systems, it's a risk I'm willing to take.  And after all, if I do get mutated, I can always rely on a handy beam of antiprotons to bring me back to my original form.

Religious mutants

A couple of days ago, a reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link along with an email, the gist of which was, "Ha ha, how are you gonna argue your way out of this one, Mr. Smarty-Pants Atheist?"

The link was to a recent article in Newsweek entitled, "Religious People Live Healthier, Longer Lives -- While Atheists Collect Mutant Genes."  Notwithstanding the mental image this created -- of us atheists having stamp-collection-like binders of mutant genes on bookshelves in our studies -- the whole premise sounded idiotic.  The article quotes study co-author Edward Dutton as saying:

Maybe the positive relationship between religiousness and health is not causal—it's not that being religious makes you less stressed so less ill.  Rather, religious people are a genetically normal remnant population from preindustrial times, and the rest of us are mutants who'd have died as children back then...  [The Industrial Revolution caused us to develop] better and better medical care, easier access to healthy food and better living conditions.  Child mortality collapsed down to a tiny level and more and more people with more and more mutant genes have survived into adulthood and had children...  Religiousness makes you more pro-social, and you become more religious when you're stressed.  Religious people would have been sexually selected for because their pro-social, moral, unstressed nature would be attractive.

Well, my background is in evolutionary genetics, so I thought, "Here's a claim I'm qualified to evaluate."

Let's look first at his contention that religious people are healthier.  Turns out that there's some weak correlation there, but only if you look at First-World countries.  In the United States, for example, comparing religious people and non-religious people of similar socioeconomic status, there's a small improvement in health and longevity in the religious people over the non-religious ones.  (It very much remains to be seen that there's any kind of causal relationship there, however.)  But if you look at the human race as a whole -- comparing largely non-religious countries (Sweden, Finland, Iceland) with largely religious ones (Bangladesh, Malaysia, Egypt) gives you exactly the opposite pattern.  There's as much evidence that ill people in questionable living conditions seek out religion as solace as there is that religion itself makes you healthier.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The last part of the claim, that religion is due to some kind of sexual selection, moves us into even muddier waters.  If this claim is true, people would be eliminating potential mates on the basis of being non-religious, something I see no evidence of whatsoever.  Also, there's the problem of people like me -- the child of a dad who was a Pascal's-wager kind of guy and a mom who was more or less the Cajun Mother Teresa.  So I almost certainly inherited "religiosity genes" (whatever those are).  My first wife, and the mother of my children, was an agnostic who didn't really care about the question of god one way or the other, and at the time our two sons were born, I was still trying like hell to find a reason to believe, a battle I gave up when my youngest son was about five.

So how do you classify me, on the Religious Mutant Gene scale?

Anyhow, as befits a good skeptic, I decided to go to the source, and went to the paper by Dutton et al. in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science that makes the original claim.  The paper has the rather histrionic title, "The Mutant Says in His Heart, 'There Is No God': the Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load," and although the entire paper is behind a paywall, the abstract reads as follows:

Industrialisation leads to relaxed selection and thus the accumulation of fitness-damaging genetic mutations.  We argue that religion is a selected trait that would be highly sensitive to mutational load.  We further argue that a specific form of religiousness was selected for in complex societies up until industrialisation based around the collective worship of moral gods.  With the relaxation of selection, we predict the degeneration of this form of religion and diverse deviations from it.  These deviations, however, would correlate with the same indicators because they would all be underpinned by mutational load.  We test this hypothesis using two very different deviations: atheism and paranormal belief.  We examine associations between these deviations and four indicators of mutational load: (1) poor general health, (2) autism, (3) fluctuating asymmetry, and (4) left-handedness.  A systematic literature review combined with primary research on handedness demonstrates that atheism and/or paranormal belief is associated with all of these indicators of high mutational load.

Mutational load is a real thing -- it's the number of lethal (or at least significantly deleterious) genes we carry around, the effects of which we are usually protected from by our diploidy (we've got two copies of every gene, and if one doesn't work, chances are the other one does).  But there is no indication that high mutational load is connected with autism (jury's still out on what exactly causes autism) or left-handedness, and "poor general health" is such a mushy term that if you select your data set carefully enough you could probably correlate it with anything you like, up to and including astrological sign.  (There is some indication that left-handedness correlates with some medical conditions, such as migraine, autoimmune disorders, and learning disability; but the heritability of left-handedness even when both parents are left-handed is only 29% anyhow, and what exactly causes it is still unknown.)

But then I did what (again) all skeptics should do, namely take a look at the paper's sources.  I noticed two things right away -- first, that the sources from highly-respected journals like Nature were only tangentially connected to Dutton et al.'s claim (such as an article on the heritability of longevity in Nature Genetics), and second, that the authors are really good at citing their own work.   No fewer than ten of the sources were authored or co-authored by Dutton or the other two authors of the Evolutionary Psychological Science paper, Curtis Dunkel and Guy Madison.

Then I scrolled a little further, and found these listed as sources:

• Copping, J. (2013). Who you gonna call? Belief in ghosts is rising. Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/10310018/Who-you-gonna-call-Belief-in-ghosts-is-rising.html
• Daily Mail Reporter. (2011). The ghost map: Yorkshire tops spook league with a third of adults claiming to have seen a spectre. MailOnline, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1362452/The-ghost-map-Yorkshire-tops-spook-league-adults-claiming-seen-spectre.html
• Greenfield, P. (2017). Christians should pray for Prince George to be gay, says minister. Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/01/christians-should-pray-from-prince-george-to-be-gay-says-c-of-e-minister
• Kelley, M. (2011). Correlates of paranormal beliefs I: schizotypy. Journal of Paranormal Psychology, 75, 301–325.
• Malloy, N. (8 February 2017). Christian girls are beautiful and here’s why. Jesus Tribune. http://jesustribune.com/christian-girls-are-beautiful
• Yahoo Answers. (2008). Why are Mormon girls so hot? https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080713143021AAdArue
• Yelp. (2010). OMG … Why are Christian women extremely [physically] attractive? https://www.yelp.com/topic/los-angeles-omg-why-are-christian-women-extremely-physically-attractive

So you're writing a serious paper in a (presumably) serious journal, and you want us to accept your claim, and you cite Yelp, Yahoo Answers, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Daily Mail Fail, and -- for fuck's sake -- The Jesus Tribune?

What this makes me wonder -- besides the obvious question of how Dutton et al. pull this stuff out of their asses without cracking up -- is about the reliability of the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science itself.  I wasn't able to find any meta-analysis of EPS's reliability online; that sort of self-policing by academia is sorely lacking.  But this paper has all the hallmarks of a pay-to-play publication in a journal that honestly doesn't give a flying fuck about the study's quality.  It's hard to imagine any study that cites The Jesus Tribune making it into Science, for example.

So predictably, I'm unimpressed.  Nothing in my understanding of population genetics lends the slimmest credence to this claim.  It's unsurprising that Newsweek picked up the story, although one would hope that even popular media publications would be a little more careful what they print.  In any case, we atheists don't have to worry about our being poorly-fit unhealthy left-handed autistic mutants.  We're no more likely to be any of the above than the rest of the general population is.  Although, I have to say that while we're talking fiction, if mutations could work like they do in The X-Men, I'd be all for 'em.  I want a mutation that gives me wings.  Big, feathery hawk wings arising from my shoulders.  It'd make fitting into a shirt difficult, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

Confirmation bias, false news, and The Palmer Report

I'm going to make another plea for something that I've requested before:

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE CHECK YOUR SOURCES.

In these fractious times, it's easy to get your dander up and post, share, or retweet links about controversial stuff without double-checking their veracity.  And you should especially check your sources if you're inclined to agree with them.  Confirmation bias plagues us all, and we are all more likely to accept a claim uncritically if we already thought it was true.

This all comes up because of an article from Business Insider about The Palmer Report.  The Palmer Report is a strongly left-leaning news website run by one Bill Palmer, and has established itself as being about as reliable as Fox News in presenting verified, accurate information.

The Business Insider article describes an incident involving Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts.  Markey went on CNN and said, "Subpoenas have now been issued in northern Virginia with regard to [National Security Adviser Michael] Flynn and Gen. Flynn's associates. A grand jury has been impaneled up in New York."

This resulted in some puzzlement, as no one else seemed to have heard about the impaneling of a grand jury in New York, or anywhere else, for that matter.  Questioned about the claim, Markey identified the source of it as The Palmer Report.

Bill Palmer, apparently, made the claim up out of whole cloth.  But when this became obvious, did he back down, and say, "Oops, guess I was wrong"?

Of course not.  Websites like The Palmer Report have, as their motto, "Death Before Retraction."  Instead of addressing the apparent falsehood, Palmer responded with a dazzling display of circular reasoning and said by quoting The Palmer Report, Markey had "confirmed" that a grand jury had been appointed.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The site has kept Snopes busy lately.  Just in the last week, Snopes has debunked false or misleading claims from The Palmer Report including that James Comey sent out a malicious tweet about Donald Trump and the alleged "pee tape" after he was fired; that Donald Trump had said that "Americans have no right to protest;" and that Trump called up CBS after Stephen Colbert's anti-Trump diatribe and "got him fired."

All of these stories are false.  But they line up very much with what the left would like to be true, so they've all gone viral.

Palmer, for his part, is unapologetic.  "Anyone unfamiliar with my work shouldn't just take my word, or anyone else's word, on its validity," he wrote last year.  "My articles include supporting source links which allow readers to easily verify the facts in question, meaning there's nothing controversial about my reporting."

Believe me because I say it's true, in other words.  And why should you think I'm accurate?  Well, I just told you I was, dammit!

All of which brings up a rather unpleasant tendency; for the left to see all of the right's claims as unfounded supposition and their own as well-sourced, fact-based, virtually self-evident to anyone with a brain.  And vice versa, of course.  The truth is that everyone is prone to bias, and we need to evaluate stuff we agree with even more carefully because of the danger of accepting it without question.

And as far as The Palmer Report and the other purveyors of fake news out there, left and right; you are muddying the waters, stirring up conflict and dissent, and making the ugly polarization that is characterizing today's United States even worse.  I have no doubt you know this already, and suspect that you don't care much.  But I will add my own voice to others in saying: if you don't know that the claim you're making is true, shut the fuck up.

Clickbait directory

Coming hard on the heels of a story about how hexagonal cloud formations in the south Atlantic proves the existence of the Bermuda Triangle, we have: a story about a guy in an evil clown mask who, after scaring people for weeks in rural Cambodia, died by accidentally stepping on a land mine.

This is one of those stories that those of us with a twisted sense of humor just would love to be true.  Much to the annoyance of most of us, the whole clown thing has (as I mentioned in a previous post) exploded recently.

Wait, that was a poor choice of words.  Let's just say that clown sightings have skyrocketed.  This of course leads to false sightings, not to mention copycats, and my guess is that the legacy of the evil clowns will be with us long after Halloween has come and gone.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem with the story about the clown stepping on a land mine is, it's fake.  And that's why I'm writing about it.  Not only is the story false, the source of the story -- the Times of Cambodia -- is a recently-created bogus news site.  In other words, the Times of Cambodia appears to have been put online specifically to give visibility to this story.

And the problem is, it worked.  The story has progressed its way up the credibility ladder, and has (thus far) appeared in the Evening Standard, the Mirror, and the Daily Star, to name three.  Not that any of these is above posting a dubious news story to get readers' attention.  But these are at least approaching mainstream media -- in other words, a cut above such unadulterated baloney as InfoWars, Before It's News, and Area 51.

Whoever created the story (not to mention the Times of Cambodia) has also benefited greatly from social media.  I've now seen this story at least a half-dozen times on Twitter and Facebook, usually from people who apparently think that it's true.  So we're back to "check your sources, dammit," a theme I've rung the changes on so many times that I've lost count.

So I thought it might be a good idea to post a list of unreliable news sources.  This is not my own list (although I agree with it 100%) -- to give credit where credit is due, this comes from Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News.  But I'm hoping that since she and I are entirely on the same page about this, she won't mind my swiping her list and reposting it here.

Starting with the nearly always unreliable, not-even-once sites. Some of these are deliberate spoof sites (e.g. Topeka's News), others are claiming they're telling you the straight scoop but are so wildly biased that I'd automatically discount any claim they make (e.g. Natural News).  Here are the top offenders:

• Natural News (Mike Adams, “Health Ranger”)
• Pat Robertson (700 Club)
• Before It’s News
• Info Wars / Prison Planet (Alex Jones)
• Mercola.com (Joe Mercola)
• CryptozoologyNews.com
• News-hound
• Topekasnews.com
• The Canadian (agoracosmopolitan.com/new)
• All News Web
• World News Daily Report
• World Net Daily (WND.com)
• NationalReport.net
• Empire News (empirenews.net)

Then, there are the ones that are such ad-revenue-seeking clickbait that they tend to pick up any story that sounds sensational (like the killer clown story), so what they post is a complete hash of actual news, biased political grandstanding, and outright nonsense.  Anything from them falls into the "check another source" department:

• Daily Mail (U.K.)
• The Sun (U.K.)
• Examiner.com
• Bubblews
• European Union Times
• RT.com
• Siberian Times
• Pravda.ru
• Buzzfeed
• Gawker network of sites
• Mother Nature News
• Epoch Times
• The Blaze
• Drudge Report
• Mirror (U.K.)
• Breitbart
• IFLS (I Fucking Love Science)

So there you have it.  Some news sources to avoid.  Of course, that doesn't mean that what you find elsewhere is reliable; as always, use your brain and double check your sources.  Especially if you're considering forwarding a story about exploding clowns in Cambodia.

Go to the source

One of the many things I harp on with my students is "check your sources."

And "check your sources" doesn't mean the same thing as "cite your sources."  A bullshit citation written up in perfect MLA format, every comma, parenthesis, and colon in place, is still a bullshit citation.  There is no substitute for doing the legwork of making certain that the information you're using comes from a reputable source.

Which brings us, predictably enough, to Natural News.

Natural News has hidden for years under the façade of being a healthy-lifestyle site.  The 10% of their articles that are about better diet and regular exercise as a way of increasing vitality and longevity, however, are drowned beneath piles of nonsense of the worst sort, including anti-vaxx rhetoric, homeopathy, "toxin cleanses," and conspiracy theories about how the scientific world is an evil empire bent on ruining human health permanently.  Here's a sampler of their most-viewed articles as of today:

• 10 shocking reasons why Zika virus fear is another fraudulent medical hoax and vaccine industry funding scam
• How antidepressants ruin your natural serotonin so you can never be happy again ... without your pills
• Why double-blind drug trials are a science FRAUD: The more toxic the side effects, the more patients believe the drugs are 'working'
• Mother beats cancer with JUICING after told she only had two weeks to live

So it's not surprising that you won't find anything from Natural News in a peer-reviewed science journal, and it's not because there's a big conspiracy to keep their discoveries from becoming known.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But if there's one thing that Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams and his cadre of loons over at Natural News excel at, it's marketing.  They know how to push their ideas into social media, giving it all a nice glossy veneer of respectability, duping the desperate, gullible, and scientifically illiterate into buying what they're selling.  However, they haven't been able to make any inroads into the world of actual scientific research, which is why...

... they are starting their own science journal.

Called the Natural Science Journal, the idea is to make an end run around all of the legitimate checks-and-balances that keep outright bullshit from making its way into print.  Here's a bit from their press release:

In a world where nearly all so-called "science" is actually little more than corporate fraud and government malfeasance, nearly all mainstream science journals have been taken over by pharmaceutical and biotech interests.  As a result, they destroy and suppress human knowledge rather than expanding it. 

All the big science journals -- Nature, The British Medical Journal, The Lancet and so on -- function almost entirely as science prostitutes for corporate interests, spewing out a vomitous cascade of fraudulent, industry ghostwritten "doctored" studies that the industry pretends represent real science.  This sad, filthy corruption of science harms the reputation of science itself and detracts from the valuable expansion of knowledge that can be achieved when science is practiced in the interests of humanity rather than corporate profits.

Which is mighty convenient, given that most of what peer-reviewed science has shown directly contradicts everything that Mike Adams and his crew believe.

And I feel obliged to mention that he really needs to lay off the "bold" typeface.

Adams is adamant that he is fostering actual research:

Please note that this journal is a hard sciences journal, meaning we seek scientific papers based on hard analytics in chemistry, physics, botany and so on. This is not a journal for philosophy or thought experiments that cannot be proven through hard experimental data.

So he's asking for submissions about the following topics:

• Geoengineering and weather modification
• Climate change / carbon dioxide
• Vaccine composition, toxicity and adverse events
• Genetically modified organisms
• Agrochemicals (pesticides / herbicides)
• Epigenetics and chemically-induced genetic expression
• Biosludge and biosolids
• Botany, permaculture and chemical-free agriculture

But don't worry, they're not biased at all.

Look, I know science isn't perfect.  Scientists (like all of us) have their biases, peer review sometimes misses mistakes (and occasionally outright fraud), the money motive drives research to an unfortunate degree, and so on.  But it is still by far the best tool we have for understanding the universe, including ourselves and how our own bodies work.  The idea that Adams has created his own "journal" simply because he doesn't like the fact that scientific research doesn't support what he believes isn't an indication of a failure of science.

It simply means that Adams is wrong.

My fear, though, is that given Natural Science Journal's neutral-sounding name, and its cursory nod in the direction of peer review, it will be taken seriously.  And then it'll be even harder to deal with the unscientific hogwash Adams and his ilk put out.

Nutritional hydrogen

Yesterday I ran into an interesting example of the fact that a novel idea, explained by a non-scientist, can skew a person's reaction toward thinking it's nonsense.

The topic came up because of an email from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a link to the website of one Zen Honeycutt, called Moms Across America, wherein she touts the value of molecular hydrogen as a nutritional supplement.  The email said, in toto, "What the hell?"

And to read what she writes, it seems like woo of the worst kind.  I mean, listen to how she sells this stuff:

Approximately 3.6 billion years ago Molecular Hydrogen served as the original energy source for Primordial cellular life, fueling its metabolic processes and protecting it from the hostile environment of early Earth. Without it, life would not exist.

Which is true in the sense that 99% of the atoms in the universe are hydrogen, and a great proportion of the atoms making up the organic compounds in our body are hydrogen (in fact, they're only outnumbered by carbon).  Add that to the fact that hydrogen is what fuels the nuclear fusion reactions in our Sun, then yeah... I'd say hydrogen is pretty important.

[image courtesy of NASA]

She goes on to say:

Hydrogen is the first and most abundant element in the Universe! Two atoms combine to form hydrogen gas, H2, the smallest and most mobile molecule. This exclusive property gives it greater cellular bioavailability than any other nutrient or nutraceutical. Molecular Hydrogen can rapidly diffuse into cells, mitochondria and fluids throughout the body to deliver its unique and abundant benefits.

And once again, there's truth here, but it's so mixed up that it's misleading.  Hydrogen ions are used as energy carriers in both respiration and photosynthesis, but it's unclear if this is what she's referring to.  And the part about hydrogen diffusing quickly is a pretty dubious selling point.  After all, hydrogen cyanide is also a small, mobile molecule, capable of diffusing rapidly into your cells and your mitochondria.  The problem is, it also blocks cellular respiration, leading to the unfortunate side effect of death.

Then we hear that hydrogen is found in high quantities in "healing waters" and raw foods:

An additional benefit is that Active H2 generates an electron-rich potential (-ORP) in the water (you can measure it!). This rare property is uniquely found in fresh, raw living foods and juices, mothers milk and many of the world’s healing waters.

And that, unfortunately, is just plain nonsense.

So anyway, on and on she goes, sounding like the wooiest woo that ever wooed.  But the ironic part?

This all has some basis in fact, as far-fetched as it sounds.

Shigeo Ohta, of the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the Nippon School of Medicine, wrote a paper describing research he'd performed on the effects of molecular hydrogen on oxidative stress.  His research, described in "Recent Progress Toward Hydrogen Medicine: Potential of Molecular Hydrogen for Preventive and Therapeutic Applications" in the June 2011 Current Pharmaceutical Design, is described as follows:

Persistent oxidative stress is one of the major causes of most lifestyle-related diseases, cancer and the aging process.  Acute oxidative stress directly causes serious damage to tissues.  Despite the clinical importance of oxidative damage, antioxidants have been of limited therapeutic success.  We have proposed that molecular hydrogen (H2) has potential as a “novel” antioxidant in preventive and therapeutic applications [Ohsawa et al., Nat Med. 2007: 13; 688-94].  H2 has a number of advantages as a potential antioxidant:  H2 rapidly diffuses into tissues and cells, and it is mild enough neither to disturb metabolic redox reactions nor to affect reactive oxygen species (ROS) that function in cell signaling, thereby, there should be little adverse effects of consuming H2.  There are several methods to ingest or consume H2, including inhaling hydrogen gas, drinking H2-dissolved water (hydrogen water), taking a hydrogen bath, injecting H2-dissolved saline (hydrogen saline), dropping hydrogen saline onto the eye, and increasing the production of intestinal H2 by bacteria.  Since the publication of the first H2 paper in Nature Medicine in 2007, the biological effects of H2 have been confirmed by the publication of more than 38 diseases, physiological states and clinical tests in leading biological/medical journals, and several groups have started clinical examinations. Moreover, H2 shows not only effects against oxidative stress, but also various anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic effects. H2 regulates various gene expressions and protein-phosphorylations, though the molecular mechanisms underlying the marked effects of very small amounts of H2 remain elusive.

When I read this, I said, and I quote, "Well, I'll be damned."  Upon doing some digging, I found corroborating papers in the Journal of Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology, the Journal of Biomedicine and Environmental Science, and the prestigious Nature Medicine.

Now, it's important to note that the research I read was pretty clear that these were preliminary results, and it is far from certain what positive effects a person might accrue from consuming hydrogen-infused water.  A lot of interesting supplements and medical therapies have turned out, upon further study, not to live up to their promise.  Certainly Zen Honeycutt's enthusiasm seems a little premature.

But what I find most interesting about all of this is how unscientific commentary, blended in with misunderstanding and outright silliness, can blind you to something that actually has scientific merit.  I know that my own reaction, upon reading Honeycutt's website, was "Wow, this is serious bullshit."  And had I dismissed it out of hand because it "sounded silly," that wouldn't have been proper skepticism -- it would have been scoffing at a claim because it didn't fit my preconceived notion of how the world works.

All the more indication that the fundamental rule, when reading anything, is "check your sources."

Especially when it sounds like nonsense at first.