Scientific names, Indigo Children, and Alpha Thinkers

Most people are, by nature, categorizers.  We like to put labels on things, sort the world into neat little boxes.  For many of us, this drive is integral to our understanding of the world.

An example from my own field is the concept of species.  The definition seems simple enough: a group of morphologically similar individuals that are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring.  It seems, on the surface, that given this definition, it should be trivial to determine whether two individuals are, or are not, members of the same species.

The problem is, the world is messy, and doesn't often acquiesce to our desire to paste labels on various bits of it.  The word species is actually one of the hardest to pin down definitions in biology.  Ring species, fertile hybrids, morphologically distinct populations that can interbreed, morphologically identical populations that cannot, and so on, all point up that we're trying to draw firm distinctions in a realm where those distinctions probably don't exist.  As my long-ago vertebrate zoology professor once said, "The only reason that humans came up with the concept of 'species' is that Homo sapiens has no near relatives."

It's funny how serious taxonomists get about this, however.  There are fierce arguments over whether species should be "lumped" or "split" (particularly contentious amongst birdwatchers, who often bump up their lists with no hard work if what was once a single species gets divided into two or more).  There are endless arguments even about what names species should be given, and every month taxonomic oversight groups publish lists of name changes, to the chagrin of biologists who then have to go back and alter their records.

The same urge to divide a messy reality into neat compartments pervades a lot of other fields, too, and the results are sometimes more pernicious than the biologist's need to decide whether some plant or another is a new species.  In psychology, for example, it has driven the use of diagnostic labels on groups of behaviors that might not actually be conditions in the clinical sense.  ADD and ADHD, for example, are diagnoses that even the experts can't agree upon -- whether or not they are actual medical conditions, how (or if) cases should be medicated, and inconsistencies in how they are diagnosed have all led to significant controversy.  (There's a nice overview of the arguments here.)

Then, there's the urge to relabel in order to give a previously stigmatized group a more positive spin.  The adoption of the word "gay" to mean "homosexual" in the 20th century was, in part, to find a positive word to identify people who have throughout history been the targets of the worst sorts of epithets.  In the 1990s, a group of atheists tried the same kind of rebranding, and settled on calling themselves "The Brights" -- a move that to many people, including myself, seemed so self-congratulatory as to be cringeworthy.

More recently, there have been two rather interesting examples of this same sort of thing.  One is the idea of "Indigo Children," which is an increasingly popular label given to kids who are "empathetic, sensitive, intelligent, and don't fit in well."  I can understand the difficulties that parents of sensitive children face -- one of my own sons certainly could be described by those words, and he had a hell of a time making it through the teasing and bullying that seem to be an entrenched part of middle school culture.  But labeling these kids, even with a positive term, doesn't help the situation, and might even make it worse if the label makes the child feel even more different and isolated.  Add to that a pseudoscientific twist that you often see on "Indigo Child" websites -- that "Indigo Children" frequently have paranormal abilities -- and you have a fairly ugly combination of a non-evidence-based false diagnosis with a heaping helping of New-Agey condescension.  (For a particularly egregious example of this, go here -- and note that the article begins with a statement that the easiest way to identify "Indigo Children" is that they have "indigo-colored auras.")

Just yesterday, I found another good example of this -- the idea of the "Alpha Thinker."  Eric Schulke, who wrote the article I linked and who works for the "Movement for Indefinite Life Extension," tells us that Alpha Thinkers "... are creatives, innovators, pioneers. They acutely and agilely navigate an abundance of diverse, fallacy aware thinking. The alpha thinker can’t bring themselves to live at the last outpost and not venture further. They cannot resist poking their finger through the realm of subatomic particles. They can’t stay on this side of the atmosphere. They look into biology and the elements. They want to know why we are here, why the universe and all of existence is here, how far it goes, what is out there, what the hell is going on. Alpha thinkers are the universe’s way of creating the devises [sic] needed to help bring out all of the potential in its elements."

Well, that's just fine and dandy, but how do you know if someone is an "Alpha Thinker?"  It turns out that you more or less have to wait for them to do something smart:  "It is not a college degree that signifies the alpha thinker. As the alpha thinker knows, its [sic] an abundance of fallacy-aware thinking that signifies it...  Alpha thinkers control the elements. They are cosmic titans, the leaders of humankind, the explorers of the universe setting sail with fierce urgency."

Spinoza, Newton, and Thomas Paine, we are told, were "Alpha Thinkers," which strikes me as kind of an odd trio to choose, but I guess there's no denying these three men were bright guys.  Then, we are given two curious pieces of information: (1) whether or not you are an "Alpha Thinker" can be determined by an electroencephalogram; and (2) from "historical times" until now the ratio of "Alpha Thinkers" to ordinary folks has increased from 1 in 99 to 1 in 6.

So, I'm thinking: how can you know that's true, given that the EEG machine was only invented in 1924, and most people in the world will never have an EEG done during their lifetimes?  It seems to me that the label "Alpha Thinker" is just a new way to say "smart person," and Schulke is pulling made-up statistics out of his ass in order to support his point that there's something inherently different about them.  Further evidence of this comes at the end of the article, where Schulke gives the whole thing a New Age twist by saying that "Alpha Thinkers" are here to guide us into the next stage, the "Transhuman Revolution."

Oh, and of course, throughout the article Schulke makes it clear that he's an "Alpha Thinker."  As if there were any doubt of that.

So, there you are.  Today's musings about human nature.  I suspect that all of the above really, in the long haul, does minimal damage, with the possible exception of the misdiagnosis of individuals who are actually mentally ill and who don't receive treatment because they are labeled "Indigo Children" or "Alpha Thinkers," or whatever.  But it is a curious tendency, isn't it?  I think I'll wrap this up here, because I need to go update the database of my birdwatching sightings and see if any of the scientific names have changed.

Moral relativity

Once you accept a given non-evidence-based belief system, be it homeopathy or fundamentalist Islam, I see why that would require you to disbelieve in certain realms of scientific understanding.  If you are embracing something based on faith, and it comes into conflict with rationality, one or the other has to go.  It's time to surgically remove the source of the conflict.

I do, however, find it curious how selective the surgery can be.  The same people who object to biological science's understanding of evolution are frequently the same ones who are perfectly willing to take medicines and undergo medical procedures, all of which were developed by the same scientific framework that generated the theory of evolution.  It's a little hard to see how science can be so far right in one way, and then lead you so far wrong in another.

Be that as it may, I do get why the jettisoning of fact-based science happens.  But sometimes the specific bits that get rejected are a little hard to fathom.

Most of you have probably heard of Conservapedia, the crowd-sourced wiki project begun in 2005 by Andrew Schlafly to counter the "liberal bias" he found in Wikipedia.  His idea was that everything in the project would be written and supported from conservative and Christian ideals.  As a result, the page on Barack Obama is entirely negative; the page on climate change states that, basically, it isn't happening; the page on Jesus unquestioningly accepts his divinity; and so on.

All in the name of "eliminating bias."  Oh, and did I mention that its motto is, "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia?"

But so far, none of this is all that surprising.  It's hardly to be marveled at that conservative Christians embrace conservative Christian viewpoints.  But I just stumbled a couple of days ago onto two pages on Conservapedia that really, truly, mystified me.

Because apparently they find the Theory of Relativity, and Einstein's mass/energy equivalency formula (E=mc²) to be "liberal claptrap."  (Direct quote from the page on E=mc².)

And I'm thinking, "Okay.  I can see rejecting evolution, cosmology, and plate tectonics, because all of those strongly support the antiquity of the Earth.  But what in the hell is the problem with Einstein?  All that Einstein has done is to show that matter and energy can be converted back and forth, and how objects behave when they are traveling at a high rate of speed."  Neither one, I would think, would be first on the list of Theories Conservatives Shouldn't Like.

Apparently they are, though.  The Conservapedia folks go to great lengths to say how both of them are suspect, that any "dissenting views" by scientists who doubt Einstein are "suppressed as heresy," and how neither relativity nor E=mc² has ever been experimentally verified (in fact, they state in several places on the page for the Theory of Relativity that it has been "rejected," "is not entirely successful or proven," and contains "clear contradictions").

Amusingly, on the page for E=mc², they then follow up this criticism with a bunch of evidence that completely supports its validity, and state outright that in an experiment done all the way back in 1932, mass/energy equivalency was supported to an accuracy of ±0.5%.  I guess that's not enough to count as "verification," for some reason.

Only at the end of the page on the Theory of Relativity do we get an inkling of what is going on here.  Einstein's ideas, they say, promote moral relativism:

Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic President Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of "curvature of space" to promote a broad legal right to abortion.  As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this liberal application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments.  Applications of the theory of relativity to change morality have also been common.  Moreover, there is an unmistakable effort to censor or ostracize criticism of relativity.

So, yeah.  A mathematical system describing how matter behaves at extremely high speeds has anything to do with abortion law.

In any case, I decided to do a little digging, and find out what they hell they could possibly be talking about regarding the Tribe article showing that the General Theory of Relativity was pro-choice.  And I found the source; a paper from the Harvard Law Review in 1989 called "The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics," in which Tribe used Relativity as a metaphor:

The Roe v. Wade opinion ignored the way in which laws regulating pregnant women may shape the entire pattern of relationships among men, women, and children. It conceptualized abortion not in terms of the intensely public question of the subordination of women to men through the exploitation of pregnancy, but in terms of the purportedly private question of how women might make intimately personal decisions about their bodies and their lives. That vision described a part of the truth, but only what might be called the Newtonian part. ... [A] change in the surrounding legal setting can constitute state action that most threatens the sphere of personal choice. And it is a 'curved space' perspective on how law operates that leads one to focus less on the visible lines of legal force and more on how those lines are bent and directed by the law's geometry.

So, now I'm thinking, are you people just idiots?  Or what?  When conservatives branded Bill Clinton with the nickname "the Teflon president," did you throw away all of your non-stick cookware?  Do you think that a "puppet government" is run by Pinocchio, Charlie McCarthy, and Howdy Doody?  When reporters call North Korea "the Hermit Kingdom," does that mean that we should immediately round up and imprison all of the hermits?  Or possibly hermit crabs?

Do you think that rainbows literally taste like Skittles?

You know, in this blog I've deliberately taken up the cause of clear thinking, and tried to do battle with those who promote ridiculous ideas and pretzel logic.  But sometimes, honestly, the muddy water seems to run too deep.  If you are that delusional, that much of a blithering moron, I just don't know that there's anything I, or anyone else, can do about it.

Einstein showed that morals are relative.  I mean.

The doggit on trial

There's a story developing in California that has me casting a wary but curious eye in that direction.

Joseph Mastropaolo, a former biomechanics and kinesiology teacher who "found Jesus" and gave up his career to advocate for various young-earth creationist causes, has dreamed up a contest in which a YEC/anti-evolution proponent and a proponent of science and evolution would each pony up $10,000, and would then present their positions (and evidence) before a judge.  (Mastropaolo has said that he himself will fund the YEC proponent's ante.)  The judge would decide whose case merited the win, and the victor walks away with the whole $20,000.

My first thought was, "What a nitwit.  I hope he has $10,000 to lose."  The weaker sister to creationism -- intelligent design -- has already gone to trial, in 2005, in the Kitzmiller vs. the Dover Area School Board case, and even it was found to be a stance that in the words of Judge John E. Jones III, who decided the case, was "breathtakingly inane."  He said, in his decision,

ID's backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.

Couple this with the fact that "religious freedom" statutes, which would coerce teachers to give "alternate explanations" to evolution in biology classes, have been found unconstitutional every time they have come to trial, and Mastropaolo's idea seems like a good way to lose $10,000.

But I wonder if it'll be that easy.  According to the rules of the game, the goal is to pit a "literal Genesis advocate" against a "non-literal Genesis advocate."  In other words, people like me, who consider the Book of Genesis mythology (i.e., false), might be excluded from the outset, because I don't advocate for the Bible at all, either literally or non-literally.

Second, the two have to agree on the judge.  This may or may not be a problem; for example, in the Dover case, Judge Jones is a self-professed "Republican and Christian," and yet he still decided against the School Board in his decision.

Third, and more troubling, is the requirement in the rules that the "non-literal Genesis advocate" prove his/her case before the judge, using "objective, valid, reliable, and calibrated" evidence.  This would seem immediately to favor the advocate of science, given that the amount of reliable evidence that supports young-earth creationism is exactly zero.  But the problem, I believe, hinges on the word "prove."  When is a scientific theory proven?  The rather facile answer is "never;" as a possibly apocryphal quote from Einstein goes, "A thousand experiments could never prove me right, but one could prove me wrong."  Theories are supported, but are always subject to revision with better data -- one of the strengths of science.  Proof, in the sense that we prove a theorem in trigonometry, is out of reach of the inductive scientific method.

So I can easily see the case going something like this:

Scientist: The evidence is that the universe is billions, not thousands, of years old.  For example, we see light from galaxies that are far more than six thousand light years away; if the universe were only six thousand years old, the light from those galaxies wouldn't have arrived yet.

Creationist:  God created the light en route.  You can't prove that the entire universe wasn't created, with the light already part of the way here, six thousand years ago.  Or maybe the speed of light has changed in the last six thousand years.  You can't disprove that conjecture, either.

Scientist:  But what about radioactive dating?  The geologists and paleontologists have calibrated radioactive decay rates, and they all agree with each other.

Creationist:  If all of the decay rates are changing simultaneously, the fact that they're calibrated against each other means nothing.  If everything in the world were expanding, including the meter sticks, you'd have no way to tell.  So again, the rate of decay could have been different in the past, just like the speed of light.

Scientist:  But... fossils?  Genetic homology?  Structural homology?

Creationist:  All created that way by God.

Scientist (desperately):  The Lenski experiment?  Examples of rapid speciation?  Bacterial antibiotic resistance?

Creationist (smugly):  That's microevolution, not macroevolution.  There are no intermediate forms, and no changes in "type."  Show me something halfway between a dog and rabbit, and I might be convinced.

Scientist:  *faceplant*

So, I think the whole thing might hinge on some judge demanding that the scientist (or "non-literal Genesis advocate," or whatever) be able to come up with evidence to meet every potential objection that the creationist could bring up.  This, of course, isn't possible, because the creationist just has to fall back on "god did it that way," to which there's no possible scientific answer.  (And lest you think that I'm joking about how ridiculous this can get, the picture I linked above came from a creationist site, Fish With Trish, wherein we find out that supposedly evolutionists believe in transitional forms like the "doggit (a mix between a dog and a rabbit)," and that "the purpose of fossils is to speak about death and God's judgment.")

So, I can easily see the whole thing going awry -- not because there's any chance that evolution is wrong and creationism is right, but because proponents of science and religion essentially don't speak the same language.  Their standards of evidence and proof differ; their understanding of how we know something is true or false differs; their entire way of comprehending the world differs.  It is to be hoped that a judge would side with reason, but I'm not confident enough of it to risk $10,000.

So, it'll be interesting to see what will happen.  A couple of the skeptical sites I frequent had folks pawing at the ground saying, "Lemme at him!"  So maybe someone will take the bait.  Myself, I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing.  But in my optimistic moments, I can see such a trial going very right -- which would certainly be a victory to celebrate.

Straw man media

I think that mental laziness contributes more to the prevalence of media idiocy than any other factor.

I mean, let's face it.  The simplistic, single-cause vitriol poured into newspapers, magazines, and websites by the likes of Ann Coulter and Ted Rall would get nowhere if the consumers were willing to get up off their metaphorical asses and do the hard work of evaluating the actual arguments these people make.  When what they say constitutes an actual argument, that is, which is seldom.  Most of it seems to be one long free-floating ad hominem, delicately laced with unintentional irony -- such as yesterday's pronouncement by Rush Limbaugh that lesbians were obese substance abusers.

No, he apparently didn't realize why everyone else thought that this was screamingly funny.  I guess oxycodone addiction can make you a little slow on the uptake.

The problem is, once you have a critical mass of consumers who think of media as being pithy sound-bites that loudly confirm what they already thought, you have dulled the whole lot of them to learning anything from what they read.  And wasn't the original purpose of news media to inform?  I sure thought it was.

I was sent an especially good example of this by a friend and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia yesterday.  The whole thing started with an article in the Boston Globe online entitled, "Report Slams State for Lack of Corrections Reform."  In the article, posted last Sunday, writer Wesley Lowery describes a recent study by MassINC, a non-partisan research group that looked into incarceration patterns over the past forty years in Massachusetts.  The group produced a forty-page report that found, amongst other things, a puzzling statistic -- that as incarceration rates climbed steeply, the rate of violent crime was falling equally steeply.

Okay, so far, so good.  But then Michael Graham, radio talk show host and GOP consultant, weighed in with "Boston Globe-Democrat Asks: Why is Crime Going Down If We're Putting So Many Crooks in Prison?"  And in this stunning piece of investigative journalism, we read the following:

So you don’t understand why prison enrollment is going up while crime is going down? You don’t see the connection between more criminals off the street and fewer crimes in your neighborhood?

Okay….

After all, if crime is going down with all the crooks in jail, why are we wasting money keeping them in jail? Let’s let them back out on the streets.

What could possibly go wrong?

So, we have three fallacies at once here:

1)  If-by-Whiskey -- defining a term however you damn well please, and acting as if that definition were the correct one.
2)  Red Herring -- throwing in an irrelevant or misleading statement to throw your opponent off his stride.
3)  Straw Man -- recharacterizing your opponent's argument as an oversimplified or ridiculous parody of its actual stance, and arguing against that.

Mr. Graham has, probably deliberately (although as with the case of Rush Limbaugh, you can never be certain if they see it themselves), confused the rates of crime and incarceration with the raw numbers of criminals in jail and on the street.  It's not an easy point; consider how tricky it is to understand the fact that (for example) right now, the number of people on the Earth is increasing, but the rate of growth is decreasing.  If all that the report found was that the numbers of criminals on the street went down as the number of criminals in jail went up, that would hardly be surprising.  But it is curious that the rate of violent crime is declining as the rate of incarceration is increasing, and that statistic certainly deserves a better answer than the ridiculous If-by-Red-Straw-Herring Man-Whiskey that Mr. Graham saw fit to create.

I think what bugs me, however, is how easily suckered the readers are.  I read the comments following Michael Graham's article, and not one recognized what was, to me, an obvious problem with it -- half of them (the conservatives) responded with a rah-rah-right-on-dude, and the other half (the liberals) with messages decrying the inequities of the American justice system and their cost to society.  Nobody, or at least not in the first few pages of comments, said, "Wait a minute.  Your argument has a hole in it big enough to float the Queen Elizabeth through."  (The ship, not the monarch.)

So, anyway, that's today's frustrated anti-media rant.  It's not like the problem would be easy to fix; clear thinking is hard work, and people seem to like easy answers.  Going har-de-har-har at a blatant straw man is certainly simpler than putting your mind to figuring out what's really going on.  I just wish so many of the media wonks weren't getting rich off of it.

Know thyself

A lot of us seem to have an innate drive to understand the workings of our own brains.  The whole field of psychology, and later, neuroscience, grew out of a need to figure out how the electrical firings of the 1.5 kilograms of gray matter inside our skulls turns into everything we experience, think, respond to, and desire.  This same impulse, I think, also has been a big factor in the persistence of a lot of pseudoscience -- the popularity of astrology and divination comes, I think, as much from the human desire to know ourselves as it does from our wish to know the future.

It's also given birth to some gray-area practices, such as personality assessment tests.  I was just talking yesterday with some students about one of these -- the Alignment Test (take it yourself here), which asks you 36 questions and then places you into one of nine categories: Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, True Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, and Chaotic Evil.  You can then read the description of yourself, find out others (especially fictional characters) who fall into that classification, and so on.

So, naturally, I had to take the test.  And I turned out to be... *drum roll*

"True Neutral."

Here's my description:

A neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn't feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil-after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he's not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way.

Some neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run... The "true" neutral looks upon all other alignments as facets of the system of many things. Thus, each aspect--evil and good, chaos and law--of things must be retained in balance to maintain the status quo; for things as they are cannot be improved upon except temporarily, and even then but superficially.

True neutral characters are concerned with their own well-being and that of the group or organization which aids them. They may behave in a good manner to those that they consider friends and allies, but will only act maliciously against those who have tried to injure them in some way. For the rest, they do not care... If someone else is in need, they will weigh the options of the potential rewards and dangers associated with the act. If an enemy is in need, they will ignore him or take advantage of his misfortune.

True neutrals are offended by those who are opinionated or bigoted. A "hell-fire and brimstone" lawful good priest is just as offensive as a neutral evil racial supremacist in their eyes. They do not necessarily strive for philosophical balance. In fact, they may avoid philosophical considerations altogether. A true neutral may take up the cause of his nation, not because he necessarily feels obligated to do so, but because it just makes sense to support the group that protects your way of life. True neutrals tend to believe in lex talionis forms of justice.

So.  There you are, then.  Apparently, being a True Neutral puts me in good company; Han Solo, Dr. House, Severus Snape, and Niccolo Machiavelli are supposedly True Neutrals, as is a certain leafy character from Lord of the Rings:

Anyway, all in all, I'm pretty happy about this, even though I know that (1) it's based on my own self-assessment, which may or may not be accurate, and (2) dividing all personality types into nine pigeonholes is kind of silly.  After all, even the astrologers admit that there are twelve.

But it's interesting how deeply this "type theory" has affected reputable psychology.  Consider one of the most widely-used, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a personality assessment test whose first iteration was developed by Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabelle Briggs Myers, in 1962.  This one divides humanity into sixteen types, based on four pairs of traits: extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judgment/perception.  (If you're curious, and not sick of hearing about me, I'm an ISFP, which may be surprising.)

The problem is -- in fact, the problem with all of this is -- type theory has no particular basis in science.  As far back as 1989, research by behavioral scientists Robert McCrae and Paul Costa concluded that "there was no support for the view that the MBTI measures truly dichotomous preferences or qualitatively distinct types."  More recently, David Pittenger, a researcher in psychometrics at Marshall University, said, "Although the MBTI is an extremely popular measure of personality, I believe that the available data warrant extreme caution in its application as a counseling tool, especially as consultants use it in various business settings."  Critics have claimed that its widespread use is unjustified -- as Michael Moffa pointed out, in his article "A Critique of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator," mainly because it gives results that are unreliable.  Individuals given the MBTI twice, with a five-week wait between testing, show as high as a 50% likelihood of falling into a different type the second time they're tested.  This by itself is extremely problematic, and makes you wonder why it's still used.  It may, Moffa wrote, be simply "popular because it's popular."

Really, though, the problem is the weight that the results are given.  Human personality is a remarkably complex, changing, and difficult-to-pin-down thing, and any hope that we can classify humans using nine, twelve, sixteen, or even a hundred designations is probably doomed right from the outset.  So, as a skeptic and a scientist, I do tend to cast a wary eye on such assessments; but put in their proper light, I think they can be instructive.  It can't be denied that personality tests are kind of entertaining, and if along the way, they give you some insight into how you think, then that's all to the good.  The maxim "Know Thyself," after all, has been a guiding principle for a long time.  It is for good reason that it's inscribed on the front wall of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

All of which probably seems pretty wishy-washy, for a guy who usually prides himself on thinking critically.  It's not my fault, of course.  All of this ambivalence is just because I'm a "True Neutral."

Not that there's anything wrong with that, right?  Being an ISFP makes up for it, right?

Of course right.

Sea slugs in space

Some days, I simply do not get how woo-woos think.

In some ways, though, I understand them pretty well.  For example, who amongst us has not wished that the world was other than it is?  Telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, the afterlife, various cryptozoological marvels -- I have felt the attractiveness of all of those, and spent time thinking (and written fiction) about what it would be like if those were real.

But what I don't get is the seemingly complete abandonment of reason that these folks frequently exhibit.  When I am wrong about something, when I am presented with evidence or a logical argument that I am mistaken, I generally acquiesce with an apology.  But these people?

Arguing, I find, simply makes them hold on to whatever their belief is like grim death.

I had an especially vivid demonstration of this yesterday, about a claim last week that the International Space Station had captured footage of a translucent alien creature swimming past, in the depths of space.  [Source]

If you've not seen the video, you should go to the link I posted and check it out.  In my opinion it's a flat hoax, although admittedly it's quite a clever one.  Here's a still of the "creature," in false color and high contrast:

Well, like I said, the whole thing "screamed" hoax at me.  The first thing I noticed was that in the video, the view of the space station seemed "stretched," as if it had been digitally altered.  The footage didn't have the crisp lines that the high-quality cameras aboard the ISS usually provide:

There's also the problem that I'm a biologist, and I happened to recognize the "creature" in the video as being blurred footage of a very terrestrial species.  The whole thing was skilfully done, but no question that it was faked.  So, anyway, when this was posted and a link sent to me by a friend, I went to the site, and then I did what I should never do -- started arguing.  Here's a transcript of the exchange that ensued:

Me:  There are a variety of problems with this footage.  First, notice how the creature is moving.  It clearly has some kind of fins, and is using those and a rippling movement along its body to propel itself.  That wouldn't work in space.

True Believer:  Why not?  How do you know how alien creatures move?

Me:  It has nothing to do with not knowing about aliens.  It has to do with the fact that space is nearly a vacuum, so there's nothing to push against.  That kind of propulsion only works when you're going through a medium at least as dense as water.

TB:  Space isn't a vacuum.

Me:  Oh?

TB:  Scientists have proven that all sorts of things exist in space.  Vacuum energy, pair formation, plasma streams, magnetic oscillations.  Space is filled with all those and more.

Me:  You're seriously claiming that you could use scuba fins to swim through a magnetic field?

TB:  You don't know what interactions alien tissue could have with energy in space.  Aliens could have adapted to swim through plasma the way fish swim through water.

Me:  You keep saying that "I don't know."  I suspect you don't, either.

TB:  Why are you so hostile?  Why are you so desperate to prove that aliens don't exist?

Me:  I'm not saying aliens as a whole don't exist.  I'm saying this claim of alien life is a hoax.  In any case, I know what this "alien" is, and it's not an alien, unless you could use that word to describe an arctic mollusk.

TB:  What are you talking about?

Me [after brief pause to double-check photos, to see if I was remembering my invertebrate zoology correctly]:  Check out pics of "sea angels" (Clione limacina).  Pretty close match, isn't it?  If you check out vids of sea angels swimming, you'll see what I mean.  It's identical.  Seems clear that the guy who created the video simply overlaid the footage from the space station with a clip of a sea angel swimming.  In any case, it's not an alien, it's a sea slug.

TB:  You're a biologist, and you've never heard of convergent evolution?

Me:  You're seriously claiming that convergent evolution between a space creature and a sea slug explains this better than "it's a hoax?"

TB:  All kinds of similarities crop up because of convergent evolution here on earth.  There's no reason to believe it couldn't happen with alien evolution too.

Me [after swearing profusely at the computer, which of course my opponent couldn't hear]:  Look.  There's also the problem of the source of the video.  This guy, Stephen Hannard -- he posts under "Alien Disclosure Group - UK," and as far as I can tell, he's deranged.

TB:  Name-calling is part of your logical argument,  I see.

Me:  Have you checked out some of his other claims?  Last year he said that the Mars rover had spotted an alien groundhog on Mars, along with a flip-flop and a fossilized finger.

TB:  How do you know that those weren't true?  What proof do you have?

Me:  If I need to prove to you that a vaguely shoe-shaped rock is not a Martian flip-flop, I give up.


So.  Yeah.  Did you notice that every time I presented an argument, he simply dodged it?  This guy has perfected the argument from ignorance -- if we don't know what something is, it must be _____ (fill in the blank with: aliens, Bigfoot, ghosts, angels, whatever).  Once you accept that fallacious stance as logical, you become impossible to argue with.  Any evidence to the contrary is simply looked upon as special pleading, or (as with my pointing out that the "alien creature" was actually footage of a terrestrial sea slug), more support that your stance was right in the first place.

Convergent evolution, my ass.

Anyhow, that's today's exercise in frustration.  And I need to stop getting drawn into online arguments, my blood pressure is high enough as it is.  But if you see the "alien creature swimming past the ISS" posted somewhere, I encourage you to post a comment with this link.  After all, if they want to argue, they can argue with you for a change.

Muzzling the scientists

Let me say, from the outset, that I am not a particularly political person.

I do vote, and I try to keep myself informed, but I find that politics in general seems mostly to fall into two classes: (1) arguing over things that are obvious, such as whether banning same-sex marriage is discrimination; and (2) arguing over things that are so complex that it's unlikely we'll ever see a solution, such as how to balance the federal budget.

So, I find politics alternately maddening and baffling, and mostly I leave the political debates to the people who relish that sort of thing.  But what does make me sit up and take notice is when politicians begin to intrude on the realm of science -- which is what the government of Canada did, just last week.

In an article that a Canadian friend sent to me, entitled, "Canadian Government Votes Against... Science," we hear about a frighteningly common trend -- the desire by politicians to control what scientists research, publish, and discuss.  Here's what happened:

A little over a year ago, a claim hit the media that the Canadian government was "muzzling" its scientists.  At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held last February, Canadian scientists discussed the push of politicians to control what scientists were doing, particularly about controversial topics.  The government had the previous year issued a "protocol" that provided rules governing how scientists could interact with the media.  This protocol included the following:

Just as we have one department we should have one voice. Interviews sometimes present surprises to ministers and senior management. Media relations will work with staff on how best to deal with the call (an interview request from a journalist). This should include asking the programme expert to respond with approved lines.

Naturally, scientists were infuriated by the demand that they toe the party line.  "The Prime Minister (Stephen Harper) is keen to keep control of the message, I think to ensure that the government won't be embarrassed by scientific findings of its scientists that run counter to sound environmental stewardship," said Thomas Pedersen of the University of Victoria.  "I suspect the federal government would prefer that its scientists don't discuss research that points out just how serious the climate change challenge is."

Andrew Weaver, also of the University of Victoria, was even more pointed.  He said that the desire of the government was to keep the public "in the dark."

Some politicians took notice, and there was a measure recently introduced into parliament that read as follows:

That, in the opinion of the House,

a) public science, basic research, and the free and open exchange of scientific information are essential to evidence-based policy-making;

b) federal government scientists must be enabled to discuss openly their findings with their colleagues and the public;

c) the government should maintain support for its basic scientific capacity across Canada, including immediately extending funding, until a new operator is found, to the world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area Research Facility to pursue its unique research program.

The measure was defeated, 157-137.

I find this infuriating, but hardly surprising.  Here in the United States, there has been so much emphasis put on spinning science news that we have gotten to the point that a significant percentage of the public doesn't even trust the facts.  The scientists themselves have an agenda, political leaders claim.  If scientific research presents findings that run counter to the party-approved position, the scientists must be shills.

The result: to a lot of people, even the data is suspect.  At the far end of this we have articles like the one that appeared last week in Forbes entitled "Sorry, Global Warming Alarmists - the Earth is Cooling," which was such a hash of cherry-picked facts, misextrapolations, and outright lies that I barely know where to start.  Beginning with the fact that the author, Peter Ferrara, is the Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, which has as its stated goal "promoting climate skepticism."

Because that, evidently, is an unbiased, "skeptical" stance.

It is a frightening trend.  The problem is that if you can convince people that facts, that hard data, have a bias, you can convince them of damn near anything.  Yes, there can be productive political arguments over how to respond to a particular set of facts; but the data are either true or false, they cannot in themselves have an agenda.  And the desire of the government to control what the public knows is especially terrifying -- "Orwellian," in the words of Professor Weaver.  The fact that the Canadian parliament voted down a measure that stated that "federal government scientists must be enabled to discuss openly their findings with their colleagues and the public" should scare the absolute hell out of you.

I hope, for the sake of truth, that scientists in Canada and elsewhere defy this increasing demand by politicians that they should have the right to control the free flow of scientific information, and its release to the public.  It's bad enough that in many cases, governments control the purse strings, determining which research gets funding and which does not; it's worse when they want to make sure that the results of that research support the party's platform.  In the words of Carl Sagan, "The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there is no place for it in the endeavor of science."