Exploding the birth-order myth

How often have you heard a friend mention an odd characteristic of a mutual acquaintance, and follow it up with a statement like, "Well, he's a middle child," leaving you both nodding knowingly as if that explained it?

Conscientious, strong-willed eldest children.  Lost, rebellious middles.  Immature, demanding youngests.  Then there's my situation -- the spoiled, tightly-wound only children, who were doted upon by their parents and had their every whim met immediately.

I know that wasn't really true in my case; far from being overprotected, my youth was more a case of free-range parenting.  After school, and all summer long, my parents' style could be summed up as "Be back by dinner and try not to break any bones.  Either yours or anyone else's."  So I knew that at least from a sample size of one, there was something wrong with the birth-order-determines-personality model.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Even seeing other exceptions here and there never left me confident enough to contradict the prevailing wisdom.  After all, the plural of anecdote is not data.  But now a pair of studies has conclusively disproven the connection between birth order and... anything.

In the first, a trio of psychologists at the University of Leipzig analyzed personality assessments for a huge sample size (they had data for over 20,000 individuals), looking for how they scored on what are called the "Big Five" features of personality -- extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and imagination.  They found no correlation whatsoever between birth order and any of those.  In their words:

[W]e consistently found no birth-order effects on extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination.  On the basis of the high statistical power and the consistent results across samples and analytical designs, we must conclude that birth order does not have a lasting effect on broad personality traits outside of the intellectual domain.

A similar, but much larger study done at the University of Illinois -- this one of 377,000 high school students -- also found no correlation whatsoever:

We would have to say that, to the extent that these effect sizes are accurate estimates of the true effect, birth order does not seem to be an important consideration for understanding either the development of personality traits or the development of intelligence in the between-family context.  One needs only to look at the “confounds,” such as parental socio-economic status and gender, for factors that warrant much more attention given the magnitude of their effects relative to the effects of birth order.

So if there really is nothing to the birth-order effect, why is it such a persistent myth?  I think there are two things going on, here.  One is that during childhood, older children differ in maturity from their younger siblings because... well, they're older.  Of course a fifteen-year-old is going to be more conscientious and articulate than his seven-year-old brother.  There'd be something seriously wrong if he weren't.  So we tend to see any differences that exist between siblings and interpret them in light of the model we already had, thus reinforcing the model itself -- even if it's wrong.

Because that's the second problem -- our old arch-nemesis confirmation bias.  Once we think we know what's going on, our confidence in it becomes unshakable.   I have to wonder how many people are reading this post, and thinking, "Yes, but for my own kids, the birth-order effect works.  So I still believe it."  It's a natural enough human tendency.

On the other hand, I think you have to admit that your own personal family's characteristics really aren't going to call into question a scholarly analysis of 377,000 people.

So that's pretty much that.  No more blaming your appreciation of fart jokes on being an immature youngest child.  And my friends and family will have to cast around for a different explanation for why I'm as neurotic as I am.  There probably is an explanation, but my being an only child isn't it.

Rethinking the Sphinx

Can we get something straight, here?

The statement, "Some radical ideas have proven true" is not equivalent to "if an idea is radical, it must be true."  There are many, many ideas out there that are simply batshit crazy, and the experts think they're wrong for a reason.

And you do not improve your case by bringing up the fact that "they disbelieved Einstein at first, too."

This comes up because of a loony idea that appeared over at the site Ancient Code that claims that the Egyptian Sphinx is 800,000 years old.  And no, I didn't slip and put in too many zeroes.  There are apparently a couple of geochemists over at the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine who analyzed erosion and wear patterns in the rock from which the Sphinx is built, and concluded that the only possible explanation is that the Sphinx is 200 times older than archeologists are telling us.

This just brings up two questions:

1. You do realize that 800,000 years ago, there were no modern humans?
2. Where did you get your degrees from, Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse?

So at first I thought this was some kind of hoax.  But no, the two scientists, I. Vyacheslav Manichev and Alexander G. Parkhomenko, are apparently serious. "The absolute mark of the upper large erosion hollow of the Sphinx corresponds to the level of water surface which took place in the Early Pleistocene," Manichev and Parkhomeno write.  "The Great Egyptian Sphinx had already stood on the Giza Plateau by that geological (historical) time."

The article, which quotes extensively from their paper, describes their argument, which seems to be based on an assumption that the weathering of the rock from which the Sphinx is built couldn't have happened in 4,500-odd years.  Plus, as the Sphinx is thought to have spent at least part of that time covered in sand and thus protected from damage, there's no way all of the erosion we see can be due to processes that have occurred in that time.  We then hear about the geological history of the area around Giza, including the presence of a freshwater lake 800,000 years ago that could account for the condition of the Sphinx.

No mention is made of the fact that the builders of the Sphinx could have constructed it from rock that was already partially weathered.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But it's only at the very end of the article that they admit the worst problem with all of this:

Some might say that the theory proposed by Manichev and Parkhomenko is very extreme because it places the Great Sphinx in an era where there were no humans, according to currently accepted evolutionary patterns.  Furthermore, as it has been demonstrated, the two megalithic temples, located adjacent to the Great Sphinx were built by the same stone which means that the new dating of the Sphinx drags these monuments with the Sphinx back 800,000 years.  In other words, this means that ancient civilizations inhabited our planet much longer than mainstream scientists are willing to accept.

So, if some model of geological weathering requires that an archeological artifact be 200 times older than anyone thought, it must be all of the other archeological, historical, and biological evidence that is wrong, not something amiss with the model itself?

You'd think this would be a case where most everyone would read this and say, "Yeah, right," and walk away, snickering softly.  But as we've seen before, people love an iconoclast.  All you have to do is claim that you've shown that the fancy-pants ivory-tower scientific experts are wrong about something, and you'll have wingnuts of all descriptions swarming to your defense.  This claim showed up on Reddit, over at the r/conspiracy subreddit, a few days ago, and here are a few of the responses posted:

As someone who has always been into history and science (and the popularly accepted ideas in those fields), lately I've been really interested in alternate, extended human timelines and alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution (which as described in The Origin of Species, is actually much rougher and less accurate than mainstream education would have you think, don't get me wrong we can watch viruses and even plants and animals adapt and "evolve" on a small scale, but Darwin's theory goes a lot further than that). 

Look into the Thunder Bolt Project, pretty interesting.  A lot of shared culture, mythology, cave paintings can be traced back to electrical events witnessed in the sky, by cultures that never spoke to one another. 

Get into any meaningful science discussion about the true nature of reality, and fairly soon the discussion will go toward "14th dimensional hyper-strings" and "wave/particle duality" or "multiverses".  Point being, is that eventually it all becomes philosophy / metaphysics.  And all of it is beyond our level of comprehension.  This is whats [sic] so frustrating in speaking to the "Bill Nye" science types.  You know the ones, with a simple childlike answer for everything.  They are truly no more inquisitive nor intelligent than the average bible thumper.  Instead of quoting John 3:16, they simply reflexively quote their overly simplistic 5th grade science book.  What's so sad is they go through their life actually believing that they have some sort of lock on the objective nature or reality. 

If all possibilities exist, then what we see as our past and the course of evolution up until this point is precisely the way things had to happen in order that we be here right now, no matter how improbable. That, I believe, is the explanation for the seemingly magical leaps in evolution and indeed the genesis of life in this universe itself.  It happened that way in order for us to be here now, and why we are here now is not a question that we can answer. 

Science and scientists want to have all of the answers, they want to have everyone just bow down and believe, they're worse than the religions, look at how they treated Einstein, first he was crazy, now everyone thinks that relativity is gospel.

The last one is the one that made me facepalm the hardest.  Not only is the author an odds-on favorite for a gold medal in the Olympic Comma Splice Event, (s)he apparently doesn't realize that Einstein has one other thing on his side besides blind devotion: evidence.

Relativity has been tested every which way from Sunday -- pressed harder, honestly, than a lot of other scientific models, because its conclusions are so counterintuitive.  And every time, the evidence has supported Einstein.

And where is the support for there having been modern, monument-building humans in the Nile Valley 800,000 years ago?

*crickets*

I'm waiting.

*more crickets*

Thought so.  You can't just make a claim, and then state that your explanation is the only possibility, so fiat lux and q.e.d. and so on.  It has to explain all of the relevant data, or there's something wrong with your model.

Just being a radical swim-against-the-current type isn't enough.  "Many great thinkers were criticized at first" is not logically equivalent to, "I'm being criticized, therefore I must be a great thinker."

And if any further evidence is uncovered that the Sphinx is 800,000 years old, I'll eat it for breakfast.

Zap!

Four days ago, I wrote about a new study that appears to show that trans-cranial magnetic stimulation of the posterior medial frontal cortex of the brain causes a decrease in belief in god.

As I mentioned in the post, the effect was small, the sample size was small, and the whole thing is a lot flimsier than the media seemed to treat it.  Headlines like "Scientists Use Brain Stimulation to Make You Stop Believing in God" vastly overplay the actual results of the research, turning a mildly interesting psychological study into hyped, sensationalized clickbait.

But there is never a misinterpretation of scientific research so skewed that you can't respond by misunderstanding the misinterpretation, and making it way worse.  Conservative talk radio host Joe Miller, in interviewing Cornell adjunct professor of statistics William Briggs, put forth the opinion that such a technique could be used to suck religion out of the devout.

The funny thing about the piece, which is about ten minutes long and is well worth giving a listen, is that Briggs starts out by making precisely the same objections to the study that I did -- that the number of test subjects was too small to show an overall effect, that self-reporting as a means of getting data on psychology is inherently flawed, and that trying to come up with a metric for a complex behavior like religious belief is somewhere between difficult and impossible.  But instead of coming to the conclusion that because of all of this, the study probably isn't worth worrying about, Briggs and Miller went the opposite way -- that this is just the first of many attempts by evil progressives to "use any aggressive tactics" to destroy faith.

Miller also brought up the inevitable role of the "transgender agenda" in pushing such abuses of technology.  This agenda, according to Miller, involves "no parameters on sexual acts of behavior," and requires the destruction of Christianity to achieve its ends.

Notwithstanding the fact that the transgender people I know seem more concerned with living their own lives free of ridicule, criticism, and threat than they do with telling anyone else what to believe, Miller paints progressives  in general and LGBT individuals in particular as wanting to achieve a no-holds-barred attitude toward sex any way they can, up to and including "zapping people's brains with magnets" in such a way as to destroy their belief in god.  And, Miller adds darkly, along the way leaving them "incapable of adding two plus two."

So we start with a study that most likely didn't demonstrate anything of interest, and we end up with evil transgender people attaching magnets to the skulls of the devout to suck Jesus out of their brains.

What I find most interesting about this fear talk is that it glosses over one little fact that Briggs actually let slip during the interview (and Miller jetted past without a mention) -- 3/4 of the people in the United States are still Christian.  Just about every public office in the land is held by a Christian.  Despite the fact that Article VI of the Constitution states, "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States," one of the quickest ways not to get elected in the United States is to admit to being an atheist -- or, worse, to hint that religion might wield too much power over politics.

So the idea that even if the trans-cranial magnetic stimulation did reduce religiosity (it probably didn't), and the effect was permanent (it wasn't), you'd still have to zap something like 240 million people to produce an effect.

That, my friends, is a shitload of magnet-wielding transgender people.

But of course, it's pretty obvious why people like Miller traffic in such fact-free paranoia.  Fear tends to make people close ranks, circle the wagons, and double down on what they believe.  The surest way to get voters to espouse a view is to make them afraid of what will happen if they don't.  "Vote conservative," Miller is saying, "unless you want transgender people sneaking into your home and zapping your brain with magnets."

How someone could believe something like this is a question worth asking; but as we've seen so many times before, when you engage the emotions -- especially fear -- the logic centers of the brain pretty much go offline.

Which means that Miller has also succeeded in brain zapping, without using even a single magnet.

Hums, bloops, and snores

Today I was perusing the online news and happened to note a link to LiveScience called "The Ten Top Unexplained Phenomena."  Contrary to its name, LiveScience seems to specialize in catchy little blurbs on stuff that hardly qualify as actual science, but do attract the attention because they're either about stuff that most everyone is interested in even if they won't admit it (e.g. sex) or stuff that many of us are curious about even though some of us think it's nonsense (e.g. the supernatural).  This particular "top ten list" was predictably ordinary, and listed several things as "unexplained" that I have a fairly good explanation for, such as psychic phenomena (explanation: people are gullible), UFOs (explanation: people are gullible), Bigfoot (explanation: people are gullible), and mysterious disappearances, such as that of Jimmy Hoffa (explanation: don't fuck with the Mafia).  But the last unexplained phenomenon on LiveScience's list was one I'd never heard of, so of course that caught my attention.

It's called the "Taos Hum."  The Taos Hum is, as you presumably have already figured out, a pervasive humming noise heard near Taos, New Mexico.  (Check out the Taos Hum Page if you're interested in more information, or in signing up for the Taos Hum email listserv. Of course there's a listserv.)  The Hum was featured on the television show Unsolved Mysteries a while back, wherein they tried to capture the hum on recording equipment and failed, so they instead created an audio clip that was what the hum allegedly sounds like, to people who can hear it.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

However, as anyone knows who's ever seen Unsolved Mysteries or other shows like it, they completely downplayed that the audio clip wasn't actually a recording of the real hum, but a simulation of a sound that may or may not exist in the first place.  It didn't stop them from acting all amazed and freaked out when they were listening to it, which made me want to scream, "You people just made this idiotic recording, and you're acting like it's real!  Are you crazy, or just stupid?"  But I didn't, because yelling at a video clip would make my family members ask the same question about me.

All of this, of course, is not to say that the Hum may not exist.  There are peculiar sounds in the world, many of them without a current explanation, and not all of which have proven impossible to detect.  An unexplained hum in Auckland, New Zealand, for example, was actually captured in a recording.  It is an acoustic signal that peaks at 56 hertz, near the bottom of the range of audibility for most people, and has yet to be explained.  But this makes it all the more odd that the Taos Hum hasn't been detected on sound equipment, much less recorded -- the Unsolved Mysteries people made it sound like making recording devices detect in that range is extremely difficult, when in fact it isn't hard at all.  A typical cassette recorder isn't very sensitive in that range, no; but with professional recording equipment, it shouldn't be a problem.

Another problem is how few people actually report hearing it.  Even a website that clearly considers the Hum to be real, and suggests as an explanation something that would be worthy of an episode of The X Files -- they imply that the Hum is either of supernatural origin, or caused by some secret government technology -- admits that only 2% of Taos residents can hear it.  Most people who've allegedly heard the phenomenon, when asked to listen to recordings of various low frequency sounds and identify which is closest, perk up when they hear recordings in the 50-80 hertz range, which is definitely in the audible range for most people with unimpaired hearing.  This raises the question of why, if it's as powerful as hearers say it is (some even say they can't sleep when the Hum is going on), everyone in Taos who isn't deaf hasn't reported the phenomenon.

Still, 2% is enough people that it deserves an explanation.  I tend to lean toward the idea that it's some form of tinnitus, combined with a dose of confirmation bias -- in this case, accepting an appealing lack of an explanation, and interpreting further anecdotal reports as evidence of its being some kind of grand mystery.  Once you think that the low-pitched ringing in your ears is a real phenomenon that is audible by others, you (1) pay more attention to it, and (2) become more and more convinced that it's true every time it subsequently happens.

I also must add, however, that I've been to Taos, and not only did I not hear any humming noise, I was immediately struck by the fact that there seemed to be an inordinately large number of Purveyors of Woo-Wooness -- Tarot card readers, palm readers, sellers of crystals, and metaphysical book stores.  Even at the time, before I'd ever heard of the Hum, it seemed to me a population of people who were primed to interpret everything with a mystical twist.

Of course, I could be wrong.  It's been known to happen.  After all, the Auckland Hum was shown to be a real phenomenon, and researchers haven't been able to find anything that explains it.  There are lots of unexplained noises in the world -- the most famous being the Bloop, which has actually been recorded by subs.  Of course, with the Bloop, there's a perfectly rational explanation; it's the noise made by Cthulhu snoring.  You think I'm joking.  Apparently the most common projected origin for the Bloops recorded by subs is right near the spot where H. P. Lovecraft said, in The Call of Cthulhu, stands the majestic sunken city of R'lyeh, where the octopoid god lies snoozing peacefully.  This fact should put the quietus on storming in there with subs and recording equipment.  It's not that I'm for impeding the progress of science, mind you; it's just that we ought to be careful.  Cthulhu, as far as I've heard, is not a morning person, and resents being awakened suddenly.  He also tends to wake up hungry, and with a serious case of morning breath.

On the other hand, honestly demands that I mention that in the case of the Bloop, there's a more likely explanation than the snoring of aquatic Elder Gods.  Just last year, some scientists over at NOAA found pretty good evidence that the Bloop is the sound of Antarctic ice sheets breaking up, distorted by being transmitted for long distances underwater.  Which is kind of a relief.  As interesting as the Lovecraftian pantheon is, I'd prefer that they weren't real, given the frequency with which his main characters had run-ins with Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep et al. and ended up missing valuable limbs.

But I digress.

Assuming the Taos Hum actually is a real, external phenomenon, and isn't just a case of collective tinnitus or a resonance generated by a critical mass of woo-woos, it definitely deserves some more careful exploration.  I'd volunteer, but it's getting kind of late in the year, and Taos is one place in the United States that is even colder and snowier in the winter than upstate New York.  So I think any investigative team I lead will have to wait until spring.  Call me a wuss, but freezing my ass off listening for a sound that only 2% of people can hear anyway doesn't sound that inviting.  So I'm not planning on a trip to Taos any time soon, and if you're a Taos resident, you'll just have to deal with it for the time being.  I'll do what I can on my next visit, but until then, you'll just have to hum along or else ignore it.

ORMUS to the rescue

Ever heard of ORMUS?

I hadn't, until a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link.  And when I got it, my first thought was that ORMUS sounds like the villain from a cut-rate 1960s science fiction movie.

But no.  ORMUS stands for "orbitally rearranged monoatomic elements," even though that spells ORME and not ORMUS.  The whole thing was supposedly discovered in 1975 by healer and erstwhile Arizona cotton farmer David Hudson, who claimed that he was drying out some minerals in the sunlight, but they exploded and disappeared completely, thus leading him to the discovery of "an exotic state of matter, where the metals do not form any bonds or crystals but exist as separate single atoms" and disproving the First Law of Thermodynamics simultaneously.  Even though ingesting stuff that explodes violently is generally speaking a bad idea, Hudson said that said exotic matter was good for damn near anything.  According to RationalWiki, here's a "non-exhaustive list" of things that ORMUS can allegedly do:

• Cure all forms of disease, including cancer and AIDS
• Correct errors in the DNA
• Act as a superconductor
• Emit gamma radiation
• Partially levitate in the Earth's magnetic field
• Read a person's mind
• Have a "weigh-ability" different from mass, which probably means an inertial mass different from the gravitational mass
• Be fused into a transparent glass
• Act as a flash powder, causing "explosions of light"
• Make severed cat tails grow back

Notwithstanding that several of them seem mutually exclusive -- such as "correct errors in the DNA" and "emit gamma radiation" -- Hudson and his followers have insisted that the stuff is real.  This is despite the fact that Hudson himself gives every evidence of having failed 8th grade physical science; for example, he repeatedly says that there are 10¹⁸ ergs in one gauss, which is odd because an "erg" is a unit of energy and a "gauss" a unit of magnetic flux density, which are not even close to the same thing.  So this statement is a little like trying to figure out how many minutes there are in a kilogram.

After reading the RationalWiki  article I thought, "Okay, this claim is so obviously wrong that no one could possibly fall for it."  So I did a search for "ORMUS products."

And turns out, I was the one who was wrong.  About people falling for it, at least.  I got 425,000 hits, which made me want to weep softly while banging my forehead on my desk.

First, no idiotic alternative medicine claim would be complete without an equally idiotic article in Natural News supporting it.  And this one is a doozy -- it claims that ORMUS is the "Philosopher's Stone," thus vindicating not only David Hudson but the medieval alchemists.  But here are a few of the products I found featuring ORMUS:

• "Monatomic [sic] Gold Platinum Fortified ORMUS Elixir," which "quickly delivers trillions of monatomic particles connecting you to your subtle energy body thereby opening up a person's many acupuncture points and restoring the proper flow to these starved locations, thus bringing the body back into ease and providing the correct energetic template for future cellular regeneration."
• "SunWarrior ORMUS Peppermint Supergreens," which appears to be dried grass flavored with mint, but which was "nurtured... in a fertile, mineral-rich volcanic soil" and thus is "enriched with trace minerals."
• "Crown Chakra ORMUS," which allows you to "Connect with Spiritual Energy to Live by Divine Purpose and Will, Be Tranquil, Complete, Compassionate, Empathetic and Self-aware, [and] Help Illuminate the Path for Others," and thus blends the ORMUS nonsense with chakra nonsense for a nice woo-woo mélange.
• "Mountain Manna," which combines ORMUS with homeopathy for double the fun, and claims that ORMUS has something to do with the manna from the bible.  Oh, and "Their unique energy frequencies tend to bring a holistic balance to the nervous, and cellular systems, as well as the subtle bodies," because a claim of this sort would not be complete without a mention of "frequencies."
• And finally, "Gaia Thera ORMUS Gold," which at a whopping $530 will cure what ails you, and comes with the selling point, "Does nuclear radiation, EMF damage, Chem-trails, tumors, E. coli in your gut, some yet unnamed disease or any other uncontrolled environmental toxins scare the xxxx out of you?... Gaia Thera ORMUS Gold could be the answer... Some call it the Fountain of Youth."

And on and on and on.  Each one is laden with testimonials, meaning that there are people who are actually falling for this nonsense, and spending their good, hard-earned money on it.

Of course, "This product is not intended to treat, diagnose, or cure any human disease."  Because that's not what telling people that ORMUS "could be the answer" to "tumors... and some yet unnamed disease" amounts to.

Yes, I know the caveat emptor principle.  But preying on people who evidently didn't do well in public school science classes just isn't nice.  And when you add the fact that some of the people being ripped off are probably desperately ill, it really pisses me off.

It makes me wish that there was a new arm of the FDA called the "Prove It Department."  When people make claims like this, a couple of guys would show up at their door and say, "Okay, you say that your product contains unique quantum energy frequency wavelengths.  Prove it." And if they can't, they have their business license taken away.

But that's a forlorn hope, I'm afraid.  There's a sucker born every minute, and that means that we'll never see the hucksters like these run out of business. 

Floating cities and fused books

Confirmation bias really bugs me.

This is the tendency of people to accept minuscule amounts of evidence if it seems to support what they already believed.  It's a natural enough human failing, I suppose; as Kathryn Schulz points out, it's only possible for us to consider being wrong in the abstract.  When we try to think, in the here and now, of what we might currently be wrong about, it's impossible to come up with a single thing -- even if we know it's highly unlikely that we're right about everything we believe.

But still.  Confirmation bias is such an amazing fuel for woo-woo belief, it's hard not to hate it.  And I saw two examples of headdesk-quality confirmation bias just in the last two days, claims that would be immediately ridiculous to anyone who didn't already have their heads in the clouds.

I use the clouds analogy deliberately, because the first claim has to do with there being a giant floating city in China.  This particular far-fetched tale is popular amongst the crowd who thinks that what we experience is constantly being manipulated by HAARP and "Project BlueBeam" and other such mind-altering ray guns from space.  Here's the photograph that gave rise to the claim:

Now, I have to admit that it's pretty creepy looking, and that if I saw something like this, I'd be mighty freaked out.  But listen to how the source I linked above explains it:

Project Blue Beam... claims that NASA will soon attempt to inaugurate the Illuminati-sponsored Satanic New World Order (NWO) agenda under the authority of the Antichrist by using holographic image projection technology to simulate the second coming of Christ, or a space alien invasion of Earth.

There's also a bit in there about this signaling the "return of the biblical Fallen Angels."

The problem is, even if this isn't a digitally-altered photograph, there's a perfectly reasonable natural explanation -- that this is an example of atmospheric refraction, where strong temperature gradients in the atmosphere causes the air to bend light rather like a lens.  On rare occasions, this leads to the illusion that a distant object is hovering above the horizon.

But of course, understanding that requires that you know some physics.  Much easier to babble about the Illuminati and Fallen Angels.

The second claim has to do with the revelation that someone found a bible page "fused to a piece of steel beam" after 9/11.  Much is being made of the fact that the page is the "turn the other cheek" passage from the Gospel of Matthew, and that this is god sending us a personal message.

Notwithstanding the religious conundrum of why an all-powerful god would choose to make a page from the bible survive rather than all of the innocent people on the hijacked airliner, we also have the minor problem that (1) the earliest iteration of the story dates from 2011, not 2002 as mentioned in the claim, and (2) paper, being flammable, would not "fuse to steel."  It would simply burn to ash.

This didn't stop The This Isn't Really History Channel from doing a documentary about it in 2013 (and also claiming that the discovery was made in 2002 and for some reason kept secret for nine years), and from the religious passing the story around on social media as if it were some kind of miracle, rather than being evidence that god has an odd set of priorities.

You see what you want to see.  Whether it's god sending message in 9/11 debris, or floating cities heralding the beginning of the Satanic New World Order.

The whole thing is kind of maddening.  I know we all do it, to some extent; there may well be unconsidered parts of my own belief system that I am taking for granted because of the same kind of confirmation bias that plagues everyone.  I get that.  But it sure would be nice if we spent more time doing analysis of what we're claiming -- and applying a little bit of rationality to what we believe to be true.

Dialing in belief

A recent study at UCLA has both atheists and the religious buzzing.

A paper called "Neuromodulation of Group Prejudice and Religious Belief" describes research at UCLA by Colin Holbrook, Keise Izuma, Choi Deblieck, Daniel M. T. Fessler,  and Marco Iacoboni, and appeared  in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience last week.  And what it seems to show that down-regulating part of the brain can decrease both bigotry and religious belief.  Here's how Holbrook et al. describe their research:

People cleave to ideological convictions with greater intensity in the aftermath of threat.  The posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) plays a key role in both detecting discrepancies between desired and current conditions and adjusting subsequent behavior to resolve such conflicts.  Building on prior literature examining the role of the pMFC in shifts in relatively low-level decision processes, we demonstrate that the pMFC mediates adjustments in adherence to political and religious ideologies.  We presented participants with a reminder of death and a critique of their in-group ostensibly written by a member of an out-group, then experimentally decreased both avowed belief in God and out-group derogation by down-regulating pMFC activity via transcranial magnetic stimulation.  The results provide the first evidence that group prejudice and religious belief are susceptible to targeted neuromodulation, and point to a shared cognitive mechanism underlying concrete and abstract decision processes.  We discuss the implications of these findings for further research characterizing the cognitive and affective mechanisms at play.

 My sense has always been that who we are -- our beliefs, personality, fears, desires -- are a result of the interplay between electrical and chemical processes in our brains.  Change those processes, and who we are changes; the idea that our selves are somehow static, independent, unchanging whatever happens to our physical body, is simply not borne out by the evidence.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But this still strikes me as a weird result.  Measuring a complex phenomenon like the strength of a person's religious belief isn't going to be easy; we don't have a ReligioMeter that points to 99.8 when you attach it to Pope Francis and 0.2 when you attach it to Richard Dawkins.  Any measurement of the intensity of belief has to be determined by self-reporting, which can be influenced by any number of things -- up to and including the tone of voice in which the researcher asks the question.  Here's how Holbrook et al. did it:

{R]eligious belief was measured using a version of the Supernatural Belief Scale (Jong et al., 2013) modified to create two scales which mirror “positive” and “negative” aspects of Western religious belief, comparable to the “positive” and “negative” immigrant authors in the ethnocentrism measure.  The items were presented in random order and rated according to the same scale employed in the immigrant ratings.  The positive scale consisted of: (a) “There exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God”; (b) “There exist good personal spiritual beings, whom we might call angels”; (c) “Some people will go to Heaven when they die”; (α = .90).  The negative scale consisted of: (a) “There exists an evil personal spiritual being, whom we might call the Devil”; (b) “There exist evil, personal spiritual beings, whom we might call demons”; (c) “Some people will go to Hell when they die” (α = .93).  An overall religiosity variable combining both scales was calculated by averaging all six items (α = .95).

Which seems like a pretty simplistic measure, if you're looking for a subtle result.  Add to this the fact that there were only 38 participants, and the scale change for subjects treated with TCMS showed a statistically insignificant reduction only in their positive religious beliefs, and you have to wonder what all the hype is about.  Might it be that TCMS is simply affecting your emotional state?

Now, I'm not saying it isn't an interesting result.  Certainly, the effect on prejudice (which was greater) is fascinating in and of itself.  But both religious and atheist media are giving the impression that "if you turn off part of the brain, you lose your religious convictions," and each crowing about it for different reasons, and both seem not to have read anything more than the abstract of the paper itself.

If there's one thing that becomes clear when reading psychological research, it's that isn't simple.  We're only at the very beginning of understanding how the brain works.  That there exists a neurological underpinning to religiosity seems very likely -- just as there's almost certainly a neurological underpinning to believing in conspiracy theories.  It's just that we don't know what it is yet.

And the idea that we can now turn such beliefs on or off with a switch is entirely premature.