Halloween hijinks

Happy Halloween!  The day that little children are rewarded for wandering around in the dark wearing plastic masks with improperly lined-up eyeholes by being given enough sugar to induce diabetes in the entire population of China!

Which, of course, makes me sound like a grumpy curmudgeon.  To be honest, it's the crass commercialism that bugs me, not the holiday itself.  I actually rather enjoy a good costume, and have been known to don one myself, on occasion.

So I don't have anything against Halloween.  I just wish the stores would hold off on pushing candy and plastic pumpkins and the like until a little closer to the day itself.  (And the same goes for Christmas decorations, which I've already seen in our local grocery store.)

But of course, there are people who have strong feelings about Halloween.  That it's not just an innocent fun time of putting on Elsa costumes and wandering around saying "trick or treat."  That it amounts to...

... giving your child directly to Satan.

At least, that's the contention of Linda Harvey of Mission America.  Harvey warns us that that any kind of participation in Halloween is tantamount to dropping your kids straight into the maw of hell:

It's Halloween time again, and parents need to use caution and discernment about their family's participation in Halloween events.  Here's why: it's all about the spiritual safety of our children...  Halloween celebrates the spirits of darkness like no other event.  Demons are real.  So is Satan.  And these forces are more active than ever in recent times in America because we are inviting their activity in our lives.  So here’s my question about Halloween: Why hand your children to dark spiritual powers on a silver platter?  Oh, sure, maybe your smaller children only collect candy at a few houses, but down the road, what will Halloween be in their lives?  It's sure to develop into trick-or-treating with their friends, minus parents, and then... parties.  And what goes on at a Halloween party?  I've been talking for years about the dangers for years, and I have not changed my mind; the dangers are more prevalent all the time.

No, not parties!  Anything but that!  What is the world coming to?  We start with little kids in Captain America suits, and before you know it, we have teenagers holding demonic parties with satanic blood sacrifice rituals.

Slippery slope, that.

Then we had the ever-amusing Rick Wiles, claiming that even donning a costume makes you a Satan-worshiper:

You really see this present in South America, where the Catholic Church recognizes very paganistic holidays and practices.  I've traveled to some Third World nations and developing nations, and I've seen some pretty bizarre things, the locals marching down the street in their costumes, devil masks and Satan and skeletons and so forth, and you stand there and you think, "What a bunch of uncivilized pagan barbarians!"  But you realize they're lost, they're spiritually lost, they don't know the truth, they don't know god, they don't know Jesus Christ.  But then you come to America on Halloween, and you go, "What a bunch of uncivilized pagan barbarians!"  It's the same group of people!  They're worshiping their god.  And that's what we have to tell people.  They're worshiping their god, their father.  Lucifer.  That's the reason they're drawn to this day.  It's because he is their father.  

Thus weaving together fear about demons with cultural insensitivity, prejudice, and white privilege to make a picture that is far uglier than some guy wearing a devil suit.

And the whole thing wouldn't be complete without Pat Robertson weighing in:

It used to be called All Saints' Eve.  Now we know it as Halloween...  That’s the day when millions of children and adults will be dressing up as devils, witches, and goblins … to celebrate Satan. They don’t realize what they’re doing.

So anyhow, that's this year's message from the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Paranoia.  Myself, I'm not going to wear a costume this year, but it's not out of any fear that I'm offering myself up to the Dark Lord.  It's more that living out in the middle of nowhere, we never get any trick-or-treaters, so the only ones I'd be in a position to scare are my wife and dogs.  My wife already thinks I'm odd enough, and my dogs would probably just give me the Canine Head-Tilt of Puzzlement and then take a nap.

Instead, I'm thinking of going with a friend of mine to investigate a claim that our high school auditorium is haunted, something I've heard more than once from people who've been there at night.  I downloaded a ghost-hunting app on my iPad, so I should be all set.  Plus, our local fortuneteller consulted her mystical future-reading device (a "Magic 8 Ball").  She asked if we were likely to detect a ghost if we went to the auditorium on Halloween night, and was told "My Sources Say Yes."  So I think we've got a sure bet, here.

Ghost wardrobe

Debating endlessly over silly conjectures is nothing new.  The claim has been endlessly circulated that the medieval scholastics, for example, conducted learned arguments over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.  Whether they actually argued over the issue is itself the subject of debate; it seems like the earliest iteration of the idea for which we have written evidence is in The Reasons of the Christian Religion by 17th century Puritan theologian Richard Baxter, wherein he writes:

And Schibler with others, maketh the difference of extension to be this, that Angels can contract their whole substance into one part of space, and therefore have not Extra Partes.  Whereupon it is that the Schoolmen have questioned how many Angels may fit upon the point of a Needle?

Which I think we can agree is equally silly.  Given that no one has actually conducted a scientific examination of an angel, determining whether they have Extra Partes is kind of a waste of time.

Although you may recall that Alan Rickman as the Angel Metatron in Dogma made a significant point about angels not having genitalia.  Whether that's admissible as evidence, however, is dubious at best.

So there's a good bit of precedent for people wasting inordinate amounts of time arguing over questions that there's no way to settle.  Which is why I have to admit to rolling my eyes more than once over the article by Stephen Wagner, "Paranormal Phenomena Expert," called, "Why Are Ghosts Seen Wearing Clothes?"

I have to admit, however, that it was a question I'd never considered.  If the soul survives, and some souls decide not to go on to their Eternal Reward but to hang around here on Earth to bother the living, you have to wonder why their clothes came along with them.  Clothes, I would imagine, have no souls themselves, so the idea that you're seeing the Undying Spirit of grandpa's seersucker jacket is kind of ridiculous.

Be that as it may, most ghosts are seen fully clothed.  There are exceptions; in 2011 a woman in Cleveland claims to have captured video of two naked ghosts having sex.  But I think we have to admit that such afterlife in flagrante delicto is pretty uncommon.

Wagner spoke with some ghost hunters, and turns out that there's a variety of explanations that have been offered for this.  Troy Taylor, of the American Ghost Society (did you know there was an American Ghost Society?  I didn't) said that ghosts are seen clothed because a haunting is the replaying of a deceased spirit's visualization of itself, and we usually don't picture ourselves in the nude.

On the other hand, Stacey Jones, who calls herself the "Ghost Cop," says that ghosts can project themselves any way they want to.  So what they're doing is creating an image of themselves that has the effect they're after, whether it is eliciting fear, pity, sympathy, or a desire for revenge.  Does that mean that Anne Boleyn, for example, could wander around the Tower of London wearing a bunny costume?  You'd think that she'd be mighty bored after nearly five centuries of stalking around with her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm.

Ghost hunters Richard and Debbie Senate were even more terse about the whole thing.  It's a "gotcha question," they say.  But if pressed, they'd have to say that "Ghosts appear as wearing clothes because that's how they appear to us."  Which I think we can all agree is unimpeachable logic.

I find it pretty amusing that this is even a topic for debate.  Shouldn't we be more concerned about finding scientifically sound evidence that ghosts exist, rather than fretting over whether we get to take our wardrobe with us into the next world?  As I've said more than once, I am completely agnostic about the afterlife; I simply don't know.  I find some stories of near-death experiences and hauntings intriguing, but I've never found anything that has made me come down on one or the other side of the debate with any kind of certainty.  I'll find out one way or the other at some point no matter what, and if I haven't figured it out before then, I'm content to wait.

So I suppose this falls into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  But it does raise the question of what kind of clothes I want to bring with me if it turns out you do get to choose.  If I end up haunting somewhere nice and tropical -- certainly my preference -- all I'll need is a pair of swim trunks.  On the other hand, if I'm stuck here in upstate New York, which seems more likely, I want my winter jacket, wool scarf, hat, and gloves.

Unless my spirit getting stuck here in perpetuity, with no cold-weather gear, is because I've been sent to hell by the powers-that-be.  Which unfortunately also seems fairly likely.

Spooky action, weeping angels, and quantum physics

One of the reasons I get so impatient with woo-woos is that science is plenty cool enough without making shit up.

There were two examples of this from the field of quantum physics this week.  Because quantum physics is already weird even without any embellishment or misinterpretation, it's been particularly prone to being co-opted by woo-woos in their search for explanations supporting (choose one or more of the following):

• homeopathy
• psychic abilities
• astrology
• the soul
• "chakras" and "qi"
• auras

But you don't need to do any of this to make quantum physics cool.  Let's start with an experiment regarding "quantum entanglement" -- the linking of two particles in a state describable by a single wave function.  While this might seem uninteresting at first, what it implies is that altering the spin state of particle A would instantaneously change the spin state of its entangled partner, particle B -- regardless of how far apart the two were.  It's almost as if the two were engaging in faster-than-light communication.

There is a further twist on this, and that's where things get even more interesting.  Most physicists couple the entanglement phenomenon with the idea of "local realism" -- that the two particles' spin must have been pointing in some direction prior to measurement, even if we didn't know what it was.  Thus, the two entangled particles might have "agreed" (to use an admittedly anthropomorphic term) on what the spin direction would be prior to being separated, simulating communication where there was none, and preserving Einstein's idea that the theories of relativity prohibit faster-than-light communication.

Scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have closed that loophole.  Using an extremely fast random number generator, they have altered the spin state of one of two entangled particles separated by 1.3 kilometers, and measured the effect on its partner.  The distance makes it impossible for sub-light-speed communication between the two.  This tosses out the idea of local realism; if the experiment's results hold -- and they certainly seem to be doing so -- the particles were indeed communicating faster than light, something that isn't supposed to be possible.  Einstein was so repelled by this idea that he called it "spooky action at a distance."

To quote the press release:

With the help of ICFO’s quantum random number generators, the Delft experiment gives a nearly perfect disproof of Einstein's world-view, in which "nothing travels faster than light" and “God does not play dice.”  At least one of these statements must be wrong. The laws that govern the Universe may indeed be a throw of the dice.

If this wasn't weird and cool enough, a second experiment performed right here at Cornell University supported one of the weirdest results of quantum theory -- that a system cannot change while you're watching it.

Graduate students Yogesh Patil and Srivatsan K. Chakram cooled about a billion atoms of rubidium to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, and suspended them between lasers.  Under such conditions, the atoms formed an orderly crystal lattice.  But because of an effect called "quantum tunneling," even though the atoms were cold -- and thus nearly motionless -- they could shift positions in the lattice, leading to the result that any given atom could be anywhere in the lattice at any time.

Patel and Chakram found that you can stop this effect simply by observing the atoms.

This is the best experimental verification yet of what's been nicknamed the "Quantum Zeno effect," after the Greek philosopher who said that motion was impossible because anyone moving from Point A to Point B would have to cross half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half again, and so on ad infinitum -- and thus would never arrive.  Motion, Zeno said, was therefore an illusion.

"This is the first observation of the Quantum Zeno effect by real space measurement of atomic motion," lab director Mukund Vengalattore said.  "Also, due to the high degree of control we've been able to demonstrate in our experiments, we can gradually 'tune' the manner in which we observe these atoms.  Using this tuning, we've also been able to demonstrate an effect called 'emergent classicality' in this quantum system."

Myself, I'm not reminded so much of Zeno as I am of another thing that doesn't move while you watch it.

See what I mean?  You don't need to add all sorts of woo-woo nonsense to this stuff to make it fascinating.  It's cool enough on its own.

Of course, the problem is, understanding it takes some serious effort.  Physics is cool, but it's not easy.  All of which supports a contention I've had for years; that woo-wooism is, at its heart, based in laziness.

Me, I'd rather work a little harder and understand reality as it is.  Even if it leaves me afraid to blink.

Risk, research, and red meat

Most people really don't understand the concept of risk.

Let me give you an example.  Let's say that there is a woman who has been identified as being at risk of having a stroke.  She goes to a doctor, who offers her one of three medications to reduce her risk of stroke over the next five years.

Medication A would increase her likelihood of remaining stroke-free from 91% to 94%.

Medication B reduces her risk of a stroke by 1/3.

Medication C reduces her risk of a stroke by 3%.

Which one should she take?

Most folks seeing this problem pick B, largely because it sounds better -- a reduction by 1/3 is a lot, right?  3% is a pretty paltry change, and 91% and 94% chances of remaining healthy are pretty close.

It comes as a big surprise to find out that all three of them are the same.

If she has a 91% chance of remaining healthy without the medication and 94% with it, her risk of stroke drops from 9% to 6%.  That's a drop of 3%.

It's also an overall 1/3 reduction in her risk.

Such mathematical monkey-business is why there's been such confusion over the WHO's recent declaration that red meat causes cancer (and processed meat, such as hot dogs and pepperoni, are even worse).   In fact, processed meat is now in "Group 1" -- "substances that cause cancer" -- along with tobacco, human papilloma virus, and asbestos.

[image courtesy of photographer Jon Sullivan and the Wikimedia Commons]

It's even accompanied by statistics that seem, frankly, pretty terrifying:

[M]eta analysis found that colorectal cancer risk jumps by 17 percent for every 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of red meat consumed each day.  Meanwhile with processed meat, colorectal cancer risk increases by 18 percent for every 50 grams (1.7 ounces) eaten each day.

Holy crap, right?  1.7 ounces a day (not much) translates to an 18% increase (a lot) in your chance of colorectal cancer (a disease that is high on most people's "Least Favorite Things to Think About" list).

Add that to another study that found that "2% of hot dogs contain human DNA," and it looks like we might see a lot of people finding other things for their summer barbecues.

The problem is that all of this stuff is misleading.  First, what does an 18% increase look like?  According to the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Fact Sheet on colorectal cancer, current rates of diagnosis estimate the number of new cases at 42.4 per 100,000 each year.  An 18% increase brings that number up to a little over 50.

In other words, if 100,000 people ate 1.7 ounces of salami a day for a year, you'd expect there to be eight more cases of colorectal cancer in that group as compared to a comparable non-salami group of 100,000.

Here's another problem with the WHO information.  "Group 1" substances are said to be "known to cause cancer."  But all that means is "known to increase your risk."  It doesn't say by how much, nor what the risk was to begin with.  For example, cycling to work and swimming naked in a crocodile-infested river are both outdoor activities that are "known to increase your risk of dying in an accident."  So on the "Outdoor Activities Risk" list, these would both be classified as "Group 1."

Which one would you prefer doing?

At the risk of beating the point unto death, Casey Dunlop of Cancer Research UK cited statistics illustrating how silly it is to put tobacco and bacon in the same category.  Tobacco is a product that is toxic in any amount, confers no benefits whatsoever upon the people consuming it, and is directly responsible for 86% of lung cancers and 19% of all cancers combined.  Even assuming the worst-case scenario, daily consumption of processed meat is responsible for 21% of colorectal cancers and 3% of all cancers combined.

Puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

Oh, and about the human DNA in hot dogs thing; this doesn't mean that the hot dog manufacturers are incorporating Soylent Green into their meat.  Given the sensitivity of DNA tests, this probably means the presence of a few cells from a bit of dry skin or something.  And if you think that it's only hot dogs that have this kind of contamination, I have news for you.  The amount of extraneous cellular material (to put it euphemistically) that we consume by accident on a daily basis has not been tested, but is undoubtedly high.  If you are a pet owner, and don't think you consume dog and/or cat DNA every single day, well... either you clean your house far more frequently and thoroughly than I do, or you're living in a fool's paradise.

And amazingly enough, most of us are pretty healthy.  Funny thing, that.

Now, I'm not saying we should eat hot dogs and bacon and pepperoni with wild abandon.  Reducing your consumption of red and processed meat is definitely a good thing.  But everything has dangers; there are risks associated with every food out there.  The trick is to figure out which calculated risks are worth taking, and what the tradeoff is.

After all, as Chuck Palahniuk put it in Fight Club, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

The Sesame Street vaccination conspiracy

A lot of you might have heard about the newest character on Sesame Street -- a little girl named Julia who is autistic.

It's a gutsy move by a show long known for its efforts to teach children about fairness and compassion and the effects of social stigma.  Its goal statement has included right from the beginning the intent to encourage children to "appreciate cultural diversity by modeling people who differ in appearance, action, or point of view playing together, working together, making friends, and resolving conflicts."  From its inception, there was a deliberate decision made to have minorities and people of various ages deeply represented, and not simply to have a token minority character or two.  They also never shied away from helping children to deal with difficult topics -- unusual in a kids' show.  For example, Sesame Street deliberately (and tactfully) addressed the concerns and fears children had after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

So the move to include an autistic character was perhaps to be expected from the directors of such a thoughtful and forward-thinking show.  The author of the story introducing the character, Leslie Kimmerman, wrote, "More than 20 years ago, my beautiful son received the diagnosis of autism, and my world changed instantly and profoundly.  I knew nothing about autism, and it seemed that those around me — even the professionals — didn’t know much either.  Today, happily, that has changed."

She and the others involved in the creation of the character hope that this will bring awareness and understanding, given that non-autistic children watching the show will inevitably interact with autistic children in school, and also to help autistic viewers to feel more accepted.  Jeanette Betancourt, Sesame Street's senior vice president, said, "Children with autism are five times more likely to get bullied.  And with one in 68 children having autism, that’s a lot of bullying.  Our goal is to bring forth what all children share in common, not their differences.  Children with autism share in the joy of playing and loving and being friends and being part of a group."

Hard to see what's to criticize about that.  I have several friends with autistic children, and the response from them has been uniformly positive.  So imagine my surprise when I found out that the anti-vaxxers are saying that the move is actually an end run by "Big Pharma" to make autism seem normal, so that we'll continue to get vaccinated.

It'll probably come as no surprise that the person spearheading the claim is Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, founder of Natural News.  Adams has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn't have a very firm grasp on reality -- a quick perusal of the headlines on Natural News is usually sufficient to confirm that.  But this has revealed an uglier side of his narrative, one which the glitzy, health food polish of the site might hide.

Adams writes, "The rollout of autistic Julia is Sesame Street’s attempt to ‘normalize’ vaccine injuries and depict those victimized by vaccines as happy, ‘amazing’ children rather than admitting the truth that vaccines cause autism in some children and we should therefore make vaccines safer and less frequent to save those children from a lifetime of neurological damage."

Well, Mike, let's start out with the obvious.  (The more sensitive members of the studio audience might want to plug their ears.)

VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM, YOU ANTI-SCIENCE, IRRATIONAL, WILLFULLY IGNORANT LOON.  What they do is they protect children from devastating diseases that used to kill or permanently injure thousands every year.  Just because every scientific study done on the topic has confirmed results that run counter to the mission statement of your company does not mean that there's a conspiracy to discredit you.

It simply means that you are wrong.

But second, and more encouragingly, I think Adams may have miscalculated this time.  To discredit an attempt to "normalize" autistic children -- his words, not mine -- puts him in serious danger of alienating the very people he's dependent on for support, namely parents of autistic children whom he has hoodwinked into believing that their kids' health issues were caused by vaccination.  Even if you are a parent of an autistic child who believes that modern medicine is responsible for autism, calling a television show that is trying to heighten awareness and understanding of your child's condition a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical companies doesn't seem like it would strengthen the anti-vaxxers' credibility.

More likely, it would bring up thoughts of, "Wait, I thought he actually cared about autistic children.  If so, why is he condemning a show that is working towards seeing them treated fairly?"

So as a PR move, it stands a good chance of backfiring, which is all to the good.

But it's also a bit puzzling, even coming from a guy who shows every evidence of having spent too much time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  Okay, in Adams's BizarroWorld, "Big Pharma" has fucked things up royally by creating vaccines that cause neurological damage in children.  If so, then why on earth would they respond by spending millions of dollars on a campaign to "normalize autism" on a children's show instead of simply making the vaccines safer?

Maybe it's because the vaccines are already safe, the scientists are right -- and Mike Adams has gone even further off the deep end than he was before, however impossible that sounds.

Defending the vegetarians

October must be International Confirmation Bias Month, or something.

First we had the conspiracy theorists saying that a probably-Photoshopped photograph of a floating city was evidence that Project Blue Beam was targeting China with a death ray.  Then religious types claimed that there was a miraculous artifact from 9/11, in the form of a bible page "fused to a melted steel beam," despite the fact that paper, being flammable, would be awfully hard to fuse to a red-hot piece of metal.  Then we had people falling for a snake-oil cure-all called "ORMUS," one version of which turns out to be peppermint-flavored dried grass clippings.  We had a hum in Taos, New Mexico that everyone is freaking out about but which probably is nothing more than tinnitus, some erosion patterns on the Great Sphinx that have convinced some scientists that it's 200 times older than it actually is, and finally people still vehemently believing that birth order determines personality despite a study of 377,000 people that says that it doesn't.

Awfully pervasive, confirmation bias.  Not to mention frustrating.  Which is why the latest example caused me to do multiple facepalms.

It all started, as so many bogus news stories do, with Fox News.  A couple of weeks ago they ran a story called "One-third of Vegetarians Eat Meat When They Get Drunk," which claims that a study shows that 37% of British vegetarians eat meat -- and then won't admit it afterwards -- when they've been imbibing.

Well, this story got some serious traction on social media, especially amongst that subsection of meat eaters who like to think of vegetarians and vegans as holier-than-thou hypocrites.  More than one has brought up the Larry Groce song "Junk Food Junkie," about the guy who leads a double life, wearing natural fibers and eating macrobiotic health food during the day, and going out secretly for a cheeseburger at night:

In the daytime I'm Mr Natural
Just as healthy as I can be
But at night I'm a junk food junkie
Good lord have pity on me

The story fit the narrative so well that it wasn't even questioned.

The problem is, it turns out that the study wasn't done by any kind of scientific team, it was done by a  "U.K.-based discount code website" called "VoucherCodesPro."  Initially, this wasn't said explicitly in the story, but very quickly (some) people caught on that we weren't talking about cutting-edge science.  We weren't, in fact, talking about science at all.   Even after Fox edited the article to include the source in the first paragraph, people still spread it all over the place, hee-hawing about how funny those hypocritical vegetarians are, and almost none of them questioning whether the source itself was valid.  An exposé over at the vegetarian/vegan blog The Avocadbro put it this way:

When you see all of these news outlets report the same thing, you have to assume at least one reporter—if not two, three or all of them—spent some time verifying the study. Apparently none of that happened.  Again, I’m still holding out a small percentage of hope that I’m wrong about this.  But I’m just some random Internet blogger.  It’s up to one of the many reporters who passed along these surveys to scrutinize their sources... How, apparently, did not a single one of these reporters, after they typed (or copy and pasted) the words “a survey by coupon website Voucher Codes Pro,” stop and think to themselves: What?  Is this a legitimate source?

Well, yeah.  Exactly.  And you should read the post over at The Avocadbro in its entirety, because it takes apart the Fox News claim one piece at a time -- leaving you questioning not only the results of the poll, but whether there was a poll conducted at all, or if the people over at "VoucherCodesPro" simply made the entire thing up.

Look, I'm not a vegetarian myself.  I think a t-bone steak with a glass of fine red wine is one of the real pleasures in life.  I have nothing against the farming of animals for meat as long as it's done humanely, and hunting as long as it's done responsibly.

But my personal dietary preferences shouldn't lead me to accept without question an accusation of hypocrisy against people who make different choices.  Especially when the accusation is based on information that is almost certainly specious.

And man, I wish there was some way that applying the "Check your sources" rule could become mandatory before being allowed to post anything on social media.

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.