Crowdfunding the scientific method

As a skeptic, I'm all for testing claims.  That's what the scientific method is all about.  You think you have an idea about how some physical process works?  Design an experiment, collect some data, and see if you can support your hypothesis.

Which is the approach that businessman Paul Salo is taking...

... with respect to whether or not a jet collision could have collapsed the Twin Towers.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I kid you not.  This guy wants to recreate the World Trade Center disaster, in the name of science, to test the conspiracy theorists' claim that 9/11 was caused by explosives planted in the building, not the jet collisions.  So he's started an IndieGoGo campaign to raise money.  Here's how he describes his project:

Many people want to know more about 9-11.  We are like a Mythbusters for September 11th.  It's an important project for many reasons.  Many people doubt various details of 9-11. As the world has changed our trust in government and media has declined significantly.  We want to see for ourselves.  We don't need people to guide our thinking. In this project we will recreate 9-11 to the best of our ability given the funds raised.  Our ultimate goal is a fully loaded 767 and a similar structure to the WTC.  We will crash the fully loaded (with fuel) plane (complete with black box) into the building using autopilot at 500 MPH... 

You can be a part of this.  How will it end up?  Will the plane disintegrate?  Will the black box disappear?  Will the out of date passports we scatter in the plane survive?  You will see it all.  We aren't trying to prove anything either way.  We will recreate the event and let the chips fall where they may.

Which, I suppose, is approaching things the right way.  It only raises a couple of teeny little problems, though: in order to recreate 9/11, you need to purchase, and then destroy, a 767 jumbo jet and a 110-story-tall skyscraper.  Also, given that most skyscrapers are in cities, you have to be willing to smash an airplane into a building in the middle of (for example) downtown Newark.

Or, more accurately, the people who run Newark have to be willing.  Which I have a hard time imagining, even considering that it's Newark we're talking about.

Salo and his team are aware at least of the financial repercussions of his proposal:

We need about $1,500,000 to purchase the plane and building and to pull this complex event off.  The fuel alone is over $100,000!  I'll document everything on 911redux.com and you will be on our newsletter and have full access to our weekly webinar updates.

I'm pleased to report that so far, Salo has received $105 in donations.  Off to the races!  Only $1,499,895 to go!

He's pretty optimistic about the whole thing, although he did admit that there's a possibility that he won't meet his goal.  Undaunted, he says that if he doesn't, he will simply "purchase a smaller plane and building."

Notwithstanding that he is raising cockeyed optimism to unprecedented heights, I can't fault his general approach.  You want to understand something, you design a way to find out.  Crowdfunding is uniquely suited to this type of thing, even if his goal does seem a little pie-in-the-sky.

And his experiment also has the other appeal of Mythbusters: the pure joy of watching things explode.  If Salo really can run this test (even with "a smaller plane and building"), I would watch the hell out of this.  So I wish him the best of luck.  Although if he does succeed, I would caution him against moving on to bigger and better things.  Recreating the eruption of Mount St. Helens, for example, would probably not end well.

Holy genome, Batman!

In yesterday's post, we learned that the bible predicts that Babylon is the United States, and therefore we're all doomed.  A loyal reader of Skeptophilia read this and responded with an email that said, "I see your End Times prophecies, and raise you God's word showing up in your DNA."

He included a link to a site called Gostica: The Spiritual Path, in particular a post called "The Scientists Are Shocked: First Scientific Proof of God Found."  And in it, we hear that passages from the bible have shown up...

...in the genetic code.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm not making this up.  I would strongly recommend your taking a look at the actual site, but not while you're drinking anything, because I will not be responsible for coffee sprayed all over your computer screen.

The fun starts, in fact, with the very first phrase of the first sentence: "Linguistic professors at Bob Jones University, long noted for its intellectual rigor..."

Intellectual rigor?  The school that has been nicknamed "The Buckle on the Bible Belt?"  The school whose biology program description states, "One of the benefits of studying biology at BJU is that you’ll get a top-notch science education from a thoroughly Christian perspective.  In addition to strengthening your faith in the reliability of the Bible, this perspective will also help prepare you to understand modern secular interpretations of science and apply a biblical worldview to them."?

The school whose behavior code explicitly forbids its students to wear denim skirts, have "fauxhawks," access an "unfiltered internet," or listen to "Rock, Pop, Country, Jazz, Electronic/ Techno, Rap/Hip Hop or the fusion of any of these genres"?

And in any case, who the hell wears denim skirts anymore?

But I digress.

So the "intellectually rigorous scientists" from Bob Jones University started looking at pieces of DNA, including "transposons and retrotransposons" (Ooh!  Big words!), and this is what they found:

[They] began to attempt to translate the decoded segments that W.I.T. was providing. The structure was notably and demonstrably human in nature.  The coding language found, which utilized sequences of twenty-eight independent values, fell easily into the incidence range of known alphabets.  Sequences of independent connected values likewise mirrored the structure of word composition in human languages.  The Linguistic and Philology team at Bob Jones began an extensive comparison of the quizzical script found in the “Junk DNA” with the catalog of every recorded human language; hoping to find similar lingual threads so that they could begin to formulate translations of the message laying hidden in the DNA.  Professors were rocked with sheer awe when they found that one existent language, and one language alone, was a direct translatable match for the sequential DNA strands.

And guess what that language was, and what it said?  You'll never guess.

The Language in the “Junk DNA”, the DNA that scientists had for years discarded as useless, was indistinguishable from ancient Aramaic.  Even more amazingly, as linguists started to translate the code within the human genome, they found that parts of the script it contained were at times remarkably close in composition to verse found in the bible. And at times contained direct biblical quotes. 

On the human gene PYGB, Phosporomylase Glycogen, a non-coding transposon, holds a linguistic sequence that translates as “At first break of day, God formed sky and land.”  This bears a stunning similarity to Gen 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  Gene Bmp3 has a Retrotransposon sequence which translates to the well-known 1 Cor 6:19 “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?  You are not your own.”  This is repeated over and over throughout the entire sequence of human DNA: embedded equivalent genetic code of ancient Aramaic that seems to translate as the word of god to his people.

Righty-o.  Where do I start?

The first problem with this is that the "language" of DNA is composed of four letters (nitrogenous bases), A (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine), and T (thymine).  Perhaps what god is saying is something like "ACT TAG CAT GAG GAG GAG," although to my ears that sounds more like a pronouncement from Bill the Cat than it does like something the Divine Creator might say.  In any case, it's not really possible to spell out English using the DNA alphabet, much less ancient Aramaic.  Even if you make the allowance that maybe the "linguists" were using some kind of correspondence between the letters in Aramaic and the amino acid sequence coded for by a gene, you still only have twenty letters, not 28 as the article claims.

So what the amazingly rigorous researchers at BJU seem good at is making shit up and then lying to the media about it.  But this didn't stop them from shouting their findings from the rooftops:

Matthew Boulder, chief linguist for the project and professor of applied creation sciences at Bob Jones University, issued this statement: “As for the evidence- it is there and it is, to my view, undeniable.  The very word of God, elegantly weaved in and out of our very bodies and souls, as plain as day.  And the beauty of it, that God would lay down the words of truth in our very beings, shows his love and The Miracle.”

"Professor of applied creation science."  Which is right up there with "Professor of applied unicornology" in terms of scientific validity.

So to the reader who sent me the link, all I can say is thanks.  I did read the whole thing, and also the internal links that went to the BJU "research," so you can't say I didn't give it my all.  Throughout I was torn between guffawing and slamming my forehead repeatedly against my computer keyboard.  I hope that's the reaction you wanted.  But I do wonder what my own personal DNA spells out.  Maybe a passage from The God Delusion, you think?

As hath been foretold by Mr. Prophecy

Worried about the End Times?  Concerned that you and your family might not prosper during the Apocalypse?  Upset that the Four Horsepersons might end up trampling your prized daffodils, or that the Beast With Seven Heads might eat your poodle?

Do I have news for you.

We now have hope, thanks to Jason A. Prophecy.

At least I think that's his name.  On his YouTube video called "The World in 2017: The End of America" that's how he's listed.  Or maybe he's using it in the sense of "A Prophecy by Jason."  It's ambiguous.  So I will continue to consider Prophecy his last name, because I think that gives what he has to say considerably more gravitas.

I was sent a link to his video by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, with the message, "Good news for those of us who are probably damned in any case."  So I sat down and watched it.

Well, I watched part of it.  The whole thing is a little under an hour long, and patient man though I am, I'm not going to sit through 52 minutes of a guy telling me that America Is Doomed over and over.  To save you the trouble of watching it yourself, let me summarize his main points.

• America is doomed.  In case I hadn't made that point clear enough yet.
• President Obama is going to be the last president of the United States.  Interestingly enough, Mr. Prophecy doesn't seem to consider the upcoming conflagration to be Obama's fault, which is kind of unusual amongst these types.  It was going to happen anyway, he says, and Obama just happens to be the one who's going to bear the brunt of it.  So unfortunately, we don't even have the satisfaction of saying "Thanks, Obama" after the Seventh Seal is opened.
• World leaders, including the Pope, know all about this because it's predicted in the bible.
• Yes, I know that the bible doesn't say anything about the United States, because it was written two millennia too early.  Instead, in the bible the United States is code-named "Babylon," so everywhere you read "Babylon" you should understand that the writers meant "the United States."  (Which reminds me of the anecdote about Reverend William Spooner, of spoonerisms fame, who was preaching to his congregation one Sunday morning and noticed that everyone was looking at him with an expression of complete bafflement.  He suddenly brightened up and said, "Oh!  I'm so sorry!  Everywhere I said Aristotle, I meant St. Paul.")
• The reason that Babylon is referred to as female in the "Holly [sic] Book" is because what it's really talking about is the Statue of Liberty.
• Babylon is going to be destroyed.  *cue scary music*
• Vladimir Putin is going to be the one who causes America/Babylon's downfall, because he's the evil "king of the north" mentioned in the Book of Daniel, chapter 11.
• So what Putin is going to do is to launch an "electromagnetic pulse weapon" to knock out the entire electrical grid of the United States (the implication is that it will also cause automobiles and airplanes to malfunction and crash), and then invade and destroy us.

So while I'm watching this, I'm thinking, "If we're all doomed, why is he bothering to warn us?  This is a little like shouting 'Look out for the ground!' at a guy who's fallen off a cliff."  But then at the end, we get to the good news that the alert reader who sent me the link had referenced:

Mr. Prophecy has written several books about how to survive all of this nasty stuff, and they can all be yours for only $39 (plus postage and handling).

He tells us that he was tempted to give them away for free, but "people don't value what they don't pay for."  Evidently, surviving the apocalypse is not a sufficient motivator.  You also have to think, "Dammit, I paid cold hard cash for this book!  I'd better actually read it and find out how not to die!"

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So anyway.  Predictably, I'm not going to buy the books, because (1) I suspect that when the authors of the bible said "Babylon," they meant "Babylon," (2) even Vladimir Putin is smart enough not to launch an attack against the most heavily-militarized country the world has ever seen, and (3) I have better uses for $39, which in my opinion would include using it to start a campfire.  

And I'm not worrying about Obama being the last president, honestly.  I'm spending more of my time worrying about who's gonna be the next one.  I wonder if the Book of Daniel had anything to say about that?

Remembrance of immorality past

Like most of us, I try to act morally.  I do my best to tell the truth, respect others' feelings and belongings, follow through when I say I'm going to do something.

But like most of us, I fall short sometimes, much to my own chagrin.  It's inevitable, I suppose; we all stumble, make mistakes, succumb to temptation, indulge in fits of peevishness and anger and envy.

I recall those moments with considerable embarrassment, however.  And now two researchers have published research suggesting that we remember fewer of our unethical moments than we believe we do.

Maryam Kouchaki of Northwestern University and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School collaborated on research that appeared this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Entitled, "Memories of Unethical Actions Become Obfuscated Over Time," the gist of the study was as follows:

Despite our optimistic belief that we would behave honestly when facing the temptation to act unethically, we often cross ethical boundaries.  This paper explores one possibility of why people engage in unethical behavior over time by suggesting that their memory for their past unethical actions is impaired.  We propose that, after engaging in unethical behavior, individuals’ memories of their actions become more obfuscated over time because of the psychological distress and discomfort such misdeeds cause.  In nine studies (n = 2,109), we show that engaging in unethical behavior produces changes in memory so that memories of unethical actions gradually become less clear and vivid than memories of ethical actions or other types of actions that are either positive or negative in valence.  We term this memory obfuscation of one’s unethical acts over time “unethical amnesia.”  Because of unethical amnesia, people are more likely to act dishonestly repeatedly over time.

Which is a little disheartening.  I've been aware for years that memory is far more plastic and unreliable than we are most times willing to acknowledge; but I've always thought that its malleability was random, and that we were equally likely to forget or modify the memory of anything with equal emotional charge.  (It hardly bears mention that highly charged memories are more likely to be recalled than emotionally neutral ones are, regardless of content.).

[image courtesy of photographer Michel Royon and the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, it appears, we are wired to be selective -- remembering the pleasant memories in which we acted according to our own moral codes, and forgetting the unpleasant ones in which we breached ethical standards.  "We speculated…that people are limiting the retrieval of memories that threaten their moral self-concept and that is the reason we see pervasive ordinary unethical behaviors," Kouchaki wrote.  "Strong consequences might reduce unethical amnesia with your rationale.  However, the emotional pain caused by remembering severely negative consequences could work as even more motivation to forget that we acted immorally in the first place."

It might be natural for us to forget our misdeeds, but it's hardly constructive.  I've often cast a wry eye at the pop-psychology approach to good mental health that involves getting rid of "guilt feelings."  You know what?  There are times when we should feel guilty.  When we hurt someone's feelings or person, lie, cheat, steal, or slander, we should remember those actions with humiliation.  Those feelings are an impetus not only to make up for what we've done (insofar as it is possible), but never to repeat it.  Without those brakes on our behavior, how much more damage would we do to each other?

So Kouchaki and Gino's study turns out to be a bit of a cautionary tale.  We sometimes lie to each other -- but what we humans seem to excel most at doing is lying to ourselves.

The price of precaution

There's a fundamental idea in ecology called the precautionary principle.  Put simply, the precautionary principle says that it's always easier and cheaper to prevent environmental damage than it is to clean up the mess afterwards.

Note that this is not saying we can predict and prevent every disaster.  Mother Nature has a mean curve ball.  But there are all too many instances of the powers-that-be hearing, acknowledging, and then ignoring the advice of the scientists and other experts, with devastating results.

Let's look at a quick example before I tell you what this post is really about.

The Everglades were once a sawgrass, cypress, mangrove, and palmetto wetland encompassing most of the southern tip of Florida.  Through this wetland flowed a 100 kilometer wide sheet of water slowly making its way to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.  The wetland acted as a natural filter, and the water entering the sea was remarkably pure and sediment-free.  The area was home to hundreds of native species, some found nowhere else on Earth, and hundreds more used it as a stopover point on migration.

The Everglades [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem is, you can't raise cattle, grow oranges, or build houses in a wetland.  So in the first few decades of the 20th century, the Everglades were "improved" -- that is, turned into a patchwork of swamp with 2250 kilometers of canals, levees, and spillways designed to drain land for settlement.  The 160 kilometer long Kissimmee River was “straightened” by the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control; it’s now 84 kilometers long and has drained the wetlands north of Lake Okeechobee, which farmers turned into cow pastures.

In 1947, ecologists saw what was happening, and lobbied for protection.  In that year the founding of Everglades National Park attempted to conserve part of it, but you can't draw an arbitrary line around a piece of land and assume that what happens outside the line won't matter.  Continued development progressively cut off the water flow to the wetland, and in the following years between 75% and 90% of the park’s wildlife (depending on how you count the toll) disappeared.

Fast forward to 1990, when finally the Florida state government took notice -- prompted not by the recognition that Everglades National Park is one of the most damaged national parks in the United States, but because without the wetland, farmers and landowners were beginning to see problems.  The Everglades acted as a water catchment, and its reduced size caused a loss of fresh groundwater.  Not only did this compromise agriculture, it led to saline intrusion into wells, and the opening up of limestone sinkholes -- some big enough to swallow houses.  The sediment and fertilizer runoff that was once filtered by the marsh was now being ejected into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, killing fish, fouling coral reefs, and clouding the water.

The result was that in the late 1990s the government of Florida reluctantly agreed to the world’s largest ecological restoration project, to be carried out between 2000 and 2038.  It plans to restore the Kissimmee River to its original course, buying up farmland and creating new wetlands for both wildlife habitat and to filter agricultural runoff, and to create 18 large reservoirs to supply drinking water and slow down freshwater diversion.

At a cost to taxpayers of $7.8 billion.  To, if I haven't hammered in this point strongly enough, undo everything that we've done in the past eighty years, and return things back to where they would have been if we hadn't screwed them up royally in the first place.

This all comes up because two days ago, Crestwood Midstream, the company that is planning to expand natural gas storage in salt caverns underneath Seneca Lake, received a last-minute two year extension from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on their rights to use the site.  It had been hoped that FERC would come to their senses and deny the permit, but whether money talked or the officials at FERC simply shrugged and said, "Well, nothing bad has happened yet," they chose to allow the Texas-based company to continue in this reckless and irresponsible practice.

Seneca Lake [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Just how reckless and irresponsible are we talking about, here?  All it should take is one statistic to convince you: salt cavern storage accounts for only 7% of the total underground storage of natural gas in the United States, but was responsible for 100% of the catastrophic accidents from natural gas storage that resulted in loss of life.  

A major accident here in the form of a cavern breach wouldn't just endanger the workers at Crestwood Midstream's facility in the Town of Reading; it would result in the salinization of the south end of Seneca Lake, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the Northeast, and the source of drinking water and water for irrigation for tens of thousands.  It would imperil the Finger Lakes wine industry, one of the biggest sources of revenue and tourism in the area.

Worst still, it would be damn near impossible to clean up.  You think the bill for wrecking the Everglades was high?  That's nothing compared to what it would take to rectify a salt cavern collapse and the resulting explosion.  If it was remediable at all.

And how likely is this?  Is this simply a panicked overreaction?  Another fact might clarify: a mere fifty years ago, a 400,000 ton chunk of the roof of one of the very salt caverns Crestwood is proposing to use caved in.

Imagine what the result would have been had the cavern been filled with natural gas.

Put simply, the precautionary principle isn't alarmism.  Oddly enough, we have no problem with the idea with respect to our homes, health, and lives; why it's so hard for people to swallow with respect to the planet we live on is incomprehensible to me.

And for a government regulatory commission like FERC to give Crestwood carte blanche to proceed with this potentially devastating plan is the height of irresponsibility.

Stopping Marie Curie

I have a simple request.  Can we stop electing morons to public office?

As you might expect, this comment arises because of Louie Gohmert, the Texas representative who has been elected to five consecutive terms despite having only recently mastered the ability to walk without dragging his knuckles on the ground.

Gohmert, you might recall, is the one who said the military's function is to "kick rears, break things, and come home."  He's also the one who took a highly humiliating trip to Egypt (humiliating to the rest of America, although probably not to him, given that you have to have an IQ that exceeds your hat size in order to experience humiliation), in which he and Michele Bachmann made a highly condescending speech in which, amongst other things, they implied that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was responsible for 9/11.

Representative Louie Gohmert [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, Gohmert has beat all previous stupidity records by throwing sexism into the mix.  He was one of four representatives who voted against a bill authorizing the National Science Foundation to utilize funds to recruit women into scientific fields.  When asked why he had voted against the measure, here was his response:

This program is designed to discriminate against that young, poverty-stricken boy and to encourage the girl.  Forget the boy.  Encourage the girl. 

It just seems that, if we are ever going to get to the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., that he spoke just down the Mall, he wanted people to be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.  I know after race has been an issue that needed attention, then gender appropriately got attention. 

But the point is that those things are not supposed to matter. 

It just seems like, when we come in and we say that it is important that for a while we discriminate, we end up getting behind.  And then probably 25 years from now boys are going to have fallen behind in numbers, and then we are going to need to come in and say: Actually, when we passed that bill forcing encouragement of girls and not encouraging of little boys, we were getting behind the eight ball.  We didn’t see that we were going to be leaving little boys in the ditch, and now we need to start doing programs to encourage little boys.

So here is a person who is so steeped in white male privilege that he honestly doesn't get the toll that has been taken on women and minorities by systematic institutional prejudice.  One and all, the people who cry "overreach of political correctness" are themselves privileged -- and don't know what it's like to deal with, every single hour of every single day, others denying you access based on your gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.  They do not understand what it's like to have doors closed to you because of factors that you can't change (and in a fair society, wouldn't want to).

Yes, I know, I'm a heterosexual privileged white male myself.  The difference is that I know I don't know these things.  I'm not blowing hot air pretending that I have any perspective at all.

Gohmert, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be smart enough to recognize his ignorance.  In fact, he went on to say that it's a good thing that such a program didn't exist in Marie Curie's time:

I thank God that there wasn’t a program like this that distracted her.  But according to the bill that we passed today, we are requiring the Science Foundation to encourage entrepreneurial programs to recruit and support women to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and into the commercial world.  Thank God that is not what Madame Curie did.

If you have any doubt about how the brilliant minds of women like Marie Curie, Hilde Mangold, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Barbara McClintock, and Rosalind Franklin would have benefited from a program like this, read about their lives, and the struggles that they faced simply having anyone in the field take them seriously.  Consider how much more they could have accomplished if the majority of their time hadn't been spent in proving that their credibility, competence, and intelligence had nothing to do with which sex organs they born with.

Gohmert's comments are a profound insult to women everywhere, and to their allies who at least partly understand how sexism still permeates our culture.  Unfortunately, though, I suspect that if such ugly willful ignorance hasn't caused him to lose the election the last five times, it probably won't make any difference in the next one.

Still, one can keep hoping.

Analyzing the backfire

One of the most frustrating phenomena for us skeptics is the backfire effect.

The backfire effect is the documented tendency that people, when confronted with logic or evidence against their beliefs, actually hold those beliefs more strongly afterwards.  Being presented with a good argument, apparently, often has exactly the opposite effect from what we'd want.

This is understandably difficult for people like me, whose writing centers around getting people to reconsider their understanding of the universe using the tools of rationality and critical thinking.  But some recently released research has given us at least some comprehension of why the backfire effect occurs.

Entitled "Identity and Epistemic Emotions during Knowledge Revision: A Potential Account for the Backfire Effect," by Gregory J. Trevors, Krista R. Muis, Reinhard Pekrun, Gale M. Sinatra, and Philip H. Winne, the research was published a couple of months ago in the journal Discourse Processes.  The researchers designed an intriguing test to demonstrate not only that the backfire effect occurs (something that has, after all, been known for years) but to give us some understanding of what causes it.

Prior research had suggested that the resistance we have to changing our understanding comes from the fact that being challenged brings up the whole network of why we had those beliefs in the first place.  In effect, it reminds us of why we think what we do instead of triggering us to reconsider.  The result is a mental arms race -- a contest between what we already believed and the new information.  Given that the new information is usually understood more weakly, the old framework usually wins, and the fact of its having been considered and retained gives it the sense of being even more strongly correct than it was before.

The new research by Trevors et al. focuses on a different facet of this frustrating tendency.  What their study shows is that it is the emotion elicited by being challenged that triggers the backfire effect.  When we feel that our beliefs, and therefore (on some level) our core identity, is being attacked, the negative emotions that arise cause us to shy away and cling to our prior understanding.

Specifically, what the team did was to look at people's attitudes toward GMOs, a subject rife with misinformation and sensationalistic appeals to fear.  They first assessed the participants' attitudes toward GMOs, then gave them an assessment to gauge how strongly they felt about the issue of dietary purity.  They then gave the participants a passage to read that argued against the anti-GMO position, and afterwards asked them questions designed to measure not only how (or if) their ideas had changed, but how they responded emotionally while reading the passage.

[image courtesy of photographer Rosalee Yagihara and the Wikimedia Commons]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the anti-GMOers who ranked dietary purity as a strong motivator were the most angered by reading the passage -- and they experienced the backfire effect the most strongly.  The weaker the emotional response, even if the participant was anti-GMO to begin with, the smaller the backfire.

I'm not sure that this is heartening.  So many of the ideas that we skeptics fight are deeply ingrained in people's idea about how the world works -- and therefore, on some level, entangled with their core identity.  To quote the Research Digest of the British Psychological Society, which reviewed the study:

If persuasion is most at risk of backfire when identity is threatened, we may wish to frame arguments so they don’t strongly activate that identity concept, but rather others.  And if, as this research suggests, the identity threat causes problems through agitating emotion, we may want to put off this disruption until later: Rather than telling someone (to paraphrase the example in the study) "you are wrong to think that GMOs are only made in labs because…", arguments could firstly describe cross-pollination and other natural processes, giving time for this raw information to be assimilated, before drawing attention to how this is incompatible with the person's raw belief – a stealth bomber rather than a whizz-bang, so to speak.

Which is hard to do when the emotional charge on both sides is strong, as is so often the case.  The bottom line, though, is that we humans are fundamentally not particularly rational creatures -- something worth remembering when we are trying to change minds.