A line in the sand

Richard Dawkins wrote, "I think it's important to realize that when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them.  It is possible for one side to be simply wrong."

After yesterday's unhinged press conference, this is the situation we are in with respect to Donald Trump and his supporters.

The subject of his speech was the violence between white supremacists and protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a young woman was killed when an angry young man with neo-Nazi leanings drove his car into the crowd.  The violence, Trump said, was the fault of both sides:

What about the 'alt-left' that came charging at, as you say, the 'alt-right,' do they have any semblance of guilt?  What about the fact they came charging with clubs in hands, swinging clubs, do they have any problem?  I think they do...  You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now.

The "club in hands" reference is to a photograph of an Antifa member allegedly striking a police officer with a club -- a photograph that has since been shown to be digitally altered.

That is, a fake.

What is grimly ironic about this is that Trump defended the two-day delay in condemning the white supremacists and neo-Nazis by saying that he wasn't sure of his facts:

I wanted to make sure, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct, not make a quick statement... What I said was a fine statement.  I don't want to go quickly and just make a statement for the sake of making a political statement.

Besides the fact that even after the delay, he still got the facts wrong, it bears mention that it took him only an hour to respond when Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier resigned in protest from the President's Manufacturing Council.  Trump's ego was stung by the resignation -- something which evidently moves him more than seeing people marching in Nazi regalia does.  "Now that Ken Frazier of Merck Pharma has resigned from President's Manufacturing Council," Trump sneered via Twitter (of course),  "he will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!"

But apparently it takes way more time to decide whether to condemn white supremacists who had not only killed a young woman for protesting, but who had said, on a website affiliated with their cause, "Despite feigned outrage by the media, most people are glad [Heather Heyer] is dead, as she is the definition of uselessness.  A 32-year-old woman without children is a burden on society and has no value."

This is the ideology that our president thinks is so morally ambiguous that it took him 48 hours to decide whether it was worth condemning, and then afterwards claimed was actually no worse than the beliefs of the anti-Nazi protesters.

Most media were quick to condemn Trump's speech, but as soon as it hit the news, the apologists started in with equal speed.  Within a half-hour of the story breaking, I saw the following comments posted:

• All he's saying is that white people shouldn't be ashamed of being white.
• I'd take the people in the march before I would the leftist whiners who are trying to tear America down.
• The people in the march aren't responsible for what one crazy man in a car did.
• For crying out loud, shut up and give the President a chance!

This last one is, of all of them, the one that galled me the most.  You know what?  Trump has had seven months of chances.  He has shown himself to be a dishonest, racist, misogynistic prick over and over.  The most surprising thing, in fact, is how unsurprising this last speech was.  It was totally in keeping with his prior words and actions.  All he did here is clarify his own ideology in such a way that there is no doubt any more where his loyalties lie.

So the chances are over, not only for Trump but for his followers.  It's no longer conservative versus liberal, Democrat versus Republican.  This is about deciding whether you side with a man who has allied himself with people who wear swastikas on armbands and chant, "The Jew will never replace us!"  There is no moral ambiguity here.  If you don't repudiate him, now, you are complicit in his actions and those of his followers.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I try my hardest to listen to the people I disagree with, but at some point, there is no compromise, no way to find common ground.  After that, there is no choice but to commit to every effort necessary to stop people who are violent, amoral, and so convinced they are in the right that there is no possibility of discussion.

You might be saying, "Well, aren't you equally convinced that you're right?"  Perhaps.  But I'm not the one calling for violence against people of different races, religions, or sexual orientations.

This is the point where moral people have to stand up and take a hard look at what is happening here, and realize that neutrality is no longer an option.  We are fast approaching something very like the Weimar Republic of the 1930s -- waiting only for our own Reichstag Fire to plunge the nation into darkness and bloodshed.

So if you're a Trump supporter, I'm sorry if you were misled by his rhetoric.  I understand that it's easy to get swept away by the theatrics of politics, to vote for someone who turned out to be something other than you wanted.  But we've crossed a line, here.  If you still support him, if you are one of the ones crying out "give him a chance," then you and others like you are fully responsible for the horrifying place we seem to be headed.

Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of a hat!

Because so much of the world lately seems to be immersed in hatred, violence, and just general suckiness, for today I'm going to retreat to my Happy Place, which is: cool scientific discoveries.

Today's contribution from the Happy Place comes from the fields of paleontology and evolutionary biology, two disciplines that are near and dear to my heart.  While my educational background is kind of all over the map (less charitable sorts have called it "a light year across and an inch deep"), evolutionary biology has been something of a passion of mine for ages.  In getting my teaching certificate, I did as many courses as I could that focused on such things as population genetics, cladistics, and the origins of life, so I have come to think of that as being more or less my specialty within the field.

The discovery that spurred today's post comes from northeastern China, where two new species of mammal were uncovered (literally and figuratively) -- Maiopatagium and Vilevolodon.  These species were probably closely related, and appear to have been small tree-dwellers who had flaps of skin that ran from the outsides of the front legs to the outsides of the hind legs, so that when necessary, they could jump from a tree branch, fling their limbs outward, and glide like a living kite.

[image courtesy of study leader Zhe-Xi Luo of the University of Chicago]

If you're thinking, "Wait a second.  Isn't that just a flying squirrel?", you should know two things: (1) these two species were only very distantly related to flying squirrels and other rodents; and (2) they were alive during the Jurassic Period -- something on the order of 160 million years ago, when the dominant life forms were dinosaurs.  (For comparison purposes, the earliest known rodents didn't show up until 100 million years later.)  They belong to a group called Euharamiyids, one of the four branches of true mammals (the other three are the Multituberculates, which like the Euharamiyids are extinct; the Monotremes, which include egg-laying mammals such as the platypus; and the Therians, which encompass all other mammals, including us).

What I think is coolest about all of this -- besides the fact that ancient animals are simply inherently cool -- is that it's further evidence of the fact that similar selective pressures often result in separate lineages that happen upon the same "solutions" to evolutionary problems.  This is called convergent or parallel evolution, and one of the best examples of this is the evolution of flight and/or gliding.  Taking to the air has apparently evolved over and over again, resulting in the most familiar flying groups -- birds, insects, and bats -- but also in...

Pterodactyloids:

Colugos:

Flying fish:

Sugar gliders:

and the aforementioned flying squirrels:

... the latter of which were studied extensively by noted scientists Boris Badinov and Natasha Fatale.

And now, we can add two more to the list, a pair which (like all the rest) evolved aerobatics completely independently of all the others.

Anyhow, the whole thing illustrates a fundamental rule of biology, which is that there are a limited number of powerful evolutionary drivers (the most important being finding food, not getting turned into food, avoiding the vagaries of the environment you're in, and finding a mate), and a limited number of solutions to those drivers in the real world.  So it's inevitable that the same kinds of structures and behaviors will evolve over and over, even in groups that aren't very closely related.  What is most remarkable about this particular discovery, however, is how early the innovation of gliding in mammals evolved -- back when the whole mammalian clade had barely gotten started, and the dinosaurs still had 95 million years left before a giant meteor strike ended their hegemony.

And all of this ties into another field I'm fascinated with, which is exobiology -- the study of alien species.  At the moment, the number of available samples to study is zero, so we're left speculating based on what we have here on our home planet.  But the fact that we see the same sorts of patterns cropping up again and again -- bilateral symmetry, organs for sensing light and sound, defensive and offensive weapons, and adaptations for rapid locomotion -- is a pretty sound argument that when we do come across life on other planets, it will probably have some striking similarities to what we see here on Earth.

So that's our cool scientific discovery of the day, courtesy of a research team working in China.  And unfortunately I need to wrap up this post, which means I have to leave my Scientific Happy Place and return to the real world, at least for a little while.  Maybe I'll luck out and there'll be other fun and fascinating discoveries announced soon so that I can read something other than the news, which is more and more making me wonder if it might not be time for another giant meteor to press "reset" on the whole shebang.

Giving weight to illusion

The idea that our sensory processing apparatus and our brains are unreliable has been something I've come back to again and again here at Skeptophilia.  "I saw it with my own eyes" is simply not enough evidence by which to make any kind of sound scientific judgment.

Not only are we likely to get things wrong just because the equipment is faulty, our prior ideas can predispose us to get things wrong in a particular way.  Think of it as a sort of built-in confirmation bias; our brains are set up in such a fashion that when we've already decided what's going to happen, it's much more likely that's what we'll perceive.

This latter problem was demonstrated in an elegant, if disturbing, fashion in a paper released last week in Science called "Pavlovian Conditioning–Induced Hallucinations Result From Overweighting of Perceptual Priors," by Albert R. Powers, Christoph Mathys, and Philip R. Corlett, of the Yale School of Medicine, the International School for Advanced Studies (Trieste, Italy), and the University of Zurich, respectively.  Their research springboarded from previous studies wherein individuals who had been trained to associate a tone with an image were more likely to continue "hearing" the tone when shown the image with no accompanying tone than were members of a control group.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What Corlett's team did was to divide participants into four groups: normal, healthy individuals; self-described psychics; individuals with psychosis who did not report hearing voices; and individuals with schizophrenia who reported hearing voices.  The researchers trained all test subjects to associate a checkerboard image with a one second long, one kilohertz tone.  They not only recorded data on which participants continued to "hear" an illusory tone when shown the checkerboard in silence, they also used a protocol (how hard they pushed the button when they heard the tone, whether real or imagined) to gauge their confidence in what they were experiencing, and they looked at neuronal activity in the brain using an fMRI machine.

The results were intriguing, to say the least.  Both the schizophrenics and the self-described psychics were five times as likely to report hearing a tone when none existed than either the control group of healthy individuals or the psychotic individuals who did not hear voices.  Not only that, the schizophrenics and the psychics were 28% more confident in their perceptions when they did hear a tone that wasn't there than were the other two groups when they made a similar mistake.

Further, the schizophrenics and psychics showed abnormal neuronal activity in two regions of the brain; the parts of the cerebrum involved in creating our internal representation of reality showed strikingly different firing patterns, and the cerebellum -- the part of the brain involved in planning and coordinating our motor responses to stimuli -- showed much lower than normal neuronal activity.

"The findings confirm that, when it comes to how we perceive the world, our ideas and beliefs can easily overpower our senses," said Albert Powers, one of the paper's authors.  Which is about as succinct a cautionary statement about trusting our judgments as I can imagine.

While the researchers specifically tested the likelihood of experiencing auditory hallucinations, I find myself wondering if this study might not have wider applications.  How do our prior perceptions bias us in general?  I know I have frequently been baffled, especially in these fractious times, how two people can see the same event and come to strikingly opposite conclusions about it.  At times, I have found myself asking, "Are we even talking about the same thing, here?"  But if our preconceived notions about the world can bias us strongly enough to hear sounds that aren't there, why should any other perception be immune to the same effect?

This possibility drives me to a disturbing conclusion.  How do you convince people that what they're perceiving is not real, if that conclusion is contrary to what their senses and their brains are telling them?

I think the key, here, is always to keep focused on the statement, "... but I might be wrong."  A lot of our faulty judgments are caused not only by our coming to the wrong conclusion, but our stubborn certainty that we are, in fact, right.  A willingness to revise our beliefs -- failing that, at least to consider the possibility that our beliefs are incorrect -- is absolutely critical.

Otherwise, we're at the mercy of sensory apparatus that are easily fooled, and a brain that bases what it perceives as much on what it already thought to be true as on the actual data it's presented with.

Which seems to me to be awfully shaky ground.

Total eclipse of the brain

In ten days, people in the United States will get the best shot at seeing a total solar eclipse we've had in years.  The path of totality crosses the country diagonally from northwest to southeast, starting near the northern border of Oregon and ending in South Carolina.

[image courtesy of NASA]

Astronomy buffs and people who simply like an unusual spectacle have been excited about this for ages.  Motels in towns within the path of totality sold out months ago, especially in places like the Midwest where you're more likely to have clear skies.

The buzz about the eclipse prompted the eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to make the following observation:

Well, far be it from me to argue with someone of NdGT's stature, but just because people aren't denying the eclipse doesn't mean that they're viewing it with any kind of scientific eye.  We're already having the wingnuts putting their unique spin on the event, and you should watch for this sort of thing to increase exponentially as we approach August 21.

First, we have Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of evangelist Billy Graham, who claims that the eclipse is a sign of the approach of the End Times.  Have you noticed how every damn time there's some interesting astronomical event, the religious nutjobs claim it's a sign of the End Times, and then the End Times kind of don't happen?

Well, a zero batting average doesn't discourage people like Lotz in the least.  It's interesting that the elder Graham, although we don't agree on much, always impressed me as a thoughtful and deeply compassionate man.  His kids, though... son Franklin is a virulently anti-LGBT firebrand, who has a real talent for ugly invective.  And now, his daughter... well, let me give it to you in her own words:

The warning is triggered by the total solar eclipse of August 21, nicknamed America's Eclipse. For the first time in almost a hundred years, a total solar eclipse will be seen from coast to coast in our nation.  People are preparing to mark this significant event with viewing parties at exclusive prime sites.  The celebratory nature regarding the eclipse brings to my mind the Babylonian King Belshazzar who threw a drunken feast the night the Medes and Persians crept under the city gate.  Belshazzar wound up dead the next day, and the Babylonian empire was destroyed...  Therefore, my perspective on the upcoming phenomenon is not celebratory.  While no one can know for sure if judgment is coming on America, it does seem that God is signaling us about something.  Time will tell what that something is.

As far as I can tell, what god seems to be signaling is that if something is in front of the sun, it creates a shadow.  End of story.

But the religious fringe aren't the only ones who are jumping up and down making excited little squeaking noises about August 21.  We also have the crypto-woo-woos, who warn us that the eclipse is going to be noticed by more than just humans:

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that I warned South Carolina residents about Lizard Man way back in 2011.  As far as Bigfoot, you may be questioning how there could be Bigfoot sightings down there in the Southeast -- after all, the real Sasquatch hotspot is the Pacific Northwest.  But just yesterday, an alert reader sent me an article about a sighting of Bigfoot last week in North Carolina, so it's evident that the cryptids are on the way.  The fact that they're converging on the path of totality is a little peculiar, as solar eclipses have no particular precursors that might warn an animal that one is imminent, and I generally don't think of Bigfoot as being particularly knowledgeable about astronomy.

Unless it's that Bigfoot is psychic, and is sensing oscillations in the quantum frequency dimensions.  You can see how that could happen.

In any case, I'm understandably not inclined to share NdGT's optimistic assessment of Americans' attitude toward the solar eclipse.  As I've observed before, there is no finding so solidly scientific, so evidence-based, that the woo-woos can't woo all over it.

So if you're going to head over to the path of totality in ten days, keep your eyes open, and make sure you drop me a line here at Skeptophilia headquarters if you see any Bigfoots, Lizard Men, or Apocalyptic Horsepersons.  I'll be happy to post an update, especially if you can take photographs.  As is required with such photographs, however, make sure you have your camera's settings on "AutoBlur."

Veterinarians and anti-vaxxers

Let's get something straight from the outset.

Vaccines don't cause autism.  They never have.  The "research" of Andrew Wakefield, which started that whole myth, was shown to be fraudulent years ago, and every study since then -- and there have been many -- has supported that vaccines have few side effects, the vast majority of which are mild and temporary, and their benefits outweigh any risks they might engender.

And yes, that includes the two vaccines most often cited as being dangerous, MMR (Measles/Mumps/Rubella) and HPV (Human Papillomavirus).

This whole thing should have been laid to rest ages ago, but there's no idea so baseless and stupid that there won't be loads of people who believe it.  Which, I believe, largely explains the bizarre resurgence of the "Flat Earth" model, a claim so stupid that anyone who believes it apparently has a single Froot Loop where most of us have a brain.

But back to vaccines.  I've dealt with this topic here at Skeptophilia often enough that you might be wondering why I'm returning to it.  Well, the answer is that the anti-vaxx movement has now expanded its focus to a different target...

... pets.

[image courtesy of photographer Noël Zia Lee and the Wikimedia Commons]

I kid you not.  Veterinarians, especially in urban areas of the United States, are reporting an increasing number of pet owners who are refusing to get their pets vaccinated.  Only one vaccine is mandated for dogs in the U.S. -- rabies -- but the others are critical to prevent devastating diseases.  The reason you hardly ever hear about a dog getting (for example) canine distemper is because responsible dog owners have their dogs vaccinated against it.  The vaccine is nearly 100% effective, and (like virtually all vaccines) safe and side-effect free.

If your dog actually contracts distemper, however, he has a 50-50 chance of surviving it, even with the best veterinary care.

There's no question which option I take for my own dogs.

The anti-vaxxers, however, don't see it like this.  Recall that this is the group of people who believe that it's better to develop "natural immunity," meaning immunity from exposure to the actual pathogen.  If a child (or a pet) has a good diet and is otherwise healthy, they say, these infectious diseases aren't dangerous.  Thus the book Melanie's Marvelous Measles by Stephanie Messenger, which tells the story of little Melanie who is just thrilled to get measles and develop "natural immunity" rather than having to go through the ordeal of getting a vaccination.

For the record, I'm not making this book up.  Although I do find it heartening that of the 511 reviews it's gotten so far on Amazon, 74% of them are one-star.

The problem is twofold.  First, this "natural immunity" carries with it the risk of horrible complications from the disease itself, a few of which are shingles (chicken pox), sterility (mumps), blindness (measles), and birth defects (rubella).  That's if they don't kill you outright.  I have mentioned before my grandfather's two sisters, Marie Emelie and Anne Daisy, who died nine days apart of measles -- at the ages of 22 and 16, respectively.

The second problem is that it doesn't take all that many people choosing not to vaccinate to give infectious diseases a foothold.  Measles and mumps are both making comebacks; to return to the original topic of pets, so is distemper, to judge from a 2014 outbreak in Texas that resulted in 200 cases of the once-rare disease.

And why are people making this decision?  As with the anti-vaxxers who are refusing to vaccinate their children, these people are trying to protect their pets against some unspecified set of ostensible risk factors.  Stephanie Liff, a Brooklyn-based veterinarian, has reported that she has clients who elected not to vaccinate their dogs -- because they were afraid the dogs would become autistic.

"We've never diagnosed autism in a dog," Liff said.  "I don't think you could."

The bottom line here is that our pets, like our children, depend on us to make responsible decisions with regards to their health, safety, and welfare.  The fact that people have loony ideas sometimes is unavoidable; but when those loony ideas start to endanger others, including animals, who have no say in the matter -- then it becomes reprehensible.

Party-line science

The latest from the "Why the Hell Are We Still Having to Fight This Battle?" department, we have: a new rule within the Department of Agriculture forbidding employees to use the term "climate change."

Yup.  Emails from the National Resources Conservation Service, a unit within the USDA, describe terms that "are to be avoided."  According to Bianca Moebius-Clune, one of the directors within the NRCS, here are some substitutes for the forbidden terms:

• instead of "climate change," say "weather extremes"
• instead of "climate change adaptation," say "resilience to weather extremes"
• instead of "reduce greenhouse gases," say "increase nutrient use efficiency"
• instead of "sequester carbon," say "build soil organic matter"

"We won’t change the modeling, just how we talk about it," Moebius-Clune writes.  "There are a lot of benefits to putting carbon back in the sail [sic], climate mitigation is just one of them."

Which is disingenuous to say the least.  No one is fooled, Ms. Moebius-Clune, by "how you're talking about" climate change.  This administration has made it clear from the get-go that they are not only science deniers, they will do everything in their power to block or undo efforts to mitigate climate change, up to and including lying outright about what the evidence means.  

And if there was any doubt about the shenanigans going on here, consider that one of the NRCS emails mentioned in the story was from a USDA employee named Suzanne Baker, who asked whether NRCS staff were "allowed to publish work from outside the USDA that use ‘climate change’."  Baker was advised that the issue was best discussed via telephone rather than email -- presumably because telephone conversations leave no paper trail.

The whole thing goes back to an issue I've discussed before in Skeptophilia; that when the government starts having a Party Line with respect to what is acceptable science, there's a serious problem.  Science is by its very nature apolitical; data has no spin.  Now, what should be done about problems uncovered by scientific research is a different matter.  Solutions obviously have political and economic implications that need to be decided by responsible leaders.

But the science itself has zilch to do with whether you're a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or anything else.  You can disbelieve it if you want to, but that doesn't make you a staunch party member, it just means that you're willfully ignorant.

This all makes the timing of a report on climate change released last week, drafted by scientists from thirteen different agencies, seem even more on-point.  The last decades have been the warmest in 1,500 years, and Alaska and the Arctic are warming at twice the global average -- making a positive feedback loop from the methane released by thawing permafrost a frighteningly real possibility.

The report is now sitting on President Trump's desk, and there's considerable concern in the scientific world that Trump will either order it to be amended, or else suppress it completely.  It contradicts his stance that petroleum, coal, and gas use is completely safe, and that global warming is a myth -- something he's stated in one form or another over and over.  "It’s a fraught situation," said Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geoscience and international affairs at Princeton University (who was not involved in the study).  "This is the first case in which an analysis of climate change of this scope has come up in the Trump administration, and scientists will be watching very carefully to see how they handle it."

I may be pessimistic in this regard, but I don't think there's any question how they'll handle it.  Trump has loaded the relevant governmental positions with climate change deniers and people in the pockets of the fossil fuels industry, so his position on this matter is crystal-clear.  If the report isn't round-filed immediately, it'll be returned for revision -- rewriting it so as to cast doubt on its conclusions, taking out language that the powers-that-be dislike and replacing it with vague verbiage intended to generate a shoulder shrug rather than resolute action.

After all, if all of the studies that have gone before this haven't changed the minds of people like Trump, EPA director Scott Pruitt, and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, this one sure as hell won't.

What I find grimly ironic about this is that in the United States, the state that is projected to have the most damage from climate change is Florida.  So if the ice melt continues at the current rate, Trump's precious Mar-a-Lago resort is going to be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a hundred miles from the nearest land.  I know that if this happens, it will come along with the displacement of millions of people worldwide from coastal cities, which is nothing short of tragic; but the mental image of Trump piling up sandbags around his palatial estate, trying futilely to keep the seawater from flooding in, at least cheers me up a little bit.

[image courtesy of the University of Arizona and the Wikimedia Commons]

It would take a bigger man than me not to watch him and say, "How's that 'weather extreme' treating you, Donald?  Bet you wish you had engaged in a little 'increasing of nutrient use efficiency' while you still could, don't you?"

Linda vs. the serial killer

There's a logic problem that's often nicknamed "The Linda Problem," and I hasten to state that by calling it that I don't mean any general criticism of people named Linda.  It goes like this:

Linda is a 30-year-old woman who lives in a big city in the United States.  She is single, has a master's degree in sociology, and is deeply interested in issues of discrimination, social justice, and addressing poverty and homelessness. 

Which of the following is more likely?

1. Linda is a bank teller. 
2. Linda is a bank teller who voted for Hillary Clinton.

The whole thing rests on what is known as the conjunction fallacy, and it's amazing how many smart people this one trips up.  The answer is that the first statement has to be more likely; the more qualifiers you add to a list, the fewer people will meet the whole list at the same time.  To give an illustration that is less likely to elicit a wrong answer, consider the following.

You see a dog.  Which is more likely?

1. It's a golden lab.
2. It's a golden lab wearing a red collar.
3. It's a golden lab on a pink leash wearing a red collar.
4. It's a golden lab sitting on a sidewalk while on a pink leash and wearing a red collar.

For this one, it's clear that each additional qualifier makes the pool of (in this case) dogs that fit the description smaller and smaller.

[image courtesy of photographer Eric Armitage and the Wikimedia Commons]

So why does the Linda Problem trip people up?  It's because in statement #2, the second qualifier -- that she voted Democrat in the last election -- is actually quite probable, given what we know about her.  Once people see that, they tend to grab on to it and ignore the bank teller part, thinking, "Well, I have no idea how likely it is she's a bank teller; but it's really likely she voted for Clinton.  So the second one must be the most likely overall."

Which is why I found the results of a paper that appeared last week in Nature: Human Behavior simultaneously so funny and so appalling.  The study, conducted by a team led by Will Gervais of the University of Kentucky, investigated biases against people based on their religious adherence (or lack thereof).  Test subjects were asked one of two versions of a question designed to see if people connected atheism with sociopathy.  They were given the following scenario:

A 45-year-old man, who tortured animals when he was young, later moved on to hurting people.  He has killed five homeless people that he abducted from poor neighborhoods in his home city.  Their dismembered bodies are currently buried in his basement.

Half of the test subjects were then asked the following:

Which of the following is more probable?

1. The man is a teacher.
2. The man is a teacher who does not believe in any gods.

The other half got a different question:

Which of the following is more probable?

1. The man is a teacher.
2. The man is a teacher who is a religious believer. 

Well, you can see that this is just the Linda Problem in a different guise, and that in each case statement #1 is more probable, regardless of the qualifier (or what the additional qualifier was in statement #2).  But Gervais found a surprising result -- a full 60% said that in the first case, the second statement was more likely, and only 30% said the same for the second scenario.  (For comparison purposes, one study found that the average number of people who miss ordinary conjunction-fallacy problems is around 48%.)

So that means that people's innate biases against atheists make them more likely to fall for the conjunction fallacy.  Unsurprisingly, when this test was carried out in highly religious countries -- like the United Arab Emirates -- the percentage who miss it was even higher.  In less religious countries, such as New Zealand, the percentage was lower, but the bias still exists, in that the percentage who got the question wrong was still higher than the average of 48%.

Most interesting of all, people who were themselves non-believers were less biased -- but not by much.  (52% of self-described atheists got the first question wrong, as compared to 60% average for the entire group of test subjects.)

As fascinating as this is, it's also pretty disheartening.  I know there's prejudice against atheists, but really... a serial killer?  And even my fellow atheists have that perception?  I do run into this kind of thing, usually in the guise questions like, "If you don't believe in god, how do you have any moral compass?  Why don't you go around committing immoral acts?"  My response usually is something like, "If your fear of punishment in the afterlife is the only thing that's keeping you from lying, stealing, and hurting others, then you're the one whose moral compass needs examination, not mine."

But I didn't realize how deep the bias goes.  Gervais et al. write:

The results contrast with recent polls that do not find self-reported moral prejudice against atheists in highly secular countries, and imply that the recent rise in secularism in Western countries has not overwritten intuitive anti-atheist prejudice.  Entrenched moral suspicion of atheists suggests that religion’s powerful influence on moral judgements persists, even among non-believers in secular societies.

Which is kind of terrible, really.  Any kind of unfounded prejudice is a bad thing, but judgments like this lead people to make some pretty hideous assumptions.  It'd be nice if the Gervais et al. paper might get people to reconsider their biases, but given the words the authors use -- "intuitive" and "entrenched moral suspicion" -- that's probably a forlorn hope.

In any case, I hasten to reassure readers of Skeptophilia that I have no dismembered bodies buried in my basement.

For one thing, my basement has a cement floor, which would make it kind of difficult.