World War Woo

If you're wondering why the world seems to have lost its collective marbles lately, we now have an answer:

The Reptilians who control all of the governments in the world have realized that we're on to them, and they're trying to start World War III.

At least that's the contention of YouTube user "2CirclesArchive," who posted a video a couple of days ago that should win some kind of award for complete batshit lunacy.  In case you don't want to jeopardize valuable cells in your prefrontal cortex watching the thing, here are a few salient quotes:

The Reptilian parasites know that humanity is waking up to their existence and presence. That’s why the need the Third World War as a distraction.  That’s the sole reason for this irrational conflict.

Which of the many irrational conflicts are we talking about, here?  Because in the last few months, we seem to be having global-scale irrational conflicts on nearly a daily basis.  And I'm not entirely sure how starting a world war helps out the Reptilian parasites' goal of remaining undercover.  You'd think that'd kind of seal the deal, actually.

It’s Reptilians versus humans – not humans versus humans.  Not the West versus Russia...  Putin had been part of a group advised by reptiles.  Nordics made the counter offer to Putin.  The technology the Nordics are giving to Putin is on par with America.  The Nordics have told Putin he no longer has to toe the American line, hence his resistance.

The "Nordics" doesn't refer to Scandinavian people, here.  They're a race of sexy blond aliens, kind of like Liam Hemsworth only with superpowers.  So apparently the Nordics and the Reptilians are playing some kind of chess game with Putin as one of the pawns.  And since "2CirclesArchive" claims that the focal point of the unrest is going to be in the Ukraine, I suppose it makes some kind of bizarre sense that Putin would be involved.

Then we're told that at least one other human besides "2CirclesArchive" has figured it out.  This person is Simon Parkes, former councilor in Whitby, North Yorkshire, England.  Parkes has appeared in Skeptophilia before because of his claims that (1) his mother was a nine-foot-tall green alien with eight fingers on each hand, and (2) he's been abducted by an alien he calls "the Cat Queen," who screwed him silly and proceeded to give birth to a half-alien, half-human child named "Zarka."

So I think we can safely conclude that Parkes is a few fries short of a Happy Meal.  Nevertheless, "2CirclesArchive" thinks he is a credible witness, and finds it completely plausible that he has interacted with "aliens, shadow people, elementals and UFOs... Mantid (Mantis) beings, Draconis Reptilian, Feline, small and tall Grey creatures, Crystalline beings and other creatures that can’t be identified."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons CGP Grey, Roswell - Alien 4889611102, CC BY 2.0]

Okay, what do we do about all this?  "2CirclesArchive" has some advice:

Pass it on and tell everyone.  The internet is controlled.  Call people in Ukraine randomly.  Google for a phonebook of Ukraine and call people and businesses and tell them all politicians are Reptilians.  They want the Third World War.  Search on the internet.  I love you.  Hurry, time is running out.

So because the internet is controlled, we're supposed to... search on the internet?  And then... just call random people in Ukraine?

There's also the problem of the fact that even if I was inclined to do this, which I'm not, I don't speak Ukrainian.  I mean, anyone can look up how to say "All politicians are Reptilians" using Google Translate ("Vsi polityky ye reptiliyi"), but I should warn you that Google Translate isn't all that accurate.  Every year I have to advise my Latin and Greek students not to attempt cheating on their assignments by loading them into Google Translate, because what comes out is an often-hilarious hash.  As an example, take the simple and rather well-known quote from Petrarch, "Nihil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio" ("There is nothing as hateful to wisdom as too much cleverness").  Here's what Google Translate did with it:

There is nothing more offensive to that wisdom of the sharpness of the excessive.

Right!  What?

So I'm not sure you should be all that confident of my translation into Ukrainian.  You might be better off hiring an actual Ukrainian person, although you'd have to choose carefully, or they'd just tell you, "ty absolyutno bozhevilʹna" ("you are absolutely insane," at least if you believe Google Translate).

Other than that, I'm not sure what to do.  I mean, I've done my part in passing the message along, but I'm not sure I'm going to push it much further.  I'm only willing to stretch the patience of my readers so far.  Beyond that, I think we'll have to take our chances with the Reptilians, shadow people, Mantids, and Liam Hemsworth.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia is Flim-Flam!, by the grand old man of skepticism and critical thinking, James Randi.  Randi was a stage magician before he devoted his career to unmasking charlatans, so he of all people knows how easy it is to fool the unwary.  His book is a highly entertaining exercise in learning not to believe what you see -- especially when someone is trying to sell you something.

Labels, morality, and hookups

There have been some interesting, and all too predictable, responses to a study that appeared in the Archives of Sexual Behavior this week.

The paper, written by Arielle Kuperberg and Alicia M. Walker, is entitled "Heterosexual College Students Who Hookup With Same-Sex Partners," and investigates the skew that can exist between a person's behavior and their self-identification.  Specifically, Kuperberg and Walker sifted through data from 24,000 American college students, asking questions about hookups, long-term relationships, and which demographics they fell into.

The results were unsurprising, at least to me.  Only looking at the individuals' most recent hookup, they found that 12% of the male-male experiences, and 25% of the female-female experiences, were reported by self-labeled heterosexuals.

In an interview with PsyPost, study co-author Kuperberg explained that the (also self-reported) reasons for these hookups by students who consider themselves straight varied all over the map.  Some said they were curious, or experimenting; others, that found themselves in the situation in the heat of the moment (as it were) but had no inclination to repeat the experience.  Most fascinating -- and saddest -- were the 8% of the students who said they were heterosexual but had participated in a same-sex experience, and who described themselves as highly religious and such behavior immoral and sinful.

What is a little disheartening are the responses I saw on social media to this study, a link to which I've now seen on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter.  Some of the comments were positive, but a great many were like the following:

• Another skewed study by liberals trying to ram their immorality down everyone's throats.
• If you're male and like to have sex with women, you're straight.  If you like to have sex with guys, you're gay.  Why is that so hard to understand?
• More license to treat deviancy as normal.
• So trans and pansexual and bisexual and so on isn't enough?  Now we have to have a separate category for guys who want a girlfriend and a boyfriend at the same time?
• Astroturfing to destroy our culture.

(Astroturfing, by the way, is "the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by a grassroots participant(s)."  I'd never heard the term, and had to look it up, so I thought I'd save you the trouble if you also hadn't run across it.)

What baffles me about all of this, and in fact what has baffled me for years, is why anyone cares who's having sex with whom.  As long as there's consent, and no breaking of trust with a significant other, how is any of it immoral?  (And, in the case of opposite-sex hookups, measures are taken to prevent conception.)  Jonathan Haidt, who has extensively studied morality, includes "purity/sanctity" as one of his five moral pillars.  But it seems to me that this one is different from the other four (care, fairness/justice, in-group loyalty, and respect for authority) in that even when it's broken, no one gets hurt.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ludovic Bertron from New York City, Usa, Rainbow flag and blue skies, CC BY 2.0]

Again, let me emphasize that I'm not talking about situations of cheating.  That's not just about the sex, it's also about disloyalty, dishonesty, and lack of respect for a commitment.  But setting that aside, how can two guys trying it out be "immoral," or "deviant," or a move toward "destroying our culture?"

After all, they're not insisting that you have a same-sex hookup.  They're just saying they wanted to.

And as far as the person who objected to all the categories, let me say something I've said before.  Gender and sexual orientation are not binary.  They never have been.  Gender is not just about the physical anatomy -- it also has to do with the chromosomal makeup (XX versus XY) and the fundamental wiring of the brain.  As far as orientation goes, it was known all the way back to the Kinsey studies that there are plenty of people who are not exclusively heterosexual or homosexual in their desires -- irrespective of whether they ever act on them, or how they choose to label themselves.

So the idea of same-sex hookups between people who consider themselves mostly hetero might make you feel squinky, but the fact that you don't like reality deserves only a shrug and a comment of "tough shit."  As I've also said before, the universe is under no particular compulsion to behave in a way that makes you comfortable or conforms to your biases.

I'll end with a quote from study co-author Arielle Kuperberg:

Our research shows that sexual identity and sexual behavior do not always match up.  Same-sex behavior may not necessarily have implications for sexual orientation; not everybody who has hooked up with a same-sex partner but identifies as heterosexual is "secretly gay" or "on the down low." 

Some may be engaging in experimentation because that’s now an expected part of college, and they are curious about same-sex sexuality.  Others may be experiencing conflicts between their sexual orientation and their religious beliefs, which can cause psychological distress.  Although the behavior is the same, motivations for it are diverse, which is important to take into account in future research and in clinical settings.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia is Flim-Flam!, by the grand old man of skepticism and critical thinking, James Randi.  Randi was a stage magician before he devoted his career to unmasking charlatans, so he of all people knows how easy it is to fool the unwary.  His book is a highly entertaining exercise in learning not to believe what you see -- especially when someone is trying to sell you something.

Astrohomeopathy

Because there's no idiotic idea that can't be made even more ridiculous by blending it with another idiotic idea, today we consider "astro-homeopathy."

If you're thinking, "Wait... that can't mean what it seems to...", unfortunately, yes, it does.  There actually are people who are prescribing homeopathic "remedies" based on your astrological sign.

As we're told over at the the site Ashwini Homeopathy Holistic Healing:

Each planet and its sign have certain characteristics, which may be weak or strong, depending on their placement in the horoscope.  By matching these characteristics of the planets and their signs with the symptoms of Homoeopathic [sic] remedies, it is possible to connect them in order to select the right medicine.

It's explained even more fully over at the site Mystic Scripts:

Astro homeopathy is based on a very unique idea of relating homeopathy with astrology.  Many people follow the astrohomeopathy principles and lead a healthy life.  You can also try astro homeopathy healing methods so that you can lead a life free from health hazards and fitness problems.

Astrology and homeopathy are bridged in astro homeopathy.  An astrohomeopathy reading for you finds out your sun sign and the body parts related to your sign of the zodiac, and tells you the health problems you have the possibility to suffer from (if, of course, there is [sic] any).  In addition, you also come to know the homeopathic remedies for the health problems.

On this site there is a link where you can get your own free astrohomeopathy reading, so of course, I had to do it.  So I entered my birthdate, and this is what I got:

You are intense and ong [sic] willed people who have a very determined nature.  You are powerful and full of energy.  You may seem very calm on the surface but inside, you have a lot of latent aggression. You are very thoughtful and good company, but you are more than that meets the eye.  You seem to be detached from events but actually keep a careful track of what is happening.  You are very sensitive, which leads you to being short tempered.  You have great will power and will achieve your goals if focused.  You are highly motivated individuals who are very resourceful and passionate in your dealings.  You have ong [sic] powers of reasoning and if put to the right use, you will reach the top in no time.

Man, if being short-tempered and having latent aggression are my "positive traits," I can barely wait to see what my negative ones are.  At least I'm a very "ong" person.  That's good, right?

L'homme zodiacal from Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry (ca. 1410) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Now, for the bad news -- my "negative traits:"

Your bluntness may hurt a lot of people.  You may get too involved and probe into issues, which doesn't concern them.  You may be temperamental, making them very difficult to get along with.  You believe you can achieve a lot in life, but just talk and don't do anything as you may have become over confident.  You may be arrogant and jealous of others' achievements.  You do no [sic] trust people and are always suspicious.  Your secretive nature may create problems.  Also you may turn violent at the blink of an eye.

If wanting to flip a table when I'm reading paragraph after paragraph of horseshit constitutes being "temperamental and violent," then guilty as charged.

Then there's the homeopathy part.  Apparently, given my birth sign, what I need is a "remedy" made from plaster of Paris.  I shit you not.  And wait till you read why:

CALCAREA SULPHUREA (Sulphate of Lime, Plaster of Paris) -- Scorpio exerts influence over the sexual organs and as such the pure Scorpions are prone to suffer form infections and problems in their sex organs.  They are susceptible to skin eruptions on the genitals, cystitis and diseases of the urinary tract along with venereal infections.

I don't know about you, but that's enough to make me walk around in a protective crouch for the rest of the day.  The remedy, by the way, "has no side effects," which is a relief, although a more accurate way to put it is "has no effects whatsoever."

Oh, and my lucky numbers are 2 and 4, my lucky colors are burgundy and black, and my lucky day is Tuesday (which is today!  Yay!).

I'm also told that famous persons I'm supposedly similar to include John Keats, Julia Roberts, Bill Gates, and Pablo Picasso.  And I'm sure you can see immediately how alike those four are.

Anyhow, I'm off to take my plaster of Paris pills so my sexual organs don't erupt, and so my arrogant and overconfident nature doesn't cloud my powers of reasoning and bring to the surface my latent aggression.  I hate it when that happens.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia is Flim-Flam!, by the grand old man of skepticism and critical thinking, James Randi.  Randi was a stage magician before he devoted his career to unmasking charlatans, so he of all people knows how easy it is to fool the unwary.  His book is a highly entertaining exercise in learning not to believe what you see -- especially when someone is trying to sell you something.

Authentic lies

A paper that appeared in the American Sociology Review in January, by Oliver Hahl (of Carnegie Mellon Institute) and Minjae Kim and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan (of MIT) should be alarming to anyone who values the truth over partisanship -- which, I hope, is the majority of thinking individuals.

The paper is entitled "The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy," and begins with a frightening statement:

[H]ow can a constituency of voters find a candidate “authentically appealing” (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a “lying demagogue” (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)?...  [Our] results demonstrate that mere partisanship is insufficient to explain sharp differences in how lying demagoguery is perceived, and that several oft-discussed factors—information access, culture, language, and gender—are not necessary for explaining such differences.  Rather, for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate.

Study co-author Zuckerman Sivan elaborated further, in a press release from MIT's School of Management.  "The key to our theory," he said, "is that when a candidate asserts an obvious untruth especially as part of a general attack on establishment norms, his anti-establishment listeners will pick up on his underlying message that the establishment is illegitimate and, therefore, that candidate will have an ‘authentic’ appeal despite the falsehoods and norm-breaking."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Madhumathi S V, Business ethics, CC BY-SA 4.0]

I don't know about you, but I find this legitimately terrifying.  One of the most common statements I heard people make in defense of Donald Trump during the lead-up to the 2016 election was that he "tells it like it is."  Even back then it was obvious -- and we've had about a million examples since -- the one thing Trump doesn't do is "tell it like it is."  The phrase "like it is" implies that he's the only one brave enough to tell the truth, when in fact, I have never seen an elected official lie as outrageously and continuously as Trump does.  (And I lived in Louisiana while Edwin Edwards was governor, which sets the bar pretty high.)

So Trump doesn't, in fact, "tell it like it is;" he tells us (1) like he'd like it to be (as in his recent statement that he's more popular than Obama ever was), and (2) like his devoted followers think it is (as in his claim that illegal immigrants are pouring across the border in record numbers, when in fact the number of illegals entering the country has been on a downward trend for over ten years).

"We argue that when voters identify with an ‘aggrieved’ social category — that is, one whose members see themselves as unfairly treated by the political establishment — they will be more motivated to view demagogic falsehoods from a candidate claiming to serve them as gestures of symbolic protest against the dominant group," Hahl et al. write.  "When this happens, such voters will view the candidate making these statements as more authentic than would people in other social categories...  If the key to the authentic appeal of the lying demagogue is that he is signaling a willingness to be regarded as a pariah by the establishment, Trump was certainly a credible pariah.  In this sense, his statements reminded his voters that he is a pariah just like them."

So we've somehow moved from "authentic" as meaning "true" to "authentic" as meaning "whatever flips the finger at the dominant paradigm, whether it's true or not."  Maybe it's always been this way; I've commented before that the hippie movement of the 1960s was just as clearly founded on a lie, that you could burn your draft card and driver's license, jettison all social convention, and live in a world of free food and free sex and no rules -- when, in fact, the vast majority of the hippies lived by sponging off people who had conventional jobs that paid for food, rent, and utilities.  The appeal was that the hippies appeared to be sticking it to the man, shaking a fist at a system that (in the words of the authors) was "flawed and illegitimate" -- a view that, in a lot of ways, wasn't wrong.  Nor are the Trump voters wrong, not in their basic objections -- that the system has largely profited the rich and screwed the lower middle class workers, and that the wealthy elite has many times acted with arrogance and disdain for the people of the "flyover states," when they didn't ignore them completely.  It's no surprise that the poorest states in the United States are the most staunchly red.

But just as the hippie movement wasn't the way out of the tangled morass of unrest during the 1960s, Trumpism isn't the way out of our problems now.  Trump and his cronies haven't helped the working class; damn near everything they've done has been of sole benefit to the fat cats and lobbyists, even if Fox News hasn't had the balls to say so.  And merciful heavens, he has lied.  I know that "politicians lie" is a cliché for good reason, but I have never seen anyone with such a complete and callous disregard for the truth as Donald Trump.  Worse, he gets away with it.  I swear, the man could say "2+2=3" today, and "2+2=5" tomorrow, and not only would his followers believe him both times, he could say "I never said that 2+2=3" while the fucking videotape was running, and they'd believe that, too.

So this takes "lying demagoguery" to unprecedented heights, where it's not so much that truth matters less than "gestures of symbolic protest against the dominant group," but that truth doesn't matter at all.

The basic problem is that addressing this would require remediating the conditions that have led half of America to view the system as "flawed and illegitimate" -- which is even less likely now that we have a government that views funneling money to the Koch Brothers et al. as a greater good than addressing poverty, unemployment, and infrastructure failure.  So the working class gets angrier, the poor get more desperate, and the whole thing snowballs as the democracy unravels -- just as it did in Weimar Germany.

Speaking of lying demagogues.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia is Flim-Flam!, by the grand old man of skepticism and critical thinking, James Randi.  Randi was a stage magician before he devoted his career to unmasking charlatans, so he of all people knows how easy it is to fool the unwary.  His book is a highly entertaining exercise in learning not to believe what you see -- especially when someone is trying to sell you something.

Heavy-duty nonsense

Online Critical Thinking course -- free for a short time!

This week, we're launching a course called Introduction to Critical Thinking through Udemy!  It includes about forty short video lectures, problem sets, and other resources to challenge your brain, totaling about an hour and a half.  The link for purchasing the course is here, but we're offering it free to the first hundred to sign up!  (The free promotion is available only here.)  We'd love it if you'd review the course for us, and pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested!

Thanks!

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Yesterday I ran into a claim that, even by comparison with most alt-med nonsense, is way out there.  The gist of it is that you can fix all your physical ailments if you just stop drinking water with deuterium in it.

Deuterium, as I probably don't need to explain, is "heavy hydrogen" -- hydrogen atoms whose nucleus contains a proton and a neutron (rather than only a proton, as in ordinary hydrogen).  Heavy water has a few different physical and chemical properties from ordinary water -- such as (unsurprisingly) being 10.6% more dense and being more viscous.  It has an ability to slow high-energy neutrons down without absorbing them, making heavy water important in nuclear fission reactors.  Additionally, deuterium forms stronger bonds to carbon and oxygen than ordinary hydrogen.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dirk Hünniger; Derivative work in english - Balajijagadesh, Hydrogen Deuterium Tritium Nuclei Schmatic-en, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The "Beginner's Guide to Deuterium and Health," however, has some information that would be seriously scary if it weren't for the fact that nearly all of it wrong.  It starts with a definition of "deuterium," which is correct, and is honestly the last thing on the entire webpage that is.  You're put on notice about the veracity of the site in the first paragraph, wherein we find that the details of how awful deuterium is for you is only accessible to "those with an understanding of advanced bio-chemistry, bio-physics and quantum health."

What, pray, is "quantum health?"  The health of your subatomic particles?  The health of people who are so extremely small that they can only be detected with sensitive instruments?  The health of people who jump from "sick" to "well" and back again without passing all the stages in between?

Or, perhaps, does it refer to someone who is both sick and well at the same time until they go to a doctor, at which point the Alt-Med Wave Function collapses, and they become one or the other?

Then we find out that our health depends on how fast our mitochondria are spinning.  No lie, here's the relevant passage:

At a quantum level hydrogen plays a vital role in mitochondria function.  Mitochondria are the powerhouse batteries of the body.  They ultimately facilitate energy production.  Within the mitochondria there is a spinning head that rotates very fast, the rotation speed of this spinning head determines how efficiently you create energy.  The faster the spinning head rotates the more energy you make and the healthier you will be.  The slower the spinning head rotates the less energy you will make and this leaves you more susceptible to chronic mismatch diseases and faster aging.

What this is referring to, insofar as I can understand it, is the electron transport chain, wherein electrons in your mitochondria give up some of their energy through a series of oxidation/reduction reactions, and that energy is used to shuttle hydrogen ions across the mitochondrial membrane.  The ultimate result is the generation of ATP, a crucial energy storage molecule.

The amusing part is that the rate of this reaction is controlled incredibly tightly.  You need about seventy million ATP molecules per second, per cell, and you use them equally quickly -- ATP doesn't store well.  If your rate of production went up without your rate of consumption going up, you won't be healthier; the ATP will break down, liberating the energy as heat, and you'll spontaneously burst into flame.

So the site is right to the extent that if this happened, worrying about illness and aging would be down near the bottom of your Priorities List.

Anyhow, what we're told is that deuterium kind of gums up the works, making the "spinning head" run more slowly, giving us chronic diseases.  What kind of chronic diseases is never specified, because apparently they're all caused by the same thing, whether you're talking about arthritis or high blood pressure.

The pièce de resistance, however, is when the website tells us what to do about all this.  In order to avoid this bad stuff, the solution is simple: we have to start drinking water with the deuterium removed.

But how do you do this?

Easy.  You take ordinary tap water, and freeze it.

If you put water in the freezer, they say, the heavy water will freeze first.  So you wait until a crust of ice forms, and either chip off and remove that, or else pour off the still-liquid part of the water.  Do it again and again, and eventually you'll have healthful "deuterium-depleted" water.

It works even better, they say, if you start with water "from glacial regions," because it's already been de-deuterium-ized naturally.

I know that the people who construct nuclear reactors would be glad to hear this.  The current method of producing heavy water for industry is called the Girdler sulfide process, which produces one ton of heavy water for every 340,000 tons of water you start with.  This means the stuff's expensive -- one place I looked is charging $680 per liter.  If all they had to do is freeze regular water and pull off the ice, it'd be quite a cost savings.

As with many wacky claims, there's a (small) grain of truth to this stuff.  Heavy water does have a higher freezing point than ordinary water (3.7 C as compared to 0 C).  It's also toxic, but only if you replace 25% of your body's water content with heavy water -- an expensive proposition given its cost.  (One source said, "accidental or intentional poisoning with heavy water is unlikely to the point of practical disregard.  Poisoning would require that the victim ingest large amounts of heavy water without significant normal water intake for many days to produce any noticeable toxic effects.")

What about our consumption of heavy water from contamination of ordinary water?  Well, since in virtually all tested water sources, the concentration of heavy water is one part in 3,200, I don't think you have much to worry about.  But if it amuses you to partly freeze your drinking water and throw away the icy part, by all means have at it.

Oh, and the website also says that once you "flush out the deuterium" from your body, your "energy level will increase, along with your magnetic field."  Which sounds potentially dangerous to me.  I would hate to have just made myself all healthy and deuterium-free, then I walk into a Williams-Sonoma and my magnetic field starts attracting metal kitchen implements, and I get impaled in the forehead by a meat cleaver or something.

So there you have it.  How to go through a lot of folderol to remove something from your water that (1) is there in vanishingly small amounts, and (2) has no toxic effects at that dosage.  Me, I'm more inclined to eat right and exercise regularly, but maybe I'm only saying that because the deuterium has gummed up the "spinning heads" in my brain's mitochondria and I'm not thinking straight.  You can see how that could happen.

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders.  A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!

Alien DNA test

Online Critical Thinking course -- free for a short time!

This week, we're launching a course called Introduction to Critical Thinking through Udemy!  It includes about forty short video lectures, problem sets, and other resources to challenge your brain, totaling about an hour and a half.  The link for purchasing the course is here, but we're offering it free to the first hundred to sign up!  (The free promotion is available only here.)  We'd love it if you'd review the course for us, and pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested!

Thanks!

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Today we're going to take a break from subatomic physics and the Big Bang, not to mention the current state of political affairs (and I'm using that in both senses of the word) in the United States, to consider:

DNA tests that are designed to see if you have alien ancestry.

As with so many of the topics I address here at Skeptophilia, I owe this one to Reddit, that amazing clearinghouse for ideas from profound to ridiculous to completely baffling.  The post on Reddit that clued me in to the fact that alien DNA testing is a thing lands toward the "baffling" end of that continuum, although to be fair, the person who found it posted it on r/Skeptic, so they clearly didn't believe it themselves.

It was accompanied by a screencap of the offer on eBay, which I include below:

Being that the print is a little small, let me list the salient features:

• It sounds like your typical DNA analysis kit, wherein you spit into a test tube and send it in.  I did one of these (23 & Me) just out of curiosity, not that there's anything particularly in question about my own ancestry.  My heritage is French, Scottish, German, Dutch, and English, and my DNA came back: French, Scottish, German, Dutch, and English.  At least it speaks well for the accuracy of the analysis, not to mention my genealogical research and the low incidence of infidelity in my family.  (Incidentally, my DNA profile allowed me to connect with four different people whom I had not known before, and who turned out to be fairly close cousins.)
• The difference here is that instead of telling you your ethnic makeup, this test purports to tell you how much of it doesn't originate on planet Earth.  Note that it is accompanied by a highly scary-looking artist's representation of an individual who, if your test turns out to be positive, is apparently your Great-Great-Great Grandpa G'zork.
• It originates in Canada, and you can't have it shipped to the United States.  I find this a little suspicious.  I mean, it could be because it would require the transportation of bodily fluids across national boundaries, which could be a serious issue vis-à-vis disease transmission, but I prefer the hypothesis that it's because here in the United States, they'd prefer it if we don't find out we're actually aliens.  So far, apparently they're keeping Rudy Giuliani in the dark, and he looks a lot more like the aforementioned G'zork than most of the humans I've seen.
• It costs only $15.95 (Canadian).  This is a hell of a deal, especially given what it purports to do.  My 23 & Me test set me back eighty bucks, which I spent to find out what I more or less already knew.  (It did tell me that I have about three hundred "Neanderthal gene markers," which probably explains why I like my steaks on the rare side, and periodically feel like hitting people with a club, especially the ones who walk really slowly while blocking the entire aisle in the grocery store.)

So to any of my Canadian readers who don't mind sacrificing sixteen bucks for a little empirical research, I encourage you to buy a kit, and let us know here at Skeptophilia headquarters about the results.

Having a background in genetics, however, I have to wonder what they're using for their basis of comparison.  I know that in the historical documentary The X Files, the government had lots of deep-frozen alien babies in a lab somewhere, which (of course) Mulder found and (of course again) Scully didn't get to see.  So did they do a genetic analysis of the alien babies?

More importantly, why am I putting so much effort into analyzing this?

My general feeling is that even if alien intelligence exists, it's extremely unlikely that it will have a similar biology to ours, and even less likely that it will encode its genetic material the same way.  (Witness the fact that even related terrestrial species, who have fairly recent common ancestry, can't interbreed.)  So the chance of human/alien hybridization is nil, and that's even assuming they have naughty bits that are of the right size and shape to be compatible with ours.

Anyhow, that's our dip in the deep end for today.  And if you turn out to have alien DNA, I'm sorry if I sounded scornful.  I don't mean to insult your family.

Although I'd make an exception in the case of Rudy Giuliani.

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders.  A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!

Taming the multiverse

Online Critical Thinking course -- free for a short time!

This week, we're launching a course called Introduction to Critical Thinking through Udemy!  It includes about forty short video lectures, problem sets, and other resources to challenge your brain, totaling about an hour and a half.  The link for purchasing the course is here, but we're offering it free to the first hundred to sign up!  (The free promotion is available only here.)  We'd love it if you'd review the course for us, and pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested!

Thanks!

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I had a rather mind-blowing experience yesterday, as I was reading a BBC Online article called "Professor Stephen Hawking's Multiverse Finale," by Pallab Ghosh.

You know how sometimes when you're reading a book or watching a movie, and suddenly you realize that a major plot twist is about to happen?  At first, you're thinking, "No... no, that can't be what's happening...  Really?"  Then you think, "C'mon... wow... that couldn't be what this is leading up to!"  And finally, "OMG it actually happened!"

That's how I felt reading this article.

It'd have been interesting even without the sucker punch.  It's about Stephen Hawking's last academic paper, co-authored with American physicist James Hartle and submitted to the Journal of High-Energy Physics ten days before his death, which proposed a solution to the result of the Big Bang (and largely unrelated to the issue of cosmic inflation I wrote about in yesterday's post, except that they happened at the same time) that simultaneously solved several "loose ends" regarding the beginning of the universe.

The problem was, their first attempt at a solution generated another problem; an infinite number of parallel universes, each with their own physical laws, and seemingly no particular reason why a given universe had a given set of rules.

Thomas Hertog, of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, who contributed to the research, wasn't satisfied with this.  "Neither Stephen nor I were happy with that scenario," he said in an interview with BBC News.  "It suggests that the multiverse emerged randomly and that we can't say very much more about that.  We said to each other: 'Maybe we have to live with it'.  But we didn't want to give up."

So they didn't.  And their investigations concluded something earthshattering:

The multiverse is only composed of universes with physical laws similar to our own.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I first ran into the concept that the properties of the universe were controlled by a small number of seemingly arbitrary constants when I read Sir Martin Rees's book Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shaped the Universe, wherein we find out that there are six that seem "fine-tuned" to generate a universe that can support life: N (the ratio between the electromagnetic and gravitational forces), ε (the strength of the strong nuclear force), Ω (the ratio of the mass of the universe to the critical mass), λ (the cosmological constant), Q (the ratio of the gravitational energy required to pull a large galaxy apart to the energy equivalent of its mass), and D (the number of spatial dimensions).

Rees's book goes into the fascinating details of what a universe would look like if one of those constants was even slightly different than it is.  The end result for most of these nudges is a universe that would be profoundly uninhabitable; in many of them, stars couldn't form, and in some of them, there would be no atoms, only a homogeneous soup of quarks.  Rees himself seems inclined to use this seeming "fine tuning" as support for the Strong Anthropic Principle -- that our universe was created with the physical constants it has so that it will be conducive to the formation of matter, stars, and ultimately, life.

 

Predictably, that solution has never really appealed to me.  I'm much more inclined toward the Weak Anthropic Principle -- that of course our universe has constants set in such a way as to allow life, because if they hadn't been, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.

But Stephen Hawking's final contribution toward physics may render all of this a moot point.  If the mathematics of quantum physics restricts the Big Bang from forming universes except those with physical constants like our own, it may have been constrained -- and these seemingly un-derivable constants may come from the physics of the Big Bang itself.

Which is mind-blowing.  From the chaos of an infinite number of universes with random physical laws, we have the possibility of a multiverse composed of universes much like our own.  Of course, it still seems certain that there is no travel between our home and these parallel worlds, which invalidates the premise of about half of the plots of Star Trek: The Next Generation (not to mention my own novel Lock & Key).  But that's a price I'm willing to pay.  The contribution of Stephen Hawking, along with his colleagues James Hartle and Thomas Hertog, have brought order to a universe that seemed random, and may have provided us the answer to one of the most fundamental questions -- why our universe has the laws it does.

What more fitting Swan Song could Hawking have had?

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders.  A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!