Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

The case of the crystalline eyes

One comment from students that consistently drove me crazy, as a science teacher, was, "Why do we have to learn this?  It could all be proven wrong tomorrow."

The implication is that since science alters its models based on new evidence, we could wake up one morning and find that we have to throw out the chemistry texts because the alchemists were right after all.  As I've mentioned before here at Skeptophilia, such complete recasting of our understanding is awfully uncommon; the majority of scientific discoveries refine the models we already have rather than completely overthrowing what we thought we understood.

The most frustrating thing about that attitude, though, is the suggestion that science's capacity for self-correction is some kind of flaw.  Is it really better to persist in error despite new information, damn the opposition, rather than saying, "Okay, I guess we were wrong, then," and fixing the mistakes?

I saw a great example of how science handles that sort of thing last week, when a fantastically well-preserved fossil of a crane fly 54 million years ago called into question a long-held theory about the eyes of trilobites.  You've probably seen crane flies; they're the insects that look like large, bumbling mosquitoes, entirely harmless (although two European species, now introduced and invasive in the United States, feed on plant roots and will muck up your lawn).

Here's the fossil in question, specifically a close-up of its multi-faceted eyes:


What was interesting about this fossil was that the lenses of the crane fly's compound eyes were composed of crystals of calcite, and that put the researchers -- a team led by Johan Lindgren, a paleontologist at Lund University in Sweden -- in mind of a claim about the eyes of trilobites, a distantly-related group of much older arthropods that went extinct in the massive Permian-Triassic Extinction, 252 million years ago.

In a paper in Nature, Lindgren et al. point out that crystals of calcite in fossilized trilobites were interpreted as being the lenses of the animals when they were alive -- i.e., the crystals were present in trilobites' eyes while living, and were left behind in the fossils.  But the discovery of similar crystals in fossil crane flies calls that into question; after all, there are still living crane flies, and none of them have crystalline eyes (nor do any extant groups of insects).

So it appears that the calcite crystals formed during the fossilization process -- that they're "artefacts," which is paleontology-speak for a feature that was generated by inorganic processes after the organism's death.  Lindgren's point is that since the crystals are artefacts in the crane flies' eyes, it's pretty likely they are in the trilobites' eyes, as well.

This discovery overturns something we thought we understood -- and while I imagine that the paleontologists who framed the crystal-eyes-in-trilobites model are saying, "Well, hell," they're not staunchly refusing to budge.  In science, our models stand or fall based upon evidence and logic; if the evidence changes, the models have to, as well.

And that, really, is the main strength of science as a way of knowing.  We continue to refine it as we know more, homing in on a model that works to explain all the available data.

Even knowing that "it could all be proven wrong tomorrow" -- but very likely won't be -- we keep moving forward, whether or not it lines up with our preconceived notions of how the world works.

*****************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Ouija analysis

What do you do with a piece of research that (from the paper itself) sounds like it was done right, but appears in a journal that is notorious for publishing highly suspect papers in the past?

That was my reaction -- well, my question, anyhow -- after reading "A Camera-Based Tracking System for Ouija Research" by Eckhard Kruse, which appeared last month in The Journal for Scientific Exploration.  The JSE has a reputation for being filled with woo, fringe/pseudoscience, and wacko claims, something that has merited the following entry in Rational Wiki (which is never afraid to speak bluntly):
JSE has much less to do with science than it does with whatever pet crank theories its editors are out to promote.  It's chock-full of all kinds of woo, including (but not limited to) alternative medicine, astrology, remote viewing, AIDS denial, quantum woo, UFOs, and much, much more!
So given that, it's unsurprising that they published a paper investigating Ouija boards in the first place.

The conventional explanation for the Ouija phenomenon is the ideomotor effect, wherein a thought, mental image, or suggestion results in a movement of the body, seemingly spontaneous or beneath the individual's conscious awareness.  The idea is that when people have their fingers on a Ouija planchette, they're subconsciously directing it to spell out a message that makes sense.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What the researchers were looking for was evidence that the planchette movement occurred independently of the individuals touching it -- something claimed by aficionados of Ouija boards, who apparently believe that the planchette is being manipulated by a spirit, and the people involved are only acting as a conduit of the "energy" (that word being used in the usual fluffy non-scientific fashion).  They put sensors on the planchette that detected whether the fingertips moved prior to the planchette sliding (indicating the "sitters" were directing its motion) or that the fingers and planchette started moving simultaneously (suggesting the paranormal explanation).  They also looked at the speed with which the planchette selected letters, claiming that if it was the ideomotor effect at work, the selection should speed up within a particular message, because once the first couple of letters (presumably chosen at random) are selected, this suggests an actual word to the "sitters," so the rest of the message is selected more quickly.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the results were fairly equivocal.  The motion sensors did indicate that the "sitters'" fingertips moved prior to the planchette sliding, but the expected increase in speed once a message begins did not happen.  Here were a few of the conclusions the researchers made:
  • When hitting a letter, details of the motion path (cusps vs. smooth curves) could indicate whether the next letter is already anticipated, hinting at (conscious or unconscious) knowledge of how the spelling will proceed.
  • The time needed to spell the next letter was only weakly related to its “guessability,” i.e. the number of choices to construct meaningful words, in contrast to Andersen et al.’s (2018) statement about imposing “structure on initially random events.”
  • According to the experiments with the touch sensor, it is the sitters’ fingers that are moving first, then the planchette follows. This complies with the ideomotor explanation. If there were psychokinetic effects, it seems likely that it would be the other way around and the fingers would be following the actions of the planchette.
  • Often two sitters were able to move the planchette synchronously, similar to the volitional spelling of a given message. This challenges conventional ideomotor explanations, as these would require some negotiation process regarding the next, unknown target. Even though this might happen unconsciously, it would require some time for information transmission between the sitters and potentially some delay in the action of one sitter, causing similar rotations as when one sitter voluntarily leads the planchette—unless there are psi effects explaining the synchronicity.
So nothing here blows me out of the water, but still, this seems to me to be the right approach for testing any paranormal claim.

Oh, and then there's the part at the end of the paper where Kruse admits that blind Ouija sitting never works -- that as soon as the "sitters" are blindfolded, the messages stop coming.  You wouldn't think it would matter if the spirits were controlling the thing, would you?

So I'm still pretty confident that there's nothing supernatural going on with Ouija boards, however bent out of shape people get over how diabolical the things are and how they're summoning up demons and whatnot (every time I mention them in Skeptophilia I get emails about how I shouldn't ever touch one because they're eeeeeevil.).  The most parsimonious explanation is pretty clearly ideomotor phenomena, and anyone wanting to get a skeptic to believe anything else would have to come up with better evidence than Kruse did.

And, for the record, publish it in a journal that doesn't have a reputation for printing crap.  My guess is if someone did find hard, replicable evidence for any kind of paranormal claim, it wouldn't be difficult to find reputable journals interested in it -- provided it met the minimum standard for controlled experimentation.

Like every other scientific inquiry has to.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Monday, September 2, 2019

Dark clouds

I still remember when I was about twenty years old, and I first heard about Carl Sagan's proposal to terraform Venus.

On first glance, this is a crazy idea.  Venus brings new meaning to the word "inhospitable."  Its average surface temperature is 462 C.  The atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, which is denser than Earth's air, so the pressures at the surface are immense.  (It's the density and composition of the atmosphere that's why early photographs taken by probes on Venus's surface looked warped, as if the probe were sitting at the base of a bowl; the refraction of what light makes it to the surface caused optical distortion.)  If being inside a pressure cooker isn't bad enough, its dense clouds are largely composed of sulfuric acid.

As Sagan himself said, "Venus is very much like hell."

But Sagan was an amazingly creative thinker, and he came up with a proposal for reworking the atmosphere and, possibly, making it livable for Earthlings.  He suggested detonating a rocket carrying a cargo of cyanobacteria in its upper atmosphere, dispersing them into the clouds.  Cyanobacteria are primitive photosynthetic single-celled life forms, and Sagan's idea was that the updrafts would keep at least some of them aloft.  As they tumbled about in the (relatively) temperate clouds, they'd photosynthesize, consuming some of the atmosphere's carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen gas as a waste product.

The idea is that the aerial microbes would multiply, and although some would inevitably sink low enough to fry, enough would stay up in the clouds to steadily drop the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere.  Less carbon dioxide, less greenhouse effect; less greenhouse effect, lower temperature.  Once the cloud temperature dropped below 100 C, water vapor would condense, and it would rain out the sulfuric acid.

Far-fetched, perhaps, especially for its time.  But it was an exciting enough proposal that I recall discussing it eagerly with my college friends and fellow science nerds.

This all comes up because of a peculiar observation of Venus made recently, by teams at the Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Technical University of Berlin, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.  What they've seen is that there are clouds of "unknown absorbers" darkening the upper atmosphere of the planet in patches -- enough to affect the weather.

A composite image of theVenus, using data from the Japanese probe Akatsuki.  [Image courtesy of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency]

And there are astronomers who think these "unknown absorbers" are not the products of exotic Venusian chemical reactions -- but are airborne single-celled life forms.

"It is hard to conceive of what would cause a change in the [planet's] albedo without a change in the absorbers," said Sanjay Limaye, planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of a paper last week in The Astronomical Journal that seriously considered the possibility of the absorbers being life forms.  "Since there are few species which have physical, chemical and spectral properties that are consistent with the composition of the Venus clouds, they may have evolved independently on Venus."

The researchers are up front that extraterrestrial microbes are just one possible explanation of the peculiar darkening of the skies, which occurs with an odd periodicity along with an overall decrease in albedo since measurements started in 2006.  It may turn out to be simply a chemical reaction -- still the most likely explanation for the gas output from search-for-life experiments by the Mars landers -- but the fact that scientists are even considering the microbe hypothesis is encouraging and exciting.

Whichever it turns out to be, it seems fitting to end with another quote by Sagan: "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

*****************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Saturday, August 31, 2019

Sex, choice, and genes

Sometimes a piece of research makes me simultaneously think, "Okay, that's pretty interesting," and "Oh, no, this is not going to end well."

That was my reaction to the latest study of the genetics of sexuality and sexual orientation, which appeared in Science this week.  The paper, entitled "Large-Scale GWAS Reveals Insights Into the Genetic Architecture of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior," was the work of a huge team headed by Andrea Ganna of the Center for Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and looked at genetic correlations amongst almost 500,000 individuals with their self-reported same-sex sexual behavior.

Before we launch off into how this is being spun, let's look at what Ganna et al. actually wrote:
In the discovery samples (UK Biobank and 23andMe), five autosomal loci were significantly associated with same-sex sexual behavior.  Follow-up of these loci suggested links to biological pathways that involve sex hormone regulation and olfaction.  Three of the loci were significant in a meta-analysis of smaller, independent replication samples.  Although only a few loci passed the stringent statistical corrections for genome-wide multiple testing and were replicated in other samples, our analyses show that many loci underlie same-sex sexual behavior in both sexes.  In aggregate, all tested genetic variants accounted for 8 to 25% of variation in male and female same-sex sexual behavior, and the genetic influences were positively but imperfectly correlated between the sexes [genetic correlation coefficient (rg)= 0.63; 95% confidence intervals, 0.48 to 0.78]...  Additional analyses suggested that sexual behavior, attraction, identity, and fantasies are influenced by a similar set of genetic variants (rg > 0.83); however, the genetic effects that differentiate heterosexual from same-sex sexual behavior are not the same as those that differ among nonheterosexuals with lower versus higher proportions of same-sex partners, which suggests that there is no single continuum from opposite-sex to same-sex preference.
To put it succinctly, and without all the scientific verbiage: sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender are complex, and the differences we see amongst humans are not attributable to a single cause.

Which you'd expect, I'd think.  The old binary divisions of male vs. female and heterosexual vs. homosexual are so clearly wrong it's a wonder anyone still thinks they're correct.  Transsexual and anatomically intersex individuals are hardly rare; and I know for a fact bisexuality exists, because I've been equally attracted to women and men since I was aware of sexual attraction at all.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

But this doesn't square with how some people want the world to work, so immediately this paper was published, it began to be twisted out of all recognition.

First, there was the "we wish the world was simple" approach, as exemplified by Science News, which for the record I'm about fed up with because for fuck's sake, they should know better.   Their headline regarding the study was "There's No Evidence That a 'Gay Gene' Exists," which is one of those technically-true-but-still-misleading taglines the media seems to be increasingly fond of.

No, there is no single "gay gene."  But reread the passage from the original paper I quoted above; the gist is that there is a host of factors, genetic and otherwise, that correlate with sexual orientation.  Here's a more accurate phrasing of the paper's conclusion, from Melinda Mills, writing about the study in the "Perspectives" column of Science: "The genetic correlation identified in the GWAS of whether a person had ever engaged in sex with someone of the same sex and the more complex measure of proportion of same-sex partners was 0.73 for men but only 0.52 for women.  This means that genetic variation has a higher influence on same-sex sexual behavior in men than in women and also demonstrates the complexity of women's sexuality."

Even the lower 0.52 correlation for women is pretty damn significant, considering that correlation runs on a scale of 0 to 1 where 0 means "no correlation at all" and 1 means "perfectly correlated."

But that didn't stop the next level of misinterpretation from happening, predictably from the anti-LGBTQ evangelicals and other crazy right-wingers, who would prefer it if people like me didn't exist.  All they did is read the headline from Science News (or one of the large number of media outlets that characterized the research the same way) and start writing op-ed pieces crowing, "See?  No gay gene!  We told you homosexuality was a choice.  Now science proves we were right all along."  Add to that the alarmists who went entirely the other direction and suggested that the Ganna et al. research could be used to identify non-heterosexuals for the purposes of persecution, or even eugenics, and you've got a morass of hyperemotional responses that miss the main conclusions of the study entirely.

So can I recommend that all of you read the fucking research?  For the Right-Wing NutJobs, let me just say that if you have to lie about what a study actually says to support your viewpoint, your position must be pretty tenuous from the get-go.  And while I sympathize with the alarmists' fears, it's hard to see how the Ganna et al. research could be used for any sort of nefarious purposes, when the best genetic correlates to homosexuality numbered around a half-dozen, not all of them showed up in every LGBTQ person studied, and even aggregated only predicted correctly around half the time.

So the whole thing got me kind of stirred up, as measurable by the number of times I felt obliged to use the f-bomb to express my frustration.  Which you'd have predicted, given my (1) bisexuality, (2) background in genetics, and (3) hatred of popular media mischaracterizing science.

In any case, the take-home message here is threefold:
  1. The universe is a complex place.  Deal with it.
  2. Wherever human sexuality comes from, it isn't a choice.  If that offends your sensibilities or conflicts with your worldview, you might want to re-examine your sensibilities and worldview, because as far as I can tell reality doesn't give a rat's ass about what you'd like to believe.
  3. Don't trust headlines.  Always go back to the original research before forming an opinion.  Yes, reading scientific papers is challenging for non-scientists, but that's the only way you'll know your understanding is on solid ground.
So that's the latest highly equivocal piece of the nature-nurture puzzle, the outcome of which you'd probably have expected from knowing the history of the question.  As much as I'd like it if these matters were simple, I'm much happier knowing the truth.  I'll end with a quote from the inimitable Carl Sagan: "For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to my heart; the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life.  In The Three-Body Problem, Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu takes an interesting angle on this question; if intelligent life were discovered in the universe -- maybe if it even gave us a visit -- how would humans react?

Liu examines the impact of finding we're not alone in the cosmos from political, social, and religious perspectives, and doesn't engage in any pollyanna-ish assumptions that we'll all be hunky-dory and ascend to the next plane of existence.  What he does think might happen, though, makes for fascinating reading, and leaves you pondering our place in the universe for days after you turn over the last page.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Friday, August 30, 2019

A new twig on the family tree

My long-ago professor of evolutionary biology, Dr. Andrew Collins, once said, "The only reason humans came up with the concept of species as little air-tight boxes is that we have no near relatives still alive."  After a pause, he added, "And it's also the reason why evolution isn't completely self-evident to everyone."

I've always remembered that -- the word "species" is an artificial construct, and is the hardest concept in biology to come up with a consistent definition for.  No matter how you define it, you come up with exceptions and qualifications (something I dealt with a while back in my post "Grass, gulls, mosquitoes, and mice"), and it's only our determination that nature should be pigeonholeable (to coin a word) that keeps it in the textbooks.

We had a lovely example of that announced this week, when we learned that a stunningly well-preserved 3.8-million-year-old skull from Ethiopia had been identified as Australopithecus anamensis.  This species had been thought ancestral to A. afarensis (the species to which the famous Lucy belonged), but the Ethiopian skull (nicknamed MRD after Miro Dora, the site where it was discovered) is the same age as the earliest clearly A. afarensis remains.

So it looks like the two coexisted at least for a while, which is actually a much more common thing than the textbook one-species-slowly-morphing-into-another model.  Take, for example, our own (much more recent) ancestry, when only fifty thousand years ago there was enough interbreeding between Neanderthals, Denisovans, and anatomically-modern humans that we still find significant traces of each of those lineages in our own DNA.  (When I had my own DNA sequenced, I was proud to find out that I had 284 clearly Neanderthal markers, putting me in the 60th percentile and possibly explaining why I eat my t-bone steaks rare and like running around with little to no clothing on.)

The current discovery, though, is awfully cool.  Here's the skull itself, and a reconstruction of what its owner might have looked like, by the amazing John Gurche:

[Images courtesy of Jennifer Taylor, Dale Mori, and Liz Russell (right); and John Gurche and Matt Crow (left)] 

As an aside, John Gurche lives in the same little upstate New York village that I do, and I was privileged to teach all three of his kids.  His son, Loren, is now a paleontologist in his own right, and even when he was an eleventh grader in my AP Biology class he so clearly knew more about extinct animals than I did that I gladly asked him to contribute every time the topic came up in class.

Anyhow, the whole thing is wicked cool.  Picture it; an African savanna with not just one, but several different kinds of proto-hominins running around, some of them quite human-like and others more similar to our ape ancestors.  I'm always a little astonished at people who find the idea of our non-human ancestry demeaning -- I think it's grand that we're connected, in a series of unbroken links extending back three billion years, to every other life form on Earth.

And the whole thing took place, for the most part, in a smooth set of small changes, almost indistinguishable without the advantage of a huge time scale.  As Charles Darwin put it in The Descent of Man, "In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some apelike creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point where the term 'man' ought to be used."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to my heart; the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life.  In The Three-Body Problem, Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu takes an interesting angle on this question; if intelligent life were discovered in the universe -- maybe if it even gave us a visit -- how would humans react?

Liu examines the impact of finding we're not alone in the cosmos from political, social, and religious perspectives, and doesn't engage in any pollyanna-ish assumptions that we'll all be hunky-dory and ascend to the next plane of existence.  What he does think might happen, though, makes for fascinating reading, and leaves you pondering our place in the universe for days after you turn over the last page.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Thursday, August 29, 2019

Social media and bad decisions

In his famous dialogue Phaedrus, Plato puts the following words in Socrates's mouth:
If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls.  They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. 
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.  And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing.  And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows...
You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting.  The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive.  But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence.  It is the same with written words.  They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.
I'm always reminded of this every time I hear the "kids these days" schtick from People Of A Certain Age, about how young adults are constantly hunched over their phones and rely on Google and don't know anything because they can look it up on Wikipedia.   Back In Our Day, we had to go to the library if we wanted to look something up.  On foot, uphill, and in the snow.  And once we got there, find what we were looking for in a card catalog.

That was printed in freakin' cuneiform on clay tablets.

And we appreciated it, dammit.

You hear this kind of thing aimed most often at social media -- that the use of Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and so on, not to mention text messaging, takes people away from face-to-face social interactions they would have otherwise had, and the current ubiquity of this technology is correlated with depression, poor relationship outcomes, and even teen suicide.  The evidence, however, is far from rock solid; these correlations are tenuous at best, and even if there are correlations, it's a long way from proven that the use of social media caused all of the negative trends.

My (admittedly purely anecdotal) observations of teenagers leads me to the conclusion that the number of truly internet-addicted kids is small, and that social, well-adjusted kids are social and well-adjusted with or without their cellphones.  And I can say from my own socially-isolated childhood that having a cellphone would probably not have affected it one way or the other -- even if I magically had Facebook when I was sixteen, I probably would still have been the shy, lonely kid who spent most of his free time in his room.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

That's not to say there aren't some interesting, if troubling, correlations.  A study published recently in The Journal of Behavioral Addictions looked at the connection between social media use and performance on the "Iowa Gambling Task," a simulation that is used to pinpoint impaired decision-making in situations like heroin addiction.  The authors write:
Our results demonstrate that more severe, excessive SNS [social networking site] use is associated with more deficient value-based decision making.  In particular, our results indicate that excessive SNS users may make more risky decisions during the IGT task...  This result further supports a parallel between individuals with problematic, excessive SNS use, and individuals with substance use and behavioral addictive disorders.
The trouble with the study -- which, to be fair, the researchers are up front about -- is that it's a small sample size (71 individuals) and relied on self-reporting for measurement of the daily duration of social media use for each participant.  Self-reporting is notoriously inaccurate -- there have been dozens of studies showing that (for example) self-reporting of diet consistently results in underestimates of the number of calories consumed, and participants have even reported calorie intakes that are "insufficient to support life" without any apparent awareness that they were giving the researchers wildly incorrect information.

So self-reporting of the number of hours spent on social media?  Especially given the negative press social media has gotten recently?  I'm a little suspicious.  The researchers say that their experiment should be repeated with a larger sample size and up-front monitoring of social media use -- which, honestly, should have been done in the first place, prior to publishing the study.

But even so, it's a curious result, and if it bears out, it'll be interesting to parse why Facebook use should be correlated with poor decision-making.  These sorts of correlations often lead to deeper understanding of our own behavior, and that's all to the good.

But now that I'm done writing this, y'all'll have to excuse me so I can post links to today's Skeptophilia on Facebook and Twitter.  You know how it goes.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to my heart; the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life.  In The Three-Body Problem, Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu takes an interesting angle on this question; if intelligent life were discovered in the universe -- maybe if it even gave us a visit -- how would humans react?

Liu examines the impact of finding we're not alone in the cosmos from political, social, and religious perspectives, and doesn't engage in any pollyanna-ish assumptions that we'll all be hunky-dory and ascend to the next plane of existence.  What he does think might happen, though, makes for fascinating reading, and leaves you pondering our place in the universe for days after you turn over the last page.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Planet of doom

Here I was, thinking that the stupidest thing I'd hear all day was that windmills cause cancer and that the way to stop hurricanes is to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of one, when along comes my friend A. J. Aalto, the amazingly talented author of the Marnie Baranuik series, and asks me if I've ever heard of Planet 7x.

Well, I'd heard of the actual seventh planet (better known as Uranus) and I'd heard of Planet X, but Planet 7x was a new one on me.  A friend, she said, had told her all about it, and when I say "all" I mean it, because apparently it came in the form of a five-hour monologue while A. J. was trapped in a car with him.   "Planet 7X... is the reason for all bad things on earth," A. J. explained to me.  "He tried to explain the 'science' proving it, which hurt my head, but I was in no position to show him where he was going wrong.  I googled it just now—wow, a goldmine of woo.   Pure woo."

So naturally I had to follow suit.  And after a couple of hours of research, I think I'd amend "wow" to "what the actual fuck?"  Because this is a synthesis of about two dozen different realms of craziness, including apocalyptic prophecy, conspiracy theories, biblical literalism, Atlantis, gravity denialism (no, I'm not making that up), and various wackiness about supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, the shift of the magnetic poles, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Mayans, the Black Death, Alexander the Great, invisibility cloaks, Ronald Reagan, and the Ice Age.

Oh, but he states outright that he doesn't believe in the Flat Earth.  That would be ridiculous.

Apparently this whole thing is the brainchild of one Gil Broussard, and this is where the whole thing gets an added frisson of weird coincidence, because Broussard hails from my home town of Lafayette, Louisiana.  Not only that, apparently Broussard got the idea for Planet 7x from two University of Louisiana physicists, Dr. John Matese and Dr. Daniel Whitmire.

So it's even weirder, because I majored in physics at the University of Louisiana, and I've taken classes with both of these guys.  I took Quantum Mechanics with Dr. Matese (whose name Broussard misspells "Matisse," which I guess is understandable enough), and Astronomy with Dr. Whitmire.  And what's even weirder is that I went "aha" when I saw their names -- because I knew why they'd inspired Broussard's kooky idea.

When I was an undergraduate, Matese and Whitmire were working on a (legitimate) theory that went by the unfortunate name of "Planet X," and in fact I heard them give a talk on it.  Their idea, which was persuasive enough to merit a paper in Nature in 1985, was that there is a large planet outside of the orbit of Pluto that periodically passes through dense parts of the Oort Cloud, thus gravitationally perturbing the orbits of comets and sending them hurtling inward toward the Sun.  This created regular spikes in cometary impacts on Earth, and were the source of mass extinctions.

Their theory hasn't stood the test of time especially well, and there's been no subsequent hard evidence that their Planet X even exists.  Furthermore, we have pretty good models for the causes of mass extinctions, largely triggered by supervolcano eruptions (e.g. the Deccan Traps and Siberian Traps) and collision by asteroids (not comets), such as the one that left the Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico.

But what Gil Broussard has done is take Matese's and Whitmire's theory and twist it out of all recognition.  Planet 7x (I don't know where the "7" comes from; it probably says somewhere on the website, but honestly, I only got through about half of it before pooping out) is in a highly elliptical orbit, and when it comes in toward its perihelion, it does things like send "plasma discharges" toward the Earth (I have no clue why), which not only causes craters and mass extinctions, but makes the magnetic poles flip.  This is all documented in the Bible, apparently, and explains such events as: the parting of the Red Sea (why a huge planet swooping by affected only the water in one location, I have no idea); the account of the battle against the Amorites where Joshua asked for an extra long day to finish Smiting the Enemy so God made the Sun "stand still over Gibeon" until the battle was over; Sodom and Gomorrah being obliterated, and Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt; the Tower of Babel "confusion of languages" incident; all the awful shit that happened to poor Job; and the eclipse that supposedly happened when Jesus died.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you -- the next time Planet 7x is scheduled to visit in 2021, and that's going to usher in the End Times as per the Book of Revelation, so that gives us something to look forward to.  How a large planet could generate the Seas Turning to Blood and Apocalyptic Horsepersons and Dragons With Seven Heads and Ten Crowns, I have no idea, but apparently it can.

Which brings up a question I've always had; why would a dragon have seven heads but ten crowns?  By my math that means it has three crowns left over.  What would it do with those?  Put them on heads that already had crowns?  That image is appallingly asymmetrical.  Stack them on its tail?  Carry them in a dragon-sized backpack?  Maybe it doesn't wear all its crowns at once, and swaps out the spares when one of the crowns is at the cleaners, or something.  I dunno.

But I digress.

Anyhow, I encourage you to visit Broussard's website and read about it for yourself, because I can't possibly explain it fully enough for you to get the whole picture.  There are also excellent illustrations, including one of the Earth being zapped by a bolt of lightning from a very evil and threatening-looking orange planet, in the fashion of the Emperor trying to fry Luke Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi.


So thanks to A. J. for sending me the idea, especially given that it originates with a Hometown Boy and references two people I actually know.  I'm going to need a double scotch to recover from the brain trauma of wading through the site, but that's not A. J.'s fault.

I mean, I think it wasn't A. J.'s fault.  Considering some of the stuff she writes, this could well be a diabolical plot to short-circuit important parts of my brain.  *gives A. J. a suspicious side-eye*  Maybe it's all part of a conspiracy against me.

Or maybe it's just the influence of Planet 7x approaching.  Who the hell knows.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to my heart; the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life.  In The Three-Body Problem, Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu takes an interesting angle on this question; if intelligent life were discovered in the universe -- maybe if it even gave us a visit -- how would humans react?

Liu examines the impact of finding we're not alone in the cosmos from political, social, and religious perspectives, and doesn't engage in any pollyanna-ish assumptions that we'll all be hunky-dory and ascend to the next plane of existence.  What he does think might happen, though, makes for fascinating reading, and leaves you pondering our place in the universe for days after you turn over the last page.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]