SGU Episode 31

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SGU Episode 31
22nd February 2006
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SGU 30                      SGU 32
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
P: Perry DeAngelis
Guest
T: Terence Hines
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Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday February 22nd, 2006. This is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me tonight are Perry DeAngeles,

P: Yello.

S: And Bob Novella,

B: Hey, Everyone!

S: We have a special guest tonight: Terence Hines - author of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. He’ll be joining us in just a few minutes.

News Items

WiFi networks and leukaemia, brain tumours (0:40)

S: But first, let’s start with some sceptical news items this past week. A report published in The Register, which is a British newspaper discusses the possibility that wifi area networks basically using radio signals to wirelessly connect computers together – that there is concerns amongst some people that this may be a risk factor for either leukemia or brain tumours.

P: This is like the cell phone nonsense.

S: Exactly.

B: And the power lines.

P: And the power lines, yeh.

S: Right. It’s basically all part of the same basic health scare. Now there is actually. What the article is about is a University in Canada that decided to limit their wifi network on camps so that they wouldn’t be exposing their students to excessive radiation. The name of the university is Lakehead University. He is saying: “All I’m saying is while the jury is out on this one”, this is the president of the university, Fred Gilbert, “I’m not going to put in place what is potential chronic exposure for our students.” So, again this as you guys pointed out, this sort of radiation – It’s not really radiation, just electromagnetic fields – concerns have been around singles the early 80s. There were some early reports, in some European studies suggesting that chronic exposure to power lines may be associated with leukemia. But the bottom line is after 20 years of epidemiological studies, all of the concerns have been invalidated. In essence there is is no credible evidence that there is any health risk to chronic exposure to either high power lines or radio waves or in the case wireless computer networks. Sometimes it’s just really hard to convince people about the lack of a health risk – you know what I mean?

P: Who was it? The president of a university?

S: Yeh, the president of Canada’s Lakehead University, Fred Gilbert.

P: I mean, what do you know? This guy’s the president of a university. You got to be held accountable a little bit for heaven’s sake.

S: Doesn’t make him a scientist.

P: I know, I know.

S: The issues you always run into – the logical issues – you run into with these questions. How much evidence for a lack of a health risk is enough to reassure people? Obviously, it’s never 100%. You can never, ever prove zero risk. All you could do theoretically is set statistical limits on how big the risk could be. But it’s zero, that would require an infinite amount of evidence to say that it was zero. The other thing from a logical point is that a lot of people assume that if something is potentially risky in very, very large doses or exposures then it is necessarily a little risky in little doses – and that’s not necessarily true. For most things, there’s a threshold. It’s true for some things, but for most things that are harmful to the body, there’s some threshold of exposure where there’s some biological effect and below that threshold there’s really no measurable biological effect. Still, people are left with this sort of idea that a little bit of exposure that they are getting to a toxin or electromagnetic waves or whatever – if a lot is bad for you, then a little is a little bit bad for you. They’d rather avoid it completely. Part of it stems from an inherent emotional reaction that humans have. Basically, we’re hard wired to avoid anything which seems tainted or noxious/ We’ve evolved emotion to protect from protect us from rotten or tainted food. The idea of being exposed to things which are either unnatural or toxic or whatever makes us feel uncomfortable.

P: You’ve got to have the proper filters and critical thinking skills to go beyond.

S: Right, but that requires an understanding of statistics and science, and how to evaluate evidence.

P: This is what the president of a university should have. I’m not a doctor, and don’t play one on TV – but you got to have common sense.

S: I don’t know who this guy is, maybe he rose up through the humanitarian ranks, not the scientists of academia. He wouldn’t necessarily know the first thing about weighing scientific evidence.

B: Before making a decision like that, look at consulting scientists or the literature and see what it’s all about. I don’t think he did that if he came to that conclusion.

P: I wonder if somebody sold him on this, or if he did this on his own volition. It’d be curious to find out.

S: It doesn’t say.

ASAS stands behind evolution (5:58)

S: The other item of interest this week: The American Society for the Advancement of Science, a huge organisation for science in this country, had a meeting last week, and during the meeting which included a lot of teachers as well as scientists they had essentially a rally in favour of evolution – support evolution and the teaching of evolution – and against attacks by creationist or intelligent design proponents on evolution. Basically, they took the opportunity at their annual meeting to stand united behind evolutionary theory as legitimate science and take the stand against the evolution deniers in whatever guise they took. Which is very good, I think that was a good thing to do to show support.

B: About time! I mean, I wish that this was a few years ago.

S: It’s not the first time scientists have come out and said evolution is legitimate and creationism is nonsense.

B: This is different. They took steps. They’re running classes: how to teach it, how to deal with certain questions. This is much more extensive than anything I’ve heard about.

S: Absolutely. They’ve definitely stepped it up. This is a good thing. In the past, the difference between s-called sceptical organisations and more mainstream just purely scientific organisations is that scientists and scientific professional organisations have tended to ignore either controversial fringe or paranormal or pseudoscientific claims. Their thinking is that if it’s not scientifically valid, it’s not worth their time and they don’t want to legitimise it by paying any attention to it. There is a lot of legitimacy to that point of view. When scientists and scientific organisations spend the time to debunk these things they could inadvertently help pseudo-scientists by paying attention to them. It’s better off letter them wallow in their anonymity.

But when something like intelligent design or creationism rises to the level that it has at the grass roots level, and threatens the teaching of evolution, which it historical definitely has, scientists have to take a stand – they have to get involved.

P: Absolutely. And also, don’t forget it’s not really evolution or intelligent design anymore. They’re really throwing the focus on things like the Big Bang, astronomy, certain areas of physics. It’s incredible what they’re setting their sights on. It’s really scary. That scares me more than any of that.

S: Absolutely. As we’ve covered many times on the shows – the agenda is nothing short of changing the definition of science itself. They want science to include supernatural explanations which it fundamentally cannot by its very nature. I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that they want to destroy science as we know it. And I think the scientific community is starting to see this and take notice.

P: Good. About time they got off their dots.

B: Doesn’t that make your blood boil.

S: Ye a little bit.

B: I feel so disgusted I feel like moving away.

S: Interestingly,the more outrageous pseudoscience and anti-science gets the more angry it makes anybody with a brain – anybody who understands science, anybody who loves science as we do. The more angry it makes us. The problem with that is that when we get angry, it makes us sound a little shrill and fanatical. Then the true believers turn around and say “These guys are biased. Look how emotional they are.” So really it works against us. No matter how angry it makes us, we have to take a deep breath ...

B: I know. It’s tough. It’s like talking to someone who believes the Earth is flat. After a while, you’re like “Get a life! Read a real book! C’mon”

S: We know that we’re outraged because of how ridiculous they are, but they make it seem like we’re outraged because of how biased we are. It’s really a catch-22 that we got to watch out for. Let me give you a quote from John West, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute. He says “I don’t understand how you can have a discussion of intelligent design if you invite only critics. That sounds like a monologue, not a discussion. I thought this was supposed to be science, not a pep rally.” So again, he’s trying to do this same thing – oh look at these guys, they’re having a pep rally. They’re not allowing us into the dialogue. That shows us just how biased they are. The fact is they don’t deserve to be part of the dialogue because they’re not scientists. They’re attacking science from outside, with logical fallacies, with distortions of evidence, etc etc. They really only deserve to be ridiculed by scientists not made part of the dialogue. That’s one of their core strategies – ‘teach the controversy; let us into the discussion’ – but you know what, you don’t deserve a place at the table. That’s the bottom line. In fact, letting you at the table, in and of itself, would hurt the discussion of science, because it’s not a science.

B: They don’t even belong at the kids’ table.

S: That’s right. That’s right. Another quote by the same guy is that the President of the Missouri based Creation Science Association Tom Willis called the scientists ‘desperate’. Right. That’s typical political nonsense, where if the scientists unite behind evolution they call them desperate, and if they don’t do it then they say “Oh see, support for evolution is eroding.” So no matter what happens – they have something critical to say about it.

P: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

S: So that’s just typical political nonsense.

Holocaust denier pleads guilty (12:17)

S: A couple more news items I want to hit before we invite our guest onto the show. We’ve mentioned this topic before: holocaust denial. A British historical revisionist by the name of David Irving has recently plead guilty to claiming that the holocaust never occurred – the Jewish holocaust of WWII. In Austria, which happens to be the birthplace of Adolf Hitler, denying the holocaust is a crime. So he plead guilty to a crime, and he was sentenced to three years in an Austrian prison. Irving is a pseudo-scientist, a pseudo-historian; his denial of the holocaust is pure nonsense.

P: There was a specific thing in this case where he said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. He actually in the end retracted that statement. He said it was a mistake, he shouldn’t have said it.

S: As idiotic as he is, I don’t believe anyone deserves to be in prison for being an idiot. Freedom of expression gives you the freedom to be wrong. He deserves to be ridiculed is what he deserves, not sitting in an Austrian prison. But the Austrians have a different idea of that, and he ran afoul of that.

The man who never sleeps (13:36)

S: Perry, you sent me this news item and I think it’s an interesting one: A man who never sleeps.

P: That’s the claim in the piece. He hasn’t slept in many, many years.

B: I’m skeptical. Can’t be!

P: Cannot sleep and has not slept.

S: For 33 years.

B: He’s not human. I don’t think you could be human and not sleep for 33 years.

S: He was a Vietnam man who was apparently normal for some time, and then he had a fever. After this bout of fever he’s had chronic insomnia and hasn’t slept for about 33 years. He’s now in his 60s. He says he can function and he’s otherwise healthy, but he just doesn’t sleep.

P: Is insomnia something you treat Steve?

S: Yes. There are neurologists and and pulmonologists and sleep specialists who treat it. I do occasionally treat insomnia if it’s part of a neurological disorder.

B: Two options here. It’s either a total hoax and this guy is like ‘Hey, I’ll tell a cool story or whatever’. It’s either that, or this guy thinks he’s not sleeping but maybe he has lots of episodes of what’s called micro-sleeps. If you force yourself to stay awake for extended periods of time you’ll experience bouts of microsleep where you’re asleep for moments or seconds and that kind of gets you through it. It’s not a deep sustaining sleep, but it kind of helps a little bit. This guy, maybe he’s having all these episodes of microsleep and he’s not aware he’s having them. That’s how he has remained alive. I think you will literally go insane if you don’t get REM sleep, or any type of sleep.

P: His wife says even liquor can’t put him down.

S: People with “insomnia” do sleep. They have trouble falling asleep, have disturbed sleep, wake early or they may only sleep for an hour or two or three in snatches. They are usually sleepy during the day and will have brief naps during the day. So even people with insomnia do sleep. Insomnia doesn’t mean you go completely and utterly without sleep. That’s the claim here. I guess it’s possible this news account is very inaccurate and maybe this guy has insomnia for 33 years and he’s not completely sleepless. What they’re suggesting in the article, Bob, which you have to list as a third possibility as remote as it is – is this guy’s brain has been altered in some way and he actually can’t sleep. He actually doesn’t need sleep the way that normal people do. That is a rather extraordinary claim. I’d absolutely be very, very skeptical of that.

B: I didn’t even consider that an option. You’d have to reorganise your brain to get by without sleep. It’s not like a simple little chemical change. I think it’d be a significant update to your brain.

S: It wouldn’t be difficult to damage a part of the brain that then would make it difficult or impossible for you to enter your sleep cycle – might make it difficult to make it into sleep. But it wouldn’t make you impervious to the effects of not sleeping. That’s much more of a biochemical process of the brain. What happens when we don’t sleep is that while we’re awake, certain chemicals build up in our brain and we can only get rid of them during sleep. There’s also a host of neurological processes that are necessary during sleep and if we don’t get them all kinds of bad stuff happens to our brain – we do eventually become psychotic, become crazy, and start to hallucinate. The brain cannot function without sleep. The story can’t be accurate, and we will look further into it if we can drag anything up. I couldn’t find anything else on it to find more detail on this article. There’s nothing published in the scientific literature on this. It’s more of a superficial news report.

B: I have thought about what it would be like when we eventually do away with sleep. Who knows how long it’s going to take. As much as I love sleep and sleeping, it’s such a colossal waste of time. Imagine what you could get done.

S: A third of your life.

B: A third of your life. If you make it to 100, you’ve spent 25-30 years of your life in bed. It’s such a waste of time. Look at what this guy has done, he’s dug two ponds at night while everyone’s asleep? Imagine, you could get the equivalent of university degrees; you could read – think of all the reading you could do if you didn’t have to sleep at night.

S: I don’t know that one’s solvable, extrapolating from modern technology. It would take new technologies to achieve that.

B: The article that I read said you would have to, in one sense, reorganize the brain in order to have that happen. It would be a colossal, unbelievable thing. I mean, eventually we’ll be able to do something.

S: It’s hard to argue with eventually. It’s pretty open ended.

B: I’m not proposing breaking any laws of physics here. Eventually our brains will be completely computerised into really fast and hardy software.

S: As long as you’re not violating laws of nature, it’s hard to make the argument that something will never happen.

P: Bob is a firm believer in the coming of the superhuman.

B: It’s inevitable.

The boy that never eats or drinks (19:38)

S: Well, one last quick item. I thought that we would go from the man that never sleeps to the boy that never eats or drinks. Buddha boy!

B: That’s what it reminded me of.

S: Buddha boy we talked about I think in the November or December episode. He is a fifteen year old who apparently has been mediating under a tree for six months. Has not eaten or drank, by local accounts, for six months.

Science or Fiction (24:03)

S: So, I'm gonna read the three items. We occasionally have a theme to the items. This is a... this is a loose theme, but the theme this week is primate psychology... which I thought was gonna be down your alley.

T: OK.

S: Terry, I'm gonna ask you to go last. I want Bob and Perry to give their answers first. And then...

T: OK.

S: And I'll let you go last. And I think this might be a little, you, know, I'm not sure this is gonna be as challenging for you as it is for them. OK, so here are the three items. Don't say anything until I read all three out one by one. Item number 1: Recent psychology experiments show that people make better decisions with their subconscious mind than their conscious mind. Item number 2: Recent discoveries of Neanderthal man cave paintings finally established that these primitive "cave men" had aculture of art. And, item number 3: A host of recent research indicates that the great apes have complex culture, including fads and fashions. Bob, why don't you go first.

B: First... OK, let's see. People make better decisions subconsciously than consciously.

S: That's number one, yes.

B: That seems terribly vague. I mean, there are certain things that you can do better subconsciously because you're not... cause if you try to think how you do it, you know... paralysis by analysis. You can't really think about it, you just gotta kinda just do it. So that makes sense to me, but it's so ambiguous, it's hard to make a good decision. The second one, cave paintings, a culture of art... I mean, they... that seems totally plausible to me. They... there's been so many paintings found, so many cave paintings, and how many were never found, or destroyed, or just deteriorated. There could have been hundreds of thousands of them. I could see how that could be defined as a culture of art in a sense. Maybe back then people walked from cave to cave and checked out art, I don't know.

S: Just to be specific: that means that there was an identifiable style. That you could see that two different works of cave paintings actually had similar technique and style.

B: So that's what you mean by culture of art.

S: Yes.

B: OK, that sounds plausible as well. Umm... Hmm. Sure, that sounds... I can't think of anything... that seems plausible.

S: OK, and item number three.

B: OK, fads and fashions in...

S: In the great apes.

B: In the great apes. Fads and fashions... That seems the least plausible to me. There's no fads in clothing, because they don't have...

S: Yeah, definitely not referring to clothing but behavior. (laughter) Obviously referring to behavior.

B: All right. Fads or fashinons... I mean that's not completely out there, either, but I'll go with that.

S: OK, so Bob's going number 3 is fake. Perry, what do you think?

P: Well, Bob's spewed out everything I was thinking.

S: I meant Perry.

P: Perry, with a P like Paul. I think Bob spewed out everything. I'll go along with him. I think it's number 3.

S: OK. Terry, are you gonna straighten these guys out?

T: Well, actually I read the article with number one today.

S: I figured you'd have read some of these.

(laughter)

S: Because they were plastered all over some of the science websites, but...

T: Yeah, so, number 2 certainly sounds plausible when you redefined it as a sort of identifiable style, so I'll go with number 3 being the fake.

S: OK, so you all say number 3 is the fake. Well, let's start with number 1. Terry you let the cat out of the bag. So yes, there is a series of experiments which demonstrate... Basically what they did they... they always use college students as the guinea pigs in these studies. They gave them... a choice they had to make between items. And then, in one group they forced them to decide what they wanted while they were being actively presented with that choice. And the second group, they had them do a distracting task for 15 or 20 minutes, and then quickly decide, without further deliberation. The group that had the 20 minutes of distraction were more happy with their decision in the long term than the people who had to make their choice while they were actively thinking about it.

T: Yeah. But there was an interaction between the amount of information they had to base the decision on.

S: Yes, that's true.

T: If there were just a few bits of information then conscious was better than unconscious. When they were overwhelmed, then unconsious was better than conscious.

S: Yes, exactly. The thinking is that there was time to subconsciously process this information, look for patterns or things that might actually lead you to a better decision and that when people get overwhelmed with a lot of detail they may react to one or two details and not really make a better overall decision. So interesting - you know, obviously very narrow in how this study was actually done. But, there's sort of the implication that we may actually do some useful processing of information on a subconscious level. Number 2 is actually incorrect.

T: Oh, man!

S: I always try to make them sound plausible. There's a couple of details in this that it wrong. First of all, I said Neanderthal man.

T: Oh, man.

S: Cro-Magnon man had cave paitings and definitely had a tradition, a style

B: Hate it. You didn't say Neanderthal.

P: He did.

S: I did, I said Neanderthal. I always read it. I read it from right in front of me so I don't make mistakes. So... but the thinking was, I thought you guys would err the other way, because Neanderthal man... the common belief is that Neanderthal man had no art. And in fact that's not true. They've discovered many pieces of... clear pieces of art that were found with Neanderthal remains. But here's the difference. First of all, no cave paintings. They're all stone sculptures. The second thing is that they all appear to be one-offs. In other words, an isolated, single piece of art. There's no... there's never any style or tradition or culture of art. So the idea is that sure, over the thousands of years there may have been the occasional da Vinci among Neanderthal men who saw a stone and vaguely recognized a human face in there and modified it to look more human, but there was no tradition or culture of art, where a style or a technique would pass down.

B: Really?

S: ...or would be done in a repetitive way. So there is no repetition or artistic style or pieces among Neanderthal men. Only among Cro-Magnon men. But they did have art.

T: That's interesting. I wonder if that's because cave paintings are just more long lasting than pottery. And so there's less of a database of Neanderthal pottery than there is.

S: Well, this is not pottery among Neanderthal men, these are stones.

T: I mean carvings or whatever.

S: But actually, the stones I think are more durable than cave paintings. These are blocks.

T: I see.

S: One piece of art, for example, it was basically a rock that was - I think it was about 14 or 15 inches across - that looked like a stylized face. It could have been human or it could have been meant to be feline. And a tooth had been inserted through the rock. It's very interesting. So they put the tooth through the bridge of the nose, so that the two halves of the tooth looked like eyes. And they were able to show through analysis that the stone was worked. It was not just natural, and that the tooth was deliberately inserted where it was, so it couldn't have been an accident. So it's an interesting looking piece of art, but again, it's an isolated thing. That technique has never been seen anywhere else... again, no culture of art. Number 3 is absolutely true. There have been numerous researchers who are documenting that all of the great ape species can pass on culture. And troops of - whether gorillas or chimpanzees or... whatever - will in fact use the same techniques, have the same behavior. And that behavior will be unique to that troop. And they pass it down from parent to children, so that's culture. Knowledge that they pass down. They've even observed - only among chimpanzees, which are our closest relatives, so it makes sense - they've actually observed a very peculiar behavior that seems to last for a short period of time and then goes away. So-called fads.

B: Right.

S: In other words, young chimpanzees, interestingly only among the children, were for a while doing this hand-flapping behavior which they found humorous. And they were doing that behavior, and passing it around for a while and then it just sort of faded out and they stopped doing it.

B: Wow

S: So, interesting.

B: Yeah, what threw me off... fads and fashions.

S: I took that term from the article that I referenced.

B: If you just said behaviors.

S: I thought I clarified that, but you are right, I mean it does...

B: No, but just does two words really kinda put you in a mindset that's... that... I don't know.

S: Because it's anthropomorphizing, you know. You think of them in terms of human behavior. Maybe if there was no fundamental difference between the behavior that they are observing among chimpanzees and why people will start to use certain phrases or do certain behaviors, and it will become popular for a while and everyone will do it and they will fade away. It's basically the same pattern of behavior that they are observing.

P: Shadows forgotten ancestors.

S: Absolutely... Great book by the way by Carl Sagan. Trying to learn about human behavior by observing our closest primate ancestors. Anyway, guys, your analysis was all correct. This was a tough one.

P: Stumped us.

S: I think I got all of you.

P: You got as all. It's good.

S: Terry, thanks for playing.

T: Oh, you're welcome. Do I win somebody's voice... If I'd got it right would I have won somebody's voice on my answering machine?

S: You win my voice on your answering machine, for whatever that's worth.