SGU Episode 97

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SGU Episode 97
30th May 2007
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 96                      SGU 98
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
P: Perry DeAngelis
Quote of the Week
What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say 'I know' instead of 'I am learning,' and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.
George Bernard Shaw
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Forum Discussion

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, May 30^th 2007, and this is your host Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me this evening are Bob Novella,

B: Hey everybody.

S: Perry DeAngelis,

P: Hello.

S: Jay Novella,

J: Hey, whaddya read?

S: and Evan Bernstein.

E: And to all our listeners in Peru, a very happy National Potato Day.

S: (laughs) National Potato Day in Peru.

J: You figure they'd have potato day in Ireland, not in Peru.

E: They have it in Peru.

S: Rebecca Watson is not with us this evening unfortunately, she's having technical difficulties. Actually -

P: (derisively) With her Mac.

S: With her, with her...computer.

E: She can't find the ON switch.

J: Steve, half our listeners just shut the podcast off, probably.

S: Yeah, it's true. She has been having some technical difficulties the last couple of weeks. If you may have noticed she has been unusually quiet. It was just because she was having troubles with the recordings.

P: She had some technical difficulties...with her Mac!

J: She had a bad Mac attack.

S: (affirming) She had a bad Mac attack.

P: So what she did was, she went out, and bought another Mac!

(laughing)

S: But apparently it's not up and running yet, so we plan on having her with us again next week.

P: But wait a minute, I see the commercials, they're effortless. You press a button and they're on.

E: Yeah, they make no effort to work.

P: Yeah...

J: Perry why? Do you relate to the fat guy in those commercials?

P: The fat guy is me. That’s how I make a little side income.

(laughing)

P: I certainly don’t do it doing this.

News Items

Creation Museum Opens (1:42)

S: The first news item this week is about the creation museum opening in Kentucky.

E: Booo

J: Oh…

S: Yeah.

P: This is a long time a coming.

S: Long time a coming. We’ve had a lot of emails about this. A lot of people wanted to make sure we knew about this. So this is the product of Ken Ham who is a young-earth creationist. The museum cost I think about $25 million, so these people do have money.

J: It’s too bad God didn’t just create the museum for ‘em you know?

S: Yeah, could have just miracled the museum into existence.

E: In six days.

S: Yup, no that costs money. And it’s basically a complete abomination of science and education, pretty much as bad as it gets. Actually, you can go through like a little walk-through of all the different displays they have, and it’s really more of a Genesis museum, you know, just basically goes over the story of Genesis and sort of the very Christian view of the arc of history. They make a couple of sideswipes at science and evolution. There’s one they have, a mock-up of a fossilized dinosaur allegedly

from the Grand Canyon called the Grand Canyon Wall, and on the web site the caption of this display is:

"Gape at the towering face of Grand Canyon, along the front wall, while bones of dreadful dinosaurs hint of catastrophe."

That’s right, a catastrophe caused the Grand Canyon, not millions of years of erosion.

J: What kind of catastrophe?

E: Some sort of sudden event.

S: Some sort of flood or something.

B: Steve, it could have been a very slow catastrophe, couldn’t it?

S: (chuckles) Right, the kind you don’t even notice.

P: Does it have pictures of biblical guys walking around with dinosaurs? They claim the Leviathan mentioned in the bible is dinosaurs, I’ve seen those pictures. (chuckles) Some guy in a biblical dress petting a Brontosaurus.

J: I wonder what kind of attendance they’re getting.

E: Well it just opened.

B: I think they’ll be pretty busy for a while, you know, until –

E: The novelty wears off?

B: I hope.

P: Yeah.

B: I hope it just totally goes under after, you know, a year or two.

S: That’d be nice. Here’s another one, they have a fossil display called “Them Dry Bones – one set of bones, two interpretations. How can two paleontologists digging the same dinosaur fossil in the field reach opposite conclusions?”

B: Have any of you guys ever heard of a young-earth paleontologist?

S: No.

E: I haven’t, no

B: I mean, what -

P: That’s an oxy-mo-ron.

B: - What two paleontologists is he talking about?

S: Right right, these are hypothetical paleontologists.

B: Oooh.

P: (laughing)

S: (continuing quote) “The answer? starting points. Fossils don’t come with labels, we must begin with assumptions, but which is correct?” And how could we possibly which interpretation is correct? As if there doesn’t exist anything called, oh I don’t know, science-

P: (chuckling)

S: -research

E: (singing) What a fool believes.

S: You see bones and you slap your interpretation on there, from whatever your starting point was. Well I guess they are accurately describing their process. So that’s basically the quality of stuff that you’re going to get in the creation museum.

P: I wonder what the fine is for urinating on the exhibits in a museum.

S: I don’t know. Maybe we’ll find out.

J: I wonder how it feels to bask in my stupidity.

S: (chuckles) It’s basically one long apology for the nonsense of creation.

P: I’ve always liked your stupidity, Jay.

J: (sincerely) Thanks Perry.

B: Speaking of stupidity Steve, the web site that you have linked here, and I assume you’ll also have it on the notes page, –

S: Yes.

B: - has this nice little – interactive – it’s a blueprint of the museum, and you click on various sections of them, and it shows you a little picture with a little description of what’s going on.

S: Yeah, that’s what I’m reading.

B: It is, yeah, so but one of these that I pulled out, one of these quotes said that “Everyone who rejects "His", capital H, history, including six-day creation and Noah’s flood is willfully ignorant.

S: Mmhmm.

B: Hello?. Pot – kettle – black –

P: (laughs)

B: - willfully ignorant? Oh my God.

S: Ken Ham is the poster child for willful ignorance. That is true. The science blogger community is all over it already. I’ll have a link on the notes page to Pharyngula, which is a very popular science blog, which basically links to dozens and dozens of science blogs completely trashing the museum. So if you’d like to read scientific criticism of this, there’s plenty to go around, and there are some gems in there. One blogger points out how utterly childish the entire display is, I mean, it really is – it insults the intelligence of a 5-year old, that’s how lame the whole thing is. It’s really incredible.

P: Well there’s another little entry here on their site, has a picture of people exiting, and it says “Visitors report an average loss of 20 points of IQ per visit.”

(laughing)

B: Wow, I thought it’d be more than that.

S: And that’s an underestimate I’m sure, that’s self-reporting.

P: (laughing) Can you imagine?

B: That mega-blog, Steve, that you linked to here from the LA Times, and they were talking about, you know, the state of Americans saying that 3 of the – 3 men seeking to lead the last superpower on Earth, referring to the last Republican Presidential debates, reject the scientific consensus on cosmology, thermonuclear dynamics, geology and biology, believing instead that Bam-bam and Dino played together.

S: (chuckles) Right.

B: That was a funny quote from the LA Times. I was very disappointed with a quote from the New York Times, very wishy-washy –

(murmured agreement)

B: - and very disappointing. I was surprised, I mean, Steve were you surprised that a quote like that came from -?

S: I was, you know, the mainstream media, except for a couple of exceptions like the LA Times, the mainstream was very wishy-washy on reporting on the creation museum, as if they were trying to be politically correct or (sarcastic) balanced, you know, it was terrible. I mean the journalists totally failed to put this in its proper perspective. That this is, you know, an affront to science; it is a very narrow-minded childish display that is completely rejected by the mainstream scientific community. They really completely failed to put this in the proper perspective. So this is, again, one of the most glaring recent failures of the mainstream media to deal with these types of issues.

J: How can they slip that up? I mean, how could they not report correctly on this?

B: Well the New York Times didn’t even send their science writer to write the story –

S: Yeah, that’s the problem.

B: - I mean come on.

S: It is the general decrease in the number of science writers, science journalists, and basically all purpose journalists covering science issues, and they give us this misplaced sense of balance in journalism, the notion that you have to balance every issue, even when the issues themselves are inherently unbalanced, like creation nonsense vs. the consensus of scientific opinion. These are not balanced sides of the controversy.

E: (mock news report) Two plus two, is it really four? Let’s ask the experts. "I think it’s four", "I don’t think it’s four".

S: (sarcastic) Well there we go, we got both sides.

P: How can two mathematicians come to a different conclusion? Well, one of them is a dick.

(extended laughter)

B: Steve, there was a, quickly, there was a link to the National Center for Science Education, they mentioned that have been a lot of petitions being signed against this – against this museum. They mentioned over 800 scientists in three states surrounding the museum, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, have signed a statement sponsored by the NCSE. And I mean that’s all well and good but I’m thinking wait, 3 states and they only got 800 scientists to sign it? That just seems like a low number to me.

S: What’s the statement? It’s just a condemnation, I mean there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s a privately owned museum, what can you do?

B: Well, but I expect there should be five thousand names on this –

S: Ah, give ‘em time.

E: Maybe over time they can get more.

P: After this podcast there will be.

S: (chuckles) Right. Yeah, all we can do is ridicule it -

B: Right.

S: – I mean there’s nothing legally that can be done -

B: (acknowledgment) Oh yeah.

S: - that wouldn’t be basically censorship. This is definitely a free speech issue, and they have the right to do that and we have the right to ridicule them for doing it.

Licensing Psychics in Salem (9:43)

S: The next issue is very similar actually, speaking about free speech, and this is a follow-up to our Philadelphia banning psychics piece that we’ve done in the last couples of weeks. This one comes from Salem, Massachusetts. And this one is – Salem is considering passing a law to test psychics for licensure, which is interesting because that’s the idea that Rebecca came up with when we were talking about the Philadelphia situation and I basically ridiculed her for that suggestion, (chuckles) and it’s too bad she’s not here to talk about it tonight. But basically, actually the article, in my opinion, reinforces what I was saying, which is that testing psychics as a prerequisite to licensure and licensing psychics in order for them to be able to set-up shop, is really just a way for psychics to protect their monopoly, to protect their business and to squelch competition. It really isn’t a mechanism for protecting the public from fraud. In fact, I say that because the people who are really pushing for licensure and for testing of psychics are, the psychics who are already embedded in Salem, those are the ones who want it.

B: Right.

S: Right, obviously that wouldn’t be the -

P: It’s called dollars and cents.

S: - right, that wouldn’t be the case if this was going to protect the public from frauds, cause they’re all frauds, so they’re doing it to prevent competition from coming into the city because Salem is a Mecca, because of the history there, of the witch trials, is a Mecca for this kind of stuff. One of the quote-unquote witches or psychics who has been in Salem for a long time told of how she got her license, she was tested by a police officer, and she wrote “…[he] sat down with me, I did a psychic reading, he was pleased with the reading, and I got my license.” And that was said by a woman by the name of Cabot. So, and that’s what we said, that if the testing is not adequate and scientific, if it’s in the hands of, you know, bureaucrats, it’s not going to serve the function that we would like it to serve which is protecting the public from fraud and/or false claims, whether it’s conscious or –

E: Should we offer our services to be the arbiters?

B: Well that’s what you would need. Steve, it’s even worse – it’s even worse than you’re saying. When I read the title of this - ”Psychics may have to pass test to practice in Salem” – at first blush I was like, oh that’s great, you get a good test going, and you’re all set. But you read the article and it’s really pathetic –

S: Yeah.

B: - what this testing consists of. A lot of the local – a lot of the city counselors, their recommendations were - we’ve got to do a criminal background check, require psychics to submit a five-year employment history and their educational background - and then even the psychics' ideas were even lamer. First of all, no one in their twenties should be doing the readings, that was one stipulation that they’re considering. They also want to create a committee that would screen prospective psychics and some psychic at a pyramid bookshop wants candidates to show their experience and training before becoming licensed. That’s it!? I mean those are the tests that they would go through?

S: It’s all about eliminating competition -

B: Absolutely -

S: - that’s it.

B: - that’s all it is.

S: It’s about eliminating competition –

B: That’s all it is.

S: - it’s not about quality control. The whole concept of licensing fortune-tellers is ridiculous. When you give a license to pseudoscience, you give it legitimacy it doesn’t deserve, and it doesn’t ever serve the purpose that is originally sold, which is quality control, it only serves the purpose of squelching competition.

B: Right.

J: The way that the article reads, it reads as if everybody believes that psychics exist, it would be like –

B: That’s a given.

J: - you know, a taxicab driver driving without a license. The fact is, taxicab driving exists, this is the supposition this article takes, and I have to read one thing

out of here that really got me. The person says:

"One woman paid more than $2000 for a reading at a Salem shop where she was told she had a black aura around her," -

B: (spooky) Ooooo.

J: - according to Zafransky,

- "then one day she came into my shop crying", Zafransky told city counselors, "I said, you don’t have a black aura, sit down and I’ll show you your aura on my machine, and it was blue and wonderful."

What!?

(laughing)

E: Blue and wonderful, Jay.

S: She has an aura machine, huh?

P: Well, you know, if you're gonna do this, right? If you're gonna license fortune-telling, then you have to define it, in a legal way, and they do at the bottom of this piece. I want to read this, bear with me for a second. Ok, this is how the city council is going to define fortune-telling:

"The telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cardomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrine, coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing or other such reading or through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augery, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mind-reading, telepathy, or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnitism, magnitized article or substance or by any such similar things."

E: But not voodoo.

J: No poop-smelling?

(laughing)

P: That's it.

J: Yeah, what about voodoo?

E: I'm insulted, all the voodoo people in Salem are up in arms.

J: They left out so much on that list. Those guys are crackpots.

S: What about thaumaturgy? How could you leave out thaumaturgy?

E: Yeah, duh.

B: Yeah.

S: I mean, come on, all the thaumaturges are going to be up in arms now.

J: Somebody sat down and made that list.

P: They did.

S: That's a lawyer. It's a legal - the purpose of the list was to be all-inclusive. That's what -

P: I know! I know, I understand that, but we've already come up with some things not on the list.

S: Jay, well, yeah but the list says "and any such similar thing". Right, so it means everything.

P: (chuckles) Right.

S: Jay, you're right, the article totally takes for granted that it's legitimate, that's it's a real -

P: So does the definition.

S: Right.

P: I think it does.

J: Perry, you did a good job reading that because that sums it all up right there, there it is.

P: It's outrageous, I mean it's just so stupid. We really should test - it says they're going to revisit the topic. We should -

E: We should send a letter.

Homeopath's Lame Response (15:46)

S: Another follow-up piece, I think it was either last week or the week before I reported about the UK scientists, led by a Dr. Bourne, who is urging the National Health Service to drop its covering of homeopathy, and we were heartily applauding Dr. Bourne and his colleagues for doing that. Well, Peter Fisher, who is the Director of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, has written an open letter of his own responding to Dr. Bourne and his colleagues, basically defending the homeopathic hospital that he runs...and it is an incredibly lame piece of alternative medicine apology. So, he writes, for example:

"We offer real patient choice, safe, effective drug-free and self-empowering treatments for many common medical problems provided by well-qualified doctors and nurses."

So that's just pure propaganda. First of all, he appeals to choice which is a very common ploy among the CAM artists, or scam artists. And, he appeals to, he says that his treatments are "drug-free", which is implying what? That drugs are not effective? That they can't be used safely or appropriately? What is that implying? It's really just appealing to irrational fears of drugs, not anything that's based upon science or good medicine. Also appeals to self-empowerment, and that is one of the biggest ploys of the entire CAM movement. Essentially, the scientific criticism of so-called complementary and alternative modalities is that they are not based on science, evidence, logic and plausibility.

E: Other than that, they're great.

P: (sarcastic) Who needs that stuff?

S: Yeah, and the response to the criticism is "it provides people choice". Alright, that's a non sequitur, it does not answer the claim. Or "people want to be empowered to cure themselves". Again, it's not responsive, it's a non sequitur, it doesn't address the only thing that really matters - does it work? Everything else is just a diversion.

J: Yeah, but Steve he does cite some evidence in this article.

S: Then he does go on to make claims that there is evidence for efficacy, although he refers mainly to acupuncture, saying that "we also provide things like acupuncture". Then he does cite evidence to say, to argue that homeopathy is effective. But, the evidence he cites does not at all make the case. He refers to meta-analyses and reviews of homeopathy, for example. However, completely ignores the mainstream scientific interpretation of that same exact body of evidence, that if you look at the best studies of homeopathy, they're all negative. In fact, there's pretty much an inverse relationship between the quality of the study and the size of any effect, and the best studies are all negative. Once you eliminate the centers that have been shown to be having fraud, or to have fraudulent results. So there isn't any credible evidence that homeopathy works. That's the consensus opinion of the scientific community. So he's just cherry-picking data and interpreting data his own way in order to make, really an unsubstantiated and very unscholarly, unscientific claim that the evidence shows that any of these modalities work.

J: Towards the bottom of the article, he says:

"Homeopathy is enigmatic, remarkably popular, widespread and persistent despite the skepticism of retired professors of biomedical background. It is simply not true to say that it is unsupported by evidence."

Now, doesn't enigmatic mean...mysterious?

E: or hard to define.

J: Hard to define.

S: Yeah, it's hard to know what he's referring to there. I think he's trying to dismiss Dr. Bourne and his colleagues by saying that they're behind the times, they're retired, they don't what they're talking about, and that homeopathy is the wave of the future. That's the impression that he's trying to create there. Then he makes the referral to the review of the studies, but his interpretation is completely out-of-step with mainstream scientific -

P: Reality?

S: Reality. I don't know if with "enigmatic" he means that we don't know how homeopathy works. His statement is unclear. The bottom line is that it's not just that we don't know how homeopathy works, it's that homeopathy cannot possibly work. It's water...there's no possibility within physics, forget about biology and medicine, within physics, that there could be any therapeutic effect physiologically to homeopathic remedies.

P: Well then how do you explain that hospital?

S: (chuckles) Exactly.

E: I'm surprised he didn't try out some anecdotal evidence and testimonials. That seems to be the only little piece missing to his quote-unquote argument.

J: Do they ever just come out and say "it's magic...this is magic, people."?

(laughing)

E: Yeah!

S: They do, they say - but they use slightly different terminology - they say that the water retains the vibrations of what's been dissolved in it -

E: It retains memory.

S: Water memory. But that is functionally the equivalent of saying "it's magic", because there is no mechanism for what they're saying, right? So just propping up one unknown to explain another unknown is again, the intellectual equivalent of saying "it's magic". It's like explaining a miracle by saying "Well God did it". Oh, ok well that explains -

E: Or fairies exist because leprechauns created them.

S: (chuckles) Right, whatever.

J: At least put vodka in the bottle or something, give it a little punch.

S: Sometimes they're alcohol-based, but usually they're water-based.

J: No I'm talking vodka, like -

S: (chuckles) Yeah, you're talking real - yeah.

P: Clearly you don't understand the law of infinitesimals. Who made that law anyway?

E: Someone very small.

S: Hahnemann, the guy who invented homeopathy. And they're not - law is a misnomer, these are not laws of nature, there are not laws of science.

P: I know.

S: These are rituals. These are magical voodoo rituals.

J: But Perry, it's not even that you get a small amount, you get a negative amount of the active ingredient.

E: Right, right, the likelihood of there being -

S: It's non-existent.

E: - the likelihood of there being a trace of any sort of active ingredient goes into almost impossible probability.

S: Yeah. Now I blogged about this this week, and interestingly a homeopath submitted a comment to my entry, and I wanted to just read a couple of things she said. She's a London-based homeopath -

E: (British accent) Jolly good.

S: - and she writes - she calls herself Sue - actually her name is Sue Young -

P: (British accent) She's as common as dirt. (laughing)

S: (reading comment)

"Why are you so vehement against homeopathy? You control the research and you can make it say anything you want it to. You are just sticking to the money. I would like to see you argue prejudices with India and China directly. Are they fools too? If orthodoxy was so wonderful, then why did we get thalidomide, and too salt and sugar in our diets and antibiotics in our animal feed, Surely your science could have told you this was bad for health, but you lot didn't say a word against it, did you? No, you just follow the money. Science is just a new religion, and like all religions, it is a control freak and it wants to label everything else a heresy"

P: (laughs hard at "Surely your science could have told you...")

J: She's waving that thing around like it's a stinky fish smacking us in the face.

Here's your science (slap noises)

(laughter)

S: So there we go, that was the most cogent defense of homeopathy that surfaced on my blog -

J: What did she actually say, Steve?

S: Oh Yeah?

J: Oh Yeah?

S: That was the equivalent of saying ""Oh Yeah?". I mean her response is almost incoherent -

P: Oh God...

S: - I'm supposed to argue with India and China? What is she talking about?

(laughter)

S: So, she accuses me of following the money. I love those self-serving assumptions and paranoia that people use.

B: Steve, could I borrow ten grand? Please?

S: She says - she impunes all of science, but yet at the same time, homeopaths are quick to cite scientific evidence when they think it supports their point of view. But when I use science to say it doesn't work, "oh science is just a religion, you can make it say whatever you want it to say". Well, ok, make up your mind.

E: Let's have one homeopath take the JREF challenge for the million dollars, please. Step up, take the money!

S: Randi has tried to make that happen.

P: Been there, done that.

S: It's also like homeopaths don't make money, they don't charge for their services, are they doing this for free? She also mentions things like the diet and antibiotics and thalidomide, did homeopaths reveal the problems with those things? No, medical scientists did! The fact that science is - that science takes time to work itself through the evidence and the process doesn't mean that it's not working, it means that it is working.

P: All I know is as an obese man, doctors have shoved salt and sugar down my throat ALL MY LIFE!

S: Mmhmm.

P: I wanna lay it right at their doorsteps.

S: (chuckles)

E: (digust) Damn doctors.

P: Damn doctors.

J: Yet again I'll generalize and say - there's people out there that sit around hating science, they just hate it.

S: Mmhmm.

P: They hate science when it questions their sacred cows.

S: That's right.

P: That's when they hate it Jay. When it supports them, they like it.

B: When it's convenient, they love it.

S: CAM proponents are famous for that. They cherry-pick evidence that supports what they want, and then when the evidence shows that their therapies don't work, they literally say "Well science can't study this modality".

E: Then they reach for their antibiotics so they don't get sick.

Announcements ()

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. Please send us your questions, suggestions, and other feedback; you can use the "Contact Us" page on our website, or you can send us an email to info@theskepticsguide.org'. 'Theorem' is produced by Kineto and is used with permission.

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