Skepticblog

Amy Winehouse (Wikimedia)

The death of Amy Winehouse has caused the inboxes of all skeptical podcasters to burst at the seams with discussion of “the 27 club”, an urban legend stating that an unusually high number of pop stars has died at that ominous age. Such notables as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Jim Morrison have welcomed Amy Winehouse to that great recording studio in the sky, all having died at 27.

The 27 Club legend predated Amy Winehouse, so when she died and some journalist first noted her age, the media did as we’d expect and made a big deal out of it (here and here, for example). There are web sites about the 27s (like this and this) and at least one book and one movie on the subject. And so, the skeptical mind tends to wonder: (1) do an unusually large number of musicians die at 27; and (2) is there some reason why this is so that defies explanation? (continue reading…)

Whenever I read about the conventions held by creationists, it is always staggering to see so much ignorance of science and scholarship on display. If you read through one of their programs or peruse the abstracts, your mind is boggled at the bizarre thinking and intellectual contortions these people must attempt, from weird ideas of how to fit all living thing into Noah’s ark to odd explanations of where the flood waters came from and where they went, to even weirder ideas of why the universe appears to be 13.7 billion years old (but is only really 6000 years old), or why radiometric dating doesn’t work or how to explain the complex geologic history of the earth with Bronze Age myths of superstitious shepherds. One paper after another is replete with special pleading, ad hoc and supernatural “explanations”, none of which would pass muster in even an introductory physics or geology class. As I discussed in my book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, these people are profoundly ignorant of real science and proud of it, because their faith comes first. Sadly, they have about 40% or so of the American public believing their anti-scientific view of the world.

No matter how weird their ideas seem to the outsider, we can at least understand their motivation. To the fundamentalist creationist, a literal interpretation of their version of the Bible is a life-or-death, salvation-or-damnation matter, which is why they invest so much energy confusing people with their distorted ideas about sciences like evolution, geology, anthropology, and astronomy.  If one truly believes that Darwinism will lead you to hell’s door, we can see what makes them think this way, no matter how wrong it seems to us. But, as we smugly assert, they are just fringe religious fanatics, and they are only fighting the most recent scientific battle over evolution (that still rages 152 years later). Surely, the great victories of science, such as the Copernican system of astronomy and the Einsteinian revolution in physics, are no longer disputed and even religious fanatics accept them. Right?

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When I was in a psychology graduate program in the late 1970s, the nature v. nurture debate was in full-throated either-or mode, with crudely conceived experiments and data sets marshaled to defend one side or the other, as if asking whether π or r² is more important in calculating the area of a circle. (Thankfully this debate today has morphed into much more sophisticated research by behavioral geneticists and others to understand how nature and nurture interact, well summarized in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate and Matt Ridley’s Nature via Nurture.) In addition to the studies examining twins separated at birth and raised in separate environments, I recall that raising chimpanzees in a human environment and trying to teach them sign language garnered considerable media attention as pioneering research into understanding the nature of human (and primate) nature, along with language and cognition. These were heady times of bold experimentation, the most prominent being Project Nim, initiated and monitored by Columbia University psychologist Herbert Terrace. Terrace in particular wanted to test MIT linguist Noam Chomsky’s then controversial theory that there is an inherited universal grammar that is the basis to language and unique to humans, by teaching our closest primate cousin American Sign Language (ASL). Terrace, however, did a turnabout, concluding that the signs Nim Chimpsky (a cheeky nod to Noam Chomsky) learned from his human companions and trainers amounted to little more than animal begging, more sophisticated perhaps than Skinner’s rats and pigeons pressing bars and pecking keys, but in principle not so different from what dogs and cats do to beg for food, be let outside, etc.—a “Clever Hans” effect in primates. His 1979 book, Nim, outlines the project and his assessment of its results. There have been many evaluations and critiques since that time, most recently by Elizabeth Hess in her 2008 book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human (Bantam Books), which is the basis of the new documentary film, Project Nim, by James Marsh (whose previous film, Man on Wire, is portrays the tightrope walker Philippe Petit). (continue reading…)

There is no question that Americans are getting fatter. The CDC animated graphic tells the tale – state by state statistics of the percentage of population that are obese. The big question is, what’s causing it? There are three main hypotheses, which are not mutually exclusive. The first is that activity levels are down. People, especially children, are spending more time indoors in front of computer screens and TVs and less time outside running around. The second is that people are eating more calories. And the third is that the type of calories we are eating is playing a significant role. There are two main camps in this third group: those who blame fat consumption and those who blame carbohydrates.

I do not feel that the evidence supports the third group – blaming calorie type. This hypothesis is great for selling books advocating one fad diet or another, but there is just no convincing evidence that altering the type of calories consumed has a significant effect on weight. Certainly the low-carb craze has not caused a blip in the steady rise of obesity in the country, just like the low-fat craze failed to have an effect. You can argue that this is because not enough people actually adopted an effective diet. However, if book sales are any indication, millions of people tried low-carb diets, and they do not appear to have struck upon the secret of easy weight loss. The clinical data also shows that weight loss is generally a factor of total calories, not calorie type.

It is true that Americans are becoming more sedentary, and it’s hard to imagine that this is not contributing to some degree to the obesity problem. But the data is not clear. The evidence shows an overall association between obesity and greater time spent in sedentary activities. However, recent data suggests that obesity causes lower activity levels (at least in children), not the other way around.

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The James Randi Educational Foundation’s recent The Amazing Meeting 9 conference came at a sensitive moment, right on the tail of an online shake-up in which the atheist and skeptical communities were forced to confront the interconnected issues of respectful discourse and sexism in a more serious way than they had in recent memory. (For a fascinating discussion of this debate and the “chilly climate” problem, please check out Jennifer Ouellette’s Scientific American post, “Is It Cold in Here?”)

Commendably, the JREF had already taken important steps to make TAM even more welcoming to women—steps which were both bold and sensible. To begin with, TAM9’s line-up of world-class speakers included as many women as men. This achievement was rewarded with a record-setting level of gender balance among attendees, with JREF President D.J. Grothe announcing that fully 40% of TAM9 attendees were women. Further, in keeping with the standards of larger, more established popular culture conventions, the JREF developed a Code of Conduct for the safety and enjoyment of all participants.

With all this going on, it was widely anticipated that TAM’s “Diversity in Skepticism” panel might take some interesting twists.

It did—but not in the direction anyone was expecting.

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This morning my Twitter feed was greeted by some more noise from Robb Wolf, a professional promoter of the “paleolithic diet”. Buy his books and follow his advice, and the header of his web site shouts that you will:

Lose fat. Look younger. Feel great. Avoid cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimers.

Based on that, you may judge for yourself his integrity and medical knowledge.

Today his tweet was in reference to my Skeptoid episode about gluten sensitivity. The paleolithic diet, which advises that we eat only what prehistoric people had access to, is founded upon the Argument from Antiquity. If it’s old, it must therefore be good. As the paleolithic diet does not include wheat, rye, or barley, it does not include the protein gluten. Salesmen such as Wolf therefore have latched onto gluten, and other substances, as the cause of disease (in Wolf’s fantasy universe, paleolithic people were magically disease free, despite a lack of access to his books). (continue reading…)

I’ve just survived four days of The Amazing Meeting 9 in Las Vegas, and my head is buzzing with so many thoughts—so many great talks—so many friends I haven’t seen since TAM8 last year, and new ones I met for the first time after months of email and Facebook exchanges. TAM never fails to exhilarate me—and exhaust me. My favorites: Bill Nye’s brilliant pep talk for science and space exploration; Dawkins’ wonderful preview of his new book and his speculations about extraterrestrial life; PZ Myers’ very different take on the non-prevalence of humanoids on other planets; Elizabeth Loftus’ succinct review of her lifetime of research showing the unreliability of human memory; and especially the message at the end of both Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s and Sean Faircloth’s presentations: we need to dial back all the petty sniping within our ranks and realize that we face a very serious enemy out there of religious and political zealots who do not value science, skepticism, critical thinking, or “reality-based” political views. They outnumber us; they are well funded by right-wing think tanks and evangelical churches; and they have elected plenty of people in power who are already pushing their agenda. I realize that getting skeptics and freethinkers to work together is like herding cats, but we have a powerful entrenched opposition that will require every resource at our disposal to hold them at bay, let alone push them back. They are already eroding science education and displacing good science with pseudoscience in public policies.

But my favorite talk was Eugenie Scott’s presentation, “Deja Vu all over again: Denialism of Climate Change and Evolution.” It gave me a sense of deja vu, because apparently without knowledge of each others’ work, we have converged on a common topic. This is what philosopher William Whewell would call a “consilience” or common agreement of different lines of evidence or threads of argument. As I independently pointed out in my upcoming book written last summer about science denialism, entitled Reality Check, and in a paper I wrote which is now in press, there are tremendous parallels between the evolution-deniers (creationists), the climate change deniers, and many other types of science deniers. Even more striking, they borrow most of their tactics from the prototypical reality deniers, the Holocaust revisionists, along with the tactics of the tobacco companies in creating “doubt” through PR to obscure the real science.

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I’m sitting here with my first coffee, on my first morning home from The Amazing Meeting 9 conference in Las Vegas—in many ways, the pivot point for the skeptical movement (at least in North America).

As usual, I came home with a lot to think about.

It was a conference that spoke to many of the recurring themes of my own work. Notably, many speeches explicitly tackled the practical aspects of effective, empathetic communication—and especially, the ways in which effective activism depends on well-considered messaging. I would go so far as to call that DBAD-related discussion of communication the theme of this year’s TAM: touching people emotionally, understanding their stories, telling the stories of science and skepticism in ways that people can hear and support.

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How to compute the odds that claims of extraterrestrial life discovery are real and reliable

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has to be the most interesting field of science that lacks a subject to study. Yet. Keep searching. In the meantime, is there some metric we can apply to calculating the probability and impact of claims of such a discovery? There is.

In January, 2011 the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published 17 articles addressing the matter of “The Detection of Extra-Terrestial Life and the Consequences for Science and Society,” including one by Iván Almár from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Margaret S. Race from the SETI Institute, introducing a metric “to provide a scalar assessment of the scientific importance, validity and potential risks associated with putative evidence of ET life discovered on Earth, on nearby bodies in the Solar System or in our Galaxy.” Such scaling is common in science—the Celsius scale for temperature, the Beaufort scale for wind speed, the Saffir-Simpson scale for hurricane strength, and the Richter scale for earthquake magnitude. But these scales, Almár and Race argue, fail to take into account “the relative position of the observer or recipient of information.” The effects of a 7.1 earthquake, for example, depends on the proximity of its epicenter to human habitations. (continue reading…)

Hank Aaron took the home run record from Babe Ruth, and lost it 33 years later to Barry Bonds. (Public domain photo)

At this writing, the 2011 Women’s World Cup of Soccer/Football (take your pick) is in full swing. As a gringo I’ve been following the US team, and have had many earfulls of the comparisons between Abby Wambach and former US player Michelle Akers. Akers was renowned for drive and toughness, nearly always playing with some injury wrapped or taped, and never slowing down. She had little need to throw the dramatic fake injury performances common on so many of the teams. And now we see the monstrously powerful Abby Wambach playing with much the same gusto. She’s been called “the next Michelle Akers.”

And this happens in all sports. Formula 1 racing had Fangio, Clark, Senna, then the all-conquering Schumacher whose records were so many and so untouchable that it seemed they’d never fall. And guess what; fans are already saying “Schumacher who?” as they watch the young Sebastian Vettel tearing up through the ranks. (continue reading…)