Skepticblog

There is an ongoing scientific discussion about the safety of long term cell phone use. The primary question  is whether or not long term exposure to non-ionizing radiation can increase the risk of brain cancer. There are further questions about whether or not such radiation can cause any health problems or symptoms.

As with any complex area of scientific research, perhaps the best way to evaluate the question is to put together a panel of experts to review all the existing evidence and then come up with a consensus opinion about that evidence. This is no guarantee of being right – the primary issue that tends to come up with such expert panels is that they were systematically biased toward one side of the debate. But assuming no major asymmetry in the constitution of an expert panel, they are an excellent way to evaluate the current state of the evidence on a specific question. Even better, of course, is when multiple independent panels all agree.

Recently an expert panel for the UK’s Health Protection Agency (HPA) reviewed the evidence for cell phone safety concluded that there is no clear evidence for any harm. This is good news. Their findings are similar to other reviews of the evidence, although often there is a difference in emphasis. For example, last year the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reviewed the same evidence and concluded that:

 ”the evidence, while still accumulating, is strong enough to support a conclusion and the 2B classification. The conclusion means that there could be some risk, and therefore we need to keep a close watch for a link between cell phones and cancer risk.”

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As someone who has frequently had his scientific research featured in the popular media, I’m painfully aware of the constant struggle between conveying science accurately and trying to make it sexy and newsworthy. Scientists are perpetually frustrated because reporters are often scientifically illiterate, and reduce the story to a level they can understand—which totally misrepresents what the science is about. The science reporters I know are equally frustrated at scientists who don’t know how to communicate the essence of what they are doing, or who are aloof and uninterested in making the public more aware of the reasons why their tax dollars should support pure scientific research. I’ve had my work oversimplified or misrepresented many times, and I’ve seen the work of others completely butchered by incompetent science reporters. I’ve also seen scientists who make outrageous claims and trust gullible science reporters to buy it, hook, line and sinker—and this happens FAR too often (see my April 4 post about the coverage of a ridiculous claim by an amateur that dinosaurs were aquatic, or my Nov.2 post about gigantic Triassic squids arranging ichthyosaur bones).

One of the problems both scientists and reporters face is how to make the research sound interesting to a lay public that knows almost nothing about science—and much of what the public thinks they know is wrong. Much of chemistry and physics is incomprehensible and uninteresting to people that never took a single class in high school on physics or chemistry, and even something more immediate like biology is full of subjects that are obscure to the lay audience. Geologists usually have it slightly better, since topics like earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, climate change, etc., are easier to relate to.

We paleontologists usually have it even easier, because a few of us work on something immensely popular—dinosaurs—although I’m really a Cenozoic fossil mammal specialist and only rarely has my research ventured back to the Mesozoic. Just add dinosaurs and the research goes to the front page of most science news websites or The New York Times, or gets published in high-profile journals like Nature, Science, or PNAS. But when I make an important discovery on a group such as rhinos or peccaries or camels, I’m lucky to get it published in a third-tier journal, and I typically get no reporters calling at all. The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs generated huge interest when the asteroid impact theory first emerged in 1980, with thousands of papers published and dozens of books on the topic. But it’s only the third or fourth largest extinction in earth history. The great Permian extinction 250 m.y. ago, which wiped out 95% of species on earth, is lucky to get ANY press attention. Who cares about productid brachiopods, or fusulinids, or tabulate or rugose corals, among the many victims of this event? (continue reading…)

My weekend at the New Orleans Baptist Seminary discussing God, religion, and the afterlife

On Friday, April 13, 2012 in the chapel of the New Orleans Baptist Seminary I debated the Liberty University philosopher and theologian Gary Habermas on the question: “Is There Life After Death?” I went first. I stated that since Gary is taking the affirmative I’m suppose to defend the negative, but in fact when it comes to the afterlife, “I’m for it!” Tellingly, that line didn’t get the usual laugh it engenders in audiences, but then in seminary school the afterlife is a deadly serious subject. I began with this thought experiment:

Imagine yourself dead. What picture comes to mind? Your funeral with a casket surrounded by family and friends? Complete darkness and void? In either case you are still conscious and observing the scene.

I then outlined the problem we all have in thinking about life after death: we cannot envision what it is like to be dead any more than we can visualize ourselves before we were born, and yet everyone who ever lived has died so death is inevitable. This leads to either depression or humor. I prefer the latter. For example, Steven Wright: “I intend to live forever—so far, so good.” Or Woody Allen: “It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Of course, you won’t be there when it happens because to experience anything you must be conscious, and you are not conscious when you are dead. I then outlined four theories of life after death, gleaned from my recent Scientific American column based on Stephen Cave’s marvelous new book, Immortality, which I highly recommend reading. (continue reading…)

I spent this past weekend at NECSS 2012 – the North East Conference on Science and Skepticism. I won’t bore you with details you can get from looking at the NECSS website. I just want to give some random observations of what I think these conferences tell us about the state of the skeptical movement.

This is the fourth year of NECSS, and overall it was a very successful conference. We pretty much sold out our 400 seat venue. At the end of the conference Jamy Ian Swiss, our MC, polled the audience, asking if it was their first NECSS and also if it was their first skeptical conference. I was a bit surprised to see that most of the audience raised their hands to both questions. This is definitely a good thing – we appear to be bringing new people into the movement, as self-identified skeptics, and they are coming to our conferences. NECSS is also very much a science conference, and we market it that way, so it’s possible many of the attendees were there primarily for the science.

In my conversations with those attending, however, the prevailing sentiment was that NECSS was more than a science conference, but a cultural event for them. For those attending such a conference for the first time they felt it was almost a transformational experience. Many people have expressed this to me over the years of producing the SGU – they feel isolated in their family, their social circle, and their community. They feel they are the only one who thinks as they do – meaning skeptically. Being surrounded by 400 people who share a similar world view, all enjoying a shared experience of listening to presenters talk about science and celebrate rationalism was a new and profound experience for them.

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One thing that space enthusiasts keep hearing is frustration over why the Russians are the only ones able to launch people into space, forcing American and European astronauts to hitch rides.

Click to see full size

Attached is a chart I threw together showing the five major spacefaring powers (the US, Russia, ESA, Japan, and China) and their current heavy-lift capabilities, compared to the upcoming commercially developed Falcon Heavy from SpaceX. As you can see at a glance, the SpaceX craft has capabilities that far exceed those of anyone else. (continue reading…)

Having taught for 33 years at small nationally-ranked liberal arts colleges (Vassar, Knox, and Occidental) where teaching is a priority over research, I’ve seen pedagogical fads come and go. It seems like every 2-3 years the college brings in some pedagogical “expert” to tell us experienced professors that we were doing it all wrong for years, despite the excellent responses and teaching evaluations that we receive. I’ve sat through endless committee meetings and workshops where they try to get us to follow their “one size fits all” approaches to pedagogy. In some fields where discussion of everyday experience is the norm, they insist that we should make every class a discussion section, and let students “discover for themselves” what the field is about. I’m all in favor of “active learning,” as the current fad is called, but there are limits to where it is applicable. Some subjects, such as most of the natural sciences, are “content-heavy” and require that the students be exposed to a certain minimum amount of material, or they cannot take the next course in our  highly structured and sequential curriculum. We try to make up for it by giving students all the “active learning” we can in lab sections, where they handle the materials and do the experiments themselves. But even in a small liberal arts college where the largest lecture section is limited to 32 students, it’s a severe challenge to “cover the material” and expect the student to also take an active role in every lecture. When some humanities professor tell us science faculty that we should turn Intro Chemistry into a non-stop discussion section, we all just laugh at their cluelessness. Not only do we have the constraints of a large amount of material to cover so the student can take the next course in the sequence, but in the case of chemistry and biology, there are MCAT and GRE exams that also have an expectation of a certain amount of “content” mastered by the students’ third year. Nonetheless, the reality is that the content-driven lecture is an essential element of at least some college courses. You may be able to get away from them in some subjects in the humanities and social sciences where every person has at least some valid expertise or ability to form an opinion, but it won’t work with a  lot of the material we cover in the natural sciences, since so much of it is alien to one’s everyday experience and few students could have a meaningful debate about the merits of some reaction in organic chemistry.

This is not to say that I don’t integrate “active learning” techniques in my lecture whenever I can. They can range from simple things like passing a specimen of a rock or fossil around and make sure they are all see or feel what I’m describing; or getting them to all stand up in their seats, and then having the men and women sit down in 2:1 ratios as if they were atoms paired up into crystals and settling out of a magma chamber.  I frequently pose questions to the class and wait patiently til someone comes up with the answer, giving them a few hints along the way if necessary. I’ve got amusing cartoons that make the point interspersed here and there through my slides; I try to make sly references to cultural phenomena or things the students can relate to, or poke fun at familiar movie plot devices that are geologically impossible. I try to pose realistic scenarios (especially on exam questions, which are all essay style) so that they can show they understand how their knowledge applies to the real world, and not just how well they can memorize and regurgitate a list of facts.

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Multitasking – the act of doing more than one thing at the same time – is largely an illusion. You can’t do it, at least not well. The research over the last couple of decades has shown in numerous ways how difficult and wasteful attempting to multitask is. Now a new study purports to show a possible benefit to multitasking. I will get to that study later – first, let’s review how bad multitasking is.

Researchers believe that there is a processing bottleneck in the brain. Essentially, we don’t have multi-core processors with multi-threading. In neurological terms, there are various functional components to consider. One is executive function, which is the “supervisor” function in the frontal lobes. Executive function includes the process of focusing attention, allocating resources, coordinating information, and scheduling cognitive tasks. Everything that the brain does is a finite resource, including executive function.

Attention itself is also limited. Our attention can be spread out so that we are taking in a lot of information at once, although very superficially. In this mode we may be scanning our environment for something interesting, or something in particular, but missing a lot of detail. Or we may focus our attention down on one thing, taking in greater detail but at the expense of ignoring everything else. This spreading out or narrowing down of our attention applies no only to sensory input but also ideas.

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One of the most familiar memes we hear from the climate-change deniers is the phrase, “Global warming ended in 1998 and it’s been cooling since then.” You find something along these lines on most of the AGW denier books and websites, and it is repeated endlessly as if somehow repetition makes it more true. This is just like creationists who continually repeat the phony argument that “evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics”, even though this is patently false. As has been pointed out many times, the Second Law only applies to closed systems. The earth is not a closed system since it receives energy from the sun. Yet in every creationist book and website and debate for many decades now you’ll hear them repeat it over and over again, since it sounds impressive to their scientifically unsophisticated audience and apparently they cannot understand why it’s wrong, or they don’t care as long as it suits their political agenda.

One of the most famous examples of the “cooling since 1998″ meme occurred when conservative pundit George Will wrote in a Feb. 15, 2009 Washington Post column, “Dark Green Doomsayers,” that “According to the World Meteorological Organization,there has been no record of global warming for more than a decade.” The same column also printed false claims about the retreat of the glaciers, and about scientists predicting global cooling back in the 1970s (all discussed and debunked in Jim Powell’s new book The Inquisition of Climate Science, pp. 75-79). Will was taken to task by climate scientists all around the world for his mistakes and misrepresentations, but he never retracted them. The Washington Post ombudsman tried to justify running Will’s column and rationalize their lax fact-checking procedure, writing that “opinion columnists are free to choose whatever facts bolster their arguments. But they are not free to distort them.” Eventually, the uproar was so great at Will’s egregious distortions that the Post printed two separate columns rebutting him. Apparently learning nothing from the experience, Will dug an even deeper hole by again claiming in an April 2, 2009, column that there hasn’t been a warmer year since 1998.

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Recently my friend and colleague in science and skepticism Neil deGrasse Tyson, issued a public statement via BigThink.com in which he stated that he dislikes labels because they carry with them all the baggage that the person thinks they already know about that particular label, and thus he prefers no label at all when it comes to the god question and simply calls himself an agnostic.

The Believing Brain
by Michael Shermer

In this book, I present my theory on how beliefs are born, formed, nourished, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. Sam Harris calls The Believing Brain “a wonderfully lucid, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the boundary between justified and unjustified belief.” Leonard Mlodinow calls it “a tour de force integrating neuroscience and the social sciences.”

• Order the autographed hardcover
• Order the unabridged audio CD
• Order the Kindle edition
• Order the iBook edition
• Listen to the Prologue for free

I have already written about this many times over the decades, and my 1999 book How We Believe outlines in detail why I too hate labels. In fact, in my later book, The Mind of the Market, I explained why I also do not like the label “libertarian” because people automatically think this means believing something that I very likely do not believe (e.g., that humans are by nature purely selfish, that we have no moral obligation to help others in need, that greed is the only motive that counts in business, and that Ayn Rand was actually the Messiah), and instead I prefer to go issue by issue. Nevertheless, the label “libertarian” and “atheist” stick, and as I explained in my latest book, The Believing Brain, I’ve largely given up the anti-label struggle and just call myself by these labels. In effect, what I once thought of as intellectual laziness on the part of my interlocuters who did not seem to want to bother to actually read my clarifications and what, exactly, I do believe about this or that issue, I now see as the normal process of cognitive shortcutting. Time is short and information is vast. Most of the time our brains just pigeonhole information into categories we already know in order to move on to the next problem to solve, such as why not one Mexican restaurant band I have ever asked seems to know one of the greatest Spanish pieces ever produced: Malagueña. It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a tortilla. (continue reading…)

According to a BBC article by reporter Tom Housden, scientists have discovered the ruins of an ancient city off the coast of India in the Gulf of Cambay. Artifacts from the city have been carbon dated to about 9,500 years ago. According to the article:

The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history.

To put the significance of such a find in perspective, the oldest human cities are about 7,000 years old, and the oldest Indian city is Harrappa, about 4,600 years old. If the Cambay ruins are genuine, then that would predate the oldest known human city by more than two thousand years and the oldest Indian city by 5,000 years. The implications of this, if true, would indeed be huge. The BBC article offers this quote:

“There’s a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilization with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch,” he said.

It doesn’t take long, however, for the entire story to begin to unravel, once a critical eye it turned toward the claims. I always like to consider the plausibility of such claims. In this case, finding a city older than any previously known city is not entirely implausible. It’s possible that a culture in one location developed a city which did not survive and was forgotten to history. The oldest example of anything is always only as old as the oldest example discovered, and so scientists are frequently pushing back the date of the “oldest” something as new discoveries are made.

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