My name's Joe. I'm a chemical engineering graduate student and a skeptic. If I told you about chemical engineering you'd probably want to strangle yourself with your keyboard wire, so let's talk about skepticism!
Contact email: cheglabratjoe (at) gmail.com
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June 24, 2008
Entry 08: Evolution Violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Drat! Science has been hoisted by its own petard! If only those biologists had ever taken a thermo class, we could have saved the last 150 years' worth of time we wasted on evolution. How could no one have thought of this problem in all that time?
Well, now that someone has been kind enough to bring up this issue, let's talk about it. You'll be happy to know that we're in my wheelhouse with this statement. I've taken three courses called "Thermodynamics," a fourth that should have also been explicitly called 'Thermodynamics,' and probably over a dozen others that discussed thermodynamic concepts in painstaking detail. I am chemical engineer, hear me roar! Thermo-woo pushers, beware!
Thermo 101
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a tough cookie; my professors didn't spend all that time lecturing about it for their health. The first law is the conservation of energy and the third law defines absolute zero; neither of these is too tricky either conceptually or practically. You can't just create or destroy energy willy-nilly, and things can only get so cold before you bottom out on the temperature scale.
The second law can't be summed up as easily as its buddies. It can be expressed or explained in a variety of ways, ranging from the abstract (dQ = TdS) to the humorous (the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd laws say "you can't win, you must lose, and you can't leave the table"). Most hard science classes stick with the abstract, either dQ = TdS or S = k*ln(omega), probably because trying to wrap your mind around abstract concepts like entropy (S) can make your brain ache. For instance, you can use the second law to show that the rate of change in entropy with respect to volume at constant temperature equals the rate of change in pressure with respect to temperature at constant volume. Chew on that for awhile. Actually, don't ... it's inherently non-intuitive and abstract.
So what does the second law say, at least colloquially? It says that entropy must increase in an isolated system. And what is entropy? In a word, it's randomness. Thus, the randomness in an isolated system must increase any time something happens. To steal the stereotypical example from high school chemistry teachers around the world, think about an egg breaking. If you drop an egg, it will break and splatter yolk all over the floor. But, you never see a busted egg's entropy increase by spontaneously reassembling into a whole egg. This isn't the entire story, of course, but it's enough to get by on for this week's statement.
You Down Wit Entropy? (Yeah You Know Me!)
Holy crap, does that mean the people spouting this week's statement are right? Much of evolution decreases randomness by increasing complexity. The large animals walking around today are much less random than the simple unicellular organisms that dominated early life, according to the theory of evolution. But, the second law says that entropy must increase with time. Is this an intractable problem? How do we sort this out?
Let's ask MC Hawking, physicist Stephen Hawking's gangsta rapping alter-ego:
Creationists always try to use the second law
To disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
Only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system; it's powered by the sun,
So f--- the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
"Entropy", A Brief History of Rhyme: MC Hawking's Greatest Hits
Bingo. Entropy must rise in an isolated system, meaning a system that doesn't exchange heat or mass with its surroundings. The earth and the rest of the universe exchange tons of mass and heat, so the earth's entropy doesn't have to increase with time. So long as the universe's entropy is always going up, the second law isn't violated.
Let's try applying this logic to something besides evolution. By this argument, we could never make ice cubes. Freezing is a serious loss in entropy; the water molecules go from freely and randomly floating around in the ice cube tray to being rigidly locked in a big ice crystal. The trick is that the heat leaving the ice cube tray goes elsewhere (mostly behind the fridge) and increases that place's entropy. The second law states that the entropy gained by the heated air behind the refrigerator will be greater than the entropy lost by the water molecules frozen into the ice cube. Thus, the entropy in the fairly isolated system of fridge-plus-surrounding-air has increased, and so the thermo gods are satisfied. (They're free to go back to fighting Maxwell's demon.)
Nice Try, Evolution Deniers
This statement amounts to either: a little bit of knowledge being dangerous (since the bit about isolated systems is a fine point), or another example of true believers starting with their conclusion (evolution didn't happen) and hunting for anomalies. Decide for yourself which of those possibilities is more likely; I divulged my opinion on the matter in bold above. Unfortunately for any evolution deniers trying to use this argument, the anomaly isn't even there this time.
Posted at 11:37 pm by cheglabratjoe
June 18, 2008
Entry 07: Vaccines Contain a Dangerous Mercury Compound
This statement is the bread and butter of the anti-vaccination movement. It is often followed by the claim that this compound (and/or vaccines in general) causes autism in children, but that's another story for another time. This statement is maybe 1/3 true, because some vaccines do indeed include a preservative that contains mercury. Now, before you sprint home yelling "OMG!!1!" to make your tinfoil hat and join Jenny McCarthy and the conspiracy theorists, let's take a look at the other ~2/3's of the statement.
Mercury Doesn't Just Come as Quicksilver (or, Chemistry Matters!)
The compound in question is thimerosal (or thiomersal), an organomercury compound with antiseptic properties. Its usage stemmed from its ability to preserve vaccines without reducing their effectiveness; people were dying from infections of bacteria growing in vaccines towards other diseases. The addition of thimerosal to these vaccines fixed this significant problem, allowing vaccines to provide the desired immunity to a particular disease without killing the recipient with another one. So, what's the problem? Many people think this is a problem because thimeorsal breaks down to ethylmercury in your body, and this sounds very scary.
Sadly, I'm not being facetious here. The crux of the issue truly seems to be that ethylmercury sounds very much like methylmercury or dimethylmercury, two dangerous compounds. Methylmercury is bad because it is readily absorbed by your body, accumulates wherever it can in there, and may cause significant health problems. Dimethylmercury is orders of magnitudes worse. Do you remember the professor at Dartmouth (Karen Wetterhahn) who died after getting a few drops of liquid on her latex-gloved hand? Well, those drops were dimethylmercury. Heck, a little knowledge can make this all seem even worse: methyl means one carbon atom, ethyl means two carbons, and since the prefix di means two, dimethyl must also have two carbons ... "oh my god, we're poisoning the children!"
Simmer down there, slugger. Let's check out how important chemistry class minutia can be to toxicity. Everybody loves ethyl alcohol (ethanol), because it's the molecule that gets you drunk. Methyl alcohol (methanol), on the other hand, is a poison. There's a probably-apocryphal story that always goes around undergrad chemistry labs about a scientist in Russia who ended every workday by swigging a beaker of ethanol. One day, the guy accidentally chugged methanol instead of ethanol and died. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the story, but if someone did drink more than 100 mL (about half a cup) of methanol they probably would die. Lower levels of methanol exposure can lead to blindness, which is why you shouldn't drink moonshine. Dimethyl alcohol wouldn't be a stable compound, but the closest compound to it I could think of, dimethyl ether, is used as an aerosol propellant and to cryogenically freeze warts off people. While methyl- and ethyl- and dimethyl- all sound very alike, they're actually no more chemically similar to one another than barhopping, going blind, and removing warts are similar activities.
Enough chemistry babble, you might be saying. What about ethylmercury itself? Most importantly, it does not bioaccumulate. The thimerosal in vaccines all just gets normally flushed from your body (pun intended) as ethylmercury without any to-do. That having been said, it does not seem that exhaustive toxicology studies on ethylmercury itself have ever been performed. This of course is not ideal; it would certainly be better to have that information. However, one could easily argue that the years of safe vaccinations of billions of people coupled with the fact that we know ethylmercury just gets excreted makes these tests unnecessary. After all, it does seem a bit extraneous to spend millions upon millions of dollars to inject thousands upon thousands of people with ethylmercury, perform detailed chemical analysis on their excrement for weeks, and track their health for years when we already have eighty-plus years of valid-though-not-exhaustive evidence that it's safe.
Better Safe than Sorry (or, The FDA Isn't Trying to Kill You)
Did you not buy that last paragraph? Are you steaming mad that we're not absolutely positive that ethylmercury is safe? Before you write your congressperson or join an anti-vaccination group, realize that the US government also decided that it was better to be safe than sorry with this compound. By 2001, all routine childhood vaccines save inactivated influenza have contained NO thimerosal. In addition, no new vaccines approved by the FDA since 1999 have contained thimerosal, and many of the older vaccines that were effectively grandfathered in to this de facto policy have either switched to a different preservative or changed the delivery method to eliminate the need for any preservatives.
Whether you believe it or not, what we have here is an instance of the government having your best interests in mind. They were concerned that ethylmercury might somehow not be 100% safe, so they eliminated it from the childhood vaccination schedule and promoted its removal from vaccines in general. The amount of mercury people, especially children (more on that in a moment), are exposed to via vaccines has absolutely plummeted this millennium.
So, yes, some vaccines do "contain mercury;" there's your true third of the statement (and I'm being generous with my grading). However, any mercury present is sequestered within a safe and inert molecule (minus 1/3 for 'dangerous'). Furthermore, even this safe mercury compound has been all but completely removed from vaccines (minus 1/3 for exaggeration). That's a big 33% for the titular statement. Even with a huge chemical engineering core class final exam curve, this statement fails big time.
Alright, Alright, Let's Talk Autism
I was trying to avoid the autism connection here in an effort to keep this brief, but I'd be doing you a huge disservice if I didn't tie all this back to autism. The rate of autism diagnosis has been rising for years, and most people who make this week's claim go on to blame this rise on the mercury in vaccines. How about we play the scientific method game? What hypothesis would you make from the FDA's experiment of removing mercury from childhood vaccines? Nothing difficult or tricky here: you would expect the rate of increase in autism diagnoses to lessen (perhaps even plateau or reverse and start to decrease). If you remove the causative agent, the effect should go away.
Let's turn to PubMed and see if anyone's thought to check this out. I found a study that tracked the autism prevalence rates in children born in California between 1995 and 2007. (Conveniently, this data had previously been used by the anti-vaccination movement to argue that the alarming rise in autism prevalence must be due to thimerosal.) What did their analysis of this data find? No drop in autism prevalence in the years following 2001. I'll let them state their conclusions themselves: "The DDS data do not show any recent decrease in autism in California despite the exclusion of more than trace levels of thimerosal from nearly all childhood vaccines. The DDS data do not support the hypothesis that exposure to thimerosal during childhood is a primary cause of autism." The citation is Schechter R & Grether JK, Archives of General Psychiatry, 65(1), January 2008, pgs 19-24.
I'm sure the vaccines-cause-autism crowd, if they read my blog, would try to use my own advice against me and reply that this is only one study. And, yes, it certainly is. However, it is a very good study utilizing a huge amount of data that pretty much demolishes the proposed vaccines-autism hypothesis. There was no reason to think that the thimerosal in vaccines caused autism before this study, and now you have even less ground to stand on if you stick to this belief. It's a pretty tall order to explain how thimerosal causes autism when children in California still got autism at the same increasing rate after virtually all the thimerosal in childhood vaccines was removed.
Of course, that's not going to stop many people from thinking vaccines cause autism. That's the danger in believing in something rather than approaching it skeptically: you might look awful silly when you keep on believing even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.
It would be one thing if it stopped at people looking foolish, but it's much more serious and tragic than that. These people are putting their children's lives in danger because they believe in something that has absolutely no rational basis. If that doesn't bother you, then we're just going to have to agree to disagree because that bothers the hell out of me.
Please. Vaccinate your children. In my frank opinion, it would be despicable of you to let your child die of a preventable illness because you believe in pseudoscience.
Posted at 10:12 pm by cheglabratjoe
May 15, 2008
Entry 06: People Have Been Doing Acupuncture for Thousands of Years, Who Are You to Criticize It?
I mentioned acupuncture in the first post for a reason. Most people seem to take the efficacy of acupuncture as a given, so any time I dare mention otherwise I'm all but guaranteed to get a strong response. There are a variety of arguments that immediately get thrown in my face, and the one in the title sticks out the most in my mind. Just who the heck am I to criticize something people have been doing since the dawn of time? A skeptic, that's who.
This statement amounts to nothing more than a single logical fallacy: the argument from antiquity. (My apologies for harping on about logical fallacies, but it's not my fault that pseudoscience-pushers tend to resort to them.) This fallacy is a specific example of the more general argument from authority, but it gets tossed around enough that it has more than earned a specific name for itself. The statement grants acupuncture some kind of specialness or significance merely because it happens to be old. But, the fact that acupuncture has been used for thousands of years says absolutely nothing about its effectiveness. Period.
Well, closing the door on this topic that succinctly is no fun, so let's look at another system of medicine that has also been used for thousands of years: the four humours theory of disease. In case you're not familiar with it, this is the one that claims your health is controlled by a balance of the four humours (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm) and that any disease can be treated by removing a purported excess of one of them, say by bloodletting or inducing vomiting. This was the dominant theory of disease in the western world for at least two millennia (from Hippocrates to the mid 1800's), and possibly much longer depending on where the Greeks got the idea from. We scoff at it nowadays because it's been totally out of fashion in our society for about 150-200 years, but this was serious medicine in the very recent past. Unless I'm remembering my stories incorrectly, multiple signers of the Declaration of Independence subscribed to humouralism, and we all like to fancy them the most enlightened thinkers of their day.
What ancient pedigree does acupuncture have that humouralism doesn't? If you're going to try and claim that the former is still practiced while the latter is relegated to history's funny pages, I suggest you look into the unani system of medicine. Here's a link to a page from the Government of India's Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Sorry folks, the four humours are also still out there. The only difference between humouralism and acupuncture, at least in the scope of this particular argument from antiquity, is that acupuncture happens to have become a fad in the western world. Heck, maybe I should try and start the humoural medicine fad. I'd feel bad bleeding people, but maybe I could induce vomiting by showing them the bills they might incur by visiting quacks.
Giving acupuncture some kind of special importance merely because it's old is fallacious reasoning. If you do this, you're obliged to give the same weight to things like the four humours or even über-woo like reading animal entrails and sacrificing virgins. Extreme age in no way confers correctness to a belief. People in the ancient world could believe incorrect things just as easily as we can nowadays. Don't compound the problem by repeating their mistakes.
Posted at 12:02 am by cheglabratjoe
May 7, 2008
Entry 05: History Shows That Homosexuality Dooms Civilization to Failure
This one's an oldie but goodie for me. I remember hearing this from a family member as a kid, and I've seen and heard it plenty of times since then. It's all but guaranteed to come up when people try to argue that homosexuality is dangerous or wrong without resorting to overtly religious reasons.
So, we've got homosexuality bringing entire civilizations to their knees (no pun intended). That's a pretty bold statement, don't you think? Destroyers of great civilizations: pestilence, strife, famine, barbarians ... and people of the same gender having sexual relations with each other. Let's see if one of those doesn't fit with the others.
Shoddy Logic, Shoddy History
Here's a huge reason to be skeptical of this claim: it assumes causation from correlation. They see that A (the culture has homosexuals) and B (the culture failed) both happened, and they then leap to the conclusion that A caused B. That's a big no-no. By that logic, I could consider the observations that I (A) wore new socks today and (B) it was cloudy, and argue that wearing new socks caused it to be overcast. Heck, maybe a society that's in decline and doomed to fall in the near future somehow causes an increase in homosexuality. That's no more or less (in)valid a claim that the one in the title of this post. Or maybe A and B are both caused by Z. Or maybe there's no relationship between the two at all. The fact that two things both happened implies nothing about whether or not (or how) they caused each other.
Here's another way to look at this statement: pretty much every civilization that's ever existed has failed. The only ones that haven't are the ones still around today, right? So, once you try to use a civilization like Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome (the go-to civilizations for people making this statement) as an example of this supposed devastating effect homosexuality has on a culture, it's meaningless. Regardless of the presence or absence of homosexuality, every civilization from that time period has failed. Pointing at one society from that time period that was known to condone homosexuality and yelling "it was the gays" is silly. There's no reason to think that homosexuality indicated any ancient civilization's imminent collapse.
Pretty open-and-shut, I'd say. History doesn't show that homosexuality and the catastrophic failure of a society are correlated. And, even if they were, it would not imply that homosexuality causes the downfall of civilizations. If you are against homosexuality, why not be honest about the real reasons instead of hiding behind nonexistent history and faulty logic?
I'm Sorry, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome Failed?
Before we go, I'd like to examine the claim that Ancient Greece and Rome failed. I'll admit, I'm mainly doing this because I'm one of the dying breed who took Latin in High School and thus am a bit of a Roman history nerd. I would argue that Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome constitute two of the greatest civilizations ever, so just blowing them off as "failed" is just about as silly as blaming their downfall on homosexuality. I'll also throw some Wikipedia-based summaries on just how gay these societies were out there, for no other reason than to make homophobes uncomfortable. (Hey, I've lasted like 4.75 articles now without a childish affront to pseudoscience-pushers, so throw me this bone (again, no pun intended).)
Let's start by looking at homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome for a moment. (I can't imagine what my internet history is going to look like after researching this stuff.) Pederasty was widespread in ancient Greece, and relationships between adult men were also common. If Wikipedia is to be believed (decide on that as you will), homosexuality was actively encouraged in the military because it improved morale and camaraderie. In Ancient Rome, homosexuality was largely adopted by the aristocracy along with the rest of Greek culture. There are hordes of stories about the emperors' sexual escapades with both genders, and there's even art preserved on the walls of Pompeii depicting a man-man-woman threesome in a position that many modern heterosexual men would not consent to.
With all that homosexuality, these civilizations must have failed miserably. (If you think so, shame on you for skipping to the end of the post for the good parts!) Sure the Greeks eventually got conquered by the Romans, but not before laying the cultural and philosophical foundations for all of western civilization. To this day, we prize Greek ideas such as democracy and free inquiry as the most important aspects of our society. And Ancient Rome did little short of conquer the known world, spreading its adapted Greek culture across Europe, Africa, and Asia. And, when Rome did quote-unquote fail, it precipitated the freaking Dark Ages, the modern euphemism for a millennium-long stagnation of society and culture.
Yeah, those societies failed, all right. And it was all the gays' fault.
Posted at 11:42 pm by cheglabratjoe
May 1, 2008
Entry 03: No One Bothers to Research [Herbal Remedy] Because There's No Money in It
I'm starting your regularly-scheduled posts with this topic because it was my direct impetus for firing up this reincarnation of my blog. Don’t worry; it's also an interesting statement. Not only are both parts of the statement completely and utterly incorrect, but it also might indicate belief in a grand conspiracy theory. And those are just a lot of fun, what with the black helicopters and the agents in sunglasses at night. (Shoutout to Corey Hart ... the 80’s singer, that is, not the Milwaukee Brewers outfielder.)
I saw this comment recently online. The herb in question was St. John's Wort, and the general context of the statement was as follows: (a) western medicine, mainly Big Pharma, is only interested in making money; (b) drug companies only make money off patented, expensive drugs; (c) no one can patent St. John's Wort or other herbs since they're already out there in the open; and thus (d) the title of this post.
I could get into critiquing the person's overall argument, but let's stick with the titular sentence. We'll hit the "no one bothers to research St. John's Wort" part first, and then move onto the "there's no money in [herbal remedies]" bit. And, if there's time, we'll touch on the conspiratorial undertones of the statement as a whole.
Getting that Wort on St. John Looked Into
So, you think there's no research being done on St. John's Wort? Well, Pubmed would have to go ahead and disagree with you. Pubmed is a database of academic research articles related to biomedicine, encompassing fields from medicine to cell biology to nursing to biochemistry. So, if you're interested in finding articles related to anything biological, it's probably the first place to look for them. The best thing about Pubmed is that you don't need to access it from an institution that pays thousands upon thousands of dollars for the right to use it. You won't be able to read the articles for free, but often you'll get the abstracts (brief summaries) and if nothing else you'll at least get a list of article titles.
Let's check Pubmed for research on St. John's Wort. A Pubmed search of "st. john's wort" reveals ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED FORTY articles as of late March 2008; I note the date of that search because a few brand spanking new articles appear to be coming out every week. Notice also that this is hardly a comprehensive search, because Pubmed only searches so many research journals for so distant a time period. Sure seems like a bunch of people have and are bothering to research it!
St. John’s Wort(h)
Now, let’s discuss how "there's no money in St. John's Wort." Just who the heck is paying all these professors and grad students and research medical doctors to do all that work and write all those articles? Surely not drug companies, since there's no money in it. It must be the National Institute of Health (NIH) or National Science Foundation (NSF) or some other governmental agency footing the bill. Get on the horn to your congresspeople! This egregious waste of precious funds must be stopped! Even if those academics discover that St. John's Wort does something good, no one will bother manufacturing it because there's no money in it! Rabble! Rabble rabble! (For St. John's sake, please tell me you're noting the sarcasm here.)
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Precise numbers are hard to come by, since the herbal supplement industry seems completely haphazard and disorganized. (This isn’t terribly surprising, given the deregulation the supplement industry received via the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994.) Poking around online, I’ve seen estimates of herbal supplements sales of $13 billion per year, $5-10 billion per year back in the late 90s, and $20 billion per year for “natural” supplements (whatever that means ... I’m assuming herbs count).
These numbers seem reasonable to me, because the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (part of the NIH) conducted a survey in 2002 of over 31 thousand adults and found that 19% of respondents used some kind of herbal supplement during the twelve months preceding the survey. Going back to our herb of interest for a moment, 4390 of the 31044 people surveyed claimed to have taken St. John’s Wort in the previous year.
Extrapolate from these dollar figures and percentages as you see fit, but you’d be hard-pressed to claim there’s no money in herbal supplements. These numbers could be off by an order of magnitude and they’d still make for a huge and growing market for St. John’s Wort and indeed all herbal supplements. Just think about the pill aisle in every grocery store or the back wall of every drug store ... do you think there’s no money being made in all those little bottles?
It’s a Conspiracy!
What’s lying beneath the surface of this patently false statement? A grain of what I like to call the Evil Pharmaceutical Oligopoly conspiracy theory. A better and more popular title would be the Big Pharma conspiracy theory, but I like the word oligopoly and I’m pretty sure I came up with that phrase so I’m taking this opportunity to prop up my own little moniker for it. In ultra-abbreviated form, this conspiracy involves Big Pharma and ultimately the entire medical industry colluding to make money, all consequences and peoples’ health be damned.
Beyond the factual errors in the statement in question, it implies that medical research only ever occurs if it will result in a brand name pharmaceutical. Imagine the large-scale conspiring this would require. This hypothetical E.P.O. would have to completely control the NIH and probably the NSF. It would have to squelch any and all research that implied well-known compounds give health benefits: no more research into the vitamins and minerals! Also, what would happen if some guy at a university or small company found a bona fide health benefit in St. John’s Wort or Vitamin K? They would have to kill him or at least pay him off, right? They can’t very well have people running around saying something they don’t control can help people.
If you believe all that occurs on a daily basis, all the power to you (for now); I’m sure we’ll get to grand conspiracies as a general topic at some point. Just please recognize the incredible chain of ideas you need to adhere to if you truly believe that the medical industry conspires to keep people sick.
Make That “People DO Research Herbs, and There IS Money in Herbal Supplements”
Well now, that ended up being a pretty good one. It sounded reasonable at face value, but ended up being complete crap and even coyly appealed to a grand conspiracy theory. Always stop and think about what “facts” people use to justify their arguments, especially if these “facts” eventually require you to drink the Kool-Aid pouring out of a conspiracy theory.
Posted at 9:13 pm by cheglabratjoe
April 29, 2008
Entry 02a: Skeptical Sources (For Real This Time)
All right, all right ... I'll take off my skeptic hat for a minute and give you the places I trust for my skeptical news and views. I'm certainly not recommending you take everything these folks say as gospel, especially since they absolutely wouldn't want you to do so either. However, these people are great skeptics and have earned a considerable level of credibility for it. In addition, they have taught me virtually everything about what I'm hoping to do in this blog.
My first source has to be the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast. They were my introduction to the world of skepticism, and I couldn't have asked for a better way to get started. I can't say enough about the show, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in skepticism or science in general. The driving force behind the show is Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale and an expert debunker of woo (as he likes to call pseudoscience). He especially excels at exposing the logical fallacies that underlie many pseudoscientific claims. This seemed a bit nitpicky and unnecessary at first, but I quickly realized that a myriad of woo-based arguments all rely on the same basic set of logical miscues. So, if you hear me discussing a logical fallacy, I'm sure I owe my arguments either in part or wholly to Steve.
The next source is the Skeptoid podcast by Brian Dunning. Brian takes a topic or claim, presents it as its proponents would, and then analyzes it skeptically. Each episode is about ten minutes, so they're easily digestible and are a wonderful resource. He's also more open-minded than many skeptics, which is an admirable trait that I personally have trouble adhering to even after only a year in skepticism. Outside of a few glib comments, he gives the woo a few credulous minutes before dropping the cold hammer of reality on it. (You'll notice I didn't give poor Bigfoot that much consideration here; sorry, big fella.) I'd recommend Skeptoid to anyone even vaguely interested in science-y topics, because they're very accessible and won't eat up much of your time (unless you do like I did and plow through the entire back catalogue immediately upon discovering it).
These two podcasts have been and still are my go-to places for skepticism. Steve and Brian are tough to beat: they know their stuff, they don't take pseudoscientific crap from anyone, and, on top of that, their work (both writing and podcasting) is entertaining and funny.
Some other skeptical folks I've checked out in various capacities are Michael Shermer, the Skepticality podcast, Richard Dawkins, the TV show Bullshit!, PZ Myers, Carl Sagan, Phil Plait, and of course James "The Amazing" Randi. A few of these guys stray a bit from hardcore woo-debunking (most notably Dawkins, as you probably guessed), but you can rest assured that these people aren't going to be spouting pseudoscientific nonsense at you. I would especially recommend Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark. I unfortunately listened to a terribly-produced audiobook recording of it, but the book itself was so great I still managed to love listening to it.
So, there you go. If you're interested in skepticism, I'd check all of these folks out. If you'd like a suggestion on where to start, I would recommend tossing some Skeptoid episodes that sound interesting to you on your mp3 player. Give them a listen at the gym or during your commute, and see if you like what you hear.
I'll mention more sources as I discover (and borrow material from) them. I'm always on the lookout for more islands of skepticism in the sea of woo we're all treading water in.
Posted at 11:30 am by cheglabratjoe
April 24, 2008
Entry 02: Skeptical Sources
I hate to start off with a whimper instead of a bang, but I thought it would be good to outline where I'll be getting my information for future blog posts from. Maybe I can give you a quick rundown of 'safe' websites or sources where you can obtain 'real' information on a variety of hot pseudoscientific topics. Well, here's the list:
Nowhere.
Unfortunately, you're always going to have to be skeptical of your sources, even when said sources claim to themselves be skeptics. As was mentioned in the last post (in italics, no less), skepticism is more of a method than a position or belief. There's no concrete list of Things Skeptics Believe In anywhere, and there never can be. The best you can hope for is a scientific consensus: something that experts around the world agree is the best hypothesis yet put forth to explain the available data.
Sometimes finding this consensus is pretty cut-and-dry; for instance, if you're wondering if the earth is flat or spherical, it wouldn't be too difficult to find information supporting the correct side of that debate. Nevertheless, you can easily find websites out there touting the belief that the earth is flat. So, in this and any other instance, always be skeptical of any one source!
Now, in light of this advice, how do you avoid becoming the grumpy curmudgeon also mentioned italically in the previous post? Indeed, if you went from source to source pooh-poohing each bit of evidence presented to you, I'd call you a less kid-friendly synonym of the word curmudgeon. But here's the trick: when virtually every legitimate scientific source agrees that something is correct, go ahead and start letting yourself be convinced. You can trust reputable skeptics to know this consensus, but always be wary of running into someone's sacred cow (I'm pretty sure everybody's got at least one).
Now, a couple points before I wrap up. You might be saying to yourself, "Well hold on there, sport! The scientific community laughed at Einstein and Copernicus, and they wound up rewriting science!" If so, simmer down, I'm sure we'll be getting to that point in a future post. In the meantime, mull over my opinion that it might be a touch arrogant to fancy yourself the intellectual equal of some of the smartest people to ever walk the planet.
You also might be frustrated that I'm glossing over a very obvious catch-22 ... I'm telling you that you need to be skeptical to learn about skepticism. But again, the take home message is that skepticism is a *method* as opposed to a system or list of *beliefs*. A skeptic hears a controversial claim, thinks about it rationally and scientifically, and comes to a provisional conclusion based on the available evidence. A true believer takes the controversial claim as fact, and starts propping up inadequate positive evidence and rationalizing away conflicting evidence. Those are fundamentally disparate approaches.
Finally, I'll allow that I sound a little bit paranoid, since I'm basically telling you to trust no one. No worries ... I'm not going all kooky conspiracy theorist on you. Again, I'm just emphasizing that you ought to be skeptical of any single claim you hear. I don't care if the source is a raving lunatic on the street corner or a Nobel laureate (James Watson, in particular, though it is getting tougher and tougher to distinguish him from a lunatic on the street corner), keep a skeptical mind about the claim and appeal to the scientific consensus on the subject. Remember, any one person or group can believe in literally anything, and can believe it fervently. That in no way means you ought to believe it, too.
That includes me, mind you. Don't blindly accept everything I say, either. Hell, if you read one of my posts and you feel the need to go out and research the topic for yourself, don't think I'll be mad or anything. How could I be?
That's exactly what I want you to do.
Posted at 12:20 am by cheglabratjoe
April 14, 2008
Entry 04: Ben Stein Told Me Those Mean Scientists Won’t Let Intelligent Design Play with “Darwinism”
***NOTE: No need to be skeptical of my ability to count; this was going to be my 4th post, but I decided to bump it up because the movie in question opens today. Since I fancy myself a "science blogger" now, I'd be remiss not to write something about this and post a link or two to
If you haven't heard, Ben Stein is back in the public eye. "Ferris Bueller 2: Save Ferris"? Nope. "Win the Rest of Ben Stein's Money"? Sadly, no. What he is doing is starring in a film called "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," and it consists largely of the statement in the title of this post.
One side note before we really begin. The film also describes a link between the theory of evolution and the Holocaust. Essentially, they posit that "belief" (that's in quotes because you don't believe in scientific theories, as we discussed in Entry 02) in "Darwinism" (that's in quotes because it's ridiculous to try and cast a scientific theory as a belief system) leads you directly to eugenics and the Holocaust. I find this trivialization of genocide for political, social, and religious purposes utterly offensive and repugnant, and will not be responding to it at the moment. Perhaps at a later time.
Back to those jerk scientists who are holding down Intelligent Design. You could say they're "conspiring" to keep ID out of the academic literature. And, hey, the movie apparently calls these conspirators "Big Science." Hmmm. After Entry 03, are alarms going off in your head? Haven't we heard this before from the Big Pharma (sorry, Evil Pharmaceutical Oligopoly) conspiracy theorists? And, for that matter, the UFOlogists? And the cranks who think lizards living in the center of the earth run all the world's governments?
I'm not going to hammer the conspiracy theory aspect of this film because we just talked about conspiracy theories. Besides, with Intelligent Design, there's plenty of room for all sorts of skepticism. The complaint that science isn't letting ID proponents into their sandbox to play is, on the surface, valid. You'd have a hard time getting an ID paper into a scientific journal; I'm not going to hide that because there's no reason to. But wait, does that mean scientists are biased against new ideas? Are they protecting their "Darwinistic" dogma? Is "Big Science" really out there keeping Ben Stein from proving the validity of ID? Put simply: no.
Thinking Intelligently About Intelligent Design
Let's look at what Intelligent Design ultimately is. I'll be glossing over their claims and ideas, of course, but you can easily find more information if you'd like. I'm sure Michael Behe would cry reading this overview, but I'd take more pity on him if he'd called on me so I could ask him a question when I wasted my time attending a lecture of his a few years ago. (Kidding, kidding ... he was very busy getting patted on the back by the ultra-religious people filling the auditorium.)
Their argument is that life is too complex to have evolved by natural selection, and thus must have been designed by an intelligent entity. The specific rationales and biological evidence they throw out there to support their argument are manifold, as you might expect. I'm sure we'll be coming back to a number of their juicier statements in later posts, but for now let's consider just that statement itself: "Life is too complex to have evolved by natural selection, so it must have been intelligently designed."
This statement amounts to a pack of logical fallacies. The first and foremost of ID's fallacies is the argument from personal incredulity: "I can't imagine how something as complex as modern life could have evolved via natural selection, so it must have involved the supernatural." Well hey, plenty of people don't think life is too complex to have evolved via natural means, most notably the overwhelming majority people who study and work in biology. So just saying that you think life's too complex to be natural doesn't make your ideas a scientific theory.
The next aspect is the argument from ignorance: "The ability to precisely and comprehensively explain the evolutionary history of all life on earth is beyond modern biology, so the theory of evolution is inadequate and gods or aliens must be involved." Just because modern biology can't fully explain everything does not make it wrong and necessitate a supernatural conclusion. Modern physics cannot fully explain black holes; that doesn't mean we need to throw up our hands and say "god makes black holes work!" There's a reason scientists do research: humans don't know everything! (Hell, we hardly know anything in the big scheme of things.) However, this doesn't mean that everything scientists haven't sorted out yet is controlled by supernatural forces.
And finally, there is huge false dichotomy in there: "If the theory of evolution is wrong, intelligent design must be right." Uh, what about other possibilities? Absence of evidence for one thing in absolutely no way implies anything positive about another. The fact that it didn't snow the day I began writing this post does not imply that it was sunny; if you must know, it was cloudy and it thunder-showered. Even if evolution was proven completely wrong, that proof would give zero credence to ID.
Am I getting off on a huge tangent here? Not at all. My point in all that was to briefly demonstrate that, as a theory, Intelligent Design is terrible. I didn't even touch on the facts that it is wholly non-falsifiable and explicitly invokes the supernatural, either of which itself would utterly rule ID out as a scientific theory. At best, Intelligent Design is a pack of misconceptions and logical miscues. At worst, it's a wolf in sheep's clothing (that is, creationism in science's labcoat).
All People Are Created Equal, but Not All Scientific Theories Are Created Equal
Even granted all that fallacy mumbo-jumbo, so what? Maybe ID is a crappy theory, maybe there are some holes in it, but why not give it a shot in the laboratory or classroom? There's no reason to discriminate against ideas, everyone should be given their chance to play with their theories in the sandbox of science. Right?
Wrong! Science is NOT a democracy. It's a meritocracy: theories have to earn their acceptance through trials by fire. You hear about peer-reviewed journals all the time, so let's briefly describe how that works. The peer-review process for publication consists of an editor sending your new paper to experts in that field (your research competitors, that is) to tear it apart top-to-bottom looking for any chinks in the armor of your experiments, results, discussions, and conclusions. Assuming the paper passes that process, it gets published; step one of the peer review process is then complete. Note that your ideas are in no way fully accepted by the community yet. Steps two through N continue far into the future, as various scientists across the world and for many years read your paper, think about your claims and discussions, repeat your experiments, and build upon your work. Only after years of verification and further work are your ideas (provided they are correct, of course) finally largely accepted.
I'm not parroting some ivory tower ideal to you or anything, this is really how science works. Most graduate-level elective courses I've taken spent tons of time doing literature critiques; we'd all read a paper in a respected journal by a respected professor, and pick through it page-by-page looking for weaknesses and things we disagreed with. It was never a chore to fill 50 minutes doing this, I'll tell you. Because of this, only when I see the same good science done over and over in a variety of papers by a variety of authors do I start accepting the results as genuine.
Sometimes, it's even more direct than that. A significant portion of my research is "model discrimination." I take data, fit a variety of mathematical models to that data, and run analyses to determine which model is best able to predict that data. I'm not exaggerating in the least here, my analyses literally spit out things like "Model A is 20% more likely to be correct than Model B based on the available data." That's science, folks. If my work offends the proponents of Model B, that's just too bad. If I demonstrate that some Model C is orders of magnitude less likely than other mathematical models, then I am under no obligations to continue using it to appease the Model C'ers. I don't have to cater to their beliefs, because their pet theory is demonstrably junk. Produce the goods, or don't waste your time writing articles or applying for grants or writing books. You're not going to get in for the sake of diversity or kindness, because that's not science!
Scientists Aren't Being Mean, They're Just Doing Science
Regardless of any number of sob stories, Intelligent Design is not science and does not belong in the classroom or the laboratory. As I mentioned briefly, ID is not falsifiable. You can't prove a negative, so you can never prove that some intelligent designer didn't somehow design life. You can always say things like "the designer wanted to make it look like everything evolved" or "the designer let that evolve, but designed all this other stuff." Non-falsifiable theories aren't science, by the very definition of science. End of story.
However, even if you loosened the definition of science enough to let ID sneak in the back door, it's not going to hold up. As we discussed, it amounts to a variety of logical fallacies. Modern evolutionary biology is a dynamic and robust field that has given the world countless advances in both applied and pure science. Intelligent Design, on the other hand ... well, let's sum it up as "not so much." If only it got the "not so much" credit it deserves.
Expelled From Expelled
We're going too long, but I've got a great story to tell concerning this new movie. There was a screening at the Mall of America that science blogger PZ Myers signed up to attend. He went through all the proper channels to attend the preview, and he told them he would bring some guests (which the movie people encouraged, to promote the movie). As he and his guests waited in line, security pulled PZ out of line and told him he had been asked to leave. It seems the makers of this film are very concerned about Intelligent Design proponents being shut out of the scientific world, but have no qualms about shutting scientists out of seeing their movie. That's to say nothing of the rudeness and inconvenience to PZ, of course. Or the small fact that he is in the movie, but wasn't allowed to see it!
I personally feel that this reveals quite a bit about the people behind this film, but that's not why I'm relaying the story. I'm telling this story because the people who kept PZ out of the theater didn't bother checking who he had brought as guests. That was quite the oversight on their part, because one of his guests was Richard Dawkins. Oops. Boot out the science blogger, but keep the world-renowned evolutionary biologist, staunch atheist, and best-selling author. Well done, boys!
If you'd like to track this movie, an organization called the National Center for Science Education is maintaining a website called Expelled Exposed dedicated to keeping tabs on what's going on with the film. At the moment, the website only contains the few reviews available for the film; it wasn't screened for critics, but I'll let you use that nugget of information to draw comparisons to Meet the Spartans as you see fit. However, the site should be greatly expanded within the next few hours, and ought to be a great resource for getting the scoop on what's really going on with this movie.
Posted at 11:44 pm by cheglabratjoe
April 9, 2008
Entry 01: Back in the Saddle Again
N-th time's a charm! I'm going to give reinventing this thing a shot again.
I recently discovered that I'm a 'skeptic.' I was putzing around on the internet sometime last summer, and ended up on the James Randi Educational Foundation website. If I remember correctly, I had been reading about Scientology, and surfed my way to other, ahem, interesting topics over time. I'd been on the JREF site before, but for whatever reason I stuck around this time and completely ate up everything I read.
I eventually saw a link to the podcast The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, and decided that it was time to start listening to podcasts. I had a 30+ minute walk to school at the time, and listening to music just wasn't doing it for me. I gave the then-current episodes a shot, and after only a couple dialed back to the first episode and began plowing through all ninety of the hour-long SGU podcasts then available. I was hooked on skepticism … if my iPod was on, it was blaring the SGU.
Now, you might be wondering what exactly I mean by 'skepticism.' I'd actually be interested to hear what your knee-jerk reaction to the term was (note that my reinvention does not involve ceasing the response-begging), because it was a rather ugly word to me before my fortuitous surfing. I envisioned a 'skeptic' as someone who refused to believe something regardless of how much evidence you showed them; they would always stay 'skeptical' of your claim that the earth goes around the sun or that freezing old water bottles won't give you cancer. Fortunately for me (since I'm calling myself a skeptic now), I was completely in the wrong on that one.
I'm not going to come up with a better description of skepticism than the following paragraph from skeptic.com (most like written or adopted from the writings of Michael Shermer):
Some people believe that skepticism is the rejection of new ideas, or worse, they confuse "skeptic" with "cynic" and think that skeptics are a bunch of grumpy curmudgeons unwilling to accept any claim that challenges the status quo. This is wrong. Skepticism is a provisional approach to claims. It is the application of reason to any and all ideas — no sacred cows allowed. In other words, skepticism is a method, not a position. Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true. When we say we are "skeptical," we mean that we must see compelling evidence before we believe.
I have a feeling most people would read that paragraph and agree with it (I really hope that I'm not being stupidly optimistic in saying that). I doubt most people run around believing every single thing they hear and refusing to apply reason to any decisions they make.
However, what do you do when you get forwarded a chain email making some claim about carcinogens or conspiracy theories or Bill Gates donating a penny per forward to help locate lost children with leukemia? Do you immediately forward it to your address book, or do you go to Snopes to see if it's a hoax or urban legend? Based on the hundreds of forwards preceding the text of these emails by the time they hit my inbox, I'd wager that many people fall on the non-skeptical side of that question.
Now, that's not too tough a criterion … if you spend enough time on the internet to make your way to my blog, I'd assume you have a pretty good sense of when an email is bogus. What about when you hear a Bigfoot story? Do you buy it, or do you say to yourself "boy, it seems odd that there's a population of six foot tall primates living in the Pacific Northwest that no one has ever really seen." That's still pretty farfetched, so let's dial it back a bit. How about ghosts? Or maybe psychics? Perhaps any sort of sixth sense or E.S.P., including but not limited to telepathy (reading minds), psychokinesis (moving things with the mind), clairvoyance (sensing things beyond the capabilities of your normal five senses), or precognition (predicting the future)?
If you're like many people, there was a point in that list of topics where you went from agreeing with my skepticism to being offended that I dare lump X in with all that other junk. And if not, I could go on … usually by the time you hit acupuncture, you've offended everyone by likening their opinions to those of a Bigfoot true believer.
Now you might have a number of questions for me, especially if I've offhandedly compared something you hold near and dear to believing in Bigfoot. And, of course, if you believe in Bigfoot, you're probably not reading this blog anymore. (Or you're scrolling past all this text to click the Comments link and post angry invectives … if so, great! Flame away!) Feel free to ask any and all of them, certainly. But, let me first lay out my plans for the blog to let you know the direction I'll be coming from.
The idea of writing up a comprehensive outline of a single topic of this sort is daunting, to say the very least. Entire books are written on minute aspects of topics like UFO crash landings, JFK assassination conspiracy theories, and, yes, Bigfoot. My goal is to take an extremely small statement made by proponents of these ideas, and present a rational discussion of it. This should allow me to really dissect and explore something, but in a reasonable amount of time so that posts will actually ever appear here.
In addition, this approach will emphasize what I think is a serious problem with these sorts of topics. If someone you're talking to starts trying to spread their beliefs, they're going to throw arguments and facts and opinions at you. (That's not a critique of their methods or anything, that's just how you argue.) You can judge their opinions as you see fit, but there's virtually no way to verify on-the-fly if their facts are true or if their arguments are valid. My hope with this blog is to demonstrate that, more often than not, true believers' facts are fake and their arguments are faulty. (Despite how inflammatory that sentence sounds, I'm not saying anything controversial there ... if their facts were really facts and their arguments were sound, they wouldn't have to resort to believing in these things because they would be real!) If nothing else, I hope you'll see that some extremely popular and/or superficially reasonable statements are a load of hooey.
This approach probably won't directly help with any individual discussion you might have (unless of course you hear a statement I happen to have covered), but it will show you the sorts of tactics used by true believers. Moreover, as I mentioned before, it will also result in many more posts than if I tried to sit down and compose an entry about "ghosts."
So, we'll see how this goes. I think this format will work for me. Not only should the posts come with some regularity because I'm not biting off way more than I can chew (unlike the last few times I've tried to start writing in this thing), but also it will let me rip on a ridiculous statement I happen to see in a news article or hear walking down the street. Right now, I just shake my head and get annoyed, maybe go off on it to my girlfriend or roommate or classmates if they happen to be there. Now, I can complain about it to the whole world.
And even if only one person out there ever reads this and that one person only learns a tiny little fact, well dammit that's one less bit of pseudoscience and illogic out there. And that's a good thing for everybody.
Posted at 11:39 pm by cheglabratjoe
May 20, 2006
Hey everyone. I've decided to expand my long-winded Spore away message into a blog article, mainly because I'm rapidly becoming obsessed with the game and I don't have anything else to do tonight. Besides, it's not often I get any responses to my away messages, much less superlative responses. So, if Mike tells me that the Spore away message was the longest he'd ever seen, dammit I'm going to do something about it. That's the kind of service you only get in this blog; sure you never get articles, but you get, uh, this. Yeah.
This game has really brought out my inner video game geek for the first time in a long time. I used to be really into video games; probably the only people reading this thing spent all their time in my parents' basement playing Perfect Dark and Smash Bros with me, so I won't bore you with details you probably know. (On that note: Sarah, Alex, and Pam, you'll be happy to know that the new Nintendo Wii controller will precisely respond to motion and rotation. So, if you play whatever Mario Kart comes out on the new system, you'll actually turn when you wildly twist the controller around in a panic as you fly towards the wall. :-P ) I've played a bit since, put some self-proclaimed 'awesome' Smash Bros and Goldeneye players in their place (heh, bitches) and ripped through some games (GTA III, Vice City, Black & White, Mario Sunshine, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate), but not a ton.
Let me tell you, though, I'm going to hit Spore hard if it's anything like the vibe the previews are giving me. This shit looks incredible. If you can stomach them, I'll point you towards two presentations the creator (Will Wright, the Sims guy) has given, the first at a 2005 game developers' thing and the second at E3 last week. These puppies are long and (obviously) nerdy, so be forewarned.
First: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore
Second: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1486693319327275556&q=spore
From a game-making prospective, the sweet thing about Spore is the procedural generation of graphics and game mechanics. As we'll see, this trickles down all the way to the game-playing prospective, as well. Basically, the game takes user-generated content (i.e. shit you made totally on your own) and integrates it into the game on the fly. With the ridiculous graphics nowadays, companies need armies of animators to make a game that stands up to the competition. Imagine making Shrek, except players demand the ability to control Shrek entirely and see all the beautifully-rendered results of their actions … like I said, armies of animators. Spore says, "to hell with that, we're going to let the player make whatever the hell they want, and use these gigahertz processors and gigabytes of memory to figure out how their stuff will play out as opposed to making pre-rendered stuff and using the computing power to make it look sexy on the screen."
But, we're getting way ahead of ourselves, especially if you blew off the videos and have no clue what Spore even is. You start the game as a unicellular organism, swimming around in the ocean being a microbe. You swim around, avoiding things that can eat you and eating things that you can eat. In essence, you're playing Pacman on roids. Once you eat enough, you'll be able to move onto the next generation of unicellular buggies. As far as I know, the details of the evolutionary mechanisms at this early point in the game are sketchy (just like in real life!), so we'll skip ahead drastically in the game to the point where you've evolved to a fish-like creature.
Warping ahead, you owned at the Pacman game, and you've evolved to being a little fishy-type guy via some pathway Wright hasn't been nice enough to demonstrate yet. At this point, you've got this little fish swimming around in the ocean, still eating edible things and avoiding things with larger teeth. As I mentioned, we skipped a lot of the game so far, so we'll take a step back. You've controlled this creature's entire evolution, so this creature is entirely yours in every way. I'm actually going about this discussion rather poorly; in the presentations, he skipped right to the creature editor later in the game. I'm going to go ahead and also do that, and we'll come back to the pathway to achieve this seemingly lofty point in the game later … whateva, I do what I want!
As in the presentations, we're going to cheat and start at the "creature phase" of the game. You begin with a lump of clay containing a short spine, and you just go to town on it building a critter. The options are literally infinite, I shit you not. You can, honest-to-god, make whatever creature you want. You're not limited by anything. Care Bears, dinosaurs, Big Bird, dodos, ThunderCats, smart dolphins, hobbits, some weird combination of the aforementioned things, something totally unique … the makeup of the creature is absolutely and utterly within your control. You want something with fifteen legs and a beak? With one leg and an oversized noggin? With a mouth on one end of the spine and eyes on the other? How about limbs with eyes? Mouths on extremities? Seriously, whatever the hell you want, you can build it.
Here's where the procedural stuff comes in. Spore takes a look at your monstrosity and figures out how it's going to work. It determines how this Darwinian nightmare will walk, how it will run, how it will attack prey, how it will show emotion, how it will sound, and even how it will freaking mate. If you gave it an opposable thumb or something to grasp with, the game will figure out how it will use tools. And, as we'll see later, if you give it a decent-sized brain cavity, Spore will determine how your critter is going to interact with other critters to create an intelligent society.
We're getting ahead of ourselves again. This creature editor was actually part of the evolutionary system in the game, albeit with infinite 'evolution points' for the sake of showing off the game. Traveling back to the swimming critter or even to little microbe swimming through the primordial soup, once you've eaten enough to warrant another generation, you go to the evolutionary system with some earned evolution points. Depending on how many you have, you can add various amounts and qualities of features. Maybe you want a spike on your microbe to stab that bastard that's been hurting you, or maybe you want bigger teeth on your swimmy guy to eat that pain in the ass guy that took a chunk out of your tail last time around. Or, maybe you want to just get another identical critter, and save up points for that big advance (say, a second cell).
Once you've decided to take the plunge and have emerged from the oceans (or not, as we'll see!), it's time to start the creature phase. I think I reversed my metaphors there … oh well. Same idea as before, except your creature is going to have to start dealing with the opposite sex to procreate. As Wally in Dilbert tragically discovered, advanced creatures can't exactly just will themselves into dividing to procreate. So, you gotta wander around, find some hunnies (or studs, depending on your gender), and belt out a mating call. If that works out for you, pink hearts shoot out of your hubby-to-be and a little saxophone riff blares from your speakers as you move in for some 'procedural mating.' After that, a little nest of eggs pop up, and, if you protect your eggs from hungry scavengers, you'll again hop into the evolutionary system.
You now take control of one of your new babies, obviously being very vulnerable and probably lacking whatever bitchin parts you just mutated onto your creature until it grows up. But, being social creatures, you can make friends with your brothers and sisters, forming a little pack to go explore the world and eat brand new types of creatures.
A few generations down the line, you might decide to start giving your critter a bigger brain. With increasing intelligence comes more intricate social interactions with other members of your species, and sooner or later your guy decides "let's build a hut and invent tools." At this point, the game undergoes a complete paradigm shift (again) into a tribe-based game. Rather than explicitly controlling a single creature, you're now playing a tribal game, controlling the actions and lives of a number of creatures. As always, the details are sketchy, but it seems that you trade control of the evolution of the creature at this point in the game in favor of 'evolving' your creature's culture and technologies. Also as always, you have total control over what goes down. You exchange your claymation creature editor for claymation building editors and technology editors, maintaining your complete control over the direction your creation takes.
We've hit another point where precise details simply aren't known, but we know your tribe game evolves to a city-based game and even to a civilization-type game. (We're up to five virtually independent games at this point, if you're keeping track.) You'll be interacting with other intelligent creatures, fighting inter-species battles and outright wars once you've got a full-blown civilization going. Your buildings, your vehicles, your weapons, everything has an editor giving you absolute control over what's going on with your creature. Again, they haven't released many details regarding this part of the game (I think it's safe to say that it won't be as intricate as SimCity or Civilization, for instance), but I remember hearing and reading about some trade and diplomacy aspects, so I have a feeling these segments of the game are going to be just as huge and wide-open as the creature segments. At the very least, there are pictures floating around of buildings and vehicles that are just as wacky and varied as the released creature images.
Once you've got a solid civilization going, you start achieving some killer technologies. The end goal of these technologies is the UFO. Now, if you've played the Civilization games, you know building a spaceship ends the game. At the risk of sounding like I work for the Maxis marketing department, you could argue that Spore only just begins once your UFO launches out of your city. We're again at a point where the details get fuzzy, but it looks like here you start modifying your UFO with the evolution system. Once your UFO is sufficiently souped up, you can fly right out of your planet's atmosphere and go to other planets in your solar system. Odds are these planets won't be terribly hospitable; but, if you'd like to check, you can abduct some of your less intelligent planetmates and drop them on the surface of the neighboring planets and see if they make it. :-P If that doesn't go too well for those hapless bastards, you can build huge domes and put colonies inside them, and those colonies can work to make those planets livable for your critter. Hell, they even showed that later in the game your UFO can get something like the Genesis Device in Star Trek, just zapping a planet and effectively making it into a Garden of Eden for your creature. (On a side note, I mentioned smart dolphins and never leaving the ocean before. They haven't showed it yet, but this is apparently 100% possible. They've even mentioned water-filled domes on the planet surface for intelligent marine societies, and corresponding underwater domes for us plodding land-dwellers.)
Pretty cool, huh? You've taken a unicellular organism, evolved it all the way to the point of intelligence, founded a society, evolved that society to the point of world domination, and now you've spread your influence throughout the solar system. Time to turn off the computer and get some sun? Hell freaking no. You keep trucking along, and eventually you develop the interstellar drive for your UFO. Now, it's time to explore your local solar neighborhood.
You can probably tell where this is going, but I'll spell it out for the slow kids in the back: expect to find aliens. They might still be mucking around in tide pools, they might be primitive tribes looking for a passing UFO to worship, they might be advanced terrestrial civilizations with the capacity to shoot at your UFO, or they might even be a remote outpost of their own interplanetary empire. You can try communicating with them (they've shown Close Encounters-esque attempts in the videos), or just straight-up abducting some of them, or outright destroying them if you're having a bad day. Any of these options can end quite badly for you, of course; they haven't shown what happens if your UFO goes down, but one time Will Wright attacked some alien city and quickly received a panicked message from his home planet that the civilization he'd just attacked was destroying his home planet. Whoops.
So now, you've sunk your teeth into different solar systems, interacting with creatures from entirely separate worlds through diplomacy or trade or full-scale interstellar warfare. You pick up some cool new stuff for the UFO like a Death Star planet-blower-upper ray that will quickly shut any non-spacefaring problematic species up, but nothing cooler than the intergalactic drive.
In the videos, they demonstrated the sweetness of the intergalactic UFO by starting next to a planet and just zooming out. And out. And out. And out. Wright put the number of accessible stars at 500,000; no typos there, that's half a million stars to explore. Given that each has no less than a handful of planets, the amount of worlds available to you is measured in millions.
And now, you do whatever the hell you want. Do you want to peaceably spread your creatures around the galaxy, do you want to rule a galactic empire with an iron fist (indiscriminately Death-Starring disobedient rebel planets, of course), do you want to mix and match creatures on wacky planets like the galactic TV executives in the 'Cancelled!' episode of South Park? Whatever you want, you've got the ultimate sandbox at your disposal.
We've got one more awesome aspect of the game to cover before we're through here. I haven't mentioned anything about where the other creatures populating your planet (and other planets) come from. Spore doesn't randomly generate creatures to fill up the game, it lets other players do it for them. When you make a creature, it gets uploaded into an online database of critters from players around the planet. When your creature sprouts legs and emerges from the ocean, the game goes to the database and randomly grabs a few handfuls of critters to populate your world. Some will be docile herbivores, some will have teeth the size or your creature's limbs, some will directly compete with your creature, some you may be able to happily coexist with. Once you start building huts and inventing tools, you're probably going to notice some different looking huts sprouting up around the planet. (They haven't mentioned whether the game is going to evolve the already-present creatures or grab new ones from the database.) You might well end up with someone's civilization of Howard the Ducks as your main rival for planetary dominance. Similarly, when you lay the smack down on those Howards and start exploring other planets, you'll find entire worlds of other players' creatures.
And, if that's not enough for you, they made references to some kind of tracking program where you can gather statistics on how your creature is being used in other players' games. Is your badass carnivore ripping players' creatures' limbs off multiple times per minute? Does your creature tend to go extinct without your constant help and guidance (not exactly 'fit,' let's say)? Did you build the archetypal herbivore, leading to your creature getting beamed in to eat grass and provide a good protein source in countless players' worlds? All this data is supposed to be traceable within the game.
This game sounds amazing to me. I don't think the game is supposed to come out until 2007, so many of the details haven't been released and probably aren't even known yet. For instance, they've said virtually nothing about the tribe, city, and civilization aspects of the game, focusing instead on the tide pool, creature, and UFO segments. I've heard that the three mystery phases of the game are supposed to be just as elaborate as the comparatively well-publicized phases. They've mentioned trade and other economic aspects of the tribe-city-civilization phases, and I've also heard about expanding your 'cultural influence' rather than outright conquest to expand your empire. Based on how completely unrestrained the Pacman/creature and UFO segments are, I'm sure the tribe/city/civ segments will be just as amenable to whatever style of play you're looking for. Want to militaristically conquer your planet, solar system, local star cluster, and even galaxy? Want to serenely expand your culture across the sky, slowly absorbing new species into your empire? I'm sure you'll be able to.
Well, that's Spore, at least so far. As you can easily see, it's amazingly ambitious and sounds almost too good to be true. I think the story is that this Will Wright guy created The Sims, by far the single most successful computer game ever, and so Maxis and EA are just letting him go nuts on this project, and that seems like a very, very good thing for us. If the middle parts of the game flesh out as well as the early parts already have, you have to start talking about Spore as one of the best games ever. Multiple unique and entirely user-defined experiences in one game, what more could you ask for?
Posted at 7:33 pm by cheglabratjoe
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