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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October 30, 2008
Entry 18: Theism vs. Deism
This was a segment of my thirteenth [insert scary sounds here] entry, but it didn’t really fit that well and the entry was already getting pretty long. I mainly wanted to include it to pre-empt a certain type of argument for believing in god (a type popular with some skeptics and scientists), but that didn’t really have a place in the article. Moreover, I certainly shouldn’t be doing anything to discourage responses to my articles, as my comment-getting rate is hurting enough as-is.
This topic is related to Entry 13 in that it stems from the discussion of the term atheist. The way I see it, an atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in a theistic god. And, because the concept of deism is distinct from that of theism, atheism therefore has no bearing on deism.
This sounds like mere semantics, especially because all these words are a whopping one or two letters different from one another. However, many of the arguments I was envisioning while starting this topic ultimately amount to arguments for deism. Those arguments are well and good as arguments for deism, but they are irrelevant to both theism and atheism. But, I’m getting way ahead of myself. Let’s take a step back and see exactly what deism is.
“De plane, de plane!” vs. “The plane, the plane!”
Both theism and deism are beliefs in a supernatural deity or deities. (From here on out, I will just use the singular or plural as it comes to me; feel free to change the “y” to “ies” or visa-versa in your head if this offends you.) Well heck … to an atheist, one god is as good as any other god, right? Not quite. Conceptions of deities can be wildly different at a very fundamental level, and I’m not just talking about the omni-potent/present/niscient Abrahamic god as opposed to the nowadays-laughably-human, pimp-on-a-mountaintop Zeus. The deistic conception of god is completely distinct from our everyday theistic ideas of gods.
Theism is the belief in supernatural deities that interact with the natural world. Probably every religion you’ve ever heard of is a theistic religion; I, for one, cannot think of a deistic religion and could not find one in my research (translation: ten minutes of googling). The scale and scope of the deity’s interaction with the world of course varies from religion to religion, and even from believer to believer within a given religion. The only criterion for theism is that god can interact with the observable world.
Deism is the belief in a supernatural deity that does not interact with the natural world. Though I could not find a religion that called itself deist, it does seem that a number of philosophers were into it during the age of enlightenment. Many prominent scientists and intellectuals were probably if not definitely deist, most notably Einstein and a good chunk of the U.S. founding fathers. (Are you surprised by or skeptical of that claim? Good! While you’re looking into it, I would suggest checking out the phrases “under god” and “in god we trust.” Focus on dates.)
You might be having trouble imagining a god that doesn’t interact with the universe (i.e. a deistic god). The deistic conception of god is often described as a watchmaker; a deist believes that god designed the universe, wound it up, and let it go. The way I see it, deism is ultimately more of a philosophical view than a religious view. If you believe that god cannot or will not interact with reality, then praying or following various dogmas (dogmae?) probably wouldn’t be things you’d bother to spend time doing.
Arguments for Deism
I won’t harp on specific arguments here, mainly because I’d be robbing myself of future entry topics. However, I’ll go over a few examples to illustrate my point: many popular arguments for the existence of god are arguments for deism rather than theism. This is a significant problem, and not only because the two concepts are distinct. It is much easier to argue for deism because, by definition, a deistic god is beyond the knowable universe and thus not really accessible to science (or even technically reason).
Some takes on the Goldilocks and/or Anthropic Principle are ultimately arguments for deism. People will argue that, if any of the physical constants of the universe (such as the speed of light or Planck’s constant) were even slightly different, then the universe would be completely incapable of supporting life as we know it. Thus, god must have specially set the constants just right so that life would be possible. While this may be an argument for a god, it is certainly not an argument for the god that the arguer worships. People also often say that god must have set off the Big Bang, or at least must have created that initial something from nothing. Why people go on to assume this Big Banger must be their particular theistic god definitely confuses me.
For the record, I have more substantial counters to these two arguments and will devote entries to them at some point. Suffice to say for now that these are arguments for deism, and in no way argue for a theistic god that interacts with the universe. The next time one of your religious friends suggests you ought to believe in his or her god based on deistic arguments like these, ask them why Odin couldn’t have been the one to set off the Big Bang or fine-tuned the mass of an electron.
So, You’re a Deist … And?
Well, there you have it. Theists believe in a god that interacts with the world, and deists believe in a god that does not interact with the world. Any religious person you’ve ever met is almost surely a theist, so don’t let them sway you to their religion with arguments for deism.
Finally, you might be wondering why someone would bother being a deist. I would tend to agree, because it seems that deism ultimately amounts to a sophistic set of arguments to pin the word god on the eminently unknowable. Though I’m worried I’m using the word incorrectly, note that I didn’t say sophisticated. I mean to say that someone calling themselves a deist probably (a) decided they want some kind of god in their worldview a priori, (b) likes to argue and be contrarian, and/or (c) might ultimately just be completely full of crap. I think sophistic is a perfectly cromulent word here.
My apologies to any deist readers I might have, because I’m being unnecessarily harsh. I don’t have any problems with deism, and there are plenty of compelling arguments for it (as I alluded to earlier). However, as my projection in the previous paragraph implied, I ultimately just don’t see the point. Of course, deism certainly wouldn’t be the first belief system that nonbelievers find peculiar. So let’s skeptically examine their scientific claims, but we’ll embiggen ourselves by not judging other peoples’ religious beliefs.
I think deism is more of a philosophical view than a religious view, which is probably the crux of the small problem I’m having here. I think we can all at least agree that it would seem frivolous to base a formal, organized religion on hard deism; a deist probably cannot even believe in a soul or the afterlife, at least not without some fancy apologetics and definition skirting. As such, don’t let someone arguing for the existence of their religion’s theistic god get away with deistic evidence. Don’t bring that weak sauce in here … this is a skeptic’s house! Bring the deistic arguments when you’re talking to a skeptical adeist.
Posted at 12:33 am by cheglabratjoe
October 20, 2008
Entry 17: Boys Are Better at Math than Girls
This entry is inspired by a recent article I read in Science: L Guiso, F Monte, P Sapienza, and L Zingales, Science, 320, 1164-5. I somehow scored a free membership to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) earlier this summer, and have been getting weekly copies of Science ever since. I’m not sure exactly how that went down, but I certainly jumped on the email when they asked for my contact info to accept my membership.
I’ve been trying to read at least the non-technical articles in my spare time, just to be versed in the sort of research that gets into premier academic journals these days. If you check the date that this article was released (May 30th), you’ll see I’m falling predictably far behind. This plan for doing things I feel I “ought to do” is going about as well as my plan for reading classic books. So far, I’ve managed to read Brave New World and listen to audiobooks of Heart of Darkness, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions. (That’s since moving to Wisconsin three years ago, mind you.) Bow before my literary prowess, knaves!
If this was one of those fancy blogs, I’d have some kind of special decal marking this article as Blogging On Peer-Reviewed Research or The Scientific Method In Action. Actually, come to think of it, I suppose I’m not going to be critiquing or commenting on the actual article. I’ll be using the article’s results to attack the above pseudoscientific statement, but I won’t be partaking in the post-publication peer-review process, per se. Hmmm. Perhaps this is why I don’t have one of those cool blogs.
Eyewitness Testimony: Girls Bad At Math, Have Cooties
I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard this week’s statement, having taken advanced math classes throughout my K-12 education and then majoring in engineering in college. The male/female ratio in these courses was almost always nowhere near 50-50; as two examples, I graduated college with around four women (depending on how you count people who graduated in 4-5 years), and there are only two women in my graduate school class. There must be some reason that I’ve been surrounded by dudes for all these years, right?
Well, I’m sure there is. I’m also sure that many engineers feel that they know what the reason is, and that it’s listed in bold a few inches above this sentence. Engineers tend to be a tactless bunch of people, so non-PC sentiments like girls suck at math don’t often encounter a mental filter before they spill out of engineers’ mouths. And, just in case you’re not buying my anecdotes (good for you!), I offer you the verifiable story of Teen Talk Barbie. One of her spoken phrases: “Math class is hard!” I rest my case.
Whatever the reason, the results in Guiso et al imply that American girls are indeed worse than American boys in math. US girls average score on a purportedly-cultural-bias-free math test was about 10.5 points (or 2%) lower than the US boys’ average score, and correspondingly fewer girls than boys hit the 95th and 99th percentiles. In fact, the article lists a whopping nine countries where boys outperformed girls in math: Turkey, Korea (South, I presume), Italy, the US, Portugal, France, Poland, Norway, and Sweden. Other countries were studied, but I didn’t pull the supplementary information to check for the entire list.
Ah crap. Did I just prove all those oafish engineers’ point for them? Across the globe, boys are kicking the crap out of girls on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s special bias-free math test. I guess that second X chromosome must inhibit their ability to solve for just one x on algebra tests, or something.
Freedom Isn’t Free (It Costs a Buck o’Five)
Indeed not, because what this study really shows is that equal opportunity and freedom for women costs men their false superiority in mathematics. The list of countries I provided above is in the order of decreasing gender gap in mathematics test scores; i.e., girls score miserably in Turkey and nearly match boys in Sweden. (There is a tenth country listed, Iceland, where girls actually outperform boys in math.) There’s a second bar chart underneath the test scores chart showing each country’s Gender Gap Index (GGI), the World Economic Forum’s yardstick for “economic and political opportunities, education, and well-being for women.” The graphs follow the same positive trend, and the authors provided the calculations demonstrating that the correlation is statistically significant.
Thus, in countries where women are treated equally, the gender gap in mathematics completely disappears. Girls aren’t bad at math, they just aren’t socially liberated enough in this country (and most others) to reach their full potential in mathematics.
Lest you think I’ve assumed causation from correlation, the authors covered that concern, as well. (It is a Science paper, after all.) Perhaps poverty independently decreases both women’s freedom and girls’ test scores, or perhaps there are hidden genetic factors that ultimately cause the test score differences. The authors checked these alternate explanations for the data, finding (1) no effects from the evolutionary history of populations and (2) that economic factors alone could not explain the decreasing test score gap.
The authors seem convinced that gender equality eliminates the mathematics gap between boys and girls. I, however, remain skeptical. These materialistic scientists didn’t account for the flowing human energy fields that envelop our Mother Earth, and more importantly they completely ignored the fact that the different countries spend varying amounts of time under each astrological sign. Everyone knows that Gemini is good luck for little girls, and Iceland is almost always under Gemini. COINCIDENCE?!!?!!11!
But Seriously …
The results of this paper are interesting for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it really demolishes this week’s statement. Women aren’t any better or worse at math than men, and anyone saying girls suck at math is misinformed at best and sexist at worst. There’s no doubt that something is keeping women out of the hard sciences in America, but it’s certainly not a lack of raw talent. Based on our less-than-stellar GGI score, which was considerably (and appallingly) lower than various Northern European countries’ scores, it might just be good old fashioned sexism keeping the ladies away from math classes.
The last interesting bit of this paper was the reading scores. Girls walloped the boys in reading across the globe, and the shellacking worsened as their freedom index scores increased. Here’s a real gender gap, folks: boys suck at reading. Maybe we ought to be concerned about that gender gap, since it seems to me it’s not merely a sociological phenomenon like the mathematics score disparity.
Note that the merely in that last sentence is not at all meant to trivialize the struggles of women in the hard sciences; just the opposite, in fact. It’s absurd that, in the year 2008, freaking sexism is what’s discouraging half the population from entering the field of endeavor most important for our future. It’s a shame, and I’m frankly embarrassed for my profession as a whole. I have some more thoughts on this, but they’re not exactly of a skeptical nature so I’ll hold off for now. Perhaps an Entry 17a is in order? We’ll see.
Posted at 10:34 pm by cheglabratjoe
October 6, 2008
Entry 16: Why I’m Doing This, Part 1: To Be an Example of a Skeptic
After 17 entries yet only 7 comments, you might be wondering why I haven't done my usual quit-blogging thing. (Isn't it cute how I use the second person, as if I have regular readers?) Well, I'll tell you why, hopefully in a series of Why I'm Doing This entries. This first one will be rather specific, as in why I'm writing this particular blog. I anticipate that later entries will discuss the overall benefits of skepticism, scientific literacy, critical thinking, and other goodies I'm trying to promote here.
'Leaders'? Where We're Going We Don't Need 'Leaders'
Note that I didn't use the phrase lead by example in the title of this entry. Right off the bat, I'm not so arrogant that I think people should consider me a "leader" in their life. Beyond that, skeptics can't really have authoritative leaders, kind of by definition. That's one of the catch-22s of the skeptical movement, and why it's pretty damn impressive that it ever progressed and organized itself enough to warrant the term "movement." Corralling self-proclaimed independent thinkers has been justifiably compared to herding cats.
The third, and most important, reason I didn't use the word "leader" is because I don't want to make you think the way I do. I don't want you to parrot my arguments against homeopathy or creationism; if something interests you, I want you to look into it for yourself and come to your own conclusions. This cannot be emphasized enough: skepticism is a method, not a result.
It's actually even deeper than that: I don't want you to be a skeptic if you don't want to be one. I of course feel you should be a skeptic (or at least have some skeptical tendencies) because I personally think that it's a good way to view the world. On the other hand, I'm sure you think your way of viewing the world is pretty damn good as well. But, if you indeed do want to incorporate some skepticism into your life, I want to act as an example for you.
You might wonder why I feel that this is necessary. As humans, we do a lot of things merely because everybody does it, often without giving our actions even a passing thought. This isn't a criticism, because I think a lot of it is subconscious: why even consider not doing something if it's natural for everyone to just do it? I think that simply witnessing someone going against the flow inspires people to think about things they'd previously just rolled with. I'm not talking about changing peoples' minds, per se, but instead rousing people out of society's entrenched patterns and encouraging them to do what they truly want to do.
How 'Bout Some Examples?
That last paragraph was getting a bit bullshitty, so let's ground this discussion with a few examples. These two instances show how my friends inspired me to think about something I'd just resigned myself to doing previously. Ultimately, I decided that I would do what I actually wanted to do, rather than just roll with what I'd assumed everybody does. The examples are of a religious/nonreligious nature, which is unfortunate because I think skepticism and religiosity/atheism/agnosticism/non-theism/etc-ism are separate issues. (See Entry 13, unless of course you're a triskaidekaphobe, in which case we'll talk later.) However, these are the clearest examples I can think of to demonstrate what I'm rambling about. Before we begin, let me emphasize that my friends did not change my mind, they merely acted as examples of people who had questioned the things I'd taken for granted.
I had always assumed that everyone got married in churches, unless, of course, you were (a) intoxicated, (b) within the city limits of Las Vegas, and (c) there was an Elvis impersonator nearby asking if you promised to love this woman tender, love her true. I don't remember the details of the conversation I had about this; in fact, it might not have even been a single conversation. (Memory is surprisingly fallible, which is the main reason why the plural of anecdote isn't data.) At some point I was talking with some people about marriage and made it clear that "I guess I'll get married in a church." I was even planning to go Episcopalian, because I knew I didn't want to go through the confirmation process to get married in a Catholic church.
When my friends expressed surprise at this (they knew I didn't go to church), I happily returned their surprise because I really thought everyone got married in a church. The fact that some of them weren't going to get married in a church opened my eyes to that possibility, and in due course I decided against it myself. They didn't change my mind, as such; they just showed me that I could act on what I actually thought and felt, rather than just slogging through what I'd resigned myself to without thinking about it.
I had also assumed that everyone got their children baptized. As far as I knew, everyone who wasn't Jewish or another non-Christian religion had been baptized as an infant. When I mentioned this to my girlfriend, she balked at the comment and asked why I would baptize my child if I didn't believe in the religion myself. I lamely replied something about how everybody got baptized, and she promptly listed off some people we knew who weren't baptized. I remember that my knee-jerk reaction was surprise, as if there needed to be some kind of explicit reason why you shouldn't baptize your children. It turns out that there wasn't a special reason my friends weren't baptized; their parents simply weren't religious people. Since I also am not religious, I took a step back and realized that I shouldn't baptize my children. If they decide to pursue religion later in life, I'm sure they could go through whatever rituals their faith dictates then.
"Everybody Does It"? Not Quite!
And there we have it: one reason why I'm writing this blog. Don't feel pressured to visit a chiropractor because all your coworkers see one, or check your horoscopes because they're printed in every newspaper out there, or doubt evolution because an alarming percentage of Americans do. You know someone who doesn't feel that way at all: me. The every in "everybody does it" isn't as accurate as you might think.
Also for the record, I meant it when I said I don't want you to be a skeptic if you don't want to be one. I don't print out pamphlets or proselytize on street corners; that's what the other guys do. I would certainly like you to think for yourself and come to your own conclusions, but I'm not going to preach skeptical inquiry and critical thinking at you. However, if certain popular notions start smelling a bit fishy to you, hopefully you'll remember that you know someone else who agrees that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark.
Posted at 7:29 pm by cheglabratjoe
September 23, 2008
Entry 15: The Gish Gallop
The Gish Gallop is an argument strategy named after Duane Gish, one of the foremost proponents of young earth creationism (YEC). Props for the name apparently should go to Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, and if not she surely deserves mad props for plenty of stuff anyways. The Gish Gallop is a specific example of “quantity over quality,” a concept that anyone who ever wrote a book report with a minimum page requirement can certainly appreciate. However, just like that last milked page of your Huck Finn report definitely wasn’t a good analysis of Mark Twain’s fine novel, the Gish Gallop isn’t a valid or honest way to argue a position.
The idea behind the Gish Gallop is to throw insurmountable piles of evidence and assertions at your debate opponent. That way, no matter what, after the debate you can claim that your opponent never addressed most of your claims. The ‘galloping’ aspect comes into play when your opponents try to pin you down to one specific topic. When they try that, you throw up a quick smokescreen and then gallop away to something else. Eventually you’ll either come to something that they aren’t versed in (which you can harp on to make them look terrible), or the debate will run out of time.
An example would be illustrative:
Moderator: Welcome to the evolution-creationism debate!
Biologist: Thanks for having me.
Gish Galloper: Evolution violates thermodynamics.
Bio: Actually, life forms aren’t closed systems, so their entropy can decrease.
GG: Tornados don’t make planes.
Bio: That’s a terrible analogy for evolution-
GG: If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?
Bio: Well-
GG: There aren’t any transitional fossils!
GG: No one has observed kinds evolving into other kinds!
Bio: Can we get back to the bit about entropy for a minute?
GG: No, because Darwin caused the Holocaust!
Bio: What?
GG: Evolution violates information theory!
GG: Mutations cannot lead to new genes!
GG: Evolution can’t explain the origin of life!
Bio: [Speechless.]
Moderator: That’s all the time we have. Thank you for coming.
I’m having some fun here, of course, but hopefully you get the point. If the galloper is a smooth talker with enough background knowledge to obfuscate briefly on his myriad points, he can flit from vacuous point to vacuous point and never let himself get grilled on any one of them.
This can also happen with evidence. Tons of shoddy evidence doesn’t add up to a little good evidence, it adds up to a pile of shoddy evidence. (Which, of course, is still shoddy evidence.) Let’s pick on UFOlogists with my next example:
UFOlogist: Dude, Roswell.
Skeptic: We’ve been over this a million times.
UFO: Fine, fine. What about Tunguska?
Skep: Sure, we’re not certain of exactly what happened there, but I see no reason to invoke aliens to explain it.
UFO: What about the pyramids?
Skep: What about them?
UFO: Stonehenge, then. No way ancient man built that without help from aliens.
Skep: Actually, I heard about a retired engineer who got tired of people saying things like that and started building his own Stonehenge singlehandedly with simple machines.
UFO: Come on, man! There are dozens of sightings and abductions happening every week!
Skep: Where is the evidence-
UFO: Cattle mutilations! Crop circles!
Skep: Ugh.
UFO: I used to be a skeptic, too! But I saw the light!
Again, I’m being facetious, but the point remains: lots of bad evidence is still just bad evidence. It’s not as if bad evidence registers a 1 on the science-o-meter while good evidence earns a 10, so that ten pieces of bad evidence equals one piece of good evidence. Crummy evidence and arguments are just that: crummy. No amount of slick debating can change the underlying quality (or lack thereof) of the arguments.
What’s a Skeptic to Do?
This is a tough argument style to combat. But, hey, no one said skepticism was going to be easy. It’s always going to be much easier to just believe or disbelieve something, rather than evaluating hypotheses and evidence for yourself (or at least understanding a current scientific consensus). As such, a skeptic is always going to start with that disadvantage when talking to a diehard true believer.
One technique suggested by Steve Novella of the SGU is to ask the person you’re arguing with for their single best piece of evidence. It’s an anticlimactic way to argue, but it will pin them to their strongest line of evidence and will give you a single topic to research. Some googling should lead you to sources covering all sides of the topic, and you can come back to the person with your findings. Again, it’s not the most exciting or effective way to argue with someone, but it’s better than getting trampled by a herd of galloping true believers.
Posted at 12:48 am by cheglabratjoe
September 9, 2008
This was a surprisingly tough entry to write. I try not to actively dump on pseudoscientific notions too much, at least not before I’ve detailed why I think they’re bunk. If you go too overboard with the insults and sarcasm, you’ll come off as a jerk and scare off people sitting on the fence. Worst-case scenario, you can actually drive these people towards the woo-pushers, even if your evidence and reasoning are perfectly sound. This problem is compounded by the fact that many woo-pushers are extremely good at dealing with the public and selling themselves, while scientists and doctors are historically quite terrible at it.
While I’m aware of this problem, some ideas are so out there that it’s difficult to turn down the burners and write an even-keeled discussion of them. For me, homeopathy is one of those topics. As we’ll see, the ideas behind homeopathy go against some of the most fundamental aspects of chemistry and physics. And, as if that’s not enough, people pushing this pseudoscience have managed to frame homeopathic remedies as just another type of herbal or natural supplement. This is little short of a miracle of marketing, and I’m not one to toss around the word miracle lightly.
It’s taken a few rewrites, including the painful deletion of some pithy one-liners and choice ad hominem attacks, but I think I’ve whittled my initial ranting and raving down to an almost-balanced treatment of homeopathy. We’ll start with a bit about how I discovered homeopathy. After that, I’ll cover some background on the principles behind homeopathy, which should shed some light on why this drives the chemistry-loving part of me bonkers. Finally, I’ll go over a few calculations to determine the actual contents of any homeopathic remedy you might purchase.
Onto the Vicious Screed
We’re talking alternative medicine, so I’ll steal the opening line from Quackcast. I thought it was a common phrase, but Google disagrees with me. So, Mark Crislip, I hereby grant you the sincerest form of flattery. (My google-fu tells me that’s a common phrase, at least.) Quackcast is an informative podcast about alternative medicine, but, as its name implies, it doesn’t really take much of my above writing to heart. For instance, Mark opens each episode with something like the following line: “I’ll be discussing quacks, frauds, and charlatans … oops! I mean: Supplements, and Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or SCAMs.”
I find homeopathy personally interesting for two main reasons. The first reason is that I really had no idea what it was until rather recently. It’s popular in Europe and well-known among the skeptical community, but it doesn’t seem to be a household term in America. The SGU prompted me to look into homeopathy, because the rogues completely tore into it during an early episode without defining exactly what it was. I remember bristling at this, because I didn’t think homeopathy was pseudoscience. I suppose I hadn’t ever thought about what it was, but I knew the British royal family had a homeopath, and they couldn’t possibly be that wrong about their health, right?
Wrong. Which brings me to the second reason that I find homeopathy interesting: it is a surprisingly silly notion. Many of the so-called ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ treatments at the very least seem plausible when you glance at their underlying ideas and theories. Homeopathy quite simply does not. I’ll bet you think that, in saying all this, I’ve already dismissed my stated goal of playing nice with the homeopaths. However, I suspect that’s merely because you don’t know the theories behind homeopathy. Let’s go over them.
Impressive in Name (Or Latin) Only
The main principle of homeopathy is the law of similars, often stated as “similia similibus curentur” or “like cures like.” Now this sounds good (especially in Latin), but it’s just a pre-scientific notion of disease that a guy named Hahnemann invented out of whole cloth in the early 19th century. The law of similars is the idea that taking a substance that causes a reaction similar to your symptoms will treat the underlying disease.
This conception of medical treatment is more than enough for me to stop here and get on with the rest of the article. To quote Ron Popeil, “but wait, there’s more!” Hahnemann, to his credit, realized that it was a bad idea to, for instance, tell people with indigestion to drink a beaker of acid. Thus, he developed what I’ve heard called the law of infinitesimals. Homeopaths believe that decreasing the concentration of a substance dissolved in a solvent increases its potency. Thus, if you have that acid I mentioned above dissolved in some water, you can increase its tummy-settling power by diluting it into more water. (Provided, of course, you mix and shake your preparation bottles in the special way prescribed by Hahnemann.)
This alleged healing power increases even as you reach and surpass the level of dilution where it becomes unlikely that even a single atom of the original substance remains in your homeopathic remedy. This is because homeopaths believe that the water retains the curative essence or spirit of the original substance, and the power of this quintessence increases with dilution for unexplained reasons. To maximize the purported strength of these remedies, homeopaths dilute them to an extraordinary degree. Thus, if you buy a homeopathic remedy, you are purchasing either an extremely expensive bottle of water or an extremely expensive bottle of sugar pills soaked in water.
Don’t worry if the law of similars and the law of infinitesimals sound a little fishy to you. This is magical thinking that flies in the face of the most basic tenets of chemistry and physics. There is no medical or biological plausibility to the law of similars, nor is there any chemical or physical plausibility to the law of infinitesimals.
Some Quick Calculations
Note that I said quick calculations, not quack calculations. I’m behaving!
I’d like to go over just how dilute homeopathic solutions are, mainly to demonstrate that a bottle of a homeopathic product is almost certainly pure water. For the sake of this example, the basis of the remedy will be table salt (NaCl). If you’d like to have flashbacks to high school chemistry and check my calculations, the trick is c1v1=c2v2. Concentration times volume is just the total amount, which stays constant during dilution. Each “X” in a homeopathic remedy signifies a tenfold dilution.
Let’s say you’re planning on drinking a cup of a homeopathic salt remedy; what potency would you need to have just one molecule of salt in that cup? By my calculations, 24X should give you a couple salt molecules in that entire cup. What’s fun is that the most common dilution for most homeopathic remedies is 30X. That’s right, folks: six orders of magnitude past the point where you might have a single molecule in a cup of the remedy. Sticking with salt, you’d need to drink all the water that fits in a 14.5’x14.5’x14.5’ cube to get at one molecule at 30X dilution.
And that’s not the worst of it. The homeopathic flu remedy Oscillococcinum is usually sold at 400X dilution. Again using salt as an example, this dilution comes to far less than one salt molecule per the volume of the observable universe. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, you should find a salt molecule or two in a sphere roughly a googol light-years in diameter at this dilution. You’re probably more likely to quantum tunnel through a brick wall by running into it than you are to find even a single atom from the Muscovy duck liver extract used as the basis for Oscillococcinum in your remedy.
That’s Enough Stoichiometry for Today
Hopefully, I managed to sufficiently whittle my original diatribe down to a somewhat fair assessment of what homeopathy really is. My overall goal in writing this entry was to inform people that homeopathic is not just another word for natural or herbal. Homeopathy carries much more pre- and pseudoscientific baggage than that. Of course, some homeopaths do indeed posit a handful of scientific-sounding explanations for the law of similars and/or the law of infinitesmals, and I’m sure I’ll cover the most popular of those in later entries.
If I failed to tone down this entry enough for you, I do apologize. Don’t hesitate to call me out in the comments; but, conversely, don’t think I’ll hesitate to ask for some evidence that homeopathy isn’t complete and utter woo. Using my psychic powers, I predict that any such reply would provide me with some new article topics.  My guess is that homeopathy just strikes me especially hard because it conflicts with chemistry at an extremely fundamental level. It ultimately contradicts the very concept of atoms, unless you ascribe some kind of supernatural power to substances inside bottles used to make homeopathic remedies.
I mentioned that homeopathy isn’t particularly common or popular in the United States, but I fear that I’m getting more and more incorrect every day. I’ve seen homeopathic mints at Trader Joe’s, an entire homeopathic display at a local ‘alternative’ grocery store, and homeopathic remedies for dogs at the pet store where my girlfriend shops for cat food. Decide on the evidence for the curative ethereal spirit of duck liver as you see fit, of course. But, know that any homeopathic remedy you purchase is pure placebo unless you believe that said quintessence exists and can affect human (and canine, it seems) health.
Posted at 12:23 am by cheglabratjoe
August 27, 2008
Entry 13: A Real Scientist or Skeptic Should Be Agnostic, Not Atheistic
This one is going to be rather personal for me, unlike the previous dozen entries. But, hey, after all, this is my blog. Besides, it’s the thirteenth entry … doo-doo doo-doo, doo-doo doo-doo …
The reason this post is so personal is because the crux of it is a controversial evaluation of available evidence I’ve made. What I’m referring to here was given away pretty clearly in the title, but I’ll make you keep reading to see precisely what the story is. If you have also thought about this issue critically and came to the opposite conclusion, I’d like to hear about it. This isn’t my normal pitiable panhandling for comments on something I’ve written; I truly would like to hear your thoughts on this. I’ve thought about this quite a bit over the course of my life (what can I say, I’m a nerd and a geek … I think about stuff a lot), and I’d be interested to hear what someone that came to the opposite conclusion would have to say about it.
I recently decided to begin calling myself an atheist, rather than my usual response to faith-based queries: “oh, I was raised Catholic.” I thought about this a lot, and realized that I gave this response because I didn’t want to offend the person asking the question. Someone who asks about your faith is probably religious themselves, and saying “raised Catholic” effectively says nothing about your beliefs but forges some kind of bond between you and them. At least you were once religious like them, and odds are they are also Christian (and maybe even Catholic) like you used to be.
I decided to stop dancing around my (lack of) beliefs because I have a right to them, and I shouldn’t feel pressured to keep them to myself. No religion deserves a sanctified place in our society, and so I should not hide my beliefs lest they offend other peoples’ beliefs. That’s to say nothing of the simple fact that my atheism shouldn’t offend anyone else, especially since I’m not trying to ‘convert’ people or anything like that. I don’t know whether or how this is going to affect me socially, because the only tangible occurrence that’s come of this decision was to put Atheist in the previously-empty Religion box in my Facebook profile. I’ll keep you posted if anything does happen with it.
All That Having Been Said …
Enough about me, onto this week’s statement. This argument is intriguing because it can come from both sides of the issue. A skeptic could say this to an atheist, by way of the argument that science cannot prove a negative. Since science cannot ever definitively disprove the existence of a supernatural deity, agnosticism is the only valid belief system if you do not accept the evidence for deities. A religious person could also throw this argument at a skeptical atheist, in an effort to liken atheism to religiosity. Since there is no proof for atheism, believing in atheism is just as un-skeptical as believing in a god quote-unquote “without proof.”
As you can probably imagine, both sides consider this pretty clever. It sounds like ‘skeptical atheist’ is an oxymoron! Oh snap! Well, I actually think that this is a complete non-issue. As we’ve seen before, the devil is in the details. (Well, he would be … if he were real.)
You’ve Got No Proof!
Each angle of this argument can be summed up as the following statements: “you can’t prove that god doesn’t exist” and “you can’t prove atheism.” The arguers here are ultimately trying to make atheism into a belief system, since it cannot be scientifically proven. I don’t believe (heh) that this is a matter of belief, but rather a matter of non-belief. Let’s take these statements one at a time.
“You Can’t Prove That God Doesn’t Exist”
What we have here is skepticism run amuck, with a touch of postmodernism thrown in for good measure. (There’s probably a better and more succinct way to describe this, but I’m no philosopher.) This argument promoting agnosticism towards a deity could be applied to anything. Let’s steal Russell’s Teapot, a china teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. We have no proof whatsoever that Russell’s Teapot doesn’t exist, but it would be absurd to argue that one ought to be agnostic towards it. To steal another religion debate favorite, we also have no proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster does not exist. [Insert joke about His Noodly Appendage here.] Should we be agnostic towards the FSM, since there is no proof for apastafarianism?
In my opinion, a skeptic scoffing at an atheist has crossed that cynical curmudgeon line we talked about in my first few posts. (Though, interestingly, they’re crossing the line walking backwards, in that their curmudgeonry leads to very nearly the opposite result that Michael Shermer alluded to in his quote.) Their argument implies that everyone ought to be agnostic towards everything except that which has been proven to exist, up to and including the undetectable fairies frolicking on the bobbleheads on my desk. Or are they angels? I don’t know; it’s tough to tell.
Skepticism in no way mandates agnosticism towards every unproven hypothesis ever proposed; provisionally rejecting claims is completely acceptable. I would actually argue that this ought to be encouraged to an extent, lest we waste our time endlessly retesting crummy hypotheses on the off chance that they might get proven right someday. (I’d make a comment about my scapegoat pseudoscience, Bigfoot, but I’d like to continue stifling the cryptozoology taunting until I at least write an entry on it.)
As for my offhand comment about postmodernism, I’ll admit that I’m referring to a philosophy I know very little about. My extremely limited understanding of its overall premise can be summed up as the following: nothing can be truly proven or falsified because science and logic are social constructs. In five words (all I’m going to grant the subject at this time): I think this is rubbish.
“You Can’t Prove Atheism”
The other side of this coin, “there is no proof for atheism,” sounds quite analogous but is subtly different. It’s trying to turn atheism into a hypothesis unto itself, when really atheism is just the null hypothesis of theism. Hence the term: a-theism. Thus, what this statement does is get the concept of proving hypotheses exactly backwards. The burden of proof is on the hypothesizer, not the skeptic. If the hypothesis is that a theistic god exists, then I do not think the available evidence proves that the hypothesis is true. You cannot prove a negative, because one can always technically argue that the evidence is somewhere out there. All you can do is provisionally decide that the hypothesis isn’t correct, and ask the true believers to give you a call when (or if) they find something interesting.
The statement that you cannot prove atheism really doesn’t amount to a whole lot. It’s probably just a case of projection. A religious person saying this to an atheist is attempting to make atheism out to be just another belief system. What’s funny about this is that someone making this argument is running full-tilt at a brick wall of logic. Let’s imagine for a moment that religious people did somehow prove that atheism is also a belief system. This would do nothing for their ultimate hypothesis that their (or any) deity exists. All they’ve done is commit the tu quoque fallacy: “well, you’re a true believer, too.” Such a proof would have precisely zero bearing on the theistic hypothesis, it would only show that atheism is just another one of the countless religions out there.
Curmudgeons and Projectors
Atheism is a bit of a hot topic in skepticism. Many skeptics feel that atheism ought to be a major part of the skeptical movement, while others think that this would be a mistake for a variety of reasons. I consider myself part of the latter camp, which is why I prefaced this entry with a disclaimer about this being a personal matter.
I don’t think you need to be an atheist to be a skeptic. Nor do I think you need to be agnostic to be a skeptic, regardless of what any cantankerous skeptics or silver-tongued theists might argue. And finally, I don’t think that theism and skepticism are incompatible. If you’ve evaluated the evidence for theism and concluded that it is correct, that’s your skeptical prerogative. I personally disagree with you, but your conclusion is provisionally fine. Just like mine.
Posted at 12:46 am by cheglabratjoe
August 19, 2008
Entry 12: People Go Crazy During a Full Moon
Time for a complete 180 (360 if you're Jason Kidd): I'll bet you don't know anyone who believes the last entry's statement, and I wouldn't be surprised if practically everyone you know believes this one. I remember many of my teachers claiming that we students went berserk during the full moon, to the point of saying "it must be a full moon" if we were acting up and getting preemptively irritable if they'd happened to look at a lunar calendar and see that it was the day of the full moon.
You can hardly blame them for thinking that the phase of the moon influences people's behavior. The legend of the werewolf is ingrained in our culture, with lycanthropy playing a role in stories ranging from ancient myths all the way to Harry Potter. The words lunacy and lunatic come from the name of the Roman moon goddess, Luna. The purported effect of the full moon on behavior even has technical names such as the "lunar effect" or the "Transylvanian effect," though the latter sounds to me like people are mixing up their monster mythologies.
A few minutes of googling through woo-woo sites provides countless examples of things the full moon supposedly influences. Stock prices, murder rates, baby births, car crashes, suicide rates, sleep cycles, and just about everything else under the sun (heh). I didn't bother looking at the astrology sites, but I'm sure those guys just go bonkers over the full moon (ba dum, cha!). Such a widespread and powerful belief must have some basis in reality, right?
Researching the Transylvanian Effect (Cue Thunder, Lightning, Horse Whinnying)
Wrong. Over a hundred articles have been published examining the effect the full moon might have on all sorts of things, ranging from dog bites to binge drinking. The majority of the studies show no effect, and many of the positive studies have been reviewed and refuted for a variety of reasons. Some of the positive studies had statistical errors, others could not be replicated, still others championed 'increased effects' that were within the noise of their data, and one even seems to have divided by the wrong number of days in a lunar month. I found a nice, recent, freely-available review of the literature in the Canadian Medical Association Journal called "Bad Moon Rising: The Persistent Belief in Lunar Connections to Madness." Woo-debunking and some CCR, what more could you ask for?
Such a serious lack of evidence across the board was actually a bit surprising to me. Since so many people believe that the full moon causes some kind of insanity, I'd think people would be more inclined to do wacky things on the night of a full moon. A sort of "eh, why the heck not, it's a full moon" kind of attitude. But, there's no need to invoke such a hypothesis, because the alleged lunar effect is nil.
Confirming the Bias
To heck with you and your studies, one might say, millions of schoolteachers and ER workers can't be wrong. Well, yes they can. Think back to my teachers, and how they responded to the class going bonkers or the knowledge that it was a full moon. If the class was acting up, they would wonder if it was a full moon. If it was indeed a full moon, they would use this positive evidence to support their full moon belief. If it was not a full moon, they would shrug off this negative evidence and think nothing more of it. Conversely, if it was a full moon, they started the day looking for misbehavior to ascribe to the full moon. Anything the students did beyond perfect obedience would be used as positive evidence for the "lunar effect," regardless of how much the students normally acted up on any old day.
This is called confirmation bias. People who believe in myths about the full moon are just counting the hits and ignoring the misses. My teachers were only counting the positive evidence (misbehavior during full moons) and ignoring the negative evidence (normal behavior during full moons) and false positives (lots of misbehavior during non-full moons). If you only pay attention to data that supports one hypothesis, then you're going to feel like that hypothesis just keeps accumulating more and more evidence.
Believe in the Lunar Effect? That's Lunacy!
Not really, but I thought it sounded pretty good. Believing that full moons cause people to act crazy isn't going to hurt anyone, but then again neither would believing that a completely undetectable dragon lives in your garage. (Dragon analogy stolen egregiously from Carl Sagan.) The only thing the full moon has an effect on is people's ability to accurately analyze their own observations.
The full moon myth is a great example of how pseudoscience thrives. Take some long-held cultural traditions, add a dash of credulous reporting and storytelling, simmer until you achieve common knowledge status, and regularly baste with cognitive biases. In no time, you'll have a pseudoscientific belief to rival the one about only using 10% of your brain.
Posted at 1:04 am by cheglabratjoe
July 30, 2008
Entry 08a: Bobby Jindal Maybe Ought to Read Entry 08 of My Blog
Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana and potential running mate for John McCain in the upcoming US Presidential election, recently signed the Louisiana Science Education Act into law. (Watch this: I’m about to cram an entire bill into one sentence.) The bill aims to allow and assist educators to create and foster an open environment for the discussion and criticism of evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning; most importantly, it specifically allows the introduction of supplementary texts to aide in these discussions and critiques. This is the first academic freedom bill to pass through a state legislature. This bill, or at least the motivation behind it, will certainly warrant an entry or two in the future. I’ll give it a quick paragraph now, and then I’ll get back to Governor Jindal and Entry 08.
The effort to get religion into science classrooms is evolving before our very eyes; it would be humorous and ironic if it weren’t so serious. They first tried branding creationism as creation science, brazenly replacing the ism with the very word science itself. When that failed, they moved onto intelligent design, coyly leaving the designer unspecified, for a few decades and counting. Now, between the Dover case and the ongoing drubbing the scientific community is putting on Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity, ID might actually be on the way out. Even the Discovery Institute, a well-known ID think tank, has apparently been shying away from the term intelligent design of late. So now, everybody who wants theistic creationism taught in school has moved on to promoting academic freedom in hopes of getting their unscientific ideas into science classrooms. That’s enough of that for now, so let’s bring it back to the guv’nah.
As I write this, Governor Jindal hasn’t released a statement regarding this bill, at least as far as I can tell. I find this a bit surprising, considering the level of scrutiny the bill has received from the scientific community. As such, we must turn to past statements he has made regarding science education, in hopes of ascertaining his opinions on science education overall and evolution in particular.
I found one such statement, made during his gubernatorial (what an awesome word!) campaign, on a couple websites covering the bill brouhaha:
“Let’s talk about intelligent design. I’m a biology major. That’s my degree. The reality is there are a lot of things that we don’t understand. There’s no theory in science that could explain how, contrary to the laws of entropy, you could create order out of chaos. There’s no scientific theory that explains how you can create organic life out of inorganic matter.”
This really is quite an impressive paragraph. The quote continued on to advocate teaching the ‘controversy’ and academic freedom, even directly using the word creationism rather than any of its science-y euphemisms. No worries, though … there’s plenty to work with here. Let’s break it down sentence-by-sentence:
(1) Do we have to?
(2) Argument from authority.
(3) Reemphasis from authority?
(4) Mystery-mongering, setup for god-of-the-gaps.
(5) Scroll down to Entry 08 for details.
(6) Confusing abiogenesis with evolution.
Five of the six sentences in that paragraph contain a crummy argument, and the one that doesn’t contains the phrase intelligent design. That’s a big oh-fer six, if you’re filling out your scorecard at home.
The crux of his argument really seems to be the bit about entropy, since the rest of his recorded opinions on the matter don’t actually address what he thinks about evolution itself. This is quite disheartening to me, because the man is now a Governor of one of the fifty states in the Union. He actually expressed the sentiment that there are no theories in science that can explain how order arises out of chaos. Right now, there are people sailing and swimming on a large lake less than a mile from my apartment. Within six months, people will be ice fishing on the same lake. The icy order that will be created out of the current liquid chaos in the lake is staggering to comprehend, but it happens every winter and is fully explainable by basic thermodynamics. That Governor Jindal feels this phenomenon is beyond the capabilities of modern science to explain is remarkable.
There’s really not a whole lot more to say about this, hence the 08a rather than 12. This bill is a huge disservice to the people of Louisiana, and the possibility that its passage is based on blatant pseudoscience is alarming and demoralizing.
As Governor Jindal’s genetics professor at Brown quipped when asked about his former student, “without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn’t make sense.” Professor Arthur Landy continued, “Governor Jindal was a good student in my class when he was thinking about becoming a doctor, and I hope he doesn’t do anything that would hold back the next generation of Louisiana’s doctors.” Hear, hear, Art! I know it’s a cheap rhetorical ploy to yell "they’re hurting the children!", but this bill ultimately will hurt Louisiana schoolchildren. What students are going to want to study biology if one of their teachers takes full advantage of this law? Evolution will be framed as just a theory rather than as the fundamental cornerstone of modern biology, and its gaps and flaws will be emphasized over its awe-inspiring successes.
Science and reason lost a battle when Governor Jindal signed this bill into law. While it’s a sad day for science and reason, it’s a downright depressing day for Louisiana. Students in a science class taught by a teacher that takes advantage of this law will leave with both a terrible understanding of and a deep mistrust in science. We rely more on science and technology with each passing year, and untold classrooms full of Louisiana students will only fall further behind their peers because of bills like this.
Posted at 10:26 pm by cheglabratjoe
July 17, 2008
Entry 11: By Occam’s Razor, Gamma Ray Bursts Are Most Likely Caused by Aliens
Well, this week’s statement came straight out of left field; actually, it technically came from outside of the galaxy, but we’ll get to that. It’s not that common or reasonable of a statement, but it does highlight the misuse of an idea you’re all probably familiar with.
I think I first saw the idea that gamma ray bursts (GRBs) might be caused by intelligent life in Tuesday Morning Quarterback on ESPN.com, though the comment was probably tongue-in-cheek. (It’s impossible to tell with him anymore, which is one of the many reasons I no longer read his column.) However, I have seen this idea seriously argued elsewhere, though often by UFOlogists who don’t really feel the need to justify alien-based explanations. When justification for invoking little green men (LGM) to explain GRBs is given, it’s almost always Occam’s razor.
(A quick aside: any spelling and/or linguistic geeks out there? It seems that the spelling of Occam/Ockham changes with context, so that Occam’s razor was proposed by William of Ockham. What gives? And then there’s the little issue that we say Occam’s razor and not William’s razor, but I’ll grant you that the former sounds way more badass than the latter. A note to future generations: if I think of something cool, I want it called Joe’s X or [Last Name]’s X, and not [Hometown]’s X. I would also approve of my last name being adopted as an SI unit, but definitely not a CGS or English unit.)
As you might expect, the hypotheses astrophysicists toss out about GRBs are really complex. These things are probably the most energetic events in the universe since the big bang, so the physics are extreme by definition. People that make this week’s statement claim that Occam’s razor tells us to keep it simple. And, claiming that GRBs are just the stray shots of some intergalactic empire’s Death Star is definitely way simpler than all that high-energy physics hullaballoo. Are they right? Are GRBs just ray gun blasts from some alien war? And what does this Occam guy have to do with aliens, anyways?
ASAP, WTF are GRBs?
GRBs never last more than a few minutes, so I’ll spend roughly that amount of time explaining them. They’re incredibly powerful jets of radiation streaking across the universe, always from outside our galaxy and often billions of years old. They were first detected when the US put up satellites looking for radiation bursts from illegal Soviet space-based nuclear weapons tests, but instead they detected blasts of gamma rays coming from literally every direction in the sky.
The cause of GRBs is the subject of current scientific controversy. According to Pamela Gay of the AstronomyCast podcast, astrophysicists are pretty sure that they have at least some of the GRBs pinned down. The short-duration blasts probably come from two massive objects like black holes or neutron stars colliding and merging, and the long-duration variety may ultimately be a new type of supernova (hypernova). However, these ideas aren’t completely worked out, which makes for some disagreement and debate in the astrophysics community. Hey, it’s a real scientific controversy for once! (Unlike some fake controversies we’ve discussed ... cough, cough, intelligent design, cough.)
Splitting Hairs with Occam’s Razor
Occam’s razor can be stated in a variety of ways, ranging from the fully colloquial KISS Principle of keep it simple, stupid to the original Latin scribbled down by Friar William of Ockham: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. It is often stated as the simplest solution is the best, or all things being equal, the simplest solution is the most likely to be true. As we saw when discussing the second law of thermodynamics a few entries ago, we need to be precise with the wording if we’re going to try and seriously apply this idea.
The original Latin of Occam’s razor translates to entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. When you apply the razor to hypothesis formation, it is usually referred to as the Law of Parsimony or the Law of Succinctness. By ‘entities,’ we here mean a priori assumptions: things we take to be true without evidence. When you form hypotheses, you make assumptions along the way. Among others, the death ray hypothesis for GRBs assumes there are death stars out there, and the hypernova hypothesis assumes that there are even more gargantuan stellar explosions than we’ve explained before out there. Occam is telling you to keep these assumptions as minor as they can be while still explaining the phenomenon of interest.
So, when you’re using Occam’s razor to analyze different hypotheses or explanations, don’t just pick the simplest one. Pick the one that makes the least significant assumptions. Imagine walking into your kitchen and seeing a broken plate on the floor. Let’s say the two hypotheses that leap to your mind are: (i) you left the cabinet ajar, your cat jumped onto the counter, nudged his way into the cabinet, and knocked a plate out for no good reason; or (ii) a gremlin did it. The second hypothesis might be worlds simpler than the first, but you have to assume freaking gremlins exist for it to be true. Friar Billy would tell you to blame the cat, if he hadn’t died 700 years ago. (Unless of course you break his rule and assume he’s speaking from beyond the grave.)
So, What Does Occam Think About LGM and GRBs?
Let’s go over some of the assumptions hiding behind the competing hypotheses for GRBs. On the alien side, we have to at least assume that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and that this life is capable of controlling power outputs more extreme than the most colossal supernovae we currently know of. For you nerds out there, we’re probably talking a Type III civilization on the Kardashev scale, so my Star Wars reference above was appropriate. On the hypernova side, we’ve got some ultra-high-energy astrophysics that I don’t understand. But, for the sake of argument, let’s graciously assume that you must postulate some exotic form of degenerate matter or a host of new unstable subatomic particles to get hypernovae to spit out GRBs.
Balance a scale on top of Occam’s razor and the alien assumptions are going to beat out even quark matter or stars the size of a thousand suns. Science doesn’t have a handle on the intersection of relativity (the rules for big things) and quantum mechanics (the rules for small things), and things like supernovae and black holes live directly on that intersection. Speculating about the next layer of complexity is hardly a deal-breaker; in fact, that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do as a scientist. On the other hand, assuming that’s no moon, that’s a space station is just goofy.
Be Careful with Razors, Especially Occam’s
Hopefully it wasn’t painfully apparent, but this was a toughie to write. I stuck with it because I’ve wanted to cover Occam’s razor in an entry for awhile and I happened to be reading an article about GRBs where someone commented “why couldn’t these be alien weapons?” They certainly could be, anonymous commenter on forgotten site, but there’s no reason to really think so. It’s fun to think about epic space battles in a galaxy far, far away, but isn’t it also fun to think about how there are natural events happening all around us that science still can’t quite explain yet?
Occam’s razor is a great tool for skeptics, but it’s also often misused by pseudoscientists. Don’t let some ghost hunter tell you ten stories about this one time he investigated some ‘haunted’ house, and then exclaim “the simplest explanation is ghosts!” Give yourself a moment to séance with the spirit of William of Ockham, and calmly explain that assuming he’s a true believer who spent a night walking around spooking himself is far more appropriate than assuming ghosts were goosing him and breathing chilly air down his back.
Posted at 10:08 pm by cheglabratjoe
July 10, 2008
Entry 10: [The Junkyard 747 Argument]
This is a classic anti-evolution argument. It states that evolution by random mutation is analogous to a 747 being formed by a tornado ripping through a junkyard. And, since that would be ridiculous, evolution must also be ridiculous. Indeed, if evolution suggested that monkeys and daffodils spontaneously sprung fully-formed out of a primordial soup of simple chemicals, this would be a great analogy. However, since evolution doesn’t posit anything remotely like that, this statement is also a classic straw man.
These Things Usually Don’t Scare Crows Either
The straw man logical fallacy is when you bastardize a position to a ridiculous extent, and then argue against that bastardization. Since this technique simultaneously mocks and refutes something that sounds similar to your opponent’s argument, it can be an effective way to debate. Of course, that doesn’t make it valid, for the simple reason that you’re not arguing against what the other person is actually saying.
So, regardless of how clever the junkyard 747 argument might sound at first glance, there’s no need to start throwing out all our biology textbooks. Evolution is nothing like a tornado ripping through a landfill; people making this week’s argument have keyed into the ‘random’ in the term ‘random mutations’ and gone berserk with it.
Let’s briefly go over random mutations and natural selection, to see if they bear any resemblance to a whirlwind of garbage spitting out an airplane. Take a population of bacteria in a puddle. The daughter cells of these bacteria will all have random mutations of their progenitors’ genes; a small but significant error rate is a reality of DNA replication in all life. These mutations will either be detrimental, beneficial, or silent. The daughter cells with silent mutations will be just as likely to reproduce as their parent cells were, those with detrimental mutations will be less likely, and those with beneficial mutations will be more likely. There’s natural selection, folks: nature will select for the good mutations and select against the bad mutations.
If you think all that’s in any way analogous to a tornado constructing an airplane, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. (As opposed to a monkey’s extremely distant cousin, that is.) The junkyard 747 is a laughable perversion of evolutionary theory, and using it to attack evolution is an extremely flimsy straw man argument.
So, You Want Trashy Analogies?
Courtesy of Brian Dunning of Skeptoid, here’s an apt junkyard-based analogy for evolution. This story has really stuck with me since I heard it, probably because I find it really effective to turn this fallacious analogy on its head to actually demonstrate how evolution works.
Imagine a group of welders travelling from junkyard to junkyard, fiddling with pieces of junk at random. Maybe they weld two things together, or break something, or bend something else; whatever the details, the important thing is that they only make small and random changes. There are your random mutations. Now, choose some kind of selection criteria, and pick the improved junk out of your pool of junkyards based on those criteria. There is your natural selection. Have your welders make copies of your selected junk to deliver to the unselected junkyards, and repeat the mutation and selection processes. There’s your next generation of junk.
The overwhelming majority of these mutations will be useless. However, with millions of junkyards and millions of welders’ trips to these junkyards, you can end up with virtually anything. After even one generation, you’re almost certain to have the entire assortment of simple machines at your disposal. From there, you can get pretty much wherever you want. Select for locomotion, and you’ll be Flintstoning your way to Bedrock within a few generations. Select for weapons, and you’ll be aping the primates from 2001: A Space Odyssey from the get-go. (Thank you, I’m here all week. Remember to tip your waiter or waitress.) The sky isn’t even the limit; you can select things that help you glide on your way to flight, kind of like birds probably did.
Grasping at Straw Men
Another week, another weak anti-evolution argument. Luckily, there are only so many of these arguments to go around. Unluckily, and incredibly frustratingly (holy adverbs, Batman!), no amount of writing like this is going to make these arguments go away. Some of the highest-profile evolution deniers still regularly truck out these statements, almost as if they expect the scientific community as a whole to smack their foreheads and yell “omg, evolution does violate thermodynamics and it is just as ridiculous as a twister making a plane, lolz, our bad!”
Evolution is one of the most successful theories in science, and it’s going to take more than shoddy pseudoscience and witty rhetoric to disprove it. That crap, like the debris a tornado leaves in its wake, just isn’t going to fly. Unless of course you happen to be, shall we say, preaching to the choir.
Posted at 12:10 am by cheglabratjoe
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