Skeptico

Is Deepak Chopra a negative or a positive for science and humanity?

Skeptic Magazine reports on a debate between Deepak Chopra and Michael Shermer entitled “The Value of Skepticism: Is Skepticism a Negative or a Positive for Science and Humanity?” Actually it’s not strictly a debate: Chopra has written a piece and Shermer answers it. Shermer responds pretty well, actually, so I won’t bother to deconstruct Chopra’s entire piece line by line, but I wanted to comment on some of it.

Just about all of Chopra’s criticisms are of a straw man skeptic he has built – the “skeptic” who just says no to everything. He buttresses this with false analogies and appeals to authority. Here he goes:

Worst of all, skeptics take pride in defending the status quo and condemn the kind of open-minded inquiry that peers into the unknown.

Nonsense! Most skeptics would be happy to accept changing the status quo if there was any evidence to support changing the status quo. Open minded inquiry is fine. But considering all ideas with an open mind is not the same as accepting those ideas when there is no evidence they are real, or sometimes evidence they are false. The closed minded ones are the believers who won’t accept that their particular fantasy is nonsense despite the evidence. Or as Shermer states in his response:

Skepticism has become a legitimate form of inquiry that Deepak parenthetically acknowledges (in a left-handed sort of way) as occasionally laudable, another refrain we often hear in the form of “I’m a skeptic too, but…,” where skepticism is fine as long as it is someone else’s codswallop under the microscope.

A refrain I have heard many a time.

Chopra continues:

Skepticism is the attitude of doubt, or to dress it up for the dictionary, “the method of suspended judgment, systematic doubt, or criticism characteristic of skeptics.” But in my experience skeptics are overreachers. They equate doubt with logical thinking, so that to be unskeptical makes one irrational.

Again, a straw man definition – Chopra defines skepticism as having “doubt”, so that he can point out that “doubt” is not necessarily logical. It’s not. What makes skeptics logical and rational is that they don’t make up stories to fill the gaps in their knowledge. That is, they don’t make up stories the way Chopra does.

But Keats, Beethoven, and Van Gogh all worked in irrational fields. And the line between religion and science, which skeptics defend like armed guards, isn’t so definite as they suppose, given the religious bent of Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and other scientific minds great and small.

First, false analogy. Beethoven etc may not have worked in a “rational” field, but so what? He wasn’t trying to tell us how the universe worked. Second, Chopra fallaciously appeals to the authority of Newton etc, because they were (supposedly all), religious. Again, so what? Because Newton was right about one thing doesn’t mean he was also right about religion. These are arguments any skeptic has heard and debunked ad nauseam. Isn’t it pathetic that this is the best Chopra can do?

In and of itself, skepticism has made no actual contribution to science, just as music reviews in the newspaper make no contribution to the art of composition and book reviewing falls far short of writing books.

Nonsense! The scientific method – examining evidence, testing hypotheses against external reality, not inventing explanations – are all tools of skepticism. It’s just another false analogy.

…the chief victory of skepticism — to discredit religious thinking as opposed to scientific thinking — is a battle long ago won.

If only that were true. Religious and magical thinking are as strong as ever, and are encouraged by the antics of Chopra.

But skeptics can’t wait to fight the battle again, and people like me, who discuss spirituality and science in the same breath, are vehemently accused of the same ignorant tendencies as fundamentalists waiting for Jesus to return tomorrow.

Because there is just as little evidence – ie no evidence – for Chopra’s claims as there is for those of the religious fundamentalist. The difference is that the fundamentalist doesn’t (for the most part) distort science to try to convince the scientifically illiterate that his fairy stories are true. Unlike Chopra: that is his modus operandi.

To disdainfully dismiss any immaterial phenomenon, as skeptics do, actually betrays the scientific method, which allows any hypothesis into argument in an open-minded tolerance for the next ridiculous speculation that may turn out to be true.

Yes, but then science examines this new hypothesis to see if it is true. If it isn’t, science abandons it. Or as Michael Shermer said:

By weeding out bad ideas, negative skepticism enables the good to flourish.

How many bad ideas did Chopra or any other non-skeptic “weed out”? And more importantly, how did they weed them out? What technique did they use if it was not to examine evidence skeptically?

Chopra continues.

But science is wrong if it believes it is the last paradigm or the only one that deserves credence. The nature of new paradigms, as Kuhn wrote, is that they explain more than the previous paradigm.

Fine then show us this new paradigm. And make sure it explains more than science – I mean really explain it with evidence it is real, not a fairy tale explanation such as we get from Chopra. He won’t do that though: all we get from Chopra is made-up feel good drivel.

I’ll leave the final words on what skeptics really are, to Michael Shermer (and Stephen Jay Gould), because I really can’t improve on this:

We are thoughtful, inquiring, and reflective, and we are the watchmen who guard against bad ideas in order to discover good ideas, consumer advocates of critical thinking who, through the guidelines of science, establish a mark at which to aim. “Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise,” Gould concludes. “The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency — the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.”

18th Skeptics’ Circle

The 18^th Skeptics' Circle is now up at Wolverine Tom. Go there to read some of the best skeptical blogging from the past two weeks.

Belief in God is harmful

From God is for Suckers I learn of a new study published in the Journal of Religion & Society (summarized in the Times online), that religious belief can be harmful to a society:

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.

Furthermore:

…rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates

Now, this is interesting, and certainly amusing to those of us who don’t worship the invisible daddy in the sky. But in reality, the study only reports a correlation, and as we critical thinkers know, correlation is not causation. The study specifically states:

… it is not the purpose of this initial study to definitively demonstrate a causal link between religion and social conditions.

So as much as I’d like to, I don’t think I can claim the (hyperbolic) title of my thread is proven by this study. However, it would seem to be evidence against the idea that religion is a good thing, necessary for a moral or good society. I’ll take that.

Katrina and Global Warming

From the very day after Katrina hit the gulf coast, environmentalists and other leftists seemed almost delighted to tell us that this was the result of global warming, even to the point of claiming Katrina’s name actually was “global warming”. The Spiegel Online produced a summary of claims from various environmental groups, of which this by Jürgen Trittin, a Green Party member, was a sample:

The Bush government rejects international climate protection goals by insisting that imposing them would negatively impact the American economy. The American president is closing his eyes to the economic and human costs his land and the world economy are suffering under natural catastrophes like Katrina and because of neglected environmental policies.

I’m no Bush supporter but this seemed a little presumptuous to me. It seemed a little too soon to be determining the cause of such a monumental disaster affecting so many people.

But the opposite side sprang pretty quickly to debunk the claims, notably this from the blog EU Rota that produced some handy graphs from the NOAA showing that the number of hurricanes was not increasing. No increase in the number of hurricanes = Katrina not caused by global warming, yes? Case closed. Well, I’m not a climate scientist but this also seemed a little glib. What if the number of hurricanes stayed the same but their intensity had increased?

Well, the guys at Real Climate are climate scientists and they have an interesting article about it. And yes, they talk about the increase in intensity of the storms as well as in the simple number:

Some past studies (e.g. Goldenberg et al, 2001) assert that there is no evidence of any long-term increase in statistical measures of tropical Atlantic hurricane activity, despite the ongoing global warming. These studies, however, have focused on the frequency of all tropical storms and hurricanes (lumping the weak ones in with the strong ones) rather than a measure of changes in the intensity of the storms. As we have discussed elsewhere on this site, statistical measures that focus on trends in the strongest category storms, maximum hurricane winds, and changes in minimum central pressures, suggest a systematic increase in the intensities of those storms that form. This finding is consistent with the model simulations.

(My bold.)

Hum, so the intensity of storm has increased. But is this due to global warming?

The correct answer… is that there is no way to prove that Katrina either was, or was not, affected by global warming. For a single event, regardless of how extreme, such attribution is fundamentally impossible. We only have one Earth, and it will follow only one of an infinite number of possible weather sequences. It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have.

They go on to provide an interesting analogy to try to explain how global warming might increase the statistical likelihood of more intense storms:

…we can indeed draw some important conclusions about the links between hurricane activity and global warming in a statistical sense. The situation is analogous to rolling loaded dice: one could, if one was so inclined, construct a set of dice where sixes occur twice as often as normal. But if you were to roll a six using these dice, you could not blame it specifically on the fact that the dice had been loaded. Half of the sixes would have occurred anyway, even with normal dice. Loading the dice simply doubled the odds. In the same manner, while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make - and possibly already is making - those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been.

The tendency is for statistically more intense (but not more frequent) hurricanes. Climate Science concludes, in the cautious language of good scientists, that “it would be premature to assert that the recent anomalous behavior can be attributed entirely to a natural cycle”. However they conclude:

The current evidence strongly suggests that:

(a) hurricanes tend to become more destructive as ocean temperatures rise, and
(b) an unchecked rise in greenhouse gas concentrations will very likely increase ocean temperatures further, ultimately overwhelming any natural oscillations.

Or in plain language, global warming is likely to result in more not less Katrina-like hurricanes in future years.

Deliver us from evilution

Over at The Panda’s Thumb is a prayer for the so-called intelligent design believers:

Our Intelligent Designer,
Who art in the unspecified-good-place,
Unknown be Thy name.
Thy flagella spin, Thy mousetraps snap,
On Earth, as it is in the
Unspecified-good-place.
Give us each day our unchecked apologetic.
And forgive us our invidious comparisons,
As we smite those iniquitous Darwinists
With rhetoric.
And lead us not into encounters with people
Who ask us to state our theory,
But deliver us from biologists
Who know what we’re up to.
For Thine is the irreducible complexity,
And the wiggly parts of bacterial bottoms,
And the inapplicable theorems,
Now and forever.

Amen.

Has about as much chance of working as any other prayer I suppose. That is to say, no chance at all.

(PS: Checkout the comments section at Panda’s Thumb for some more humorous prayers.)

Billions and billions

Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series has been digitally remastered and is showing now on the Science Channel in the US: 6.00pm (Pacific) through 11.00pm (with presumably more to come next week), although you can be sure it will be repeated.

Of course, “Cosmos” is on my list of recommended DVDs (see the link in the left hand column).  Although I have the DVD I'm still watching it.

(I know Sagan never said “billions and billions” – he does say "billions" a lot though.)

Abducted (or not)

In October, Susan Clancy’s new book, Abducted : How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, is being published.

Susan Clancy is the Harvard researcher who back in 1996 designed an experiment to test the validity of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. She hypothesized that people with recovered memories were more prone than the average person to create false memories, and that they might demonstrate this tendency when given a standard memory test.  She presented the recovered memories subjects with a list of semantically related words, like “candy”, “sour” and “sugar”. Then she tested their recall of those words. On the test, she would throw in words that weren't on the list but were like the words on the list: “sweet” for example. Her hypothesis was that these people would be more inclined to remember seeing the word sweet: creating a false memory out of a contextual inference. As controls, Clancy also tested people who had been sexually abused, but who had not “recovered” these memories (ie they had always remembered their abuse), and people who had not been abused. Clancy found that the recovered memories people had a higher incidence of false memories than both controls, implying their memories of abuse might be false.

Of course, this result was controversial, and she received criticism from victim support groups, professional therapists who specialized in recovered memories and even some of her Harvard Medical School colleagues. However the view that recovered memories are unreliable was not entirely new. For example Elizabeth Loftus has produced much research on creating false memories, and has testified for the defense in many abuse trials (and like Clancy, has also received much hate mail for her trouble).

Clancy then decided to do what any good scientist should do, namely she tried to falsify her hypothesis a different way. This time she would not test memories of abuse, but of something she thought everyone would agree was false: alien abduction. If alien abductees showed no more tendencies to false memories than the controls, her hypothesis on the tendency of abused people to false memories, would be falsified. She performed the experiment, and found that “alien abductees” were also more prone to false memories than the control groups.

As Clancy explains:

What you have in an abductee, Clancy suspects, is someone who is predisposed to believe. ''Here's someone who reads science fiction. They watch 'The X-Files.' Then one night they have a sleep-paralysis experience. It's weird and it's scary, and it becomes one of a multitude of events that create that wonder.''

As the subject tries to remember what happened, ''source'' errors creep in. ''You think you're recovering your own memory, when in fact it's something you pulled out of a movie,'' Clancy said. ''Memory's tendency to be reconstructive, combined with the desire to believe, combined with a culturally available script, leads to a false memory. The content of that memory is dictated by the society you live in.'' The warnings that experiencers report receiving from aliens, the Australian sociologist Robert Bartholomew has pointed out, have changed over time -- from nuclear destruction during the cold war to, more recently, ecological doom. These are simply stories, he says, that give shape to our fears.

Of course, she then got criticism from alien abductee researchers who believed that alien encounters are real. For example:

Obviously there's a mammoth leap of faith involved in generalizing from a mistake on a word list to the assumption that whole memories for extended, anomalous events can be created more or less arbitrarily

… A criticism that completely missed the point of the experiment, which was to see if the hypothesis could be falsified. One of Clancy’s main critics was (the now late) John Mack. Clancy criticized him as a:

''good-hearted,'' an ''old-school gentleman'' who was insufficiently aware of the memory-distorting effects of the hypnosis he used over the years to expand upon abduction memories in many of his more than 200 patients.

What she was getting at is that when memories are recovered using hypnotism it is not possible to tell if the person “remembers” things to please the therapist or if the memories are real.

The only valid criticism of Clancy’s research is that her alien experiment had too few subjects – 11 as I recall. Of course, I would welcome someone else replicating the experiment with a greater number of subjects. However, considering the treatment Clancy received for her troubles, I don’t see many people lining up for the honor. Anyway, Clancy’s results are entirely consistent with what we know about sleep paralysis, and (alleged) alien abduction.

Clancy’s book presumably explains the above in more detail. Obviously, I haven’t read it yet, but I imagine it would be a good read.

Green tea doesn’t cut Alzheimer’s risk

The BBC headline writers are at it again! Remember how they (didn’t) give us Placebo – pregnancy pain cure, or Acupuncture does not cut blood pressure, or Still no evidence acupuncture works? Well, today we have Green tea cuts Alzheimer’s risk, except the article specifically says it doesn’t:

An ingredient of green tea may help to protect the brain against the ravages of Alzheimer's disease, research suggests.

University of South Florida scientists found the component prevented Alzheimer's-like damage in he brains of mice bred to develop symptoms.

The component - EGCG - is already strongly suspected of offering protection against certain cancers.

All well and good, except that it goes on to say:

However, the Florida team showed that other flavonoids in green tea actually block EGCG's ability to prevent the harmful build up of beta-amyloid.

Thus drinking green tea alone would not likely have a beneficial effect.

Dr Doug Shytle, who also worked on the study, said: "This finding suggests that green tea extract selectively concentrating EGCG would be needed to override the counteractive effect of other flavonoids found in green tea."

I wonder if the headline writers actually read the article.

Of course, this is not to say that there aren’t benefits to drinking green tea. Perhaps there are. But this article doesn’t support that view.  Which is a pity, since I drink a pot of the stuff each morning. (Perhaps I should change back to coffee? It tastes better anyway!)

17th Skeptics’ Circle

The 17^th Skeptics' Circle is now up at decorabilia. There’s plenty of skeptical reading over there – in fact, the best skeptical blogging from the past two weeks. And all in a new and interesting format.

Restaurateurs in poor spirits

This story is woo on top of woo. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, two Orlando restaurateurs believe their building is haunted, and are refusing to move in:

Subcontractors who worked there and other people have reported seeing ghosts or other apparitions, said Lynn Franklin, attorney for the restaurant owners.

"It's very serious," Franklin said Thursday. "A lot of people are corroborating having seen incidents in this location."

A bit woo, wouldn’t you agree? Still, a lot of people are frightened by ghosts – it’s a visceral thing. But this is where it gets funny:

The $2.6 million lawsuit filed last month by the owners of the Church Street Station entertainment complex says an offer to hold an exorcism was refused.

A totally useless activity to get rid of an imaginary entity was refused. But why?

Franklin said Christopher Chung's religious beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness required him to "avoid encountering or having any association with spirits or demons," and Chung also objected to the offer for an exorcism because it is a Roman Catholic rite not accepted by his faith.

Bwahahaha!

More anti-GM squeals

Monsanto wants to patent the farmyard pig, according to the anti-GM Organic Consumers Association:

Monsanto Company, already a world powerhouse in biotech crops, is shaking up the swine industry with plans to patent pig-breeding techniques and lay claim to the animals born as a result.

(Snip)

"We're afraid that Monsanto and other big companies are getting control of the world's genetic resources," said Christoph Then, a patent expert with Greenpeace in Germany.

Ooh, this sounds bad: Monsanto shouldn’t be allowed to patent life forms.  Wait a minute – they’re not. Something only qualifies for a patent if it is useful, novel and non-obvious. Now, I’m not an attorney but I think that means you can’t patent the pig’s genome but you could patent (say) a method you developed for determining if a pig had genes that would be advantageous for breeding purposes. Yes, the article goes on to say:

The practices Monsanto wants to patent basically involve identifying genes that result in desirable traits in swine, breeding animals to achieve those traits and using a specialized device to inseminate sows deeply in a way that uses less sperm than is typically required.

That’s what I thought. If they have developed a method for determining breeding stock to give desired traits, or if they had developed a new insemination procedure, they should be able to patent it. This wouldn’t stop farmers from continuing to use their traditional methods for the same thing if they want. They would presumably only use the patented Monsanto procedures if it is more profitable for them to do so.

So why the sensationalist article? Well, the truth never got in the way of organizations like Greenpeace and the Organic Consumers Association, who have launched a writing campaign to bombard Monsanto executives with dross like this proposed pro-forma complaint:

I am deeply concerned about the direction Monsanto Company has taken in the past decade with respect to sustainable agriculture and farmers' rights. Right now we are at a critical crossroads in history, and I fear that Monsanto Company is not contributing to the nation's welfare with a "profits over people" attitude.

Monsanto Company has embarked on a vicious campaign against family farmers in the North American heartland, as well as across the world. These hardworking farmers are the backbone of our nation's food supply and national security. The current climate of insecurity has been exacerbated by your company¹s policies of intimidation, lawsuits and defamation.

Monsanto's legal actions against Percy Schmeiser, the Rodney Nelson family, and the Oakhurst Dairy for example, are deplorable attacks, and do not reflect your "Stake in the Ground" pledge to honesty and decency.

(My bold.)

The “profits over people” comment reveals their true motive: anti-corporation / anti-capitalism. Not that that matters in and of itself, but it is dishonest to pretend this is about “sustainable agriculture”.

And there are the usual porkie pies: allegations of a “vicious campaign against family farmers”, and the obligatory reference to Percy Schmeiser. Heard of Schmeiser? The anti-GM groups claim he was sued by Monsanto because some Roundup-ready seed was spilled and accidentally grew on his land. Sounds unfair, right? Well, if that was what happened, it would be. The true (short) version is that Schmeiser stole the seeds. The true (longer) version is that:

• Some Roundup-Ready seeds were accidentally spilled on Schmeiser’s property
• Schmeiser sprayed “a good three acres” of his non-GM fields with Roundup, to kill any crops (ie those non-GM crops he planted himself) that were not the Roundup-Ready volunteers
• Having successfully isolated the Roundup-Ready crops, he collected the seeds and next year planted them on 1,030 acres of his land
• Schmeiser sprayed these fields with Roundup, thus gaining the advantage or the Roundup-Ready crops without having paid for them.
• In 2001 he was found guilty of the above, and in 2002 his appeal was rejected.

Anyone applying a little common sense here would realize that there must have been more to this case than a simple farmer being sued because some GM seed had accidentally blown onto his land. Obviously, a case like that wouldn’t fly. The fact that Greenpeace etc still refer to Schmeiser as the poor innocent farmer, victim of the big evil Monsanto, demonstrates that the facts count less than their agenda.

Of course, with the pig patent case, it will be a few years before it is determined if Monsanto have a legitimate claim to a patent or not. I don’t know what the result will be but I do predict that the anti-GM groups will not report the legal battles honestly. Mark my words! (Randi, watch out, that million is in danger.)

This is what you will see if the Anti-GM groups report this story honestly

Carnival of the Godless

What better time that Sunday to read the 22^nd Carnival of the Godless at Agnosticism/Atheism blog? So blow off church and read Austin’s blog today.

Penta Water UK ceases trading

One down:

It is with regret that we have to inform you that due to issues beyond our control Govannon Ltd, t/a Penta UK, inc Team Penta, ceased trading at the end of June 2005.

(Snip)

Please note that the Food Standards Agency have also since confirmed that

'the Agency's (FSA's) view is that Penta water as currently formulated does not comply with the relevant bottled water legislation in the UK'

Unfortunately, many more water scams to go.

It’s a start.

16th Skeptics’ Circle

The 16^th Skeptics' Circle is now up at Red State Rabble. There’s plenty of skeptical reading over there – in fact, the best skeptical blogging from the past two weeks. But don’t take my word for it – check it out yourself!

Oh and (cough), see whose post is first.