Skeptico

Dr. Purr-vorkian I presume?

Several skeptical bloggers have commented on the story of Oscar the nursing-home cat who can apparently predict who is going to die next. Orac thinks this is just confirmation bias – the nursing home staff remember the hits and not the misses. The Bad Astronomer points out that we need more information – specifically how much time the cat really spends with the dying as opposed to those who live. All this is true.

I remember this cat from a TV program about a year ago, and I thought then that the cat probably just preferred to sleep with people who were really quiet and didn’t move much.

I don’t really have anything to add to this story. I’m only posting to show off the brilliant punning headline I thought up.  

Straw Men and Circular Reasoning

Several friends of mine are getting terribly excited about a new crop circle formation in England (shown above) that apparently couldn’t possibly have been produced by human hoaxers. You can read the details and eye witness reports online. Part One gives the meat of the claims regarding this new circle while Part Two focuses on the rather hysterical claims of “black helicopters” seen over the circles a few days later. I’m going to focus on the part one commentary, as this is the only section that contains any actual evidence (and I’m being generous) about the formation of these circles.

This New Circle

From the above link, this is what we know happened:

Several crop circle enthusiasts went to Knap Hill in England to do a “night watch” – ie look out for crop circles being formed.

They had a number of cameras, including some they claim were “light sensitive” (aren’t all cameras “light sensitive”?), and one they claim was infra-red.

No record is given of what time they got there, but the following picture was taken with the “light sensitive” camera at 1:35 am.

Nothing can be seen in this “light sensitive” picture. Nothing. And by that I mean there is no way to tell if there is a circle there already or not, or if people are there or not.  (Note: this picture is not a joke. It is the actual picture published on the website I linked, that supposedly proves there was no circle in the field at 1:35am. Seriously.)

There is no record of anything that might have taken place in the field before this 1:35am totally black photo.

There is no record of anything photographed with the infra-red camera, at any time.

At 3:08 am (approximately 90 minutes after the completely black photo), there is a big flash – presumably lightning.

There is no evidence at all that the lightning flash had anything to do with producing the circle.

At shortly some time after 3:20am the above photo was taken, showing an outline of the circle formation in the field. There is no similar photo taken earlier without the circle formation – just the totally black picture. Consequently we have no idea when this circle was produced, other than that (presumably) it was produced since sunset the previous day. Consequently we have no accurate idea of how long it took – and we certainly can’t conclude it was produced in under 90 minutes.

That’s it. That is the “incredible” information I was sent. Pretty underwhelming.

Further Nonsense

I want to highlight two other nonsensical claims made for this circle. The first is this:

[The crop stems] were just gently bent and people who have been doing crop circle research over the years, they have found this is how it usually is in genuine formations – that the stems are not broken.

They are referring to the pseudoscientific work of W.C Levengood (he’s the “L” in the crop circle research group BLT), who claims that only the stalks in “genuine” circles (ie those not produced by human hoaxers) show “abnormalities” not present in those produced by humans. How does he know which stalks come from “genuine” circles? Because they are the ones with the abnormalities only found in genuine circles. How does he know the abnormalities are only found in genuine circles? Because only genuine circles have the anomalies. How does he know….. er, you get the picture. Classic circular reasoning. (Make your own jokes.)  For more, read Joe Nickell on problems with Levengood's Crop-Circle Plant Research.

The second nonsensical claim is this:

The East Field is not a totally flat pancake field. It actually curves up and down. When you look at the formation from up above from an aerial photo, you see that the circles are absolutely 100% correct circles. To make circles look 100% from the air in a field that has up and down hills, you cannot create 100% perfect circles on the ground. You have to create ovals. And that’s the case here. All the circles that are lying on a hill more than flat surface, they are ovals. To construct 100% correct oval in total darkness – everything you do is extremely difficult because you can’t see anything.

Really? From an aerial photo, “you see that the circles are absolutely 100% correct circles”? Really? Well I took the “aerial photo” from the website and cropped one of the bigger circles to a rectangular shape and got this:

Note: it’s rectangular. I’m pretty sure an “absolutely 100% correct circle” would be cropped by a perfect square, not a rectangle. Take a ruler and measure the sides of the rectangle above if you don’t believe me – it contains nowhere near a perfect circle. Of course the believers might state that this picture isn’t directly above the circle and so wouldn’t show a perfect circle, but that’s not really my fault is it? If they’re claiming it’s a perfect circle from the air it’s really up to them to show an aerial photo that demonstrates a perfect circle. In reality, the field (as you can see from the early morning picture above) is close enough to flat that I doubt it makes any difference.

Flawed Logic

Crop circle believers the world over are all making the same logical mistake when they claim circles were not produced by humans. The logical fallacy can be demonstrated by this quote:

Under those dark conditions, I would consider that impossible and everyone I have spoken to among the researchers down here and also civil engineers who are used to land surveys – they say that to do that under those conditions and also within that limited time frame (90 minutes), they regard it as absolutely impossible for humans to do.

Here is the anatomy of their argument.  The believers don’t know how this circle was made in the time, and so they draw the conclusion it couldn’t possibly have been made by humans. The flaw in this way of thinking is this – you can’t draw any conclusion from a lack of knowledge. All we know is that these believers can’t figure out how it was done. But we can’t conclude from that that no one could have figured it out and done it. It’s the old Argument From Ignorance fallacy - the same fallacy employed by Intelligent Design proponents who claim something is too “irreducibly complex” to have evolved. But just because they can’t figure out how it evolved doesn’t mean it didn’t evolve. I’m sure some people do “regard it as absolutely impossible for humans” to have made this circle, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible for humans to have made it.

Here’s the thing: if you want to show that something other than humans produced these circles, you have to actually show some evidence that something other than humans actually produced these circles. It’s a pretty simple concept. Of course, for the believers to be able to do this they have to (1) have some idea (or hypothesis) of what produced them and how, and (2) find a way to falsify this hypothesis – test it in such a way that if their hypothesis is false it would fail the test. That’s how real science is done. Until they do that they’re just humans who aren’t smart enough to figure out what a different group of humans have actually done. And that’s true whether this circle was really made in 90 minutes, or not.

I’ve about done with this subject, but I wanted to quote the opinions of one of the credulous people interviewed in the report, to give you an idea of the mindset of these people and the beliefs that continue to fuel this crop circle nonsense:

I think there are other intelligences in this universe visiting and monitoring us. And I have a very strong feeling that our governments know a lot more about this than they will tell us. So, I think it is either something projected on the ground from an alien source. Or it is projected on the ground from an inter-dimensional source that we are not able to perceive with our senses. But definitely, this source has decided to present itself in a way that is so beautiful and that is not hostile that creates the most thrilling feelings within us and invite us to explore the unknown and invite us to start discussions about realities, consciousness … and it is an invitation to start growing as people again because we have for so long been stuck in our materialistic world view and it’s probably time to take the next step in the evolution of humankind. That’s my opinion.

This is what he’s saying. There are super intelligent aliens telling us we need to “grow” in unspecified ways and for unspecified reasons. Also, we need to abandon our “materialistic world view” (for no logical reason I can ascertain) and “evolve” to some unspecified higher level (although this is not how evolution works). Everything is being covered up by the government. And all this is being revealed in a way that only these crop circle believers (and the government, presumably) can understand.  I hope that isn’t what is happening, because if it is, these aliens aren’t nearly as smart as people think.

Some references

CSI Special Report by Joe Nickel

Crop Circle Confession in Scientific American

Levengood's Crop-Circle Plant Research by Joe Nickel

CircleMakers – the website of some of England’s actual crop circle makers – and they’re not aliens (as far as I know).

Note: photographs shown above are by Winston Keech and Lucy Pringle.

MMR Scares Debunked

Ben Goldacre writing in Bad Science, exposes the dishonesty in recent newspaper reports on how “MMR causes autism”. Ben does what the newspapers should have done and actually contacts noted autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen and other researchers quoted in the newspaper, and finds out what they actually said and think. A sample:

But in fact, the two “leading experts” concerned about MMR were not professors, or fellows, or lecturers: they were research associates. I rang both, and both were very clear that they wouldn’t really describe themselves as leading experts. One is Fiona Scott, a psychologist and very competent researcher at Cambridge. She said to me, very clearly: “I absolutely do not think that the rise in autism is related to MMR.” And: “My own daughter is getting vaccinated with the MMR jab on July 17.”

She also says, astonishingly, that the Observer never even spoke to her, before incorrectly reporting that she has a privately held view that MMR might be partly to blame for autism. I say “reporting,” but in some ways, it’s more like an accusation. Dr Scott horrified. She simply does not believe that MMR has caused a rise in autism.

Ben concludes the news media, in its need for alarmist stories, is more of a problem than dishonest researchers such as Andrew Wakefield.  It's worth reading Ben’s entire post.

Edit July 22, 2007

Ben comments on the newspaper’s lame attempts to retract and apologize cover up its errors.  Sample:

This is beyond childishness. They were wrong. They should have clarified the closeness of the relationship in the article, and if they’re making amends now, they should do so properly. But instead they’re still trying to cover up (rather ironically for a story effectively claiming a cover up about autism).

Meditate on this

I think Yahoo headline writers need to calm down, chill for a while. Gain some perspective. Visit a retreat or something. Reader and old friend Steve sent me a link to this Yahoo News story with the headline Meditation Won't Boost Health: Study. The problems with this headline were that (1) it wasn’t really a study and (2) it didn’t really say that. It was actually a review and meta-analysis of 813 other studies and the conclusion was that the quality of these studies was too poor for them to form a judgment either way.

A meta analysis is a way of combining the results of many (often small) studies and drawing conclusions based on a statistical analysis of the larger data pool. Small differences in the larger data pool of the meta analysis can be more significant than the same difference in the small data pool of the individual studies. However, as Steven Novella put it:

… a meta-analysis does nothing to address the quality of the studies being looked at. The old adage of “garbage in-garbage out” still applies. If you lump together 10 bad studies, you don’t get one good study, you get a useless meta-analysis.

And to be fair, the researchers seem to know this. From the Abstract to the report - Meditation Practices for Health: State of the Research (472 page .pdf) with my bold:

Evidence on the state of research in meditation practices was provided in 813 predominantly poor-quality studies. The three most studied conditions were hypertension, other cardiovascular diseases, and substance abuse. Sixty-five intervention studies examined the therapeutic effect of meditation practices for these conditions. Meta-analyses based on low-quality studies and small numbers of hypertensive participants showed that TM®, Qi Gong and Zen Buddhist meditation significantly reduced blood pressure. Yoga helped reduce stress. Yoga was no better than Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction at reducing anxiety in patients with cardiovascular diseases. No results from substance abuse studies could be combined. The role of effect modifiers in meditation practices has been neglected in the scientific literature. The physiological and neuropsychological effects of meditation practices have been evaluated in 312 poor-quality studies. Meta-analyses of results from 55 studies indicated that some meditation practices produced significant changes in healthy participants.

Conclusion: Many uncertainties surround the practice of meditation. Scientific research on meditation practices does not appear to have a common theoretical perspective and is characterized by poor methodological quality. Firm conclusions on the effects of meditation practices in healthcare cannot be drawn based on the available evidence. Future research on meditation practices must be more rigorous in the design and execution of studies and in the analysis and reporting of results.

Poor quality studies on an alternative medicine practice? Yes, hard to believe, I know. Whatever next? So the obvious question would be: “why did they bother?” Still, the researchers didn’t conclude meditation is no good, just that there really isn’t the data to support the claims for it. From the University of Alberta’s web page on the report:

But the researchers caution against dismissing the therapeutic value of meditation outright. "This report's conclusions shouldn't be taken as a sign that meditation doesn't work," Bond says. "Many uncertainties surround the practice of meditation. For medical practitioners who are seeking to make evidence-based decisions regarding the therapeutic value of meditation, the report shows that the evidence is inconclusive regarding its effectiveness." For the general public, adds Ospina, "this research highlights that choosing to practice a particular meditation technique continues to rely solely on individual experiences and personal preferences, until more conclusive scientific evidence is produced."

I personally don’t have a problem with the idea that meditation could help some people, especially those with stress related health problems. If you’re having trouble relaxing and this is raising your blood pressure, putting you at risk for a heart attack, say, it might help. Just don’t let anyone tell you it’s a proven method. 

It's done wonders for me.

65th Skeptics’ Circle

The 65th Skeptics Circle has just been posted at Steven Novella’s NeuroLogica blog. Click on the link to take A Tour Through the Museum of Skepticism. 

If that’s not enough for you, Martin an Aardvarchaeology has a one off archaeology carnival.

Strange arguments on Dembski’s blog

I really wonder what goes on in their minds sometimes. Creationists. PaV, writing on Dembski’s Uncommon Descent blog, has a rather strange take on this Physorg.com article – an article that describes how some scientists are studying the bacterial flagellum (you know – the one that’s too “irreducibly complex” to have evolved), to see if they can learn something to help them design nanotechnology. PaV seems to think that if you can study nature and learn some lessons from what nature has built, that proves there is an intelligent designer. I know – it makes no sense. Read this:

I find it almost infuriating that there are labs like Petr Kral’s all over the world that are doing this kind of work every day, and, yet, our Darwinist brothers tell us that, unlike any potential contact with ET’s, in this case we cannot possible know anything about any Intelligent Designer.

[Snip]

How is it possible to examine biological life, AND on the BASIS of what one SEES, then construct a molecular machine of heretofore unknown sophistication, and then, simultaneously maintain that no inference about any so-called Intelligent Designer can be made….”since we don’t know anything about Him–He’s beyond science”?

Well it’s not the evolutionists who say we can make no inference about the “designer. Such statements are made by people such as (er) William Dembski (with my bold):

…intelligent design does not presume to identify the purposes of a designer. Intelligent design focuses not on the designer’s purposes (the thing signified) but on the artifacts resulting from a designer’s purposes (the sign). What a designer intends or purposes is, to be sure, an interesting question, and one may be able to infer something about a designer’s purposes from the designed objects that a designer produces. Nevertheless, the purposes of a designer lie outside the scope of intelligent design. As a scientific research program, intelligent design investigates the effects of intelligence and not intelligence as such.

Perhaps PaV should have checked with his boss before posting.

Intelligent Design proponents are the ones who claim there is an intelligent designer, so it’s up to them to tell us something about “him”, rather than whine about how scientists haven’t been able to. Furthermore, PaV has the logic 100% backwards. He seems to think that if we understand a design we must know something about the designer. But he is assuming his conclusion here – he is assuming the flagellum is designed and therefore we should be able to learn something about the designer from the flagellum. But we don’t know that the flagellum was designed. The logic works the other way round - if we knew something about the designer we might be able to tell if the flagellum was designed. We don’t and so we can’t.

It gets even more absurd:

Further, if biological systems contain no intelligence, how, then, can you study them? Why doesn’t some Darwinian-Believer answer that one?

Easy. Something doesn’t have to have an intelligence for you to be able to study it. Geologists study rocks – do rocks have intelligence?

How can someone “learn” how to build a nanoscale molecular pump from such a study of extant biological systems and then have that very possibility denied by saying: “There’s no intelligence in what I’m studying.

I’ll assume that was a question, even though it didn’t end in a question mark. The answer is – just because something was not designed by an intelligence, that doesn’t mean we can learn nothing from it. PaV is again assuming his conclusion – complex things like the flagellum must have been designed. We are studying something complex, therefore we’re studying something that was designed.

Philisophically (sic) speaking, how can you “study” that which is, per your own definition, “incomprehensible”? Would Darwinists like to ‘fess up about all of this?

The flagellum is not “incomprehensible” per any evolutionist’s definition. Just because per an IDists definition it is “irreducibly complex”, that doesn’t mean it is, and it certainly doesn’t mean it is “incomprehensible”. Although I can see how it might be to PaV.

Argument By Analogy

An argument by analogy takes place when the arguer:

1. Has a point to prove about something
2. Gives you an analogy for the thing
3. Points out that the analog contains the feature they are trying to prove exists in the original
4. Concludes the feature in the analog must also exist in the original.

The flaw in this method of argument

The flaw is simple: the analogy always breaks down somewhere. If the analogy breaks down, the conclusion the arguer is trying to draw from the analogy just doesn’t follow. That’s all there is to it. Argument by analogy is rarely as good as an argument by logic, evidence or facts. Clearly if the arguer had any logic, evidence or facts to support his case he would present them. That he resorts to argument by analogy shows his argument is probably devoid of logic, evidence or facts.

Examples

The most persistent users of argument by analogy are ID creationists. For example, Michael Behe is especially fond of his Mount Rushmore analogy:

For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount Rushmore.

Of course, we know who is responsible for Mount Rushmore, but even someone who had never heard of the monument could recognize it as designed.

So by analogy, life on Earth must also have been designed. He goes on to invoke William Paley and his watch analogy – essentially the same argument only with a watch instead of Mount Rushmore. The obvious place the analogy breaks down is that neither Mount Rushmore nor a watch can have offspring, while living things regularly  reproduce themselves. Since this reproduction (with minor changes) is fundamental to the theory of evolution, and since it obviously doesn’t work with Mount Rushmore, Behe’s analogy is bogus. The only startling thing in my view, is how ID proponents like Behe can still use this lame analogy when it is so obviously bogus and has been debunked so many times.

Michael Egnor (another creationist) uses argument from analogy in his plea for dualism - ‘Verizon Deniers’ Find a Cellphone. He compares the human mind to a cell phone, which (as we all know) picks up signals from elsewhere. That is, we know the people we hear on the phone don’t actually live inside the phone – the phone is just a receiver of the voices. Egnor concludes that the human brain is the same – the mind exists elsewhere (in some unspecified non-material realm), and the brain is just a receiver for the mind’s thoughts. Of course, we know that if we placed the cell phone in a faraday cage that is impervious to radio waves, the signal would be lost. That is one place the analogy breaks down, since there is no equivalent way to block the “signal” (analog or digital – ha ha), from the “mind” to the brain. We also know that damage to specific areas of the brain can produce specific changes in personality or other brain functions, while damage to specific areas of the phone produce no analogous changes in the message received. (Usually damage to the phone produces either no change or the phone stops working completely.) So right there we have two places the analogy breaks down, and we can dismiss the argument. It is notable that Egnor produces no actual evidence for this rather extraordinary claim of his. (Orac did a fine and more detailed take-down of Egnor’s argument, as did Steven Novella and others.)

Correct uses of analogies

I believe there are two correct uses of an analogy in a discussion. The first is to explain something that is complex and perhaps technical, in language that is simpler or within the recipient’s experience. As an example, I modestly (well no, not really) present the Beatles analogy I used in the Lost Tomb of Jesus post. James Cameron used the analogy of some future archaeologist finding a tomb in Liverpool, marked with the names John, Paul, George and Ringo, and concluding he had found the lost tomb of The Beatles. I wrote that, by analogy, Cameron had really found a tomb with the names John, Paul, George and Britney, and concluded Britney Spears was the drummer in The Beatles. (Bear with me – you have to read the whole post.) But my analogy wasn’t used to make the case – I had done that by examining the statistics and showing where they were wrong. The analogy was to help explain it.

The other correct use of an analogy is to get around a mental block – where someone simply can’t conceive of the point you are making so you make an analogy they might be able to think about. An example would be to explain to a theist, how an atheist simply has no belief in God. A religious person possibly couldn’t even conceive of there being no God, so instead you present Bertrand Russell’s teapot analogy. Here, he believer is asked to consider if he believes there is a teapot in orbit between the Earth and Mars, and when he realizes he can’t prove there isn’t one he might understand why the atheist has no belief in God and why the burden of proof is upon the person saying God (or a teapot in orbit), exists, rather than upon those saying they don’t. Note that the teapot analogy doesn’t prove the point, but it might help the theist understand the idea.

Jesus Christ you’re late

Via Pharyngula I learn that William Dembski has examined the math behind the 1 in 600 odds quoted in James Cameron’s The Jesus Tomb, and found it wanting. Well thanks for filling us in Bill. A bit late though. I wrote The Lost Tomb of Jesus (Not) over four months ago where I pointed out that the math didn’t show what Cameron claimed, and the statistician featured in the film backtracked on the film’s claims two days afterwards. (Coincidence? You decide.) Still, it’s good to see that Dembski has caught up with the rest of us. Now, if he could only apply this degree of skepticism to his pseudo-scientific Intelligent Design belief - really just an argument from ignorance… Yes I know – but I can dream.

Dembski’s post did puzzle me a little though. He seems to think that most skeptics “until just recently… didn’t even think that Jesus existed.” Speaking personally, I always thought that there most likely was a real “Yeshua” upon whose life the Christian myths were based; I just never believed the fairy-tale version of events described in the Gospels. But really, it’s of little concern to me whether he really existed or not (other than as an intellectual exercise), and I suspect the same is true for most non-believers, so I’m not sure why Dembski thinks he’s made such a killer point.

Dembski did issue one interesting challenge with the sort of odds I like:

Question: You think any of the skeptic societies might be interested in highlighting this work debunking the Jesus Family Tomb people? I’ll give 10 to 1 odds that they won’t.

The premise behind this is telling. As someone who first formed his beliefs and then went looking for evidence to support them (while ignoring contradictory evidence), he can’t conceive that a skeptic would honestly consider evidence that would challenge the skeptic’s position. (Even though this doesn’t actually even do that.)

Anyway, I’m not a skeptic society, but this is a skeptic blog, so perhaps I count. In the hope that I do, allow me to highlight Dembski’s work debunking the Jesus Family Tomb. 10 to 1 odds. What was the bet again? $1,000 you say? I’ll take a check. Please don’t wait another four months before sending it.

SkeptiCamp

The first rule of SkeptiCamp is – you do talk about SkeptiCamp.

And email about it. I received an email from Reed Esau, one of the organizers of this skeptics conference in Denver on August 3 to 4 this year. Reed tells me:

It ain't your typical affair.

The format is based on Barcamp, a gathering where most participants give presentations. It's supported by local sponsors and free to attendees.

Should it prove successful, we hope that like Barcamp, similar events will be spontaneously organized around the world by passion skeptics as ourselves.

I’d never heard of Barcamp, but the idea seems to be that it’s a conference on a given subject (and with this conference the subject is skepticism) – with the key feature being that everyone has to participate. No spectators. If you live in the area and always wanted to present something about skepticism but haven’t been asked – here’s your chance.

64th Skeptics’ Circle

I’m back. I guess no one noticed I’d been away, but I have been. Away from my computer. Surprisingly the place stayed pretty tidy – no woos descended to party despite the doors being open and no one home. Good.

You’ve probably all seen it by now, but in case you haven’t take a stroll over to The Skeptical Alchemist to read the 64th Skeptics’ Circle. There was even an entry from me there this week.