Skepticblog

Note: Late post today. I am covering the in-patient service and more time constrained than usual.

By now most people know that the dinosaurs (now clarified as non-avian dinosaurs), along with 85% of species alive at the time, became extinct 65.5 million years ago as a result of a massive meteor impact. This is almost certainly the impact crater at Chicxulub, which dates to the correct time. In addition, examination of fossils and geological layers centers this extinction event at Chicxulub.

This is referred to at the K-T extinction, referring to the end of the Cretaceous and beginning of the Tertiary periods. However, use of the designation “Tertiary” is being phased out, and the K-T extinction is now being referred to as the K-Pg extinction – for Cretaceous-Paleogene.

While the single impact theory is the current consensus, there are two significant if minority competing theories. One is the Deccan Traps flood basalts – a 200 thousand year long event spanning the K-Pg boundary that involved massive volcanic eruptions, which could have causes extinctions through release of dust and sulfuric aerosols into the atmosphere. While not dead, this hypothesis has not fared well under recent evidence and is supported by only a small minority of paleontologists.

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There is an interesting blog debate going on between PZ Myers and Ray Kurzweil about the complexity of the brain – a topic that I too blog about and so I thought I would offer my thoughts. The “debate” started with a talk by Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit, a press summary of which prompted this response from PZ Myers. Kurzweil then responded here, and Myers responded to his response here.

Futurism

You can read the exchange for all the details. I want to focus on just a couple of points – predicting our efforts to reverse engineer the brain, and the question of how complex the brain is.  Kurzweil has predicted in the past that we will reverse engineer the brain – model it’s function in a computer, basically – by 2030. It was reported that in his talk he said 2020, but Kurzweil has clarified that this is not correct, he said 2030, sticking to his earlier predictions.

That’s a minor (but interesting) point, and Myers points out that it was not the focus of his original criticism. I agree with Kurzweil on some basic principles. First, we do have an active research program that is using computer modeling to reverse engineer the brain. These efforts are progressing nicely, and I do think that eventually it will succeed. I also agree that some technologies progress at an exponential rate, and they surprise those who were making predictions based upon a linear progression. Kurzweil gives an excellent example of this – the genome project. This project started out very slow, and many though it was lagging behind predictions, but as technology improved the effort to decode the human genome accelerated geometrically and actually finished years ahead of schedule. Now we can decode the genome of other species in a fraction of the time, and the pace continues to accelerate.

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In the town just north of where I live the middle school was completely torn down and an entirely new middle school was built. The reason for this was concerns that mold in the old school was making children sick.

Apparently, Wi-Fi is the new mold. In central Ontario parents are lobbying the school to turn off the Wi-Fi due to fears that it is making their children sick. You can take the news report of the parents concerns, time-warp about ten years in the past, and substitute “mold” for “Wi-Fi” – the arguments are the same, and the evidence as weak, but the identified problem has just shifted.

The Evidence

Let’s start by reviewing what we currently know about the health risks of Wi-Fi – wireless signals used to connect computers to a network or the internet. From a basic science perspective, there is little plausibility to the notion that Wi-Fi radiation would have any health effects. The amount of energy that is absorbed by a person living in a Wi-Fi field is negligible - less than 1% of exposure from a typical cell phone and well below current safety levels.

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I received a comment on an old post on Ten Major Flaws of Evolution – A Refutation. I thought I would answer in a separate post rather than burrying it in such an old post.

Commenter Ankur Varshney writes:

Mr Steven
I appreciate your enthusiasm to share this with all. I also appreciate that you have done so much analysis.
In all the arguments you have given your comments, i read them.
Creation / Design Argument – you have said something.
As far as watch – it is non living. So is the evolutionists idea of life comes from nonliving. SO WATCH ANALOGY IS CERTAINLY VALID. Just like a watch requires a designer, IT TAKES A CREATOR OR DESIGNER TO BREETHE OR DESIGN LIFE IN NON-LIVING! You probably failed to notice this simple logic.
There are so many flaws in all what you said that I am afraid it will take away my lot of time to point them all.
One more i would like to point though.
You said that gene mutation INCREASES information!!! Gene is there and YOU (AN INTELLIGENT SYSTEM) mutates it which leads to variation, no addition, it may lead to loss of info no addition :). It is really silly that such a thing comes from you. More so even if i take your case, the information has been added by intelligent system not automatically!!!
Have great day and please before posting such things calm down and think for a while the reasoning.
Thank you

As usual, I do not intent to pick on this one commenter, but he is regurgitating typical anti-evolution propaganda, which needs to me smacked down from time to time, and he is just a convenient messenger.

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I love this story. Entertainer Joe Power, who bills himself as a “psychic medium” was booed and heckled onstage during The Assembly’s 30th Anniversary Gala. His lame attempts to defend himself also reveal much about the medium entertainer industry.

Skeptics often go after big targets, which is reasonable, but the people who have risen to the top of their field (whether they are faith healers, psychics, mediums, or whatever) tend to be the most polished and experienced. (They tend to be, there are always exceptions.) However, we also have to realize that there is a second and third tier of faith healers and psychics who are trying to break into the top, but haven’t. These second-rate entertainers make great targets for skeptics – because many of them are not very good at their craft. They are doing the same things the top-tier psychic entertainers are, but are more obvious and are more likely to say stupid and revealing things when confronted.

By analogy – if you want to reveal how a magic trick is done, show someone who is not polished attempting the trick. They are likely to give it away. Don’t show a world class magician who is expert at hiding the technique and knows how to work a crowd.

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Scientists and skeptics are familiar with this pattern – a preliminary study suggests a wildly new understanding of a scientific or medical question. The scientific community is cautiously skeptical but interested. The press proclaims a stunning breakthrough, and the public is briefly fascinated. If the new discovery concerns a medical treatment, the community of those affected become fixated on the potential new “cure”, and many start demanding treatment based solely on the preliminary evidence. But then the wheels of research begin to grind and, more often than not (because that is the nature of discovery) the new idea turns out to be wrong – it fails the critical step of replication.

Then one of two things will happen: either the new idea or treatment will fade, becoming little more than a footnote in the history of science, or a subculture will persist in believing in the treatment and will dismiss contrary evidence and mainstream rejection as a conspiracy. Which course the new idea will take seems to depend largely on the original scientist – if they accept the new evidence and abandon their claims, it will likely fade. If they refuse to give up in the face of new evidence, then a new pseudoscience will likely be born.

We have seen this pattern play out with Laetrile, psychomotor patterning, cold fusion, and many other ideas.

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Several months ago I was interviewed by 20/20 for a follow up news report on Desiree Jennings – the cheerleader who claims to have acquired severe dystonia from a flu shot – and that show just aired on Friday. I have been following this case as the core claim is neurological and has been grossly misrepresented in the media.

20/20 did a fair job, but it’s hard for me to tell what impression the average viewer will come away with. The first 2/3 of the story was presented from a credulous point of view – essentially just telling Jennings’ story without any hint of skepticism. But then the editorial tone flips, and they give the “other side.” They did a fair job in this section of the segment, and my point of view was reasonably represented. And then at the end they leave the audience with the question – real or fake? Not the best format from a scientific point of view, but it could have been worse.

To summarize the story, Jennings, who was 28 at the time, received a flu shot in August of 2009, after which she started to develop dramatic neurological symptoms including shaking and difficulty speaking. Her story was picked up by a local news station, and from their it was picked up by Inside Edition and became a national story. Jennings spread a considerable amount of unwarranted fear about the flu vaccine, aided by a credulous media who failed to do even basic vetting of her story. In an ideal world, the original reporters would have showed their video to an actual neurologist and the story would have been nipped in the bud right there. But that’s not he world we live in.

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If you do a google search on “10% brain” every relevant hit on the first page will inform you that the notion that humans use only 10% of their brain (or some similarly low figure) is a complete myth. I think I was one of the first ones to get such a debunking article on the internet, posting this article back in 1998 (I’m not going to repeat that information here – just read the original article if you are interested). My subjective sense is that more people are aware today that this is a myth than in the past, but a surprising number of people still believe this.

I was reminded of how embedded this myth is in our culture when I heard that not one but two movies out this past week repeat the 10% brain myth. In The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Nicholas Cage informs his young apprentice that normal people only use about 10% of their brains, but sorcerers can use all of it and that is what enables them to do magic. In Inception Leonardo DiCaprio makes a similar argument about his ability to enter the dreams of other people

So maybe it’s primarily Hollywood that didn’t get the memo. The 10% brain myth seems to be the go to explanation for any fantastical mental ability. I also see it crop up in science fiction from time to time. I was very disappointed to read it repeated in one of the Dune prequels, for example.

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I know this is already a bit of old news, but I am just returning from TAM8 (which was awesome, BTW) and am behind on my blogging. Recently the third of three independent reviews of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) e-mail scandal has been completed. All three reviews concluded that the CRU was not hiding, destroying, or manipulating data.

Last year I wrote about what has come to be called climategate – leaked e-mails from the CRU at the University of East Anglia which revealed some troubling statements and attitudes among the CRU scientists. At the time there were those who believed the e-mails to be the innocent chatter of scientists and others who thought it was the smoking gun of scientific fraud. At the time I wrote:

I don’t know what the lessons of climategate are yet – we need to see what actually happened first. But how people deal with climategate says a lot about their process. Those who are making bold claims based upon ambiguous, circumstantial, and out-of-context evidence, are not doing themselves or their side any favors.

In other words – let’s withhold final judgment until there has been time for investigations to discover what has actually been happening at the CRU. The e-mails were concerning, but not smoking gun evidence of anything – let’s wait and see. Well, now we have the results of several reviews of the evidence and therefore have something substantial upon which to based an informed opinion.

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It is only recently (the last decade or so) that neuroscientists have realized that the brain harbors a reservoir of neural stem cells, even into adulthood, waiting to be recruited to make new connections. This is an important part of neural plasticity and learning. Now that we know the stem cells are there, research is underway to learn as much about them as possible, including their regulation. Perhaps they play a role in certain diseases, like Alzheimers. Or perhaps they could be exploited to treat or prevent such diseases.

It has also been learned that not all brains are the same in terms of aging. Most brains atrophy and develop pathological signs of aging, and this correlates with a reduction in mental agility (especially the ability to learn new things). But a lucky few do not seem to develop these age-related changes, and can remain mentally nimble well past 100. Nailing down the environmental and genetic variables that make the difference would be interesting and potentially very useful.

For now we are at the basic science level in addressing these questions – just figuring out what is going on. Clinical applications will hopefully come later. But there is one thing it seems we can say now based upon existing research – exercise, both physical and mental, is good for the brain and staves off the negative effects of aging.

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