Pseudoscience

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“Locally groan” (Local produce)

strawberry

The list of alarmist adjectives on some food containers is so long that soon it may need to be continued on the back. Gluten-free, MSG-free, rBST-free, non-GMO, organic, no aspartame, no glyphosate, all-natural, no preservatives, no added hormones, no antibiotics.

I have addressed these concocted carton concerns before and will not be rehashing them here. But when this word parade would include the word “local,” I figured that’s one I could support. The closer the food on my plate is to the farm where it was grown, the less fuel and resultant pollutants are being produced. Or so it seemed. But Brian Dunning at Skeptoid cautions this may not always be the case. This issue is complex and edibles shipped from farther away may sometimes mean fewer emissions.

Besides being a critical thinker, skeptic, and possessor of broad knowledge, Dunning also has a background in food produce. He once worked for a company that blossomed from a family fruit stand to a chain that sold produce from local family farms. In its nascent years, the company would send a truck to each farmer it purchased from and deliver the food straight from its store to the grocer’s. As the number of stores multiplied, the company maintained this method.

But soon the owners realized that finding a farmer near each new store it opened  was unfeasible. Sending a truck to each farm and to each market resulted in the routes crisscrossing and defeating the strategy’s intent. It proved to be terribly inefficient, besides being the antithesis of the green-friendliness they were aiming for.

So the company combined routes, enabling it to use fewer and smaller trucks, which meant less local produce but also less burned fuel. A distribution center still got the food out quickly but substantially reduced the total mileage. As the company continued to grow, larger distributions centers were built, sometimes even farther away from the markets they delivered to, but the energy savings continued to be realized.

This can work even on monumental scales. In some cases, Conex-sized purchases made from a company overseas might still be cheaper for the retailer. A crop’s cost is driven mostly by the conditions required to grow it. Spain’s soil and climate makes for fertile tomato growing year-round. By contrast, perennially dreary England means tomato growers there need to use heated greenhouses. The costs associated with that method must be passed onto the consumer. Therefore, a food wholesaler in Leeds would be making a good decision in terms of profit and energy efficiency if he has the red fruits shipped from Catalonia rather than from five miles away.

Or say you live in Moline and want some wool or lamb chops for your business. There are no shepherds in your neighborhood, so whatever are you to do? You could head to rural Illinois and likely find someone who could help. But if buying on a large scale, this would not be the most energy-efficient method.

New Zealand’s climate allows for perennial sheep grazing, so our prospective purchaser would be better off looking there. And despite being almost halfway around the world from New Zealand, if our British tomato buyers decided to branch into mutton, they would make less of an environmental impact by buying from someone near Auckland as opposed to someone in the London vicinity. A New York Times article noted that, “Lamb…shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produces 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton, while British lamb produces 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed.”

Finally, Dunning cited the case of cattle producer Joel Salatin, who stipulates that customers must come to his ranch. That may seem like a method of reducing emissions, but it actually exacerbates the problem. Under this plan, if 200 customers want Salatin’s beef, 200 of them will get in a car and drive to him. A better strategy would be to only service orders that use no more than a specified amount of fuel spent per pound of beef purchased. But at least he’s not selling it in packages that spend 20 words telling the consumer what’s not in it.

 

   

 

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“Hang a leftie” (Southpaw shaming)

trumpleft

In my early teens at church, some older youth were talking about a tabloid article which purported that all lefthanders were from outer space. This led the preacher’s southpaw son to say into the fountain pen he was holding, “They’ve discovered us, Master.”

Funny as that impromptu line was, it obscured the fact that being a lefthander in church just a few hundred years before that would have been no laughing matter. Just how long the church considers something evil will vary by sin. Gays and evolution have sat near the top of this Luciferian list for more than a century. Meanwhile, excoriations of Catholics and dancing have moved to the fringe of Christianity. And congregations who consider mixed fabrics and lefties to be Satanic spawn are virtually extinct.

While southpaws were traditionally reviled in most societies, there have been exceptions. Ancient Andeans thought lefthanders were bestowed with magical and healing properties. Also offering left-handed compliments were Greeks and Celts, the latter associating them with femininity and, therefore, the continuation of life. Jews and Christians likewise tied left-handedness to womanhood, but given the misogyny prevalent in those religions, adherents considered this a detrimental trait. Believers viewed lefties like they did their womenfolk: Inferior, weak, and destined for subservience.

In the book of Matthew, souls gather at check-in to see where their eternal reservations have been made and are told, “He shall say unto them on the left hand, depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” While the malefactors are tossed into a burning lake, Jesus sits at God’s right hand. With these images in mind, more than a few left hands were bruised by a nun’s ruler and it was common fairly deep into the 20th Century for schools to forcibly retrain lefthanders to use the correct side.

Christianity claimed no monopoly on this southpaw shaming. Even today, many Muslims and Hindus use their right hand for honorable tasks such as greeting friends, signing contracts, and accepting gifts. Meanwhile, the lowly left is reserved for actions considered unclean. These habits grew from sanitation issues. Since the right served as the dominant hand for 90 percent of the population, persons used it when eating, handling food, and interacting with others. The left hand, meanwhile, was used for hygienic activities. These customs were uniform with no consideration of an individual’s dominant hand so the left came to be considered unclean.

And these were minor annoyances compared to how other cultures dealt with left-handedness. Some 19th Century Zulu tribes scalded youngsters’ left hands so they would no longer be of use. Perpetrators of the Spanish Inquisition and Salem Witch Trials went one worse, sometimes executing persons for using the wrong hand.

Tired of religion having all the fun out in left field, pseudoscientists got in on the act. Downplaying the morally degenerate angle, they instead considered lefties to be a biological mistake. In the early 1900s, criminologist pioneer Cesare Lombroso offered precisely that take with writings that would make a Klansman proud. Switching the blame from Beelzebub to the brain, Lombroso insisted that “as man advances in civilization and culture, he shows an always greater right-sidedness as compared to…women and savage races.” Lombroso further associated left-handedness with the primitive and the barbaric, while considering right-handers to be civilized and peaceful.

Around the same time, a McClure’s article informed readers than southpaws were “more common among the lower strata, negroes, and savages.” If desiring a viewpoint even more, um, right wing, consider what Austrian physician and psychologist Wilhelm Stekel wrote in 1911: “The right-hand path always signifies the way to righteousness, the left-hand the path to crime. Thus the left may signify homosexuality, incest, and perversion, while the right signifies marriage.”

This bigotry faded over the next few decades, though it lingered in some quarters. In the 1970s, psychologist Theodore Blau was still calling left-handed children sinister, academically suspect, and prone to mental illness. And just three years ago, an Oklahoma preschool teacher forced a 4-year old southpaw to use his right hand. When pressed for an explanation, the teacher referenced a publication that branded lefthanders evil, unlucky, and sinister. She also made note of Satan’s supposed southpaw status.

One of the few nuggets of accuracy in all this is that nine out of 10 humans are left-handed. And this biological determination runs very deep. In a Discover article, retired University of Kansas anthropologist David Frayer discussed how he deduced that 1.8 million years ago, Neanderthals had the same 9-to-1 preference.

He observed a series of ridges on the outer surfaces of Neanderthals’ upper front teeth. As to how this indicated hand preference, the article explained: “One direction of diagonal marks, either from upper right to lower left or upper left to lower right, would dominate. Individuals working with tough, fibrous material could have held it between their teeth and one hand, then used an edged stone tool to saw off a small piece with the other hand.” These observations showed the 9-to-1 ratio.  

As to why it was happening even way back then, one theory holds that the brain’s hemispheres split tasks for purposes of efficiency and this division of labor included favoring the right hand for most manual activities. That would explain why most persons are right-handed, but what answer is there for the relative few who become lefties?

Neuropsychologist Chris McManus theorizes that lefties result from a mutation that began occurring around 60,000 years ago. This mutation does not precisely mandate left-handedness, but it cancels the bias for the right and gives those who inherit it a 50-50 chance of being left-handed. That clears up how a set of identical twins can include a righty and a lefty. And what McManus and Frayer have discovered likely explains why lefties are among us without needing to resort to demons, defects, or alien preacher children.

 

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“Inheritance facts” (Heritability)

genes

There is a minor Internet presence who calls himself the Libertarian Realist, though given his endorsement of the Confederacy and fluoridation conspiracy theories, I doubt he’s either.

And as a long-time libertarian and skeptic, I find libertarian conspiracy theorists to be the planet’s most baffling creatures. They think a government too incompetent to build roads, run schools, or implement a sensible welfare program will simultaneously master geoengineering, the AIDS crisis, and false flag shootings.

With this guy, however, conspiracy theories are only a tiny fraction of his work. He focuses mostly on race and fixates on the idea that those of his color (excluding Jews) are more intelligent and fit than all other skin tones, especially blacks.

He arrived at these conclusions mostly by misunderstanding, or choosing to ignore, how heritability works. Eminent skeptic Emil Karlsson explained that heritability estimates the amount of variation in a given trait within a population that cannot be explained by environment or random chance. Further, it is unrelated to genetic differences between populations, much as the Libertarian Realist wishes that it were.

Science blogger Gerhard Adam provided a concise description when he wrote,  “Heritability addresses the relationship between nature (genetics) and nurture (environment), so that as each changes, the variation between individuals within a population can be estimated based on these influences. In this context, environment refers to everything external to the genome that could affect expression.” 

Race pseudoscientists like the Libertarian Realist make three key errors with regard to heritability. First, they mistakenly think heritability is a measure of how genetic a trait is. They think genes are nearly the sole factor for determining traits and consider the environment much less relevant. This is mistaken since heritability is about how much variation in a trait can be explained by genetic differences.

Consider the heritability of height for North Koreans. In that country, it will mostly be determined by whether the person is in the ruling elite or is among the serfs. The vast differences in nutrition and health care between those two groups will be the primary factor. By contrast, height differences among Swedes, with their egalitarian access to healthy food and medicine, will mostly be due to genetics.

Another example. Karlsson wrote that in the mid-19th Century, U.S.-born males were 3.5 inches taller on average than Dutch men. But by 2000, Dutch males were two inches taller on average than their American counterparts. According to the Libertarian Realist’s thinking, neither population should have a height advantage since the majority in both groups were white men. But changes did occur, and the tendency of U.S. men to be taller than the Dutch and the reversal of this trend would best be explained by changes in environments for both groups.

This leads into racists’ second error, that heritability explains the differences between biological populations. But heritability refers to what proportion of variation in a trait can be explained by genetic variation within a specific population and in a specific environment. It is not a measure of how genetic a trait is. Racists rely on heritability estimates to insist that IQ and other factors are immutable, but heritability also depends on environment. And more than 90 percent of genetic variation occurs within groups and genetic diversity is seen more in clines than in socially-constructed racial categories.

Finally, racists assert that heritability renders useless any attempt to alter traits by managing environmental factors. They say any change to education, income, food, medicine, and housing will not impact the person’s traits, which they maintain are fixed at birth owing to genetics. But as Angelina Jolie’s adopted children and multiple studies can attest, persons going from destitute circumstances to affluent ones will see multitudinous benefits beyond wealth.

 

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“Plate histrionics” (Glyphosate fears)

SKULL

There is a claim out there (way out there) that the weed killer glyphosate is present in food at unsafe levels. This claim appears in a work promoted by the likes of Food Democracy Now and Food Babe, not in peer reviewed journals. Still, in this forum, we place a premium on what is said, not who said it, so let’s examine the assertions. 

The publication endorsed by the aforementioned pair alleges that that studies have uncovered dangerous amounts of the herbicide glyphosate in our cabbage and Oreos, among many other edibles. The cover of this work shows a foreboding figure in a hazmat suit saturating future food with what is implied to be toxic levels of chemicals. Accompanying that image is a munching baby next to a spray bottle of Roundup, a Monsanto product which contains glyphosate.

If shouts of alarm ever accompany a scientific study, they should come from those hearing the results, not those giving them. When the latter happens, it is almost always a sign that the “research” was meant only to confirm a desired outcome and that the Scientific Method was skirted. Still, let’s look at what the report said, not its cover or who produced it, in order to make a critical analysis of it.

Michelle Miller of Ag Daily notes that the methods used in the studies make it impossible to distinguish glyphosate from similar chemical structures and may not even be able to differentiate it from water. She wrote, “To detect glyphosate…costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and is a very difficult, scientifically complex task.” The methods cited in these studies fail to meet those standards, though not as spectacularly as Zen Honeycutt’s $125 device meant to detect glyphosate levels.   

Another crucial point is how little glyphosate is spread over large farming areas. It’s just 22 ounces per acre, which would be equal to about two sodas sprinkled on a baseball diamond. Moreover, Miller reports that she sprays just two days a year and that’s done early in the growing season, before the edible part of the plant has emerged. Pointing out that the dose makes the poison, Miller adds that glyphosate is less toxic than baking soda.

Besides, the weed killer impacts enzymes found in plants and does not affect mammals, including humans. The only harm done to animals is when lab rats, mice, and fish are force fed outrageous amounts of it.

I’m all for studies as long as they follow established protocols, employ the Scientific Method, are replicable, and are peer reviewed. Along those lines, the Government Accountability Office once called on the FDA to monitor food for glyphosate residue. But the effort was halted due to a lack of agreement on testing protocols, equipment shortcomings, and the varying analysis methods at the different FDA laboratories.

Sensing a connection between the shuttered testing program and the experiments on overdosed rodents, Food Babe pounced: “Could it be that Monsanto didn’t like the results they started getting, especially since the FDA found glyphosate in foods that should be especially safe like BABY FOOD?”

Shouting something doesn’t make it more relevant and all caps won’t make it more accurate. Instead of providing evidence for the conspiracy she suggested, Food Babe let her followers assume it was true. She provided no examples of test results that Monsanto wouldn’t like, offered no audio recordings about keeping the findings hush-hush, and presented no independent lab experiments that revealed dangerous amounts of herbicide on our plates.

Another vacuous Food Babe claim is that multiple studies show that while probable harm to humans from glyphosate begins at one part per 10 billion, foods in the studies were found to have 1,000 times that. In truth, only one of the studies she listed provided support for that claim, and that one involved testing on mice. And even among vermin, the danger was considered potential instead of probable. Glyphosate, if it’s detectable on any food at all, is in nowhere close to a dangerous amount.

There are legitimate dietary concerns out there, but glyphosate residue is not among them. Alarmist, untrue charges, on the other hand, are much harder to stomach.

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“Fool injected” (Anti-vax argument)

BITE

One of the keys to developing critical thinking skills is to understand the importance of addressing a point and not the person making it. Focusing on irrelevant factors like the speaker’s color, gender, ethnicity, politics, economic status, or background will leave one vulnerable to committing an ad hominem, specifically a genetic fallacy.

A few years ago, I came across a graph that purported to demonstrate that measles was well on its way out before the vaccine to combat it was introduced. It showed that the death rate from measles had dramatically declined before persons began being immunized for it. The conclusion was that the vaccine was inconsequential to the disease’s demise. To dismiss this as the ramble of an anti-vax loon would have been to commit an ad hominem. To address the point from a critical thinking perspective, I needed to examine the claim for truthfulness, then see if the whole picture was being painted, and also consider other angles.

When I did so, I learned that the anti-vaxxer’s point was accurate, but incomplete. While the death rate for measles was going down before the advent of the vaccine, the morbidity rate was not. Measles is an endemic disease, so populations can build resistance to it, but it can also be deadly when introduced to a new group. This, when combined with measles’ highly contagious nature and the susceptibility of preschoolers to it, explains why incidences of the disease spiked and descended several times, at approximately four-year intervals.

But there has been no such spike, or even a tiny bump, since the vaccine was introduced in 1964. In fact, there were 364 measles deaths in 1963, and none by 2004, a reduction of 100 percent. The anti-vaxxer’s chart showed how many persons were dying from measles, but not how many persons were contracting it. Advances in health care had enabled more persons to live with the disease, but only the vaccine eliminated it.   

Earlier this year, I again made myself examine an anti-vaxxer claim rather than dismissing it. For years, I had pointed out there was more formaldehyde in a pear than in any vaccine. But one day, I read an anti-vax blog that asked, “When was the last time you injected a pear?” The point was that the way a substance enters the body makes a difference and the blogger even noted that one could safely drink cobra venom.

And he’s correct. Swallowing the snake juice would be different from having fangs inject it into you. If one were so inclined to try the former, the gastrointestinal tract would break down the venom, similar to how the body digests proteins in food. Also, if one drank venom, it would never enter the bloodstream in active form. By contrast, when a snake bites someone, the victim has nothing beneath its skin or in its muscles to counteract the venom. Since it’s not broken down, the venom swims to the lymph glands and into the bloodstream, where it attacks the nervous system and heart, perhaps fatally.

But while anti-vaxxers are correct on these points, they again fail to understand that this has no bearing on a vaccine’s efficiency or safety. While a snakebite and a vaccine both involve injected substances, using this to compare the two is a false equivalency because one saves lives and the other ends them.   

Like the measles deaths graph, if I had dismissed the pear point because it came from someone I viewed as an anti-vax, pro-disease crank, I would have failed my critical thinking test for the day. Consider this an endorsement for avoiding echo chambers and contemplating various viewpoints. Sometimes the opposing view will be right; other times, it will be wrong, but will cause you to examine the issue and learn something you hadn’t realized. In this case, what I learned was the difference in how the body handles injections and ingestions, and the impact this has on a vaccine’s efficacy.  

The key is how much of a substance gets into the bloodstream because once it’s there, the body will process it the same, regardless of how it arrived. With snake venom, there are too many toxins for the body to handle and the poison makes its way to vital organs. While vaccines have ingredients that would be dangerous in high doses, these are in tiny amounts and toxicity is determined by dose, not ingredient. Further, venom contains active neurotoxins and vaccines do not.

Anti-vaxxers may argue that vaccines bypass the immune system, but again, they are being selective with the facts. Vaccines will bypass the body’s first line of defense, but they are designed to do so and won’t work otherwise. Vaccines contain antigens, which are dead or damaged viruses that are active enough to provoke an immune response, but too impotent to be harmful. This forces the body to develop antibodies against the real virus and thereby become immune to it. If the antigens were destroyed right away, they would never serve their purpose. Besides, antigens are not straggling interlopers, but rather they work their way out of the body like other foreign substances.

Since anti-vaxxers focus on injections, I wonder if their movement would have gained its sinister steam if it didn’t have scary needles to fall back on. What if vaccines were in chewable tablet or powder form and yielded a sweet taste as opposed to a sore arm? According to the Vaxplanations blog, the reason such an approach cannot be pursued is because oral forms of most vaccines would be incapable of getting past the gastrointestinal tract. Stomach acid, enzymes, and gut bacteria would render them useless. There are a few exceptions, such as the oral vaccines for rotavirus and polio, which work because both diseases are caused by gut pathogens.

  

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“Shake, Prattle, and Roll” (Ideomotor Response)

LUIGI

Summoning the dead, determining the location of buried items without a metal detector, and making known the thoughts of the uncommunicative would all be remarkable traits. But while none of these disparate abilities exist, there are people who believe they possess them, and the explanation lies partly in the Ideomotor Response.

This refers to a physiological trait that is responsible for unconscious, unintentional physical movements. Examples would be unknowingly tapping your foot while music plays, spiking a non-existent football as your team needs to stop the clock, or aimlessly doodling during a boring meeting (perhaps a redundant phrase). Probably the most lucrative manifestation of the Ideomotor Response was when a man trying to dream up a way out of debt mindlessly twisted a piece of metal until he accidentally fashioned the first paper clip.  

Dr. William Carpenter coined the phrase in the mid-19th Century as a portmanteau of “ideo” for ideas and “motor” for muscular movement. He linked Ideomotor Response to hypnotism, somnambulism, and what came to be known as the Placebo Effect. Since then, it has come to be associated with other things, and the person experiencing it may have no awareness of executing any movements. This leaves them potentially vulnerable to the suggestion that mystical forces are at work.

Consider dowsing and divining rods. Dowsing refers to trying to locate underground water, while divining rods can be used to look for anything a mind can come up with. The implement is usually a wishbone-shaped twig or a long, narrow piece of metal. More recent products feature ersatz electronics complete with beeping sounds and blinking lights. Operators hold the device in front of themselves and the rod’s point will allegedly start quivering when the person is standing at or near the desired object. When this happens, it might seem like magic or perhaps that some undiscovered geological feature is being tapped. It actuality, it’s just the Ideomotor Response doing its thing, occasionally aided by confirmation bias. It’s the person shaking, not the object or an unknown force.

This is one of the easier pseudoscientific ideas to test and dowsing has repeatedly flunked the exam. It was the most common method of attempting to win the James Randi Million Dollar Challenge and the grand old man of skeptics still has his money.

Spending a few bucks (or even few hundred bucks for the supposedly advanced models) in a futile attempt to find subterranean water is not that big of a deal. It’s another matter when such devices are touted as being able to find bombs. Despite exorbitant prices of up to $25,000, such products have been snagged by persons in war zones desperate for a solution, and there have been fatal results.  

While not responsible for the loss of life, the Ideomotor Response has manifested itself in another tragic way, facilitated communication. This is the notion that an otherwise uncommunicative individual can make their thoughts known on a keyboard, via a second person holding the subject’s elbow or wrist in a certain way.

This was initially billed, incorrectly, as a miraculous way for parents to be able to know what their mute child was trying to tell them. It later became the avenue for false charges of child abuse, as the patient, though the facilitated communicator, seemed to type out molestation allegations against a caregiver.

However, even the most basic test of the purported abilities have shown facilitated communication to be without merit. When only the subject has been shown an image, then the communicator is brought in and asked to help the subject type in what they saw, the failure rate is 100 percent.

Returning now to harmless manifestations of the Ideomotor Response, we will address Ouija Boards. On such objects, tweens play an innocuous, if dull, game. Matt Walsh is the latest in a long string of panicked evangelicals who consider the boards to be a devastating demonic doorway. However, the only force in play is the Ideomotor Response. For as Neil Tyson has noted, the spirit controlling the planchette always uses the same vocabulary, idiosyncratic phrases, and spelling errors as the person they are co-piloting with.

This was best demonstrated on an episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Two persons playing with the board were asked to stop and were then blindfolded. The board was then stealthily turned 180 degrees and when play resumed, the duo moved the planchette to where it would have gone had the board never been turned. So either the Ideomotor Response is responsible or the demons have permanent residency in the players’ eyelashes.

  

 

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“Canned response” (Diet soda study)

CANCER

This past month, my Facebook feed has seen a frenzy focused on fizzy drinks. The panicky parade of posts tied diet soda to dementia, stoke, Alzheimer’s, and wearing linen out of season.

The alarm centered on one study, which was read by Dr. Harriett Hall, but likely not perused by those who posted the terrified screeds. By reading it, Hall learned that there were 2,888 subjects who were followed for 10 years, and that 97 of them had a stroke, while 81 of them developed dementia, most of those displaying symptoms consistent with Alzheimer’s. The authors relied on a survey of test subjects to determine how much diet soda each person consumed. All this lead to headlines which warned that drinking one or more artificially-sweetened soft drink per day was associated with a tripling of strokes, dementia, and Alzheimer’s.

While worried posters presumed correlation meant causation, even the lead researcher cautioned against reaching that conclusion. That man, Matthew Pase, said, “It is not clear whether the diet sodas are causing stroke and dementia or whether unhealthy people gravitate more towards these drinks than healthier people.”

Addressing these and other shortcomings in Fortune, Sy Mukherjee observed that an accurate description would be, “Study determines minor observational link, but no direct cause-and-effect, between certain people who drink artificial sugar beverages, but it has a small sample size that doesn’t include minorities or account for a whole bunch of other critical factors.” But there’s little click-bait or alarmist value in that.

Meanwhile, physician Aaron Carroll highlighted several reasons why you should take this study with a grain of, in this case, sugar. Carroll pointed out that while the conclusions were based on results from one model that adjusted for demographics, diet, physical activity, and smoking, another model which adjusted for still more potentially mitigating factors produced less-pronounced results. Yet this model received scant attention.  

Other deficiencies of the study: Various artificial sweeteners have different molecular makeups, meaning they likely have different impacts on the body; the study focused only on diet soda consumption and did not take into account the subjects ingesting artificial sweeteners through other food and drink; it highlighted relative risk rather than absolute risk, as it declared that subjects were thrice as likely to have stroke or dementia, instead of pointing out that the percentage of all subjects who had these conditions was one half of one percent. That would fit into what would be expected of the general population.

This response to this study was the latest in a long string of doom and gloom pronouncements about several artificial sweeteners that has been going on since at least the mid-1970s. Then, the worry was over saccharin causing bladder cancer in rats. While this was true if the rats were force fed large doses of saccharin, the cancer developed through a mechanism that humans lack. So the danger was for rodents and that’s only if they got into your Diet Dr Pepper and finished off a case in short order. Had there been any truth to the rumor, bladder cancer rates would have plummeted once other sweeteners supplanted saccharin.

In the war on cola, aspartame has been especially slandered. Critics have accused it of causing seizures, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, birth defects, tinnitus, migraines, emphysema, and (fill in the blank with your own malady). Yet, as Hall noted, aspartame is the most frequently evaluated food additive and the metadata of published studies show it is safe for anyone without the genetic disorder phenylketonuria. But those studies don’t get the headlines and the headlines that do get published usually misrepresent what studies say about carbonated refreshment.

It’s not that there could never, under any circumstance, be any harm in diet soda consumption. We should always be open to new evidence gained through double blind studies and follow where the science leads. But there is certainly harm in spreading fear through anecdotes, flawed studies, and misinterpretation of good data.

 

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“Wishing for the end of the end times” (April 23 apocalypse)

THISNIB

It’s just about time for this year’s end of the world. On April 23, Earth will meet its demise, courtesy the rouge planet Nibiru. Sometimes going by the more sinister-sounding Planet X, Nibiru brings together two normally disparate groups: End-time Christians and those who prefer a more alien or deep space flavor to their ultimate mass extinction events.

These groups normally don’t get along, though the antagonism is mostly from the former camp, whose members consider the other bunch to be messing with demonic gateways akin to astrology, fortune telling, and Ouija Boards. The star searchers, meanwhile, are normally indifferent to the religious pronouncements of doom, although some occasionally use Biblical interpretations to bolster their case. Such persons are notionally religious and have undertaken a conversion of convenience because they can use one small aspect of a faith to support their cause.

For example, self-described Christian numerologist David Meade has interpreted upcoming celestial arrangements as a “sign exactly as depicted in the 12th chapter of Revelation. This is our time marker.” However, most Christians reject such definitive statements as, “The world will end on April 23,” because of Matthew 24:36. This verse declares of Earth’s final moments, “About that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”  Still, a  minority of Christians see it otherwise and will point to verses which suggest that discernment and signs in the skies make it possible to know when God is about to call them home.

The latest Nibiru cataclysm – there have been many – embraces the biblical apocalypse angle. An alleged alignment of planets on April 23 is said to be referenced by Revelation, which tells of a “great sign in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant, and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.”

With their being no reference there to Earth, April 23, or the destruction of every man, woman, child, dog, ladybug, and fern, how does one manage such an interpretation? Elizabeth Howell at space.com wrote that Nibiru believers think the verse references the second coming of Christ and the advent of the rapture.  

Hence, believers conclude that on that day, the sun and moon will be in the constellation Virgo, as will Jupiter. The latter is said to be a euphemism for Jesus, though this conclusion seems to be reached only because Jupiter will be in Virgo, not because there is any logical reason for our solar system’s largest planet to represent a Galilean Jewish religious leader.

In any event, Howell notes that celestial bodies will not be arranged the way doomsayers are expecting. “Jupiter is actually in Libra all day and night on April 23, while the moon is between Leo and Cancer,” she wrote. “The sun, out of view when Jupiter and the moon are in the sky, is by Pisces.”

While not occurring on April 23, the arrangement cited by believers does occur every 12 years, which would be a huge strike against the notion of it portending gloom and doom. This has led to an ad hoc rationalization that Nibiru represents the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and that its addition to the alignment will push us over the cataclysmic brim.

This planet, for which there is no evidence of existence, is touted by enthusiasts as a rocky giant in a massive, haphazard orbit, which will eventually bring about our destruction, though the dates and methods keep changing. In fact, if we all wake up on April 24, the Nibiru doomsayers already have a backup apocalypse in place, as they say it is on target to pass near Earth in October and unleash volcanic fury. I’m not much on guessing the future, but somehow I think I’ll be writing about that prediction again in early November.

 

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“Bridge under the water” (Lemuria)

LUM

Lemuria is doomed to always be the scrawny kid brother of lost continents. Atlantis has appeared in culture for millenniums, from Plato’s Republic to a 1970s television program starring Patrick Duffy. It shares its name with a Bahaman resort and a Donovan song. Lemuria, meanwhile, is mostly found only in reddit threads and on obscure skeptic blogs.

But Lemuria, while fictitious, was born from a plausible scientific theory. Nineteenth Century Zoologist Philip Sclater proposed the existence of a now-sunken land bridge in the Indian Ocean that might account for apparent inconsistencies in human and animal migrations and in ecosystems. He was especially perplexed as to why lemur fossils were found in Madagascar and India but not in mainland Africa or the Middle East. Eventually, plate tectonics solved the puzzle of lemur fossils, as Madagascar and India had split and drifted apart.

That’s the way science works. Ideas are tested and researchers go where the evidence leads. Pseudoscience on the other hand meanders down a myriad of alternate paths, all while being loose with the facts or dismissing them altogether.

For example, Lemuria has been adopted by Tamil nationalists, who speak of a great landmass that once connected Madagascar, India, and Australia. In this tale, bigger means better and the lost continent is portrayed as home of an advanced culture with mighty warriors, tireless inventors, and exemplary artists. The upshot of claiming that all this took place on a sunken landmass is that no one is going to go descend to the ocean floor and seek contrary evidence.

Another nationalist connection associates Lemuria with Kumari Kandam, a fictional landmass in Tamil literature. While Kumari Kandem was originally presented as make-believe, it is embraced by Tamil nationalists in the same way that Ken Ham will cite ancient drawings of dragons as proof the fire breathing creatures were real. Trying to transform fictional writings and drawings into fact is a common ploy in pseudo-archeology, Zermantism, ancient alien hunting, and among those out to validate religious writings, such as the Book of Mormon.

Lemuria is tied to still another Indian myth, which teaches that the islands between Sri Lanka and India are the remains of a bridge built for the Hindu deity Rama.

While Tamil nationalists appropriated the idea of a sunken Indian Ocean continent in the early 20th Century, they were beaten to it by the forerunners of today’s New Age movement. Most of the blame goes to Helena Vlavatsky, who in the 1880s proposed that humans had evolved from seven humanoid species who lived on various lost lands. To make it more interesting, our ancient ancestors were described as mentally-challenged, seven-foot tall, egg-laying hermaphrodites. Sounds like a Sleestak. Vlavatsky further labeled them as spiritually aware, not bothering to define this term nor offering evidence for any of this.

While there likely were no such egg-laying giants on a lost continent, Vlavatsky herself gave birth to the Lemuria cottage industry. It has since added many branches. In one version, the truth of Lemuria is being repressed by the Catholic Church. In another, the lost continent somehow explains Easter Island. It is telling that Lemuria is not said to be aligned with Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Kiribati, or any other South Pacific locale except Easter Island – the one with a mysterious, mystical bent. Without the Moai, the location would be little known and would not be a focus of New Age spiritualists.

Still another version has Lemuria being a confirmation of Edgar Cayce predictions. If none of those excite you, it is also associated with alien travelers or is envisioned as a peace-loving utopia. While these differing shades of Lemurian thought mostly attempt to promote to positive ideas, a darker version warns that the geological calamity that befell the continent and could happen again, sending us to a watery mass grave.

There are even a few who say Lemurians are still with us. Ramtha is described as a Lemurian warrior whose spirit is channeled by J.Z. Knight. Another tale has flesh-and-blood Lemurians living under Mount Shasta, Calif.

Which of these Lemuria variants are embraced is determined by the interests of the believers, not by the amount of evidence produced. I have no bias for or against any of them. They are all equally worthless.

 

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“H2No” (Water-fueled vehicles)

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A water-fueled car is a hypothetical but unworkable device that runs on dihydrogen monoxide. About a dozen persons or organizations have claimed to invent this. Some were genuine believers who thought they had found a breakthrough and others were fraudsters who were scamming investors. In either case, pseudoscientific ideas were the focal point.

The best-known claimant was Stanley Meyer, who also tinkered with an attempted perpetual motion machine. He died in 1998 of an aneurysm, which conspiracy theorists translate as “murdered.”

Like many pseudosciences, the water-fueled car features genuine terms being bandied about but being misapplied. One example would be “electrolysis.” Through this means, it is possible to split the hydrogen and oxygen within a water molecule and this is presented as a potential working mechanism for a water car. But doing so uses as much energy as is released when hydrogen is oxidized to form water.

The laws of thermodynamics are in play here. Releasing chemical energy from water in equal or greater amounts than the energy required to manage such a production negates the fantasy of a water-fueled car. There’s no free lunch and no free energy, either.

Meyer’s cell involved modifying existing internal combustion engines so that they could receive fuel directly. The supposed mechanism involved using hydrogen-oxygen reactions to power the engine and consume electricity in the fuel cell to split water into these components. Now, it’s true that hydrogen gas will react with oxygen to produce energy and that the only product of this reaction is water. Indeed, that is a rudimentary description of what goes on inside a fuel cell. But while energy results, it is first necessary to input energy.

If interested in hearing the other side, kindly visit YouTube or the website of Henry Makow, who insists that, ““Humanity is being held hostage by the Illuminati bankers who control the oil cartel.”

The problem with claims of repressed water-fueled cars, perpetual motion machines, or hidden cancer cures is that researchers, from amateur dreamers to post-doctoral fellows, are all working with the same laws of physics and chemistry. And most are following the same Scientific Method. Brilliant minds and forward thinkers have tried to accomplish all of these and they likely would have if the notions were possible. And it would have happened more than once, so trying to repress it would necessitate being aware of each time it occurred and silencing the inventor, through intimidation or bribery, before he or she announced it.

I had a great uncle who was naturally gifted in mechanics and who spent years trying to perfect a replacement for the internal combustion engine. If it were possible to devise a water-fueled automobile, he or someone like him would find it. So if Meyer was killed for his creation, only the man would have been destroyed, not the idea.

Another flaw in the repressed invention theory is that oil company executives would never decline the chance to embrace a lucrative innovation. Doing so would cost them billions and they would run the risk of their competitors discovering the invention.

One variant of the water-fueled car centers on supposed generators that turn water into HHO gas. From this gas, it is alleged that resulting electrons can be used to power automobiles. This is the claim made by the Japanese company Genepax, who tellingly made this claim to a press conference of mainstream reporters instead of submitting it for peer review to mechanics experts.

The holes in this idea are similar to what were present in Meyers’ device. Dr. Steven Novella of the New England Skeptical Society wrote, “It takes energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. When you then burn the hydrogen by recombining it with oxygen, you generate some of that energy back. But the laws of thermodynamics stipulate that the energy you get back must be less than the energy you put in.”

In what passes for its explanation, Genepax throws around the word “catalyst,” a typical pseudoscientific tactic where a science word is used in an attempt to impress, not educate. But Novella noted that a catalyst in merely a means to enable a reaction to run more quickly or efficiently. It would not be the avenue for a reaction to go from a low energy state such as water to a higher energy state such as hydrogen and oxygen.

Alas, the only major water-related automotive invention has been the cup holder.