Here is the video:

Some people who have discussed this video may have seen only a shorter version showing the last bit.

Here are some of the arguments given pro and con on this video’s realness, and my assessment of them.

1) It is real because Golden Eagles occasionally eat children.   Maybe. There is no particular reason that a Golden Eagle would not eat a child, though I know of no confirmed reports of this. This particular question … could or would a Golden Eagle do this … is part of a larger theme of belief in non-human animals eating humans. People are mostly divided on this issue. Lions, it is said, don’t eat humans because they don’t like the taste. However, they do now and then. Lions and other cats tend to specialize on their prey, so day to day, healthy pride lions eat one or two species of antelope (or something) as do leopards and other cats. Switching to humans is not uncommon for large predators, but once they do they are killed. So, you don’t have very many long-career human-eating large predators. The idea that a predator won’t eat a human because of some mystical exceptional property of humans (including taste) is wishful thinking. But, predators who do so immediately face serious odds against them because humans are a bad-ass species. There is no a priori reason to say that a Golden Eagle would not or could not attack and/or eat a human infant and/or toddler. It is, however, unlikely. But, unlikely events happen. Conclusion: This point does not tell us if the video is fake.

2) It is real because Golden Eagles can and do eat large prey. This is absolutely true. Golden Eagles are the (mostly) Temperate version of the large Monkey-Easting and other eagles found in many areas across the world, and they tend to specialize on largish prey. The better known (to the average Westerner) “Bald Eagle” and its sister species in Eurasia are in that size range, much more numerous, but specialize in fish, but even they occasionally take a fawn or other large non-fish (and often, they take birds). Conclusion: Plausible.

3) It is not true because Gold Eagles are rare in Montreal. True, they are in fact rare everywhere as most large territorial predators are (with some exceptions) and Golden Eagles are especially rare and “shy” of human settlements. They do live in the general area, though, and they seem to migrate from Canada to points south, so a Golden Eagle passing through is not at all impossible. Conclusion: Plausable.

4) It is not true because it is an Osprey not a Golden Eagle. I believe that this was said by a bird expert who may have seen only the shorter version of the clip. On watching the clip, I believe it is an Eagle because it looks like one. It could be an “immature” (year old, full grown) Bald Eagle, but the markings on the wing actually look like a Golden Eagle. However, telling an immature Bald from a Golden is tricky and actually requires more of a look than we get in this video. Conclusion: Nothing is disproven here.

5) It is not real because an Eagle of this size can’t lift something as heavy as an infant or toddler that high in the air. This is my personal favorite for why the video is faked, and as far as I know I’m the only person to have noted this (on various facebook posts) so far. People have argued against this saying “Eagles take large prey” and “There’s this video of them taking a wolf” and “There’s this video of them lifting mountain goats” but all that is wrong. There is one “real” video shown on Animal Planet shot from above of a gold eagle grasping a mountain goat kid that it has dragged off a cliff and “guiding” its body down as it falls, seemingly dragging it across a ravine to a cliff face. But at no point does the Eagle lift the kid. In other videos of a Golden Eagle attacking (under human command) wolves or in other cases hunting Geese does a Golden Eagle lift anything off the ground.

Bald Eagles, which are about the same size, or a bit smaller depending on which population we are looking at, lift fish they’ve caught out of the water and fly off with them, but it is a struggle. If a Bald Eagle grabs a fish that is too big, the bird will fly just above the water dragging the fish on the surface. In some cases, the Bald Eagle virtually swims atop the water with the entaloned fish under or just on top of the water, to the nearest shore, where it drags it (with difficulty) to the land, kills it, rests for a while, then eats it. (Then spends considerable time drying off!) The fish that are too large for the Eagle to lift out of the water are significantly lighter than a human infant. Conclusion: The part where the eagle lifts the child up into the air is fake. This still leaves the possibility that an Eagle or Eagle like raptor swooped down on a child, but there was no lifting.

6) It is not real because this is not how Golden Eagles hunt their prey, for a couple of different reasons (this is an extention of #5). The large eagles such as the Golden Eagle and the various monkey eating eagles do knock large prey (like monkeys) off of branches or cliffs, pounce on them, rip them up and eat them on the spot. But they only carry off bits and pieces if they carry anything off at all. I’ve seen this in the Congo: You find a monkey killed by an Eagle, but abandoned (because humans came along). You convince the Pygmies to leave the monkey there and come back later in the day and a limb is missing. You come back still later in the day and only half the body is there. You come back even later and it is all gone. Conclusion: Not relevant, but instructive, and there is always room for a Pygmy story.

7) It is fake because the carrying-off of prey behavior is done during nesting and this eagle was not nesting. Eagles carry food to their nests only when they are feeding young that are there. There are no nesting Golden Eagles near any parks in or near Montreal, and this is not really nesting season. When the Canadians are wearing warm clothes, the only “nested” eagles are large enough to fly to the food mom or dad have killed on the ground. The Golden Eagle would have killed the infant/toddler on the spot and eaten it there… But that would not have happened because an Eagle would not try to kill and eat a small human while the other, large humans are standing around ready to stomp the Eagle. Conclusion, the Eagle in question was an idiot.

It is possible, as I suggested above, that a large raptor did swoop down and strike a kid. That is not entirely impossible. Had that happened, a lot less of the video would have to be faked! But the bit of the video where the eagle lifts the child into the air did not happen. That is faked.

UPDATE: 8) It is fake because someone admitted to having faked it. Conclusion: Assuming they are not faking having faked it, this would indicate it was faked.

This is being discussed on my facebook page, Don Prothero’s facebook page, here, here, and here.

Is there life on Mars?

Despite what one might think, what with large class sizes and the homogenization of culture caused by TV and Fast Food, the fact remains that clumps of high school students organized into classes can vary widely from one another. Each year has its own characteristics, and each classroom-sized bunch of them, taking a particular course together, can be very different from the next. A teacher I know has ended up this year with a science class with a large proportion of students who believe that ghosts are real, and while they are at it, they also seem to think there is a high probability that Bigfoot is real, and probably the Loch Ness Monster and most conspiracies one might care to mention. I don’t think it is the whole class, just a half dozen students or so, but enough that the existence of ghosts has become a background theme in the patter that accompanies the usual classroom activities such as arriving at the beginning of class, asking permission to go to the bathroom during class, and leaving at the end of class.

“Wait a second … You are telling us that you don’t think Ghosts are real but you believe in Martians?”

Huh. When it is put that way, it does seem a little strange. And, it brings up an interesting learning opportunity, or really, a set of learning opportunities, but the problem has to be parsed out and pared down quite a bit to make it not backfire. This is because things are rather complicated if you acknowledge the historical context of the question. In the end, a teacher who makes a lesson comparing the quest for ghosts and the quest for Martians is asking to get fired, if they teach in a public school, unless the administration has a well proven track record of standing by their teachers when Reverend Mike and the Dark Horses on the School Board show up. And, off hand, I can’t think of any schools that have that. But, we can certainly discuss it here.

First, I direct you to Claire Evans’ discussion, The Canals of Mars. Canals have always been an interest of mine. When I was a little kid barely able to walk I dug many canals connecting inland seas (that I has also constructed) to the nearby lake. Sometimes the nearby lake was the Atlantic Ocean which added additional engineering problems (a six foot tide) but also a great deal of excitement. Entire civilizations based on canals would be inundated by the twice daily sea level rise, never to be seen again despite my best efforts to construct something that might not only remain after the flood but perhaps trap something, like a shark or small whale.

Later, when I more or less grew up and became an archaeologist, I got to work with real canals. I worked on a project wherein the most important canal in America was being transected by pipelines, and my job was to be lowered down into the canal, emptied of water by dozens of pumps, in the middle of the winter, on the scoop of a 40-foot beam backhoe, where I would dangle there and examine the wall of the 400 foot long 45 foot deep excavation for evidence of past cultural activity. We also examined the remains of the canal this big new canal had replaced, the Champlain Canal, which was made at the same time as the famous Erie Canal and which remains as part of the same water level control system. We emptied the canals out by building dams or closing locks, and then pumping out the water underneath the ice, along with the tiny fish and other organisms, which would then spread across the grass covered field that was once the site of numerous industrial buildings, where they would first die then later stink. We hand rescued the larger fish, some of them quite large, using shovels and buckets, and they went into the nearby Hudson River or into undrained parts of the canal.

Later, I got to work on the Middlesex Canal, (pronounced “Middle Sex Canal”) which was the first canal ever build in the US to move boats, that ever actually got used. I also got to work, indirectly (through documents mainly) on Mother’s Brook. If you really know your early industrial history in the US you’d want my autograph. It was the very first canal in the US, it was the first attempt at joining two different river systems in their upper reaches, and it was the first human-made water way designed to power hydraulic machinery, and it happened way before anything we Americans would call the Industrial Revolution.

But enough about my canals, let’s talk for a moment about the Martian canals. I’m going to summarize a few key factoids for you, some of which you’ll find in Clarie’s post linked to above:

• “Canals,” or waterways, were identified on Mars during the early days of modern astronomy.
• Some of the early Canals were thought to be natural waterways, others dug by intelligent beings.
• Some of the things identified as Canals were thought of as objects used by Martian sorcerers (thought this by actual scientists).
• All of the Canals identified on Mars were optical illusions of some kind, they never existed.
• The most detailed maps of Martian Canals, by Lowell himself, were probably detailed maps of the back of Lowell’s eyes, because blood vessels in the retina are a major source of the optical illusions referred to above.
• Even though the canals that were observed for decades never existed, there are in fact canals on mars.
• The canals on mars are not canals, but rather, natural water courses where water once ran. On Mars.
• Percival Lowell was a relative of Francis Cabot Lowell, who was linked to early industrial development in Massachusetts that involved the excavation of the aforementioned Middlesex canal.

So. We have the idea of water courses on Mars, which may have been rivers, may have been dug transport canals, or may have been the tools of sorcerers. These ideas are based entirely on false data and eventually go away. But, early research on Mars also suggested the possibility of ancient free water on the planet, and eventually, these suggestions panned out. Let me add that some years ago the study of a rock that fell off of Mars and landed on Earth suggested life on Mars. That evidence has been questioned, but there were two distinct forms of evidence and they have not both been refuted. Indeed, the NASA machine currently tooling around on the planet is equipped to test this hypothesis directly, in situ.

There is the distinct possibility that life once existed on the Angry Red Planet, and it is even possible, I suppose, that there is some of that life there now, underground, mostly dormant, bacteria like. The long list of assertions made about mars includes many assertions of life, but many of these assertions need to be rejected because they are bogus. But does the presence of lots of bogus assertions weaken the others? No, actually, not at all, because they are coming from entirely different sources and based on entirely different data. But, given the nature of culture, the nature of Science Fiction interacting with culture, and the nature of the History Channel, this would not be easy to parse out with 10th grade students. But it is quite possible. It can show the corrective nature of science, and this topic brings in a lot of different elements from both physical and life sciences (which, in turn, makes this a difficult topic to develop in either area of teaching).

The part about ghosts is different. First, ghosts are linked to religion. A ghost is a spirit released from a human, so there is the presumption of a spirit, and beyond that, of a particular kind of spirit. Therefore, a teacher can not discuss ghosts with any sense they might exist (or even that they might not exist) without being seen to favor a particular religion or belief system, which in turn is a violation of various rules, laws, and policies. A teacher can’t really give ghosts a chance, even a ghost of a chance, without doing what we insist creationists are not allowed to do in our pubic school classrooms.

But having said that, one could “test for” ghosts. This can be done because the phenomenon of “ghost” is linked to a list of material assertions about them, and these can be investigated. So can Bigfoot, and so can the Loch Ness Monster. And, these things have indeed all been investigated and they are all pretty much explained away, though I quickly add that you should read my novel for a different perspective on all of that.

The difficulty is that disproving ghosts does part of the work to disprove religion, for the same reasons. Most (but not all) religions also make material assertions. One can disprove one or the other of a set of such assertions, and the religion can stand, because one could argue that “we just got that one wrong” or “this one was a metaphor” and so on. But after a while, when all the assertions are tested as best they can be tested, and they are all shown wanting of proof, religion kind of dries up and blows away.

That would be about the time Reverend Mike and the School Board shows up and the teacher gets his or her ass fired. For addressing innocent questions raised by students that could have been learning opportunities.

Oh well.

But it is not. Much more recently, the SCA appointed as a co-director for one of its state groups a guy who has developed a very firm reputation as a Mens Rights Advocate and overall Sexist Misogynist Creep. Or at least, so it appears.

The individual in question is Justin Vacula, and he’s been appointed as co-chair of the executive council of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the SCA. I’ve got some information below on why this is a bad move, but I want to say right away that the SCA Executive director has already stated on a blog her answer to people’s concerns:

… the Secular Coalition for America has not “hired” anyone in any state. We have a staff of seven in DC. We are staffing state coalitions in 49 states, DC and PR. The state coalitions are made up of interested groups and individuals in the states and particupation is voluntary. We are willing to work with as many affiliated and allied groups and individuals as possible. We are seeking volunteers in the states and are thankful to those that are willing to assist. We have much work to do at the National and State level and request that all interested parties please consider joining the SCA in our mission as given to us by our member organizations. Please sign up at secular.org. Edwina Rogers

When Rogers was first hired, she made a big deal out of the fact that she’d be overseeing the development of a state chapter in every state. We are now being told that the SCA of which she is Executive Direct really has nothing to do with the state chapters. The “hired” vs. “Volunteer” distinction means nothing in relation to the present question.

Vacula published a piece on Men’s Rights Activist site “A Voice for Men” in which he attacks modern feminism and equates feminists with vampires and piles on with the attacks already underway designed to silence the Skepchicks (a group of women skeptics with whom I’ve worked for a few years) in particular Amy Roth Davis See this link for details on the attack on Amy. This act and related activities by Vacula clearly place him in the camp of anti-feminist anti-women pro-sexist activists who should not be leaders in a humanist movement which does, pretty much, have liberal and progressive political values. He has also been a regular member of the famous “slime pit” which, sadly, was a product of this very blog network (though it has been expunged).

Apparently, Vacula has been criticized for being less than smart i the arguments he’s made about various legal positions, and for showing poor leadership. The details are summarized in the writeup for the following petition which I urge you to sign:

But the Skeptic faces more than just uncritical thinking, incorrect facts, or poor scientific judgment. The Skeptic must also wrestle with … The Anti Skeptic.

Of which there are several kinds.

Of late we’ve seen an epidemic of Antiskeptic activity occur within the skeptical movement itself, with people who call themselves skeptics because they find the movement interesting, who came to this party because they head there were girls here or because they thought it was a good way to look smart, or in some cases, because they encountered some annoying belief system (bigfoot or ancient aliens or something) and thought this was a good way to purge their experience of it. But they are not willing to be skeptical, or even thoughtful, about other things in their life. They want the thrills but don’t want to invest in too much of their own critical thinking. They don’t understand that skepticism does, really, have a political edge to it, not because skepticism in inherently political, but because so many political views don’t stand up to critical analysis, and because so many skeptical or scientific perspectives have been taken up by various parties and made political. When these Antiskeptics discover that their dearly held Libertarian or “Independent” (have you ever noticed that almost all “independents” have almost identical views on most issues?) perspectives are intellectually bankrupt they quickly erect the “skepticism is not political” smokescreen and try to hide there. Doesn’t work, but that’s what they do.

But I don’t want to talk about those annoying people here. Nor do I want to talk about the professional Antisketpics … the denialists such as those in the Anti-Global Warming game, who often use the word “skeptic” to label themselves although they are almost all crazy people with a chip on their shoulder and easily led by a charlatan such as Lord Monkington or Andrew Watts.

(Threats of law suits for saying something mean in 3 … 2 … 1 …)

No, I don’t want to talk about those annoying people either.

The Antiskeptics I want to talk about are the people who don’t even know that they are Antiskeptics, and they probably don’t even know what a “Skeptic” is. They lead their lives with a mixture of critical and uncritical understanding, a lot of received knowledge, often (but not always) woo-ish beliefs. Most importantly, though, they have a vague understanding that there is a “truth” out there that is more correct than the truths they live with, but that it is too much work, and often, against their own personal self interests, to embrace it. And, even though such folks may be unaware of a “Skeptics movement” they are at least vaguely aware that you are up to something…that you are a bit more prone to correct some belief they have, or to introduce critically evaluated knowledge into the conversation, or to mention some dumb-ass thing someone is doing with the particular disdain that comes from knowing how wrong it is. Even if done politely.

This Antiskeptic is your brother or sister or mother or child or cousin or neighbor or teacher or student or coworker. Over time, they see you coming. Subconsciously or not, they are pretty good at deflecting knowledge. In some cases, that may be why they are an Antiskeptic (rather than the other way around). They may just be good at avoiding learning something new.

And there are techniques. There’s a dance, a game, a modus operendus. I think you know what I’m talking about because you’ve seen it all before.

Here is a formulaic (literally) example of one possible interaction with an Antiskeptic. Your intent is to say something quite straight forward, like “2 + 2 = 4”

So, you say “Hey, 2 + 2 =…” and just then the Antiskeptic interrupts you and says, “I know! 2+ 2 = 3!” and then they move on to the next topic quickly. In order for you to get your “2 + 2 = 4” into the conversation you have to stop and reverse and change course and do all kinds of fixing up of stuff and that rarely goes well. This is known as the Interrupting Antiskeptic.

Then, less interesting but more common, is the Evasive Antiskeptic. Simply put, this is the person who hears what you say but then dismisses it without much fanfare, obviously uninterested in engaging in an argument.

“Hey, 2 + 2 = 4,” you say.

“Yeah, whatever. How ’bout them Red Socks,” is the reply.

Then there is the Watch the Monkey Antiskeptic. This is more of a technique than a type of Antiskeptic. You are making an argument and the counter argument consists of something totally unrelated but that seem really important.

“Hey, 2 + 2 = 4,” you say

“Numbers are the hobgoblin of the Patriarchy!” is the reply. Which, of course, is true, but not really the point.

Then there is the Mine the Harbor Antisketpic. This is usually a friend you see only now and then, or a co-worker you only meet every few weeks, but they are totally on to you. With this person, almost all conversations start like this:

“I know you are going to tell me that 2 + 2 equals something other than 4, but I just think it is important to know that everybody is entitled to their own opinion.”

And thus, your critical thinking is bound to bump into that little socioculture land mine, fair or not, like it or not.

There is one other kind of Antiskpetic I’d like to mention. This is rare, and it usually requires two people who have been doing this together for a long time. Often, a married. A few years back I encountered such a couple who were ani-Vaxers, but there are other couples where this routine applies to many other aspects of life. This is where the mention of, say, two and two equaling four and stuff leads immediately to an argument between the two members of the couple, which takes off so far into the stratosphere, and does so much damage to reality, that you realize that your humble efforts to assert arithmetic have created a black hole of numerical stupidity involving calculus, trigonometry and analytical geometry (to stretch the analogy to the limit).

You say to Mary and Bob, “Hey, 2 + 2 = 4”

Mary: “Bob is so bad at math we bought a couch last month and it was two feet too long”

Bob: “I thought you told me that the couch was two feet to short! I re-ordered a shorter couch, two feet shorter than the first one”

Mary: “If it is two feet shorter than the one that is too long, then it’s going to be twice as too short!”

Bob: “No, that’s not how it works at all. Just trust me.”

Mary: “Last time I trusted you we ended up with a window air conditioner that fell out of the window after you installed it”

Bob: “That was not me, that was your brother. You’re thinking of the time I hitched up the trailer to the wrong car and we drove all the way to North Dakota without the trailer”

Mary: “No, that was the time we drove all the way to North Dakota without the kids, not the trailer. The trailer was a totally different time you screwed up”

And so on and so forth.

What is your favorite kind of Antisketpic?

Photo of bigfoot attacking biker by ( kurtz )

Fruit noun, plural: fruits

(1) (botany) The seed-bearing structure in angiosperms formed from the ovary after flowering.

source

See? Tomato is a fruit.

Having said that, in common English parlance we do not call a tomato a fruit. We put the tomatoes in with the vegetables. Is this because we are unknowledgeable? No. It is because we are wise. Anyone who reads Fortune Cookies knows this:

Knowledge is knowing that a Tomato is a Fruit. Wisdom is not putting a Tomato in the Fruit Salad.

There are two things that bother me about this. First, we don’t do this with cucumbers. Cucumbers are also a fruit. Or butternut squash. That’s also a fruit. Or peppers. Fruit. We only do this “I’m a smart skeptic look how smart I am” thing with tomatoes. Why? Perhaps because of all the “vegetables” that are “fruit,” tomatoes are the most fruit-esque, more near the vegetable-fruit line, more positioned, as it were, to challenge the common knowledge. Or, maybe the “knowledgeable” who like to make fun of the villagers by pointing out that this vegetable is a fruit don’t know that a lufa sponge is also a fruit. Personally, I think it is because tomatoes are red, and so are a LOT of fruits. (Most of which are inedible, it seems, but that’s another story.)

So, the first thing that bothers me is that it isn’t taken far enough. The second thing that bothers me is that it is taken too far. Tomatoes are not fruit, they are vegetables, as are summer and winter squash, carrots, lettuce, and onions. Why? Because that is what we call them in English. Oh, the scientists? They have a different set of terms for these things. In fact, scientists have a huge big pile of terms related to plants…Achene, Laevigate, Inframedial, Staminode, and Spinescent to name a few…and among those terms there are two that look a lot like common English words and that have overlapping definitions: Fruit and flower. Just as the word “fruit” in English does not overlap with the scientific term “fruit,” the English word “flower” does not overlap with the scientific term. You do know, for instance, that those showy red flowery things on Poinsettias are not flowers. Those are just red leaves. Yet, they are flowers. When you visit Grandma at Christmas time and she’s got a big Poinsettia sitting there on the side table, you don’t say “Oh my, Grandmother, what large and pretty leaves you have there!”

So, the second thing that bothers me is this: The “fact” that tomatoes are “fruit” is not true. In English, they are vegetables. They are in the vegetable section, separate from the fruit, in the store. We treat them as vegetables. They taste like vegetables. There is no fruit in a BLT. Oh, sure, in Science Tomatoes are “fruit” … I know this because I wrote my PhD thesis in Science on Fruit so I’m a total expert on the subject. But I also wrote my PhD thesis in Anthropology of human-plant interactions. And I noticed that while the scientific lexicon and the natural language lexicon often overlap, they are not the same. I’m not big on “separate magisteria” because that’s a bunch of crap. But if we see the world as having One True Terminology, then we see the world without its culture. That would be wrong, boring, and close minded.

So, this is the thing: Science can’t communicate by standing on a box and shouting out its rules and insisting that variance between science and culture is indicative of culture being wrong. Tomatoes are not fruit, and the word “theory” means an idea that is weak. In English. Scientists and science boosters can insist as hard as they want that everyone who believes these things are wrong, and if they insist hard enough, in intro science classes an on the Intertubes, then everyone will eventually get it and use proper botanical terms and make correct reference to The Scientific Method when talking about their’ boyfriend’s chance of getting a job at the Target. Not.

Besides. Did you ever ponder the scientific meaning of the term “Vegetable? Turns out, Tomatoes are vegetables if we consider that “The noun vegetable means an edible plant or part of a plant.” Vegetarians eat vegetables, including strawberries.

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a vegetable. Wisdom is understanding that a seeming contradiction is not a contradiction at all, but rather, a reflection of the cultural complexity of science and the scientific complexity of culture.

Image by Nina Matthews

… originally from Adam Savage or if he’s quoting someone. I think it might be his.

Today, I was in an internet argument with someone (can you believe how many people on the internet are WRONG???) and I used a phrase like that. Then I instantly lost the argument. Here’s how it went:

We were arguing about whether or not JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald shooting from the sixth floor of the Book Repository. This guy was claiming that the evidence was pretty clear that something else was going on, and I was challenging him with facts.

He told me that my facts were wrong simply because they were facts that I was merely claiming to be true (from written documents, mainly), as opposed to his facts, which were facts he had heard somewhere. Amused and bemused, I said “…You are not free to construct your own reality…”

To which he responded, ” am indeed free to construct my own reality if I wish. In fact, all realities are constructs and subjective and we all have them, so that pont is irrelevant. ”

I’m not sure that a French bridge has to do with the Grassy Knoll, but I”m sure he has some reason to make the connection.

When I was a kid, I remember people coming up with JFK conspiracy theories. One kid I knew in school went off to Dallas, supposedly, to break into the seventh floor of the hospital and liberate Kennedy’s body, on life support. I paid little attention to most of this, but then one day, when I was about 19 or so, I decided to read two or three books on the topic and find out what all the noise was about. So I got myself a couple of conspiracy theory books, read them, and learned what conspiracy theories were all about.

At the time of Stone’s JFK, I was pretty much able to cite an recite the details of most of the JFK assassination conspiracy theories. As I read about the originally, thought about them later, and then, saw Stone’s move, I became increasingly convinced that they were all wrong, in part because the evidence was pretty messed up and contradictory, then eventually, I realized that the creation of a conspiracy theory is in fact its own cultural construct, a kind of cultural mental illness, actually, that had its own life and its own reason for existing. But, even so, I never during all that time articulated a proper counter theory, or more to the point, a proper refutation of the theories.

I did have three conversations that shaped some of my thinking on this. One was from an experienced military sniper who said something like “Yeah, sure, that kind of shit happens all the time” in reference to the “magic bullet.” One was with a guy who had worked with a neurosurgeon who, in turn, worked on Kennedy. This was in relation to the “missing brain” tissue which forms part of the conspiracy theories … brain tissue that held evidence which was destroyed. The autopsy weight for the brain was something like 300 grams, and it should have been closer to 1800 grams or so. I’m told the surgeon noted that “We just put down a number … there wasn’t any brain to speak of. The guy was shot in the head.” The third conversation was with my friend Nancy DeVore, and this pertains to the seeming ned among conspiracy theorists to find people or organizations or groups of people (Hoover, Castro, the Mafia, the Cubans, LBJ, the Soviets, etc. etc.) to have wanted to shoot Kennedy. Nancy, who grew up near Dallas but has moved by the time of the assassination to Cambridge, Mass, simply said, “He was a Yankee Liberal from the North. Everybody in Texas wanted to shoot him.”

Much later on in time,I came across a book that discussed the assassination from a differnt perspective, criticizing the conspiracy theories, and independently examining the evidence. This was Case Closed by Gerald Posner. Posner does an excellent job of describing the facts and explaining the circumstances. From this book I find the following things to be most interesting:

1) Oswald attempted to assassinate another person earlier in time, and the bullet from that attempt matched the rifle he used to kill Kennedy.

2) Oswald apparently only found out that Kennedy woudl be in Dallas at the last minute, and happened to have only three bullets to his name at the time.

3) Oswald was on the list of people the FBI would have normally rounded up for the visit of the President, but they thought he was in New Orleans.

Think about these facts in relation to all of the conspiracy theories, and you will eventually come to understand that Oswald shot Kennedy, and acted alone.

Jack Ruby … now, that’s an entirely other question ….

Sarah Moglia is the event specialist for the Secular Student Alliance¹ and has written an interesting piece on “Why [she doesn’t call her]self a Skeptic” in which she asserts that there are people who call themselves “Skeptic” who are not, at least sometimes, and there are those who are rather “skeptical” (as we like to define it) most of the time but don’t bother with the label. She does not name names; I’ve made the same observation and I’m not going to name names either either. But we both have had plenty of opportunity to observe, and even a practicing Skeptic would not toss aside our unattributed observations.

Unless, of course, said practicing Skeptic simply does not want to accept our shared conclusion and wishes to use the lack of naming names in favor of their argument. It’s a matter of choice, really: Believe Sarah and Greg, and maybe make a few of your own observations, or insist on clearly enumerated cases as evidence within the same blog post that makes the assertion. You can call it either way. Demand the highest level of proof or assume that well meaning observers who prefer not to name names but may have made valid observations. It’s your choice, as a skeptic, to pick one way or another.

And the fact that it is a choice is evidence that skepticism has a cultural aspect.

It, Skepticism, also has a political aspect. I don’t think it is a coincidence that I find myself in a state of mutual understanding about skeptical matters with people with whom I also mostly share a political point of view (though such things as political points of view are big and messy, so we can’t expect perfect alignment). Like Sarah. The main political feature of Skepticism is the division between those that a) believe that a purely skeptical life is the apolitical life; b) believe that one can be political and skeptical but while a person may partake in both the two must generally be practiced separately; and c) those who believe that skeptical thinking and a particular range of political views go hand in hand. Group “c” is of course correct, members of group “a” are deluded and usually think this sort of thing because it is convenient for them to do so. Members of group “b” are probably just trying to keep everyone happy but secretly agree with me (oh, I’m in group “c”) … as all people who on the surface disagree with me surely must, at some deep level or another.

But seriously, yes, Skepticism is never apolitical. And it is never acultural. Having said that, it is a mechanism for thinking about the world more clearly than you get with other methods, within the unavoidably cultural and political world in which we live.

Sarah hits on a point that is absolutely correct and if you don’t know this you need to. “Skepticism” is not a thing, but rather, it is a process. Once you understand the processual nature of Skepticism, you will be a better skeptic. Until then, you’re just a dood with a T-shirt. Sarah notes:

To me, skepticism isn’t something you are. It’s something you do. While yes, we do have words that classify people by things they do (for example, a vegetarian or a hockey player), I don’t think skepticism is the same. … I think people should be able to tell that I’m a skeptic by how I behave (do I ask questions? Do I make decisions based on sound evidence?), not by what I call myself.

Please read Sarah’s post!

¹I’ve probably got that slightly wrong. I don’t know the structure of the SSA well enough to be sure. Feel free to correct in the comments.

For a full year, A.J. Jacobs followed every piece of health advice he could — from applying sunscreen by the shot glass to wearing a bicycle helmet while shopping. Onstage at TEDMED, he shares the surprising things he learned.

I always thought it would be interesting to assemble ALL of the warnings and instructions that come with the stuff you get (water heater, iPod, car, children’s toys, etc.) and implement all of the instructions, as per the instructions. A.J. should do that next.

Another source of alternative medicine is plants or other “natural” products. Over human prehistory and history, around the world, people have adopted the practice of eating one kind of plant or another (or extracts or products from those plants) for a ritual purpose, or sometimes, health related reasons. If we believe that culture is highly adaptive and that human cultures would, over the long term and on average, mainly adopt and maintain practices that work, then we would expect a lot of “natural” cures or supplements to be effective. And, it turns out that some are. However, it is also true that some of the most effective natural substances have already been incorporated into our mainstream medicine, and in some cases, subsequently replaced by improved synthetic versions of the original “natural” product. Mostly, though, human culture turns out to be a lot like chimp culture; Both humans and chimps do things that seem at first to have a certain purpose but are by and large arbitrary and non-functional in any direct sense. (There is some interesting discussion of this here.)

So, we can probably think of “Alternative Medicine” as a proving ground or sandbox for new ideas, but one that kinda sucks as a place to actually get new ideas that lead to anything. In fact, University research departments and Big Pharm have expended a fair amount of effort in examining plants and animals as sources of medicines. I don’t think it is ever going to be productive to search around among, say, New Age Americans to see what they are doing to find new cures for diseases. Monitoring plant and animal use by cultures world wide is probably still worthwhile because it is interesting, but likely to also be low-yield in terms of real medicines. The systematic examination of life forms for interesting and useful molecules is probably the best way to go, until science has caught up somewhat with nature and can produce and test newly imagined molecules more effectively. And that day is coming; It will not be long before there is a new anti-biotic or psychotherapeutic drug invented by someone’s screen saver.

Alternative medicines might have “Placebo effects.” But I’m pretty sure I understand placebo effects and I’m pretty sure that the phrase is misused and misunderstood. Nonetheless, some people may feel better or improve more quickly from certain conditions if they carry out certain medically useless rituals. And, even if this is of only limited use, people are still going to do it. Therefore, it seems reasonable to allow for a certain amount of “Alternative Medical” research on wooish substances simply to demonstrate their safety or lack thereof. I want the NIH and the FDA to discover that this or that herbal remedy is dangerous, so people can be warned or the product regulated. But the search for effective cures among substances that we know are ineffective is a bad idea.

Having said all that, I would now like to point out that the term “CAM” has three words in it, not one. CAM does not mean what most people think it means.

Most Skeptics, when they hear the term “CAM” focus on “Alliterative” and get all skeptically thinking about that and claim that CAM is BS because acupuncture does not work, your chiropractor is a quack, and creatin does not build muscles. At the same time, people who are favorable towards CAM hear the term “CAM” and hear “Medicine” … i.e., a thing that cures you makes you feel better, etc. Neither group is hearing the first word in the phrase: Complementary!

If you like the alternative stuff, and you take your Echinacea every morning, then you may need to be reminded that CAM is not Medicine. It is Complementary. So, for instance, the process of dialysis is not CAM, it’s medicine. The practice of making a dialysis room, where someone will sit hooked up to a bunch of tubes for several hours a week, a more relaxing and less stressful place to be, is CAM. A practice that is complementary to the medicine, and maybe a good thing.

I had the opportunity a few years ago to advise a number of students in one of the country’s largest CAM programs. The CAM program was designed for medical students, but undergraduates in my program pursuing individualized degrees could sometimes hook up with CAM faculty and do projects, or even an entire undergraduate degree, related to faculty interests. I want to say that all of my CAM students but one were students that I inherited when I started working in this particular degree program (which had nothing to do with the CAM department) and it was unlikely that had the program not been cut and had I continued there, that I would personally have attracted or developed very many additional CAM students. Having said that, the students I worked with were smart, industrious, and not annoying from a skeptical perspective (mostly). I was quite impressed, in fact. And, to help my fellow skeptics understand what CAM is a bit better than they may now, I want to relate a few experiences.

At one point I was asked to sit on the oral exam committee of a student graduating from the program. My main question for the student was this: “You’ve been in the program for several years. What sorts of things that you thought were true, or likely true, in the beginning of your time in the program that you now think differently of, and why?”

The answer was essentially this: In early days, she said, she and others thought that “Alternatives Medicine” would provide specific cures for specific things. Acupuncture would be good for pain, some herbal extract would be good for a certain infection or other disease. Now, she said, we understand that most of these things either don’t work at all, or if they have a benefit, it is a more general one related to a person’s sense of well being or level of stress.

In other words, what she learned after being involved in this program for a few years was pretty much what you, as a skeptic, were probably thinking as well.

Another students worked out something I mentioned above: How to make a dialysis facility less stressful. That same student, in a different project, worked on the mind-body-art problem. When someone engages in certain kinds of activity, often involved with art, one tends to go into a trance-likes state. Is this related to some of the things shamans in various cultures do? Is it in any way beneficial? What does the brain look like when this is happenings? This was an undergraduate research project linked to a couple of classes, not a PhD, so she did not answer these questions fully. But, her approach was scientific, and she learned quite a bit, and nothing homeopathic happened.

I’m not suggesting that we build more CAM centers. Rather, I’d prefer to see those useful elements of CAM that have developed over the last couple of decades become incorporated in medical practice. Having said that, I also understand that the world of standard medicine may not be a good place for such things to exist. Perhaps CAM needs to be separate, institutionally, simply so that it won’t be eaten alive, gutted, re-purposed, or crushed.

And, having said that, I do think CAM funding should not be spent on testing things we know don’t work. Yet, having said THAT, I do not trust the medical profession to make sound judgments in that area. There are a handful of cases of medical experts writing off things prematurely that eventually became part of standard medicine, and those cases generally demonstrate that medical researchers and physicians are often not good skeptics. They receive their knowledge from their local culture the same way Vitamin-C popping New Agers do. I mentioned Creatin above. Some years back, I looked into Creatin and found that mainstream medical experts claimed it would not do what body builders thought it would do for a particular physiological reason that made sense to me at the time. But I also found out that some medical practitioners were using large quantities of Creatin effectively in certain special cases (of heart disease) in a way that violated our assumptions of why it should not work at all. And lately, I see that the Mayo Clinic web page on Creatin suggests that maybe it does work for body building after all, though with much equivocation. I no longer uncritically accept the assurances I was given ten years ago by M.D.’s that Creatin was a useless dilatory supplement. Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not (obviously I’ve got to read up on this again!). What I do remember from my first look at it is this: It was stated that a “peer reviewed study” had disproved the effectiveness of Creatin in body building. I found the study and read it, and discovered that the study’s results were ambiguous and the methodology sucked. Apparently, a study that confirms expectations is good enough to uncritically cite even if it is a bad study. This does not engender a high level of trust, does it?

Anyway, Elyse Anders asks about funding of CAM in a recent blog post which actually inspired the post you are reading now. She points out that some 120 million dollars or so are spent each year by NIH on CAM related research. That is around one half percent of the NIH budget, if my figures are correct. So, not much. Still, is it being well spent?

That funding is done through the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). So, our question would be, what does NCCAM fund, and how much of it is crazy stuff vs. possibly not crazy stuff?

Well, this is what they funded in 2011. There are 15 pages of grants, so I’m not sure how to examine or summarize this for a mere blog post. How about if I tell you about the first item on every other page as a sample?

• ACUPUNCTURE PRACTITIONER RESEARCH EDUCATION ENHANCEMENT 90K
• BOTANICALS AND METABOLIC SYNDROME 540K (plus 924K from NIH)
• N-ACETYLCYSTEINE AND MILK THISTLE FOR TREATMENT OF DIABETIC NEPHROPATHY 155K
• MIDCAREER INVESTIGATOR AWARD IN PATIENT-ORIENTED RESEARCH (K24) 202K
• ELUCIDATING THE PLACEBO EFFECTS OF ACUPUNCTURE: HOT FLASHES AS A CLINICAL MODEL 132K
• AUTOMATED TECHNOLOGY FOR PURIFICATION OF ACTIVE INGREDIENTS IN NATURAL PRODUCTS 381K
• MEDICAL STUDENT BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE LEARNING/TEACHING 135K
• VITAMIN C IN POLYMICROBIAL SEPSIS 345

Before you even think about commenting on this list, please remember that a list of titles and amounts is very very hard to put a meaning to. Don’t criticize a research project until you’ve read the grant proposal or at least the summary of it (and you can find them via the link above) or you are no better than Bobby Jindal with his Earthquake Prediction Research remarks.

Having said that, I do feel a bit icky about the above randomesque sample. I was under the impression that acupuncture was total woo (am I wrong about that?). If it is, then is funding research on it merely throwing expensive bones to poorly behaved dogs? Med student behavioral science learning and teaching might be interesting. Let’s look at the description of that one:

Most medical schools recognize the growing need for future practitioners to know basic aspects of behavioral health and social science, yet pervasive challenges in teaching these topics impact the effective learning of the essential skills, knowledge, and attitudes.

1) Often behavioral and social science content is not integrated with what is traditionally viewed as the “core” curriculum, causing students, and faculty to view these topics as less important than others in the curriculum.

2) The effective teaching of behavioral health skills requires small-group instruction and practice, necessitating a large number of well-trained faculty tutors. Preparing these tutors to convey the necessary knowledge and attitudes as well as the skills presents a major challenge for medical schools.

3) Preparation for the rapidly changing world of medicine necessitates that students learn more than how to perform specific skills. Students need to learn to assess the evidence for doing something in a particular way, and the underlying theory as to why it works. At UCLA there is an established, integrated curriculum in behavioral science and extensive training available for faculty teachers. Thus the primary challenge, and the one to which this proposal is directed, is to bring in competencies in the “why” as well as the “how.” The overall goals of this proposal are to develop

1) curricular modules demonstrating the evidence base for behavioral sciences,

2) effective faculty development materials, and

3) valid and reliable assessment tools that illuminate the evidence base and attitudes behind the skills and knowledge we are teaching, and to

4) disseminate these materials to other medical schools.

This will be done by a Curricular Planning Committee, under the direction of Margaret Stuber, M.D. An Expert Consensus Panel of content experts from a variety of medical specialties, public health, health psychology, and medical anthropology, as well as students, consultants from RAND, the community, and other schools of medicine, will contribute a public health and research perspective to the content.

Basically, a good idea. The success and importance of such a program will all be in the execution. But I would say this is not woo.

Let’s look at one of the more technical and physiological oriented ones that has to do with a “plant that can cure you”: The use of Milk Thistle extract for treating Diabetic Nephropathy:

Oxidative stress and glutathione (GSH) imbalance are major contributors to the pathogenesis of diabetic nephropathy. Circulating monocytes participate to this process since these cells carry a high oxidative burden and are found in diabetic renal tissue. Current options for the treatment of oxidative stress in diabetic nephropathy are limited and only partially effective, thus interest in the development of new strategies is high. N-acetylcysteine (NAC) and the milk thistle (MTh) plant flavonolignans are nutritional supplements with complementary antioxidant properties. Both supplements are capable of neutralizing directly toxic free radicals but, more importantly, NAC is substrate for the intracellular generation of GSH and the MTh flavonolignans are inducers of many cellular enzymes participating in GSH metabolism, including GSH-reductase (GSH-R), GSH-peroxidase (GSH-Px), GSH-S-transferases (GST) and superoxide dismutase (SOD). We propose that combined oral supplementation of NAC and MTh flavonolignans will reduce proteinuria and urinary and systemic manifestations of oxidative stress and inflammation, which are characteristically observed in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and related nephropathy. We expect these effects to be achieved with minimal or no side effects, and with good patient tolerance.

To test this hypothesis, we propose a double-blind randomized, placebo-controlled, five-arm pilot study which includes a dose ranging component in patients with T2DM and established nephropathy. Intervention will consist of the individual and combined oral administration of one level of NAC and two levels of MTh flavonolignans or placebo for three months. The intervention groups are: (A) placebo; (B) NAC 600 mg BID; (C) Siliphosï?? 480 mg BID; (D) NAC 600 mg BID + Siliphosï?? 480 mg BID; and (E) NAC 600 mg BID + Siliphosï?? 960 mg BID. The primary outcome measure will be urinary excretion of albumin, a marker of glomerular injury. Secondary outcome measures will be alpha-1 microglobulin, a marker of tubular injury, and urinary excretion of inflammatory cytokines and C-C chemokines, i.e. markers of renal inflammation. In plasma and in peripheral blood monocytes from the same patients, we will analyze GSH content and activity of GSH metabolizing enzymes. In addition, we will analyze the plasma and urine glycoproteome, with focus on those glycoproteins serving as inflammatory cell messengers and hormones. These variables will be monitored in relation to both treatment allocation and prevalent blood and urine levels of the active treatment. Throughout the trial, we will monitor the safety and tolerability of this combination treatment.

Cool. I wonder how it came out. This is quite possibly a good example of a CAM grant, assuming that there has not already been piles of research ruling out this thistle milk stuff. Or, it could be a case of throwing bones. I would have to do a literature review to come close to making a decision on that. In theory (and as we all know, theories are just stuff we make up but don’t believe) the whole point of having an NIH is to have trusted experts making these decisions.

The thing is, there are also politics at work when it comes to federal funding. Is the NIH funding useful research, training, and development or not? And, is it the role of the Skeptical Community to get involved in this sort of question?

The answer to the last question is a resounding yet provisional YES! I gave you the link. Pick a project, read the related literature, and figure out if funding that project is a valid use of funds, a bit of congressional pork, a wooish pet product of some bureaucrat, or a bone being thrown to someone. Write a blog post about it. Don’t extrapolate from your one careful look to the entire program, but rather, put it in proper context. If you don’t have a blog post, you can put it here as a guest post (if it is legit).

Otherwise, though, please don’t be a “relieved skeptic.” Elyse asked a valid question and raised important issues, and more are raised here. NCCAM is worth looking at … critically. We should do that.