Skeptic

Several years ago, I came across an imaginative essay entitled “Explaining Affirmative Action to a Martian.”1 The author, who I had never heard of, described a fictious interaction where a human explains the rationale of affirmative action to an alien. Among its gems is the following interaction:

Earthling: Black people were enslaved and subjugated for centuries, so, sometimes they get special dispensations. It’s only fair…

Visitor: So those black kids…were enslaved and subjugated, so they get to score 450 [standardized test] points lower than Asians?

Earthling: Well these particular black students didn’t experience slavery or Jim Crow themselves… But their grandparents might have experienced Jim Crow.

Visitor: Might have?

Earthling: Well, around half of black students at elite colleges are actually the children of black immigrants so they have no ancestral connection to American slavery or Jim Crow…

Visitor: … I’m utterly confused by you creatures.

The author of this essay was Coleman Hughes, a Columbia University undergraduate at the time. In the intervening years, Hughes has been one of the leading voices on race. As a long-time listener and fan of Hughes, I was eager to read his first book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. It did not disappoint.

Hughes has a gift for clearly and dispassionately evaluating one of our most explosive social topics. Oftentimes in today’s world, the political left exaggerates the prevalence of racism while the political right a priori assumes that all such accusations lack merit. What we so desperately need is a middle ground: An analysis that deals honestly with the racism which does exist without inflating it. This is what Coleman Hughes does.

What makes his book excellent is, ironically, the mundane manner in which he evaluates race. Hughes carefully dissects the arguments of neoracism, an ideology he defines as “discrimination in favor of non-whites…justified on account of the hardships they endure—and hardships their ancestors endured—at the hands of whites.” Reading Hughes is a breath of fresh air. He gives neoracism the long overdue hearing it deserves, one that is fair but critical.

Hughes forces readers to think in terms of counterfactuals. This is typically missing from public discourse but is essential for evaluating double-standards and identifying what philosophers call the “special pleading” fallacy where rules are inconsistently applied. For example, the author points out that Yale University did not denounce the racism of a psychiatrist who gave a talk saying, “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless.” Yet, as Hughes puts it, “Suppose [the speaker] had described fantasies about shooting black people in the head, burying them, and walking away… Is there any doubt that the Yale administration would have condemned her racism?”

In chapter five, Hughes delves into seven central tenants of neoracism, such as “Racial disparities provide direct evidence of systemic racism” and “White people have power in society, but Black people don’t.” Reading the book, and this chapter in particular, felt like following the author on a tour of three-legged stools. Each claim seems believable on its face but Hughes raises compelling arguments against them. For instance, consider the racial disparity tenant mentioned above which includes the claim that “there would be no racial disparities, or at least large ones, in a fair society.” It is easy to see the appeal: Blacks have been historically discriminated against and are on the short end of many troubling disparities. However, Hughes discusses factors other than racism that could explain group differences. Perhaps most critical is the age gap, such that the median White person is 10 years older than the median Black person. Wilfred Reilly points out that the age gap is even more striking (31 years) when comparing the modal (most common) age.2 Might that play a role in some disparities, such as wealth or incarceration rates?

One of the joys of reading Hughes’ book, at least for myself as a research psychologist, is the way key psychological concepts are infused throughout—even if not explicitly named (and since the author has no formal background this is not surprising). The notion of tribalism, something my colleagues and I have studied in the context of politics,3 is depicted as key to the neoracist ideology “because it casts every event as an instance of us versus them, good versus evil, black versus white.” Sadly, one of the most important lessons4 from social psychology—the subfield largely devoted to understanding how humans interact with each other—of the past 50 years is the ease with which people separate into groups and develop preference for in-group members.

Elsewhere, in critiquing what he calls “chronic victimhood,” Hughes writes, “A wise therapist wouldn’t tell you to accept chronic victim status…and think of yourself as forever trapped in your experience of trauma. The wise therapist would instead help you develop strategies for moving past the trauma you’d suffered, empowering you to escape the trauma’s gravitational pull.” Here, the author is getting at the idea of mindset, a concept developed by Stanford Psychology Professor Carol Dweck. Hughes is correctly pointing out that victimhood and its downstream difficulties should be viewed in the context of a growth mindset—something that is malleable—rather than in the context of a fixed mindset, which is not changeable. Growth mindsets suggest that people have agency to change; unsurprisingly, research generally supports the idea that it leads to better outcomes. A study by Jessica Schleider, for example, found that a single 20–30 minute computer-based session focused on enhancing a growth mindset reduced depression among adolescents when evaluated nine months later.5

There was one observation Hughes made in passing that clearly reveals his status as a gifted intellectual with a keen eye towards understanding how people think and behave. He starts by critiquing the position that America has failed to “acknowledge and atone for its past [racism]” by pointing out several facts which seem to contradict this assertion, including the adoption of Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Day as federal holidays, affirmative action programs, and most critically, Congress issuing apologies for slavery. Hughes argues that “none of this paints a picture of a general public, or a government, that is resistant to historical soul-searching.” Several paragraphs later he continues, “To this day, it remains a talking point among media pundits that America has ‘never’ issued a formal apology for slavery.” And this is where he makes his insight:

We must realize that a game is being played here. Normally when someone demands an apology, they actually want one. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the ability to continue demanding the apology is worth more than the apology itself. Sometimes the debt is worth more unpaid than paid… This is why every new apology, program, or holiday that they demand is forgotten as soon as it’s achieved… It’s not clear to me whether neoracists play this game consciously or whether there is self-deception involved. But either way, we are indeed playing a game, and if we don’t realize it, then everyone loses.

If you took out the word “neoracist” and told me this passage was from Eric Berne’s seminal 1964 book, Games People Play, I would have believed you. Hughes is arguing that a game of shifting goalposts is occurring. One could argue another instance of this happened in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. First, there were demands for Chauvin to be convicted. After he was convicted, the guilty verdict was seen as insufficient. For instance, Bernie Sanders tweeted the common sentiment “The jury’s verdict delivers accountability for Derek Chauvin, but not justice for George Floyd.”6 If no game were occurring, which is to say that opinion was also held before the conviction, then it seems to suggest courts are unable to administer justice for victims. This raises challenging questions about how justice would be administered (if possible) and who would decide what constitutes justice.

My only substantiative critique of the book is that, while it functions as a highly effective counter to ideas presented by radical neoracists, Hughes could have bolstered his argument in favor of colorblindness by also speaking more explicitly to moderates. I think many left-of-center people are put off by the ideas of activists such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and are disturbed by the way race is discussed in elite circles. However, I also think most would still favor mild affirmative action programs that they believe are appropriately calibrated. People who fall into this camp might agree with 90 percent of the book and even agree that colorblindness is a better approach to race than our current one. Yet, they might also argue that the best solution is to reduce, yet not eliminate, the consideration of race.

Overall, I found The End of Race Politics to be an excellent read from a superb up-and-coming author. Those teaching classes on race who include Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist on their syllabus should seriously consider adding this book to the reading list for a diversity of viewpoints. Students could then engage with scholars who hold diametrically opposing positions and debate the merits of each.

I doubt that will happen anytime soon, but will be delighted if proven wrong.

A review of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America by Coleman Hughes

About the Author

Michael H. Bernstein is an experimental psychologist and an Assistant Professor at Brown University. His research is focused on the overlap of cognitive science with medicine. He is Director of the Brown Medical Expectations Lab and co-editor of The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick. For more information, visit michaelhbernstein.com.

References

1. https://bit.ly/3Vi24Xv
2. https://bit.ly/48UG3Be
3. https://bit.ly/498cmNi
4. https://bit.ly/4amn181
5. https://bit.ly/4cddOR0
6. https://bit.ly/3TuKcGu

I don’t think I know anyone personally who doesn’t have strong opinions about music – which genres they like, and how the quality of music may have changed over time. My own sense is that music as a cultural phenomenon is incredibly complex, no one (in my social group) really understands it, and our opinions are overwhelmed by subjectivity. But I am fascinated by it, and often intrigued by scientific studies that try to quantify our collective cultural experience. And I know there are true experts in this topic, musicologists and even ethnomusicologists, but haven’t found good resources for science communication in this area (please leave any recommendations in the comments).

In any case, here are some random bits of music culture science that I find interesting. A recent study analyzing 12,000 English language songs over the last 40 years has found that songs have been getting simpler and more repetitive over time. They are using fewer words with greater repetition. Further, the structure of the lyrics are getting simpler, and they are more readable and easier to understand. Also, the use of emotional words has increased, and has become overall more negative and more personal. I have to note this is a single study and there are some concerns about the software used in the analysis, but while this is being investigated the authors state that it is unlikely any glitch will alter their basic findings.

But taken at face value, it’s interesting that these findings generally fit with my subjective experience. This doesn’t necessarily make me more confident in the findings, and I do worry that I am just viewing these results through my confirmation bias filter. Still, it not only fits what I have perceived in music but in culture in general, especially with social media. We should be wary of simplistic explanations, but I wonder if this is mainly due to a general competition for attention. Overtime there is a selective pressure for media that is more immediate, more emotional, and easier to consume. The authors also speculate that it may reflect our changing habits in terms of consuming media. There is a greater tendency to listen to music, for example, in the background, while doing other things (perhaps several other things).

I’m really trying to avoid any “these kids today” moments in this piece, but I do have children and have been exposed through them (and other contexts) to their generation. It is common for them to be consuming 3-4 types of media at once. They may listen to music, while having a YouTube video running in the background, while playing a video game or watching TV. I wonder if it just comforting for people raised surrounded by so much digital media. This would tend to support the author’s hypothesis.

Our digital world has given us access to lots of media and information. But I have to wonder if that means there is a trend over time to consume more media more superficially. When I was younger I would listen to a much narrower range of music – I would buy an album of an artist I liked and listen to the entire album dozens or even hundreds of times. Now, when I listen to music, it’s mostly radio or streaming. Even when I listen to my own playlists, there are thousands of songs from hundreds of artists.

Or there may be other factors at play. Another study, for example, looking at film found that the average shot length in movies from 1945 was 13 seconds, while today it is about 4 seconds. I like to refer to this phenomenon as “short attention span theater”. But in reality I know this is about more than attention span. Directors and editors have become more skilled at communicating to their audience through cinema, and there is an evolving cinematic language that both filmmaker and audience learn. Part of the decreased shot length is that it is possible to convey and idea, emotion, or character element much more quickly and efficiently. I also think editing has just become tighter and more efficient.

I watch a lot of movies, and again having children meant I revisited many classics with them. It is amazing how well a really good classic film can hold up over time, even decades (the word “timeless” is appropriate). Simultaneously, it is amazing how dated and crusty not-so-classic movies become over time. The difference, I think, is between artistic films and popular flicks. Watch popular movies from any past decade, for example, and you will be able to identify their time period very easily. They are the opposite of timeless – they are embedded in their culture and time in a very basic way. You will likely also note that movies from past decades may tend to drag, even becoming unwatchable at times. I am OK with slow movies (2001 is still a favorite), if they are well done and the long shots have an artistic purpose. But older movies can have needlessly long scenes, actors mugging the camera for endless seconds, pointless action and filler, and a story that is just plodding.

The point is that shorter, quicker, and punchier media may not be all about short attention-span consumers. There is also a positive aspect to this – greater efficiency and a shared language. There may also be shifting habits of consumption, with the media just adapting to changing use.

But I still can’t help the subjective feeling that with music something is being lost as well. I am keenly aware that the phenomenon known as “neural nostalgia“. What may be happening is that the media we consume between the ages of 12 and 22 gets ingrained onto a brain that is rapidly developing and laying down pathways. This then becomes the standard by which we judge anything we consume for the rest of our lives. So everyone thinks that the music of their youth was the best, and music has only gotten worse since then. This is a bias that we have to account for.

But neural nostalgia does not mean that music has not objectively changed. It’s just difficult to tease apart real change from subjective perception, and to also avoid the bias of thinking of any change as a worsening (rather than just a difference). More emotional and personal song lyrics is not necessarily a bad thing, or a good thing – it’s just a thing. Simpler lyrics may sound annoyingly repetitive and mindless to boomers, but older lyrics may seem convoluted and difficult to understand let alone follow to younger generations.

I do think music can be an interesting window onto culture. It reflects the evolving lives of each generation and how cultural norms and technology are affecting every aspect of their experience.

 

The post Is Music Getting Simpler first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

In 1974 Robert Nozick published the book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, in which he posed the following thought experiment: If you could be plugged into an “experience machine” (what we would likely call today a virtual reality or “Matrix”) that could perfectly replicate real-life experiences, but was 100% fake, would you do it? The question was whether you would do this irreversibly for the rest of your life. What if, in this virtual reality, you could live an amazing life – perfect health and fitness, wealth and resources, and unlimited opportunity for adventure and fun?

Nozick hypothesized that people generally would not elect to do this (as summarized in a recent BBC article). He gave three reasons – we want to actual do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them, we want to be a certain kind of person and that can only happen in reality, and we want meaning and purpose in our lives, which is only possible in reality.

A lot has happened in the last 50 years and it is interesting to revisit Nozick’s thought experiment. I would say I basically disagree with Nozick, but there is a lot of nuance that needs to be explored. For me there are two critical variables, only one of which I believe was explicitly addressed by Nozick. In his thought experience once you go into the experience machine you have no memory of doing so, therefore you would believe the virtual reality to be real. I would not want to do this. So in that sense I agree with him – but he did not give this as a major reason people would reject the choice. I would be much more likely to go into a virtual reality if I retained knowledge of the real world and that I was in a virtual world.

Second – are there other people in this virtual reality with me, or is every other entity an AI? To me the worst case scenario is that I know I am in a virtual reality and that I am alone with nothing but AIs. That is truly a lonely and pointless existence, and no matter how fun and compelling it would be, I think I would find that realization hard to live with indefinitely. But, If I didn’t know that I was living in a virtual reality, than it wouldn’t matter that I was alone, at least not to the self in the virtual reality. But would I condemn myself to such an existence, even knowing I would be blissfully unaware? Then there is what I would consider to be the best case scenario – I know I am living in a virtual reality and there are other actual people in here with me. There is actually another variable – does anything that happens in the virtual reality have the potential to affect the real world? If I write a book, could that book be published in the real world?

Nozick’s thought experiment, I think, was pure in that you would not know you are in a virtual reality, there is no one else in there with you, and you are forever cut off from the real world. In that case I think the ultimate pointlessness of such an existence would be too much. I would likely only consider opting for this at the end of my life, especially if I were ill or disabled to a significant degree. This would be a great option in many cases. But let’s consider other permutations, with 50 years of additional experience.

I also think that at the other end of the spectrum, with people knowing they are in virtual reality, there are real people together in this virtual world, and it is connected to the real world, than most people would find living large parts of their life in virtual reality acceptable and enjoyable. This is the “Ready Player One” scenario. We know from experience that people already do some version of this, spending lots of time playing immersive video games or engaging in virtual communities on social media. People find meaning in their virtual lives.

What about the AI variable? I think we have to distinguish general AI from narrow AI. Are the AI sentient? If so, then I think it doesn’t matter that they are AI. If they are just narrow AI algorithms, the knowledge of that would be bothersome. But could people be fooled by narrow AI? I think the answer there is unequivocally yes. People have a tendency to anthropomorphize, and we generally accept and respond to the illusion of human interaction. People are already falling in love with narrow AIs and virtual characters that don’t actually exist.

What about the “Matrix” scenario? This is something else to consider – is all of humanity in the virtual reality? In Nozick’s thought experience the Matrix was run by benign and well-meaning overlords that just want us to have an enjoyable existence, without malevolent intent. I do think it would matter whether or not a subset of humanity were in the Matrix, with other people still advancing technology, art, science, and philosophy and running civilization. It is quite another thing for humanity in its entirety to check out of reality and just exist in a Matrix. Civilization would essentially be over. Some futurists speculate that this may be the ultimate fate of many civilizations, turning inward and creating a virtual civilization. The advantages may just be too massive to ignore, and some civilizations may decide that they have achieved the ultimate end already and go down the path of becoming a virtual civilization.

In the end I think Nozick’s solution to his own thought experiment was too simplistic and one sided. I do agree with him that people need a sense of purpose and meaning. But on the other hand, I think we know a lot more now about how compelling and appealing virtual reality can be, that people will respond emotionally to a sufficiently compelling illusion, and people will find fulfillment even in a virtual reality.

What I think this means for the future of humanity, at least in the short run, is something close to the Ready Player One scenario. We will build increasingly sophisticated and compelling virtual realities, and as a result people will spend more and more time there. But this virtual reality will be seamlessly integrated into physical reality. Yes, some people will use it as an escape, but it will also be just another aspect of actual reality.

The post The Experience Machine Thought Experiment first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

The not-so-famous UFO case that caused the US Congress to spend millions of taxpayer dollars.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss417_Max_Stearns_2024_03_26.mp3 Download MP3

Order the Artificial Intelligence issue of Skeptic magazine (in print or digital format).

Looking ahead to the 2024 election, most Americans sense that something is deeply wrong with our democracy. We face extreme polarization, increasingly problematic candidates, and a government that can barely function, let alone address urgent challenges. Maxwell Stearns has been a constitutional law professor for over 30 years. He argues that our politics are not merely dysfunctional. Our constitutional system is broken. And without radical reform, the U.S. risks collapse or dictatorship.

In Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy, Stearns argues that we are in the midst of the biggest constitutional crisis since the Civil War, and that the roots of the crisis are in the U.S. Constitution itself. The Framers never intended a two-party system. In fact, they feared entrenched political parties and mistakenly believed they had designed a scheme that avoided them. And yet the structures they created paved the way for our entrenched two-party system.

From the start, our systems of elections and executive accountability thwarted the Framers’ expectations. In the information age, it has spun out of control, and the result is a hyperpolarized Republican-Democratic duopoly that has poisoned our politics and society and threatens to end our democracy. The two-party system now undermines our basic constitutional structures, with separation of powers and checks and balances yielding to hyper-partisan loyalties. Rather than compromises arising from shifting coalitions, we experience ever-widening policy swings based on which party takes control of the White House in increasingly combative elections. The restrictive nature of the choices voters face in each election cycle encourages battles for the souls of the Democratic and Republican Parties, with more moderate voices on one side and more ideologically strident ones on the other. This two-party stranglehold on our politics is exactly what the Framers feared.

To survive as a democracy, we must end the two-party deadlock and introduce more political parties. But viable third parties are a pipe dream in our system given the current rules of the game. Stearns argues that we must change the rules, amend the Constitution, and transform America into a parliamentary democracy. Unlike our two-party presidential system, well-functioning parliamentary systems have multiple political parties that represent an array of perspectives, giving voters more choices that better align with their views. In such systems, parties compete in elections and then, based on the results, form a majority governing coalition. In contrast with the endless hyper-partisanship that pushes Democrats and Republicans further and further apart, coalitions represent the nation’s ideological core, capturing views of multiple parties, accommodating competing positions, and moderating the most extreme ideologies or partisan commitments. This improves the outcomes for citizens, which helps to explain why surveys have found that voters derive greater satisfaction and the governments are more responsive in parliamentary systems.

Achieving a robust parliamentary democracy in the U.S. requires amending the Constitution. Although this is difficult to do, Stearns explains why his specific set of proposals is more politically viable than other increasingly prominent reform proposals, which cannot be enacted, will not end our constitutional crisis, or both. What does he propose doing?

1. Double the size of the House of Representatives, with half continuing to be elected by district, a new cohort elected by party, and the entire chamber based on proportional representation. This reform will allow us to end the two-party duopoly and create space for thriving third-, fourth- and fifth-parties that better align with voters’ values/worldviews.
2. Transform how we choose the president and vice president. Power to choose the president will shift from individual votes processed through the Electoral College to party coalitions within the House of Representatives. They will select the president and vice president from party slates by inviting up to five party leaders, in descending order of representation, to negotiate a majority coalition.
3. Provide a new mechanism for ending a failing presidency. The House can remove the president with a 60 percent no confidence vote based on “maladministration.” This standard is lower than the requirements for impeachment, and the amendments leave the impeachment clause intact. These reforms infuse parliamentary selection, proportional representation, and coalition building into the U.S. constitutional system while retaining and preserving our most essential institutional structures. The proposal would end the two-party system, create space for multiple parties, end partisan gerrymandering, moderate the most extreme ideologies, reduce polarization, and incentivize negotiation and compromise.

Maxwell L. Stearns is the Venable, Baetjer & Howard Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. He has authored dozens of articles and several books on the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the economic analysis of law.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” —Sherlock Holmes

The “game” of my title refers to the one played by media outlets and podcasters for the past seven years interviewing rogue scientists and conspiracy theorists to spin tales of Americans being zapped by nefarious foreign actors with sonic or microwave weapons. This includes the authors of studies suggesting that there were brain and inner ear injuries suffered by many victims of Havana Syndrome when those studies were clearly flawed and any competent mainstream scientist who read them would have seen these shortcomings. Indeed, they did—there were at least two classified studies that found no evidence of such attacks, instead emphasizing the likely role of stress.1, 2, 3, 4 Publicly, these politicians and pundits were referring to the events in Cuba as attacks, yet gave no hint of the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies.5

On March 18, 2024, the National Institutes of Health released two studies that failed to find any evidence of brain or inner ear damage in victims of Havana Syndrome—a mysterious array of ailments that have befallen U.S. Government personnel in Havana, Cuba, since 2016.6, 7 The results were published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and are in stark contrast with two earlier studies published in the same journal in 2018 and 2019 that purported to uncover brain anomalies in American diplomats and intelligence officers who served in Havana.8, 9 While some media outlets are portraying this discrepancy as a deepening mystery, it is nothing of the sort.

The earlier publications were riddled with flaws.10 In fact, the editorial board of the European journal Cortex called for the authors of the 2018 study to clarify their methods or retract the article.11 Their attempt at clarification did little to quell the controversy.12 The NIH study was more comprehensive and took great pains to have a well-matched group of control subjects. The studies were conducted over a five-year period beginning in 2018. Sophisticated MRI scans were taken of the brains of Havana Syndrome participants and compared to a healthy control group of government workers in similar jobs. Some of the control subjects even worked at the American Embassy in Havana.

The Havana Cohort: A Group Under Stress

A major finding of the new study was that 41 percent of those who reported Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs) “from nearly every geographic area, met the criteria for Functional Neurological Disorders” (FND) or exhibited symptoms indicative of underlying psychological distress.13 It is noteworthy that mass psychogenic illness, which some skeptics have long tied to the episode, is a form of FND. The presence of functional disorders is not surprising because they are commonly triggered by stress and the American staff in Havana were, by any definition, under exceptional stress. They had been counselled that they would be under surveillance 24/7 once they arrived in Havana and later told that they may be targets of a mysterious weapon and to be vigilant for strange sounds and symptoms. They were even warned not to stand or sleep near windows as it could render them vulnerable to an attack. In FNDs the brain structure and hardware are unaffected, but the sending and receiving of messages is disrupted, hence neurologists often refer to it as a software issue.

Havana Syndrome participants also reported more symptoms of depression, fatigue, and post-traumatic stress. The lead author of one of the studies, Dr. Leighton Chan, emphasized that the symptoms in Havana Syndrome patients were “very real, cause significant disruption in the lives of those affected and can be quite prolonged, disabling and difficult to treat.”14 Another member of the research team, neuropsychologist Louis French, noted that the presence of mood symptoms and post-traumatic stress were not unexpected. “Often these individuals have had significant disruption to their lives and continue to have concerns about their health and their future. This level of stress can have significant negative impacts on the recovery process,” he said.15

No Evidence of Attacks

As for the role of a directed energy weapon that has long been proposed as the cause behind the events, Dr. Chan said if an “external phenomenon” such as “a directed energy ‘attack’ is truly involved it seems to create symptoms without persistent or detectable physiologic changes.”16 While the researchers found no evidence of an external source for the symptoms, this does not prove that there wasn’t one, leading one media outlet, the Daily Mail, to suggest that a weapon was likely involved but its presence was undetectable. The newspaper interviewed Georgetown University Neurologist Dr. James Giordano, a persistent critic of the possible role of psychogenic illness in Havana Syndrome victims, who was quick to dispute the findings of FNDs. “Let me be very definitive, we’re not talking about a functional neurological disorder, which is a psychosomatic disorder,” Dr. Giordano said. “We’re talking about a disruption of neurological function, that then created a host of effects, including downstream physiological effects that manifested themselves cognitively, motorically, and behaviorally.”17

Giordano’s position lacks supporting evidence. One could also argue that there was no evidence of extraterrestrial involvement, but that doesn’t prove space aliens weren’t targeting victims with a ray gun. On the weight of evidence, stress appears to have played a major role in the outbreak. While critics like Giordano have jumped on the statement that the symptoms were real and severe as evidence that they were not functional, psychosomatic symptoms are real and can be as severe as any other symptoms and often involve the same brain pathways.18

After release of the NIH reports, one of the world’s leading experts on FNDs, British neurologist Jon Stone, told The Guardian science podcast that this condition was a plausible explanation as many of the patient’s symptoms “got worse over time,” which is typical of a functional disorder. Brain injuries, on the other hand, are typically “worse at the time of the injury, then they slowly improve,” he said. The paper’s world affairs editor Julian Borger was then asked to weigh in. He said that while a “secret weapon” seemed far-fetched, it was equally unlikely that so many diplomats and spies would be affected by psychogenic illness. This response highlights a common misconception of psychogenic disorders: the symptoms are real and can happen to anyone regardless of education level or training.19

The Extraordinary Claims of David Relman

In 1953, Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir devised the term “pathological science” to refer to instances “where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking” and the like.20 The history of science is rife with examples of extraordinary claims that were eventually discredited. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries several astronomers, most notably Percival Lowell, claimed to discern through their telescopes a network of canals on Mars. This turned out to be an exercise in the subjective nature of human perception involving Martian geology where people saw what they expected to see. In 1903, French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot claimed to have discovered N-rays, a new form of radiation that turned out to be a product of experimenter bias and self-deception.21, 22 In 1989, chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann created international headlines amid claims they had achieved cold fusion—a limitless source of clean energy. Their experiment turned out to be flawed and could not be reproduced. To this list we should add the name of Stanford microbiologist David Relman.

Media coverage of the NIH studies has been dominated by the lack of evidence for brain damage and the findings of significant stress-related disorders in many of the subjects who reported anomalous health incidents. Considerable attention has been given to Dr. Relman, who was chosen by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) editors to deliver an accompanying editorial. Relman oversaw two panels that studied the claims of people reporting AHIs and the circumstances surrounding them.23, 24 He contends there is still a mystery surrounding some of the victims and holds the door ajar to the possible involvement of “pulsed radiofrequency energy.” The problem is, the two panels he oversaw showed bias by failing to interview prominent skeptics, ignoring evidence for mundane explanations, and giving considerable weight to unproven claims that supported his pet energy weapon theory. I have previously documented these and other shortcomings in Skeptic, including how one of his panels botched the diagnostic criteria for the presence of psychogenic illness.25, 26, 27 Neither panel conducted a single physical examination of a patient or engaged in any directed testing.28 The decision to choose Relman to write the commentary may be an attempt by the JAMA editorial board to mitigate the damage to their reputation after they published two poorly designed studies that have received much criticism by the scientific community.29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37

A bugaboo of Relman is the appearance of “abrupt-onset sensory phenomena” in a subset of patients on which he places great significance.38 In his commentary he mentions these cases while discussing “Havana Syndrome” reports from around the world. He writes: “Most strikingly, these phenomena often displayed strong location dependence, in that they quickly dissipated when the individuals vacated their initial location, and then returned when the location was revisited.” These incidents were followed by such conditions as “vertigo, dizziness, imbalance, blurry vision, tinnitus, headache, nausea, and cognitive dysfunction, sometimes leading to chronic disability.”39 The implication is that they may have been targeted by a directed energy weapon.40

In the press briefing, Dr. Chan said that his team looked at these reports that Relman had flagged as “cases of concern” for intelligence agencies—people who reported an acute onset coinciding with a “strong sense of locality or directionality.” But Chan said he was unable to study them as Relman had not provided the name of a single person involved, and that his definition of “locality or directionality” was not well-defined. Dr. Chan also noted that “cases of concern” were confined to “a really small group of individuals” who were affected very early in the outbreak in Cuba because early on U.S. Embassy personnel were counselled to move away from where they initially experienced symptoms. “If you’re on the X, get off the X,” they were told.41 Cases of concern were first noted in the National Academies of Sciences study that was conducted between 2019 and 2020, and only looked at reports in Cuba and China. If there were later cases of concern identified globally in Relman’s second panel that convened between 2021 and 2022, it was not conveyed to Dr. Chan.42

Why is it that the two panels headed by David Relman uncovered patterns that the American intelligence community—including the CIA and FBI—failed to find? This is a red flag. It is noteworthy that Relman’s panels had limited resources and access to government documents. For instance, in discussing the National Academy of Sciences committee and the attempt to examine cases of concern, he observed: “We did not really have the means to do our own investigation of these cases. We simply collected all that we could from those that had done various and sundry investigations and tried to make the most sense out of it we could.”43

While Relman claims to have found a small group of outliers, why weren’t the names of these victims given to the NIH study authors so they could be examined more closely? If these cases are deemed to be of such significance, why haven’t detailed interviews with these victims been released so others can read the descriptions? How many people are we talking about? The true test of the scientific method is to open your data to outside scrutiny, and in this instance, there is little to scrutinize. The ECREE Principle—extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence—was never more apropos. There are just too many questions surrounding these cases to make the claims that are being asserted. The symptoms in abrupt onset cases can be caused by an array of common conditions. While a sound may appear to be targeted, there is a considerable body of literature on ear-witness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable and subject to error.44 An energy weapon could theoretically produce what is discerned to be a concentrated beam of sound, but so can a cricket rubbing its wings or legs together. We know that some of the reports involving a beam of sound that accompanied early Havana Syndrome victims were recorded during the “attacks,” and later identified as crickets.45, 46 Curiously, Dr. Relman’s commentary was crickets when it came to this alternative explanation.

Occam’s Razor

Some media commentators and rogue scientists continue to speculate that a small number of cases in U.S. personnel in both Cuba and later around the world, may have involved a directed energy weapon. Yet, Occam’s razor fits well here. Given two competing explanations, the simplest is the most likely. The entire episode is explainable using conventional psychology, and without recourse to foreign actors and secret weapons. It is noteworthy that the NIH findings are consistent with the conclusions of a report issued in March 2023 by the Director of National Intelligence that found no evidence of sonic or microwave weapons or the involvement of state actors. Instead, intelligence agencies traced the health complaints to an array of pre-existing conditions, environmental factors, and anxiety reactions.47

The appearance of Functional Neurological Disorders in the NIH studies is consistent with the early events in Havana, which suggest a psychological origin. A 2022 interview with CIA officer Fulton Armstrong is revealing. Armstrong was in Havana during the initial “attacks” and says that the man who first reported the mysterious sounds and became known as “patient zero,” had engaged in a zealous campaign to get embassy officials to take the sounds seriously. “He was lobbying, if not coercing, people to report symptoms and connect the dots,” he said.48 This lobbying could have primed other staff to frame future sounds and states of unwellness as an attack by a nefarious state actor. It is also notable that when other staff believed they were under attack from a sonic weapon, they recorded the sounds accompanying them. These sounds were consistent with the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket.49

By 2017, the State Department began counselling new staff being posted to Cuba to be vigilant for mysterious sounds and health incidents.50 This counselling created an expectation of illness and provided the frame through which sounds and symptoms were interpreted. Suddenly, mundane events such as a headache, fatigue, insomnia, or tinnitus were perceived as symptoms of a possible attack—a classic setup for psychogenic illness.51 “Patient zero” was pivotal in laying the foundation for the mysterious sounds that were noticed to coincide with subsequent “attacks”—the sounds of crickets. While cricket sounds cannot cause physical sensations such as head pressure and tingling, hearing a cricket sound and fearing it may be emanating from a neuroweapon can trigger anxiety reactions. It is well-known that panic attacks often occur when people visit the same location associated with anxiety or previous attacks.

The Importance of Timing

Dr. Relman’s “cases of concern” raise many questions. As Dr. Chan observed, they were poorly defined, small in number, and not a single person was identified or further studied. Relman should release the information on each of these cases so their testimony can be scrutinized. The timing is also important. Relman contends that some of the early victims in Cuba were unaware that their colleagues were suffering from Anomalous Health Incidents.52 This claim is not consistent with the known timeline, which begins with so-called patient zero. This early series of events in Havana have been meticulously pieced together using interviews with over three dozen American and foreign officials and confidential government documents.53, 54

Scrutinizing these cases could help clarify the possible role of what psychologists refer to as “retrospective interpretation.” It is plausible that once alerted to their possible targeting by an energy weapon, staff would have thought back to when they arrived in Havana and identified any unusual sounds or medical events. While at the time these incidents were not deemed to have been worthy of seeking medical attention or reporting to their superiors, later, in light of the energy weapon scare, these ambiguous events could have easily been redefined as “attacks.”55

For years Relman has asserted that there was “clear evidence of an injury to the auditory and vestibular system of the brain” in some Havana Syndrome patients.56 This is a reference to a study conducted by University of Miami neurologist Michael Hoffer.57 The vestibular system deals with the workings of the inner ear, spatial awareness, and balance. Neurologist Robert Baloh, who created some of the tests that were used to assess the patients and has written the standard textbook in the field, has steadfastly maintained that Hoffer’s study was riddled with flaws and failed to demonstrate inner ear damage. Among the study flaws was the mystifying decision not to use housemates as a control group, and the notion that a directed energy attack could cause inner ear or brain damage without affecting hearing, which makes no sense.58 That the NIH studies failed to corroborate Hoffer’s findings comes as no surprise. David Relman is an acclaimed microbiologist, but he is not an expert in vestibular medicine. This is a classic example of someone outside of their field of expertise being led astray.

Relman’s attempt to take a small number of cases that are vaguely defined and discussed in passing in both his commentary and in his two panel reports, are essentially lipstick on a pig. No matter how hard you try to alter its appearance, at the end of the day, it’s still a pig. Like Bigfoot, chupacabras, and alien abductions, the evidence is lacking and there are alternative plausible explanations which are firmly grounded in established science.

About the Author

Robert E. Bartholomew is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He has written numerous books on the margins of science covering UFOs, haunted houses, Bigfoot, lake monsters—all from a perspective of mainstream science. He has lived with the Malay people in Malaysia, and Aborigines in Central Australia. He is the co-author of two seminal books: Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior with Hilary Evans, and Havana Syndrome with Robert Baloh.

References

1. Acoustic Signals and Physiological Effects on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba, November 2018. Declassified United States Government study.
2. Kirk, J. M. (2019). The strange case of the Havana ‘Sonic Attacks’. International Journal of Cuban Studies, 11(1), 24—42. See p. 27
3. https://bit.ly/4a7JvJY
4. https://bit.ly/49qjQeJ
5. One of the most vocal has been U.S. Senator Marco Rubio.
6. https://bit.ly/43ESTm3
7. https://bit.ly/3VyUDeK
8. https://bit.ly/3TPzPhx
9. https://bit.ly/4cwQM80
10. https://bit.ly/43ziVav
11. https://bit.ly/3PBMoKO
12. https://bit.ly/43uri77
13. https://bit.ly/3VyfKh9
14. ibid.
15. ibid.
16. Chan et al., 2024, op cit., pp. E10—E11.
17. https://bit.ly/3TpaiKE
18. Personal communication with Professor Robert Baloh, Department of Neurology, UCLA Medical School, March 23, 2024. For an excellent overview of FNDs see https://bit.ly/3VBqLyb
19. https://bit.ly/3vpmdAo
20. https://bit.ly/4aaO8mS, quotation on p. 16 reproduced from the original 1953 article with commentary by R.N. Hall.
21. Klotz, Irving M. (1980). “The N-Ray Affair.” Scientific American 242(5):168—175
22. Nye, Mary Jo (1980). N-rays: An Episode in the History and Psychology of Science. Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 11(1):125—156.
23. https://bit.ly/3xdTnne
24. Declassified United States Government Commissioned Report (2022). Anomalous Health Incidents: Analysis of Potential Causal Mechanisms, IC Experts Panel.
25. https://bit.ly/43uvCTP
26. https://bit.ly/4aaQ6ng
27. https://bit.ly/49fvmcy
28. https://bit.ly/3TzPxfH
29. https://bit.ly/43ziVav
30. https://bit.ly/3PCKbiu
31. https://bit.ly/3IY7gbr
32. https://bit.ly/3PyQT8Y
33. https://bit.ly/3PAXnUU
34. Baloh, R.W., and Bartholomew, R.E. (2020). Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria. Copernicus Books.
35. https://bit.ly/3vpoz2c
36. https://bit.ly/498CQhC
37. https://bit.ly/3PBajdI
38. Relman, 2024, op cit., p. E1.
39. Relman, 2024, op cit., p. E1.
40. While Relman writes about the plausibility of the possible role of microwave radiation in his commentary, he has not always been so confident. After the National Academies of Sciences report appeared, he was asked by National Public Radio reporter Sarah McCammon, “How confident are you that microwaves are what’s behind these symptoms?” His response: “We were not confident…we didn’t have any direct evidence that this could explain the entire story for sure or even parts of it…[and] we were not familiar with or read into the exact circumstances of these cases, so we couldn’t comment on the situational information that might have either supported or refuted this idea.” See: https://bit.ly/3x7kTma
41. Myles, R., moderator (2024). “NIH Telebriefing on Publication of Study Findings on Federal Employees with reported Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs) in JAMA.” This embargoed media briefing featured Dr. Leighton Chan, Dr. Carlo Pierpaoli, and Dr. Louis French who answered questions from journalists.
42. Myles, 2024, op cit.
43. https://bit.ly/3TNskaW
44. Öhman, L. (2013). All Ears: Adults’ and Children’s Earwitness Testimony. University of Gothenburg.
45. Acoustic Signals and Physiological Effects on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba, November 2018. Declassified U.S. Government study
46. https://bit.ly/3VwwOUC
47. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Unclassified: National Intelligence Council Updated Assessment on Anomalous Health Incidents, 2023.
48. https://bit.ly/3Tp6PvO
49. Acoustic Signals and Physiological Effects on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba, November 2018. Declassified U.S. Government study. An updated analysis with similar results was published on October 16, 2021 and titled, An Analysis of Data and Hypotheses Related to the Embassy Incidents, JSR-21-01, McLean, Virginia, 143 pp.
50. Oppmann, P., and Labott, E. (2017). “U.S. Diplomats, Families in Cuba Targeted Nearly 50 Times by Sonic Attacks, says U.S. Official.” CNN News, September 23.
51. One Embassy staffer told me: “The Embassy was a tightly-knit community with a very active rumor mill; many people were buzzing about the incidents’ and the related ailments starting as far back as December 2016. We knew as far back as March or April [2017] that doctors were comparing the symptoms to Traumatic Brain Injury. We were absolutely primed to know what the symptoms were. Additionally, many of us *were* experiencing headaches, mental fog, irritability, etc. —completely understandable given the high stress environment and the fact that we went asleep every night wondering whether we’d be zapped in our beds, and consequently lay awake for hours at a time, days on end, stretching into weeks and months.”
52. Merchant, 2021, op cit.
53. https://bit.ly/3TNFkNU
54. Baloh and Bartholomew (2020). pp. 29—37. These are highly respected journalists and Golden has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting prowess.
55. The NIH study found that the first reported AHI occurred in 2015. All previous investigations had placed the date as late 2016. But this does not mean we should push back the start of ‘Havana Syndrome’ to 2015. Once American staff were interviewed about their AHIs, they would have been asked to recount any unusual health incidents or sounds that they experienced since arriving in Havana. As the U.S. Embassy was reopened under Obama in 2015, it is conceivable that any mysterious sounds or health complaints that were recalled during this period, could have easily been relabelled after the fact as an incident or ‘attack.’ That at least one person reported an AHI in 2015 should receive no great significance.
56. See, for example: https://bit.ly/4aaRIxk; see also, Merchant, 2021, op cit.
57. https://bit.ly/3TP84pv
58. Baloh and Bartholomew (2020). op cit.

On March 16 surgeons transplanted a kidney taken from a pig into a human recipient, Rick Slayman. So far the transplant is a success, but of course the real test will be how well the kidney functions and for how long. This is the first time such a transplant has been done into a living donor – previous experimental pig transplants were done on brain dead patients.

This approach to essentially “growing organs” for transplant into humans, in my opinion, has the most potential. There are currently over 100 thousand people on the US transplant waiting list, and many of them will die while waiting. There are not enough organs to go around. If we could somehow manufacture organs, especially ones that have a low risk of immune rejection, that would be a huge medical breakthrough. Currently there are several options.

One is to essentially construct a new organ. Attempts are already underway to 3D print organs from stem cells, which can be taken from the intended recipient. This requires a “scaffold” which is connective tissue taken from an organ where the cells have been stripped off. So you still need, for example, a donor heart. You then strip that heart of cells, 3D print new heart cells onto what’s left to create a new heart. This is tricky technology, and I am not confident it will even work.

Another option is to grow the organs ex-vivo – grow them in a tank of some kind from stem cells taken from the intended recipient. The advantage here is that the organ can potentially be a perfect new organ, entirely human, and with the genetics of the recipient, so no issues with rejection. The main limitation is that it takes time. Considering, however, that people often spend years on the transplant wait list, this could still be an option for some. The problem here is that we don’t currently have the technology to do this.

Similar to this approach is to grow a human organ inside an animal – essentially using the animal as the “tank” in which to grow the organ. The host animal can then provide nutrition and oxygen, and a suitable environment. This would require that the animal will not reject the organ, which would mean treating with drugs or engineering animals hosts that are humanized or whose immune systems cannot mount a rejection.

The most futuristic and also ethically complex approach would be to clone an entire person in order to use them as an organ donor. This would not have to be like “The Island” movie in which the cloned future donors were living people kept in a controlled environment, unaware of their ultimate fate. Anencephalic humans (without brains) could be cloned and grown, and just kept as meat bags. There are two big disadvantages here. The first is that the clones would likely need to be kept alive for years before the organs would be mature enough to be used. How would that work? Would a recipient need to wait 10 years before they could get their donor organ, or would there be clone banks where clones were kept in case they were needed in the future? These seem like cost-prohibitive options, except for the super wealthy.

One potential solution would be to genetically engineer universal donors, whose organs could potentially be transplanted into any human recipient. Or perhaps there would need to be a finite number of donors, say for each blood type. When someone needs an organ they get the next one off the rack. Still, this seems like an expensive option.

The other main limitation of the clone approach is the ethical considerations. I doubt keeping banks of living donor clones will be morally acceptable to society, at least not anytime soon.

This leaves us with what I think is by far the best option – genetically engineering animals to be human organ donors. Pigs are good candidates because the size and shape of their organs are a good match. We just need to engineer them so their immune systems use human proteins instead of pig proteins. We can remove any of the proteins that are most likely to trigger rejection. This also means giving the pigs a human immune system. The pigs are therefore both humanized and altered so as not to trigger rejection. Slayman will still need to take anti-rejection drugs, but it is easy to imagine that as this technology incrementally improves eventually we will get to a population of pigs optimized for human organ donation. The advantages of this approach over all other approaches are simply massive, which leads me to predict that this approach is the one that will win out for the foreseeable future.

One potential ethical objection is from raising domestic animals for the purpose of being slaughtered, which some animal rights activists object to. But of course, we already do this for food. At least for now, this is ethically acceptable to most people. Slaughtering a pig not just for food but to save the lives of potentially 5-7 people is not a hard sell ethically. This approach could also be a huge money saver for the healthcare system.

I am therefore very happy to see this technology proceed, and I wish the best for Slayman, both for him personally and for the potential of this technology to save many lives.

The post Man Gets Pig Kidney Transplant first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

In the Political Accuracy and Divisions Study (PADS), we conducted an extensive survey of over 3,000 American adults to assess their accuracy about a variety of controversial topics including, abortion, immigration, gender, race, crime, and the economy. So much of our political discourse revolves around these topics—but how much do we really know about these issues and the views of our fellow Americans? How informed are the loudest, most politically confident voices? We will examine the prevalence of misconceptions across the political continuum, and in doing so, we hope to offer a means by which to improve the quality of our national discourse.

For additional information, please feel free to contact the Skeptic Research Center by email: research@skeptic.com.

DATA BRIEFS

Additional data briefs that were shared on Twitter (X)

1. Do Hispanic Americans Identify with “Latinx”?
2. Are Voter ID Laws Racist?

REPORT (PADS-011)
Younger Generations are Least Accurate About Police Shootings and Least Trusting of Police

Eleventh report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

Amidst the George Floyd anti-police riots, the Skeptic Research Center showed that Americans’ anti-police attitudes were influenced to a significant degree by their ignorance about the number of unarmed Black men shot by police (McCaffree & Saide, 2021; Saide, McCaffree & McCready, 2021). Probably due in part to mainstream media’s constant portrayals of police as bloodthirsty racist killers (e.g., Balko, 2022; Thompson, 2021), we found that Americans identifying as “very liberal” were extremely misinformed, with nearly 54% believing 1,000 or more unarmed black men were shot by police in 2019, and with over 22% of “very liberals” believing the number was 10,000 or more (the actual number is around 10). Given Americans’ continued fledgling trust in police–64% of Americans reported high levels of trust in police in 2004 compared to 43% in 2023 (Gallup Polling, 2023)—in this report we ask: how does Americans’ accuracy about policing vary by generation, and how does being inaccurate about policing relate to trust of police?

Download Report (PADS-011)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2024). Younger Generations are Least Accurate About Police Shootings and Least Trusting of Police. Skeptic Research Center, PADS-011.

REPORT (PADS-010)
Are Americans Losing Their Trust?

Tenth report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

Public opinion polling has revealed unprecedented drops in Americans’ institutional trust for several years now, and institutional trust reached a new low in 2023 (Jones, 2022; Saad, 2023). Americans’ trust in government, for example, is hovering at its lowest point since Pew polling began measuring it in 1958 (Pew Research Center, 2023). In 1973, 58% of Americans had “a great deal”/“quite a lot” of confidence in public schools—by 2023, this had fallen to 26%. Also in 1973, 42% of Americans had “a great deal”/“quite a lot” of confidence in Congress—by 2023, this had fallen to 8%. In 1975, 80% of people had “a great deal”/ “quite a lot” of confidence in the medical system, but by 2023, this number had fallen to 33% (the decline began long before COVID). And also across many other American institutions (see Gallup Polling, 2023). Some polling also suggests Americans have been losing trust in each other (not just in abstract institutional “systems”). For example, Pew polling found that 64% of Americans felt that trust in one another has “been shrinking,” (Rainie et al., 2019). In light of these concerning trends, we looked back through two of our own polls (one conducted in 2021, the other in 2022) and asked: how have Americans’ trust in institutions and each other changed?

Download Report (PADS-010)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2024). Americans Are Losing Their Trust. Skeptic Research Center, PADS-010.

REPORT (PADS-009)
Being “Liberal” in America

Ninth report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

Analysts have recognized for decades now that the world is becoming more liberal. It seems that the more removed people are from basic survival concerns, the more liberal their worldviews become, in the sense of being more accepting of cultural differences and more protective of civil rights. Some analysts have noted how paradoxically intolerant and dogmatic this trend has become in Western societies (i.e., the societies most removed from basic survival concerns): amongst many Western progressives, for example, all group disadvantages are assumed to always be a result of oppression, with oppression always being driven by white people (and usually men). Thus, it would seem that at the extremes, liberalism and the human tendency towards tribalism interact to produce both a demand for equality and justice as well as an insistence that one demographic group (white/European people) is accountable for most or all of the oppression and corruption in the world. In light of the controversies and nuances inherent in identifying as a modern liberal, in this report we ask: how do rates of identifying as “liberal” vary in the United States according to peoples’ generation, sex and race?

Download Report (PADS-009)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2024). Being “Liberal” in America. Skeptic Research Center. Political Accuracy and Divisions Study, PADS-009.

REPORT (PADS-008) The Essence of Americans

Eighth report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

Part of human reasoning involves reducing people, animals, and things to their core essence, a tendency beginning in childhood (Ahn et al., 2001; Gelman, 2003). We define dogs and cats by different essences, for example, and we do the same for people when we define them by their sex, race, age, and the like. Though helpful as a crude way of categorizing things in the world, essentialism makes us prone to error. Believing, for example, that water is defined by the essential element of “wetness” will fail to recognize ice as water; or, believing that those with recent European ancestry are defined by the essential element of “whiteness” will fail to recognize variations in cultural background or individual experience (Roth et al., 2023). While essentialism feels useful in its simplifying of an otherwise complex reality, it can lead to negative stereotyping. Given that essentialist reasoning typically produces rigid categorizations of people, and that rigid categorizations of people might be conducive to political misinformation, conspiracism, or extremism (e.g., Buhagiar et al., 2018; Kurzwelly et al., 2020), in this report we ask: how common is the tendency to essentialize amongst the American public?

Download Report (PADS-008)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). How Commonly Do Americans Essentialize Each Other?. Skeptic Research Center, PADS-008.

REPORT (PADS-007) How Accurate Are Americans About Economic Mobility?

Seventh report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

According to economists at Stanford University, economic mobility is a “fading American dream.” Richard Delgado, a founder of critical race theory, calls upward mobility a “myth” and suggests that, “the myth of upward mobility enables the wealthy to justify favorable treatment for themselves and cutbacks for the rest,” while reminding us that, “study after study shows that class membership in our society is relatively fixed.” In agreement, the Huffington Post regards economic class in America as “suffocating,” Mother Jones insists that America is a “thriving aristocracy” maintained by “powerful-yet-obscure entities,” and the New York Times informs us that class in America is a “caste system,” and that “the hierarchy of caste is… about power — which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources — which groups are seen as worthy of them, and which are not.” These claims are not new. As far back as 1897, Carrol D. Wright, the first commissioner of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, noted that, “the assertion that the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer has…taken more complete possession of the popular mind than any other.” Yet, Wright went on to say that this assertion “is a false one, false in its premises and misleading in its influence.” Is poverty ubiquitous in America? Do people have any chance of improving their economic circumstances? To assess these claims and what Americans think about them, in this report we ask: how accurate are Americans about economic mobility?

Download Report (PADS-007)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). How Accurate Are Americans About Economic Mobility?. Skeptic Research Center, PADS-007.

REPORT (PADS-006) Depression and Political Ideology

Sixth report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

Is life in America hopeless? In a peer-reviewed article entitled “Fuck the patriarchy: Towards an intersectional politics of irreverent rage,” sociologist Helen Wood suggests that, “with climate change [and] widening inequality… we are truly fucked” (Wood, 2019). In 2020, Chad Wolf, acting U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary, declared white supremacy to be the most persistent and lethal domestic threat to the United States (Behrmann, 2020). A recent New York Times feature article described one professor’s struggle to remove “whiteness” from universities given that the study of classic literature, “has been instrumental to the invention of ‘whiteness’ and its continued domination” (Poser, 2021). Some popular academic theories even doubt the possibility of moral progress (Seamster & Ray, 2018). But in 2021, a Manhattan Institute report found, among other things, that reading social justice scholarship significantly reduced Black Americans’ hopefulness and motivation (Kaufmann, 2021). The author of the report speculated that, though intended to empower women and racial minorities, misleading characterizations of America as a white supremacist patriarchy may do the exact opposite. In light of this possibility, in this report we asked: “How is mental health related to believing this popular political rhetoric?”

Download Report (PADS-006)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). Depression and Political Ideology Skeptic Research Center, PADS-006.

Follow-up to PADS-006

Posted on Twitter on August 3, 2023

Download “Depression and Political Ideology” (PADS-006F)

REPORT (PADS-005) How Informed Are Americans About Women’s Opportunities?

Fifth report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

Feminist academics argue that “patriarchy,” or the oppression of women in society by men, affects both public and private life. They argue, for example, that male managers exploit their female colleagues in the workplace, male script writers perpetuate demeaning views of women and girls on television, husbands force their wives into near-constant subservience in the home, and that patriarchy not only prevents women from succeeding in society but also causes numerous other problems (Bates, 2021). One activist wrote, “We need…to deconstruct and exorcise patriarchy – which is the root of so many other forms of oppression, from imperialism to racism, from transphobia to the denigration of the Earth” (Ensler, 2021). In apparent agreement, the American Psychological Association now regards masculinity as “harmful” (APA, 2018). Additionally, according to leading sociologist Barbara Risman and others, “challenging men’s dominance is [also] a necessary condition of ending the subordination of lesbians and gay men,” and that, “If as feminists, we believe that gender is socially constructed and used to create inequality, our political goal must be to move to a post-gender society” (Risman, 2004; 2009). Due to the alarming nature of these claims, in this report we ask: “How informed are Americans about women’s achievements and opportunities?”
Download Report (PADS-005)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). How Informed Are Americans About Women’s Opportunities? Skeptic Research Center, PADS-005.

REPORT (PADS-004) Are “White People” Morally Deviant?

Fourth report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

For decades in the U.S., and particularly in the last few years, journalists and intellectuals have suggested that “white people” are socially or morally deviant. Time magazine, for example, published the claim that white supremacy is the “foundational principle” of culture in the U.S., preventing non-whites from having “perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect grades…[or regarded as a] perfect employee and colleague.” In 2020, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture claimed “rational thinking” and “hard work” are white supremacist ideals that oppress non-whites. In a recent opinion editorial, Savala Nolan, the Executive Director of the Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law, said “white people…disappoint me. They frustrate me. They make me sad.” Meanwhile, books describing the immorality of white people, such as Caste, How to be an Anti-Racist, and White Fragility have all soared to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List. Given these strong opinions, in this report we ask: what does the public really think about the (apparent) immorality of white people?
Download Report (PADS-004)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). Are “White People” Morally Deviant? Skeptic Research Center, PADS-004.

Follow-up to PADS-004

Posted on Twitter on June 13, 2023

Download “Noble Savage Myth and Education” (PADS-004F)

REPORT (PADS-003) Update: How Informed are Americans about Race and Policing?

Third report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

“Defund the police” was the rallying cry of liberals in the Summer of 2020, motivating “mostly peaceful” protests that led to property damage in excess of two billion dollars across at least 20 US states (Johansmeyer, 2021). To better understand the motivation behind these protests, in 2020, we surveyed people about their estimates of the number of unarmed black men shot by police in 2019 and found a shocking degree of inaccuracy, particularly amongst progressives. In this report, we present an update on these data and ask: have people become more knowledgeable when it comes to the available data on fatal police shootings of unarmed black Americans?
Download Report (PADS-003)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). Update: How Informed are Americans about Race and Policing? Skeptic Research Center, PADS-003.

REPORT (PADS-002) Trans, Identity and Institutional Controversies

Second report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

A particularly salient culture-war issue in contemporary American society concerns the relationship between gender identity and biological sex. While some insist that peoples’ subjective interpretation of their sex is paramount, others insist objective markers (like chromosomes) are practically more relevant. Most recently, this issue has been enflamed by two central institutional controversies: biological males identifying as women competing in women’s sports leagues and sex/gender-oriented material being taught to young children in schools. Disagreement abounds, with liberals sometimes downplaying the severity of these controversies, and conservatives doing the opposite. In this report, we ask: what do Americans really think about these issues?

Download Report (PADS-002)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). Trans, Identity and Institutional Controversies. Skeptic Research Center, PADS-002.

REPORT (PADS-001) What Do Americans Believe About Abortion and How Accurate Are They?

First report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

In this report, one of a series of reports on controversial topics in American culture, we investigated the degree to which partisans in the United States hold accurate beliefs about abortion and about each other. Herein, we covered three central questions in the American abortion debate:

1. What abortion policies do Americans really prefer?
2. How accurate are Americans’ beliefs about the prevalence of abortion and the recent Supreme Court ruling, and what variables influence their accuracy?
3. How accurate are Americans regarding the abortion beliefs of other people?

The over-arching goal of this report was thus to contribute to our collective understanding of what Americans really believe, as well as how accurate they are about the topic of abortion and about one another.

Download Report (PADS-001)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K. & Saide, A. (2023). What Do Americans Believe About Abortion and How Accurate Are We? Skeptic Research Center, PADS-001.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss416_Abigail_Shrier_2024_03_23.mp3 Download MP3

In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?

In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids—it’s the mental health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers, and young people, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline, and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits. Among her unsettling findings:

• talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression
• social Emotional Learning handicaps our most vulnerable children, in both public schools and private
• “gentle parenting” can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult in charge.

Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied to children with severe needs, but for the typical child, the cure can be worse than the disease. Bad Therapy is a must – read for anyone questioning why our efforts to bolster America’s kids have backfired – and what it will take for parents to lead a turnaround.

Abigail Shrier received the Barbara Olson Award for Excellence and Independence in Journalism in 2021. Her bestselling book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020), was named a “Best Book” by the Economist and the Times. It has been translated into ten languages. Her new book is Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.

Shermer and Shrier discuss:

• Irreversible Damage redux: WPATH Files
• Darwin’s Dictim: “all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.” What view is this book for or against?
• What’s the problem to be solved? Anecdotes vs. Statistics
• Theories: coddling, social media, screen time, generations/life history theory
• Good and bad therapists and therapies
• Does it work?
• Bad therapists or bad parents or bad schools?
• Parenting styles
• As with trans, social contagion vs. real phenomena now acceptable?
• Iatrogenesis: “originating with the healer” (a healer harming a patient)
• Anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, autism
• ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience): Physical abuse, Sexual abuse, Emotional abuse, Physical neglect, Emotional neglect, Mental illness, Divorce or parental breakup, Substance abuse in the home, Violence against the mother, Incarcerated household member
• Trauma, stress, PTSD, The Body Knows the Score
• Punishment and spanking (corporeal punishment) vs. time outs etc.
• Anti-fragility and resilience
• Diagnosis self-fulfillment: placebo / nocebo effect
• “Doing the work” of therapy
• Goodwill Hunting view of therapy
• Previous quack therapies and psychological pseudoscience:
• The Subliminal Messages scare, the Satanic Panic, the Recovered Memory mania, the Self-Esteem movement, the Multiple Personality craze, the Left-Brain/Right-Brain fad, the Mozart Effect mania, the Vaccine-Autism furor, the Super-predators fear, Attachment Therapy, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program that increased teen drug use, the Scared Straight program that made adolescents more likely to offend, the Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) program that worsened anxiety and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and many more that have plagued psychology and psychiatry.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

Interview with Dante Lauretta of the Osiris Rex mission; Quickie With Steve: Treating HIV with CRISPR; News Items: Starship's Third Launch, Extinct Flu Virus, Keeping Voyager 1 Going, Death by Exorcism, Energy Demand Increasing; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Fighting Lions; Science or Fiction

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” —Theodosius Dobzhansky

Why can one person smoke and drink heavily into their 90s while another dies from cancer in their 40s? Why are we fat? Why does a suntan look and feel so good if it is bad for us? Why is alternative medicine so popular? Do vaccines work and are they safe? Do toxins in our food cause cancer?

In this article I outline the emerging field of Evolutionary Medicine, looking at how our Stone Age ancestors lived, got sick, and got well over millions of years, and pointing to how we can live longer, healthier, and happier lives today.

As a skeptic, I have learned to often question ideas that are accepted as “common knowledge.” As a physician, I know that some of the drugs and treatments that we are encouraged to use today are only marginally useful at times and sometimes even toxic. Where does evolution come in? I have found that applying evolutionary thinking to common medical knowledge can provide us with fresh insight into the cause and cure of common diseases.

Evolutionary medicine draws insights from three areas of scientific research: (1) archaeologists’ ongoing discoveries about the lives of our paleolithic ancestors; (2) anthropologists’ observations of modern humans living in cultures that have changed little since the Stone Age; and (3) findings of molecular geneticists that have unraveled the story told by our DNA.

These studies have led to fundamental changes in our understanding of what it means to be healthy. We now know that many problems we experience today are, in fact, understandable in terms of the natural capacities that helped us survive in earlier times. Evolutionary medicine can expose many fallacies behind commonly accepted medical practices and the quackery that fosters popular health fads.

What is Evolutionary Medicine?

Some time ago I was invited to co-teach a course in Evolutionary Medicine at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professors of parasitology and evolutionary biology, Armand Kuris and Bob Warner, explained that they needed a “real doctor” in the class because their knowledge of human disease and medical treatment was understandably limited. Since inviting a practicing physician to join the mix aligns with the interdisciplinary approach for which UCSB has become known, how could I refuse?

We were fortunate to use the just-published Why We Get Sick as the course text. In it, evolutionary theorist George Williams and psychiatrist Randolph Nesse merged their knowledge of health and disease with emerging archaeology and evolutionary biology to begin answering questions about why rather than simply how we get sick.

It soon became impossible to avoid seeing my own patients as the not-so-distant descendants of our Stone Age forbears. From allergies to the most terrifying cancer, from the ravages of mental illness to the most mysterious autoimmune disease, Darwinian evolution was no longer simply an elegant theory. I was seeing its consequences daily: in the diseases from which my patients suffered but also in how they could be healed.

When I began to share these evolutionary insights with my patients—for example, how we heal from a sprained ankle or why so many people struggle with diabetes— it didn’t take long to see positive effects. These conversations often helped patients develop an entirely new approach to problems from which they’d long suffered as significant improvements in their health soon followed.

The Primal Diet

Consider your teeth. Many of the best-preserved fossils we have found are teeth. That’s because tooth enamel is the hardest, longest lasting substance in the body. These fossils reveal that Stone Age teeth had a rough time of it, undergoing wear and tear as tools for cutting and grinding and chewing many hours a day. Remarkably, however, they had few cavities, the number one dental problem we have today! Since cavemen didn’t have toothbrushes, fluoridated water, dental floss, or dentists, why were their teeth so healthy?

The answer is diet. The bacteria that rot teeth feed mainly on sugars. Unlike proteins and fats, sugars are tiny and sticky. Streptococcus mutans, the main bacterial culprit in tooth decay, lives in the crevices around our teeth and turns sugar into lactic acid that then erodes the surrounding dental enamel, leaving holes—or cavities—in which more bacteria can live. We know from genetic studies that S. mutans has existed in its current form for several million years. It has found a good niche, so why mutate?

When fibrous roots, sour fruits, and occasional honey were the only scarce carbohydrates in a paleolithic person’s diet, these bacteria found very little to feed on. In contrast, our modern diet, overloaded as it is with simple carbs and sugary sodas, offers a bacterial paradise. It’s no surprise, then, that dental cavities are the most widespread chronic disease of childhood in the world today.

This understanding about dental hygiene leads to one of the most frequent and important questions I hear in my practice. What should I eat? Our early human ancestors spent several million years gathering and chasing down every bite of food they ate. The reason we covet sweet, salty, and greasy foods today is that they are important for survival and were rare. Not so today. Simply by reaching into the refrigerator, in a few minutes we can snag all the calories we need to get through the day. We know that eating too much is bad for us, but we seem powerless to stop.

The problem is not just a lack of willpower. We spend billions of dollars a year on foods low in carbohydrates, fats, and sugars or high in vitamins, antioxidants, or omega-3 fatty acids—hoping they will help us lose weight. We dish out billions more on diets, unused gym memberships, surgery, and appetite suppressing injections. Meanwhile, our healthcare system is burdened with hundreds of billions spent on obesity-related illnesses. Gluttony may be a vice, but overeating is an epidemic fed by wholly modern myths about food.

In the past 50 years, we’ve witnessed a tidal wave of obesity as nutritionists, doctors and food manufacturers promoted a fear of fatty foods. But low fat doesn’t mean low in calories. And calories count. Making food with less fat often means packing in more carbohydrates to make it appealing. A low-fat label gives us the false impression that we can eat as much of these “harmless, healthy” foods as we want. But if there were an easy diet that really worked, we’d all know about it. We’d all be thin. The fact that so many diet books sell each year is all the evidence we need that none of them is universally effective.

What did our ancestors eat? We can calculate that to get enough calories our earliest primate ancestors spent up to 12 hours a day finding, chewing, and grinding mostly plant-based foods, much as gorillas do today. As they evolved, their diet expanded to include berries, grubs, fruits, eggs, mushrooms, and the occasional small animal when they could catch one. They were omnivores. We estimate that our ancestors consumed up to 300 different foods in a typical week; today we average about 30.

Many of the roots and vegetables on which ancestral humans thrived were loaded with what your mom might call roughage. Stone Age fruit bore little resemblance to today’s plump, sweet, and juicy produce. An apple then looked and tasted more like today’s hard crabapple. Berries were small, and archaic citrus fruits would make a sour lime taste sweet in comparison. Along with honey and later primitive grains, these fruits were the main source of carbohydrates. Before the advent of agriculture barely 12,000 years ago, most foods contained very few starchy carbs. Before people began cultivating wheat, corn, and rice, the wild versions of these grains grew sparsely, had thick husks, and produced few kernels containing little starch. Root crops were tough and required a lot of chewing. Nuts were tiny and bitter, more like today’s acorns. Fruits were scrawny, fibrous, and none too sweet.

Evolutionary Prescription for a Healthy Diet

• Forget about a low-fat diet. Go low-carb instead. Minimize bread, cereal, pasta, potatoes, rice, beans, and other grains. None were on the menu in the Paleolithic.
• Maintain a healthy weight and avoid obesity by restricting the number of calories you’re ingesting to what you burn.
• Be omnivorous. Eat a wide variety of foods to ensure you get all the vitamins and minerals you need—without taking vitamin pills or supplements.
• In the absence of gnawing on bones like a caveman, include dairy products and root vegetables for calcium.
• If you are vegetarian for ethical reasons, you have to be very careful to avoid nutritional deficiencies, especially in children.
• Throw all rules out the window on your birthday and other special occasions. Eat whatever you want and enjoy it.

Since fruit and grains appeared for only a few weeks each year, it was vital for our ancestors to eat as much of them as possible when available, before the birds, insects, and other animals could get to them. When fruit ripened, early humans gorged themselves until they were stuffed—then ate again an hour or two later. As a result, our ancestors evolved a nearly insatiable craving for carbohydrates. The only limit was the size of their stomachs, and those could stretch to accommodate the seasonal abundance.

During times of plenty, Stone Age people ate a whole lot more each day than they needed. Those whose bodies were better at storing up those extra calories as fat, bought some insurance for any lean times ahead and passed on their genes for getting fat on to the next generation. This cycle of abundance and want lasted for millions of years. We are its inheritors.

Paleoanthropologists love to debate, “Which came first, bigger brains or more protein in the diet?” We do know that as our ancestors became cleverer, they became better hunters. (Hunting and tracking may indeed be the evolutionary basis for our ability to think scientifically, but that is another, long story.) Eating animals added protein and fat to their diets, providing more calories often for less effort than eating plants. Before farming changed everything, abundant meat was the main course for hundreds of thousands of years.

Taming fire, roughly one million years ago, was a key evolutionary event. Cooking breaks down starch and proteins, making them easier to chew and digest. More energy became available from every bite. Quickly, time spent chewing dropped from 12 to 3 hours a day. This may have been the advent of leisure; time to sit around the fire and tell stories, sing, and pass along knowledge.

Only a few hundred thousand years after harnessing fire, early hominids set out on their first great migrations around the globe. Humans loved meat. In areas where game was abundant, some settled for tens of thousands of years. When meat became scarce, because of a changing climate, overhunting, or just bad luck, it was time to pick up stakes and search for happier hunting grounds. The disappearance of many species of large animals such as massive marsupials in Australia, ground sloths in North America, and bison, elk, and aurochs in Europe, followed the spread of modern humans.

By the late Stone Age, around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged as accomplished and resourceful hunters. Studies show they got around half their calories from meat and fat, 40 percent from roots and vegetables, and 10 percent from fruits and berries. These humans, with bodies and brains similar to yours and mine, ate very well. It is from this time that we have evidence of the first obese people. There probably weren’t many of them, but a few were able to lead pampered, sedentary lives, supported by the advancing skills of the growing tribe. Sculpted images of enormously obese women, known as “Venus” figurines, are among the earliest surviving works of art, carved more than 30,000 years ago. Of course, we don’t know the exact meaning these images held for their late Stone Age makers, but it is likely that they were expressions of beauty, or at least attractiveness. Fat women have been cherished for their fertility in most cultures until very recently. “Survival of the fittest” might be better expressed as “reproduction of the fattest.”

Some hormones evolved to shut down our appetites when we had eaten enough fats and proteins. That is why fatty foods are so “satisfying.” However, others, such as GLP-1—the hormone that the new weight loss drugs Wegovy and Ozempic mimic so effectively—are released by sugar and carbs in our diet. They trigger the production of insulin and in our past helped us to pack away those excess carb calories as fat. In higher doses (mimicked by the weight loss injections) they slow down movement of food through the gut, making us feel “full” and thus suppressing our appetite.

Germ Warfare

Drop the word infection into any conversation and watch ears prick up. Mention diarrhea or COVID, and people will begin to edge away. Measles, mumps, or mononucleosis get little reaction any longer. However, up the ante with herpes, tuberculosis, or syphilis, and you can sense people starting to squirm. Invoke pus, bleeding, or plague, and you are edging beyond the bounds of polite conversation.

Most of us have a primal fear of infectious diseases, for good reason. Alongside medicine’s stellar achievements of the past few centuries—hygiene, antibiotics, vaccines, and vastly safer childbirth—many microbes have battled humans to a draw, and some are even gaining ground. As soon as we conquer one infectious disease, another seems to take its place. We defeat smallpox, arm-by-inoculated-arm, and HIV comes out swinging. COVID-19, a more lethal cousin of the common cold, caused us to apply dampers to the world economy for months. We are in an evolutionary arms race with no end in sight. As the human population rises, there are more hosts for our microscopic enemies to attack.

Even with the discovery of antibiotics less than a century ago, bacteria, parasites, and viruses have not retreated. Within a year of the first use of penicillin, some germs were found to resist it. And while vaccines have loosened the stranglehold once held on us by measles, mumps, hepatitis, and polio, as yet we have no shots to prevent HIV, herpes, West Nile, or a horde of other viruses. In the tropics, new strains of influenza emerge annually from animal hosts and spread at jet speed onto the wider world stage.

On the home front, patients come to me every day sneezing and coughing, aching and fevered, hoping an antibiotic will provide a quick fix. Sadly, these drugs have no effect against viral infections and, when used inappropriately, breed drug-resistant bacteria in our bodies. At the same time, some people worry that vaccines against the killer diseases of childhood actually damage their children. They resist immunizations, depending on others to get the shots that derail an epidemic.

Fighting infections has never been easy. Microbes invade our bodies and evade our immune systems in clever ways that science is still deciphering. In the past, they jumped from person to person, while today they leapfrog from city to city. They are nimble adversaries. Evolution happens when genes mutate and spread to the next generation—and many bacteria produce a new generation every 90 minutes!

Nevertheless, working in our favor are the very Stone Age defenses we often misunderstand. Our healthy skin, thick mucus, fever, inflammation, and antibodies are the body’s first responders on the front lines of the fight against infections. We suppress them at our peril. Understanding how our cave-dwelling forebears survived such onslaughts, long before they could reach for a bottle of pills, can teach us how to respond better to infections today.

A Few Paleolithic Symptoms That Have Lingered On

Coughing evolved to clear our airway of foreign particles—dust blown by the wind, smoke from a fire, and food inhaled when we meant to swallow. By forcefully expelling air from our lungs, coughing gets the grime out. A sneeze serves a slightly higher purpose.

Mucus, or phlegm, is also a defense mechanism. This complex and wonderful concoction of proteins and other gooey stuff entraps and disarms germs, helping us to swallow them into our stomachs where powerful acids wait to destroy them.

Evolutionary Prescription for Weight Loss

• Eat fewer calories.
• Eat fatty foods and proteins to satisfy your hunger, rather than starchy, sugary ones. Fats and proteins trigger satiety hormones and take more time to digest.
• Fool your Stone Age appetite by filling up on bulky, low-calorie vegetables such as celery, radishes, and salads. Also, drinking warm liquids such as chicken broth can trick your body into feeling full for a while.
• Watch out for fruit juice and sodas. They are mostly sugar and water.
• Exercise because it’s enjoyable and healthy, but don’t rely on it to shed weight. You’d have to exercise for hours to work off a single sugary soda.
• Eat meals whatever time of day you want to. A calorie is a calorie no matter when you eat it.

What happens when we are confronted with a cold virus? A virus is really very simple. It’s just a bundle of genes, wrapped in a protein coat. All it needs is to find a good place, i.e., you, in which to set up housekeeping, make a few million copies of itself, and then move on. For contagious diseases, it’s the moving on that matters. If they can’t get out of us to a new victim, they die out. Cold viruses such as COVID are spread on airborne droplets of moisture when we cough. Making us cough, by irritating our airways, is the evolutionary tactic a virus uses to spread itself. Diarrhea is a similar strategy of gut viruses, the “stomach bug.”

Well-meaning parents often encourage their sick children to “cough it up” to clear phlegm out of their airways. However, coughing actually irritates our airways. It’s like scratching an itch. The more you scratch, the more irritated it gets. Coughing actually makes a sore throat worse and spreads the virus to others. We are playing right into the virus’s hands.

Sneezing is even worse. Have you ever seen the famous photo of a sneeze, spraying droplets ten feet across a room? Sneezing serves the virus’s purpose by loading them on an express flight to the next victim—our children, coworkers, spouses, or strangers. This is why masks are useful in stopping the spread of airborne viruses. To really be helpful, however, you need a really good mask, such as an N95, made of multiple layers of hydrophobic filters that stop the droplets from ever reaching your nose.

When you feel the need to cough, don’t let the virus win. Suppress it. By drinking a small amount of liquid, you can help your body eliminate the germs by ingesting them. At the same time, you will prevent the irritation and swelling that coughing brings. Sometimes you can’t help but cough. In those cases, your mom had it right: Cover your mouth. Not just a polite hand in front of the face— really press your hand or inner elbow over your mouth to seal off any air from coming out. (And then be sure to wash your hand—thoroughly). This decreases the rapid flow that irritates your airway as well as stops the spread of germs. This was common advice 50 years ago when coughing around others was considered impolite at best.

Unfortunately, all the over-the-counter cough remedies containing dextromethorphan (the DM in Robitussin-DM) and other ingredients don’t do much. They coat your throat, but they don’t help suppress coughing. Without any evidence they are effective, we spend billions a year on cold remedies such as Echinacea, Airborne, vitamin C, Dayquil, Nyquil, antihistamines, decongestants, cough suppressants, and fever reducers that do nothing to shorten the infection and have minimal effect on the symptoms. Some even work against the healing process.

When we take an antihistamine to dry up the sniffles, it limits the mucus available to help engulf the virus. The sole over-the-counter expectorant used in the United States, guaifenesin, thins mucus, which makes it less effective at trapping bacteria. Codeine-based cough suppressants, now very hard to come by, can help and are useful when simply making an effort to suppress the cough fails, especially at night when we need to sleep.

The most effective way to defeat a cold virus is to recognize that we are all in this together. Once we’re infected, washing our hands and covering up when sneezing or coughing is the kindest thing we can do for others. Rest, stay hydrated, and let your immune system do what it evolved to do. When a true cure for the common cold comes along, it won’t need to be advertised or sold in alluring packages at the checkout counter. It will be obvious to all of us because of how well it works, every time. And then, like polio and smallpox, colds will be history.

You Give Me Fever

If evolution is a long war between us and germs, then a cold is a daily skirmish on the front line. While viruses reproduce quickly, our bodies react more slowly. It can take days for our immune system to mobilize specific antibodies to fight a virus.

Over millennia, we evolved a quicker response. Germs are adapted to infect us when our body temperature is normal. By turning up our internal thermostat when we first detect an infection, our bodies make it harder for the virus to grow. Shivering probably evolved to warm us when we got cold. A shaking “chill” making us hot—called a rigor in medicine—is often our first line of defense. When we feel a chill, we want to take to our beds because that is exactly what we should do. If we take a fever reducer, such as aspirin or Tylenol, we can suppress the fever and may feel well enough to be up and around. This can divert energy our body needs to fight off the infection—and affords the virus many more opportunities to spread to others.

Increasing our temperature also speeds up the activity and circulation of disease-fighting white blood cells. In early mammals, those who responded to microbe invasion by developing a fever and limiting their activity would have survived better and passed on these defenses to their descendants. It makes evolutionary sense that children get hotter faster than adults. Kids are more likely to run into germs they have never encountered before and to which they have no immunity. They need the quick general defense a fever can muster.

If a fever provides an evolutionary advantage for a near naked primate, what happens when we bundle up in blankets? We can cause our temperature to rise higher than it naturally would and so overshoot the safety mark. Exceeding 103F (39.5C) degrees can do more harm than good. Extreme temperatures can lead to seizures in children and dehydration and worse in adults. Taking a fever reducer such as aspirin, acetaminophen (Tylenol), ibuprofen (Advil and Motrin), or naproxen (Aleve) is entirely appropriate in these conditions. These medications all short-circuit our body’s natural ability to raise a fever.

Is there any sense in the old saying, “feed a cold and starve a fever”? When we have a simple cold, eating has been shown to quadruple the production of the virus-fighting hormone interferon. When we start to get hot, however, it’s not food we need but fluids. It’s no coincidence that a fever kills our appetite. Fluids trigger the production of interleukin-4, which works particularly well against many of the bacteria that cause fevers. The return of hunger is usually a sign that you are getting better.

A Paradox of Prevention

Polio offers a good example of how “progress” can inadvertently help a virus to spread in a way that evolution couldn’t. Polio is a virus that usually grows in our guts. When excreted, it survives for weeks in freshwater pools and stagnant ponds.

Throughout history, infants who were exposed to the virus early in life while they were still protected by antibodies in their mothers’ milk, usually experienced only a mild infection. Fewer than one in a thousand had the paralytic form associated with the epidemics of the last century.

Paradoxically, modern hygiene in the late nineteenth century prevented infants from ingesting water contaminated with the virus while still breastfeeding. Coming in contact with that virus later in life in swimming pools or ponds, at a time when they were no longer protected by maternal antibodies, caused them to contract the much more serious paralytic form of the disease. By 1900, small epidemics of paralytic polio began to appear throughout the industrialized world. By 1952, with breastfeeding at a minimum and better sanitation more widely practiced, polio infected thousands of children who had failed to acquire immunity in infancy. At its peak in 1950, the epidemic paralyzed 60,000 people a year.

A vaccine developed in 1952 by Jonas Salk arrested the spread of the disease within a few years. Polio is now almost wiped out. However, certain religious and political objections still hamper universal use of the vaccine.

Other diseases that could be eradicated, linger on—mumps, measles, chickenpox, and hepatitis. As vaccination has made certain childhood infections so uncommon in Western countries, some people have become comfortable with not vaccinating their children. These parents are counting on the immunity of those who do get vaccinated (herd immunity) to prevent the spread of these childhood illnesses to their own kids.

Evolutionary Prescription for Toxins

• Be very careful with the dose of all drugs—prescription, over-the-counter and recreational. All can be toxic.
• Unfortunately, alcohol is a toxin. Newer evidence suggests the less the better.
• Get all the vitamins you need from sunshine and a healthy diet, not pills or supplements. Vitamins are essential but can be toxic in large doses.
• Don’t worry about toxins in peanut butter.
• Don’t obsess about buying “organic.” As far as your health is concerned, there is no difference between organic and nonorganic.

Remember measles? Measles ranks high on the list of all-time lethal diseases. By some estimates, measles wiped out up to a third of all the people along the trade routes of the Middle Ages—and that was even before the European Age of Exploration opened vast new territories for the virus. In the past 150 years it has killed 200 million people—including 128,000 in 2021, most under the age of five.

The measles virus evolves very slowly. With so many innocent immune systems to infect in the past, it didn’t need to change much to find plenty of hosts. Luckily, it’s easier to make vaccines for slower-changing viruses because they are so stable. Faster-changing viruses, such as COVID, HIV, and influenza, form more elusive moving targets.

Today, many of us have forgotten how dangerous many formerly common infections were. Measles was a worldwide scourge. Mumps can make men sterile. Rubella can cause birth defects when it infects a pregnant woman. One vaccine, MMR, prevents all three. Diphtheria and Whooping Cough (Pertussis) were once dread diseases of childhood. Tetanus kills. Here too a single vaccine, DPT, prevents all three. Smallpox, which killed 300 million people in the last century, has now been eradicated by a worldwide vaccine campaign.

By skipping vaccination, some parents hope their children will dodge a risk. However, serious side effects of the vaccine occur at a much lower frequency than serious complications of the disease. Fears once raised that measles vaccine causes autism have been thoroughly debunked.

If enough people avoid vaccination, those once serious diseases will continue to evolve and come roaring back. Mumps and whooping cough are returning to the United States. Polio is still making its crippling rounds. Skipping vaccination is a terrible gamble. When these viruses strike, unvaccinated children are the first to fall.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the science of vaccination became even more politicized. This is unfortunate because priming our immune systems to recognize and fight off infections is one of the most effective and least harmful methods of protection we have. In the Stone Age, every infection set off a race between the “bugs” and our defenses. Vaccines activate this age-old system by injecting tiny amounts of weakened strains of these germs, allowing us to be forearmed.

The Not So Common Cold

Colds are caused by viruses—not by being out in cold weather or getting tired or soaked with rain. Understanding the evolutionary origins of viruses can help us stop them in their tracks. Most cold viruses evolved in enormous prehistoric populations of migrating birds and beasts. Because there were millions of animals in these flocks and herds, viruses could spread from one individual to another, never needing to infect the same creature twice—much like a wave spreading across the water.

By contrast, our paleolithic ancestors lived in isolated bands of a few dozen people. Archaeologists estimate that as recently as 70,000 years ago there were only 10,000 humans alive on the entire planet. Each family or clan clung together as closely as possible, seldom interacting with other groups. Stealing food or mates posed too great a risk to encourage much contact. So even if an animal virus managed to infect a person, it was very difficult for it to spread beyond the group it first entered. The common cold was not so common back in the Stone Age. Clearly, we aren’t going to solve the problem of colds by going back to living in isolated tribes. However, the insights of evolutionary medicine can help in arresting the rapid spread of these and other viruses in our modern world.

Under the Influenza

Influenza, the “flu,” kills around 400,000 people worldwide, and 36,000 people in North America—most years. In flu pandemics, which occur every 20 years or so, tens of millions die.

As with the common cold viruses, the earliest humans didn’t have enough contact with other groups to allow the flu to spread. Yoshiyuki Suzuki (Oxford University), who studies the evolution of influenza, estimates the first flu epidemics in humans occurred no earlier than 8,000 years ago. This coincided with the development of farming and village life, when people, fowl, and pigs first began living cheek by beak by jowl.

Unlike the more stable measles, mumps, and chickenpox viruses, the flu virus changes its outward appearance (that is, it evolves) rapidly. Shrouded in an ever-varying coat of proteins, like a shape-shifter in a science fiction novel, it cloaks itself in order to hide from our immune systems. However, once it gets past our defenses, it always causes the same miserable symptoms—high fever for days, severe body aches, a racking cough, and nasal congestion. It’s like a cold, only much worse.

Flu’s ability to change its surface coat so rapidly forces us to come up with a revised flu vaccine every year. Modern medicine maintains a constant watch for emerging strains in order to predict which to include in the following year’s vaccine. Before the advent of annual flu vaccines, many more people got sick and died of the flu every year, especially those over 60.

Occasionally, farmers and food handlers are infected with a strain of flu derived from another animal at the same time they have a human flu virus in them. When this happens, the two kinds of flu can merge to become an entirely new strain. The combined virus is often better at infecting us because we have no antibodies that recognize its novel appearance. This is how the avian flu pandemics of 1918, 1957, 1968 and the swine flu pandemic of 2009 occurred, and also why some people think COVID-19 originated in a live animal food market in China. (Doing justice to the debate between the “wet market” and the alternative “lab leak” theory of the origin of COVID-19 requires a separate article).

Quarantine, an early scientific method for halting the spread of disease, yields excellent results—if it is done quickly enough. That’s how SARS, the first well-known Coronavirus, was stopped in 2003. With proper public health policies in place, and enough people who take them seriously, we could likely contain any newly emerging virus within weeks, even a novel strain of the flu, without relying on vaccines. However, quarantine is expensive, inconvenient, and may even deprive people of some rights or even their livelihood for a short period. Still, that price would be minuscule compared to the devastation of a full-blown pandemic such as we have recently experienced.

On the home front, the best way to protect ourselves is to be clear about how such germs spread. Not being “part of the herd” and not going out in public when we are sick can go a long way toward stopping the spread. Covering our mouths when we cough or wearing effective masks helps a lot, as does thoroughly washing with plain old soap and water. Washing is a lot more effective than hand sanitizer, which doesn’t kill all types of viruses or even fully remove them from our hands.

Toxins and Cancer

Many things in our world are toxic. Radium, benzene, arsenic, and asbestos are widely known to cause cancer, but most of us are rarely exposed to them. On the other hand, smoking, drinking, obesity, and excess sun exposure together account for about 50 percent of all cancers.

The most significant food toxin known to cause cancer in humans is Aflatoxin, a fungal byproduct found in moldy peanuts. It contributes to the occurrence of liver cancer, mostly in parts of Africa and Asia where the hepatitis B virus, a cofactor for this cancer, is prevalent and moldy food is common. Yet, if you search online, you will find a long list of alleged cancer-causing culprits, including soda, hydrogenated oils, microwave popcorn, farmed fish, refined sugar, white flour, pickled, salted or smoked foods, and grilled red meat. We frequently hear that some common chemical such as the sweetener we use in our coffee “causes cancer.” None of these claims is backed by scientific evidence.

Evolutionary Prescription for Cancer

• Watch your weight. Obesity hikes the odds of several cancers.
• Exercise at least 30 minutes a day, three times a week, to lower your general risk of cancer by about 10 percent.
• Keep vitamin D levels up to snuff by getting 30 minutes of sun three days a week on parts of your body not usually exposed.
• Don’t smoke. You’ll decrease your lifetime risk of lung cancer by 90 percent and your overall risk of dying of any cancer by 25 percent.
• Get a colonoscopy after age 50. You’ll decrease the risk of dying from colon cancer by 80 percent.
• Lower your chance of getting some cancers by a third by saying no to antioxidant and vitamin supplements—particularly A, C and E.
• Girls and young women: Say yes to the new HPV vaccine. It reduces the risk of cervical cancer by 95 percent.

When scientists say a chemical “may cause cancer,” it usually means it was tested and found to damage the DNA of a bacteria or cause tumors in rats. However, such research uses doses hundreds or thousands of times what a person would ingest, pound-for-pound. And rats are genetically different from you and me. They get cancer very easily and that’s why we use them for tests. Just showing that a toxin causes cancer in rats, or abnormal changes in bacteria or cells in a Petri dish, doesn’t come close to demonstrating it will do so in humans. Our livers are three times the size of the whole rat and work hard to protect us. Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. I am a scientist. I trust good evidence. However, not all research is done well and we must remain skeptical—though not cynical—especially of fear-inducing claims.

Since we can’t ethically test toxins on humans, we look for “natural experiments”—groups of people exposed to a chemical at work or by accident. We then compare them against a similar but unexposed group to see what effects these toxins have. Beyond a few well-studied carcinogens—and Erin Brockovich’s cinematic arguments about a cancer cluster—there is scant linkage between trace toxins in our environment or food and cancer or other illnesses.

Your plastic water bottle, for example, won’t give you cancer. If it did, we would have detected thousands, indeed millions, of cancer cases already. The same is true for tap water. There’s no credible evidence that food preservatives, deodorant, stress, aluminum, processed foods, aspartame (Equal), or saccharin (Sweet’N Low) cause cancer. If you examine the reports carefully you will see that they are usually based on extrapolating from experiments on cells or animals given huge relative doses and always contain qualifiers such as “can” or “may” cause cancer.

We have always lived in a world chock full of poisons, and we have evolved potent defenses against the natural threats we’ve encountered in our long ascent from the primordial swamp. Our not so fragile forebears thrived among greater toxic threats than we might imagine. Why do some things smell and taste “bad”? Often it’s because they were bad for us. Our tough skin, hardy livers, and purifying kidneys evolved to neutralize many toxins that passed the nose test to make their way past this first line of defense.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of products being offered to help our bodies “cleanse” ourselves of toxins by using homeopathy, chelation, or colonics. We can buy “probiotics” to counter the antibiotic we took when we had a cold. (The marketers don’t mention that all yogurts have these bacteria—it’s what makes them yogurt in the first place.) We can sweat in saunas, chill in ice baths, soak in spas, or spend money on supplements—all in the name of “cleansing.”

Is there any real evidence that people who make such efforts are healthier than the rest of us? Not one bit. Contrary to countless celebrity testimonials, decades of research provide zero evidence that using any detoxifying products actually improves health or prevents cancer.

Dodging Cancer

There’s a good evolutionary reason why we heal so well from wounds and infections but have trouble fending off cancer. Natural selection, the weeding out of harmful traits, has a hard time acting on illnesses that occur later in life. By the time most cancers appear, people have usually finished having children. A cancer predisposition that appears only after our reproductive years gets a free pass to the next generation.

Children do get cancers, of course. Terrible as these cases are, fortunately they are rare compared to other causes of death. Most cancers occur in older people. The single most important reason cancer is increasing in the developed world is because we are living longer, not because of toxins in our food and environment.

Cancer still kills one in six people worldwide, but that means 84 percent of us will die of something else. In less-developed countries where life expectancy is shorter, most people die of infections and accidents, as in times past. In those places, cancers don’t even make it into the top ten causes of death.

While research has made significant progress against certain cancers, our fear leaves plenty of openings for a Pandora’s box of alternative therapies. This has always been the case with poorly understood diseases. In the days before the discovery of the poliovirus, rumor attributed polio to everything from fleabites to airborne toxins, insecticides, and poverty. When the vaccine came along, some people thought it was the cause. Many of these same suspects are blamed for cancer today.

One popular theory suggests that a diet low in fiber causes colon cancer. This idea arose from a 1979 book that reported a lower rate of colon cancer in men in Africa than in the West. The author attributed this to their high-fiber diet and using a squatting posture during defecation. He forgot to take into account that men in Africa die younger than men in the West, and the rate of colon cancer increases as we age. A meta-analysis of more than 80,000 participants demonstrated that fiber doesn’t prevent colon cancer. Still the myth lives on in health food stores and breakfast cereal ads.

Antioxidants are now popularly claimed to prevent cancer (as well as aging, heart disease, and “inflammation”). These molecules do limit oxidation, a kind of cell damage that can contribute to cancer—in the lab. Remember, however, oxidants and free radicals are part of how our cells fight off infection and clear damaged cells from our bodies! When tested in people, there is no evidence that antioxidants—including beta carotene, lycopene, acai berries, cumin, turmeric, or vitamins A, C or E—can prevent cancer. Vitamin A in excess can cause liver damage, osteoporosis, hair loss, dry skin, and birth defects. It seems our bodies make all the antioxidants we need, so supplementing them can make matters worse. Studies done in actual people, not Petri dishes, show that excess vitamin E, folic acid, and beta-carotene can actually increase the risk of cancer.

Vitamin Supplements

Our Stone (and Iron, Bronze, Middle, and Steam) Age ancestors survived without ever taking vitamin pills, but it wasn’t always easy. In hard times, especially when they roamed into new territory, experienced harsh winters, droughts, and floods, food could be hard to find. Their bodies evolved to be very good at absorbing whatever vitamins they needed, especially when they were in short supply. We inherited this ability to store most vitamins for times of scarcity.

Today, of course, we can buy a plethora of vitamins and minerals off the shelf, mixed in myriad combinations. Some of us gulp down enough to choke a horse. This is a high-risk endeavor because an excess of certain vitamins (A, D, E, and K) can be toxic. Some of our legislators are enthusiastic supporters (read: on the payroll) of the vitamin industry. Vitamins are sold as “dietary supplements,” not as drugs, and are largely unregulated. There are no safety inspections or uniform requirements for those who manufacture or market them, and therefore no guarantee you are getting what you pay for.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.4
Buy print edition
Buy digital edition
Subscribe to print edition
Subscribe to digital edition
Download our app

The only real proof we need for the benefit of vitamin pills should be that taking them makes us healthier. However, people who take them, in small or mega doses, are sick just as often and have just as many other illnesses as those who don’t. Of the 13 known vitamins, six can be taken in overdose. Every year more than 60,000 people in the United States overdose on vitamins—80 percent of them are children under the age of six.

If you eat a variety of unprocessed food you get all the vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants you need. Let your body do all it evolved to do, and you will get just the amounts you need.

Alternative Medicine

Many “alternative” therapies, such as acupuncture, massage, Reiki, homeopathy, aromatherapy, naturopathy, and ayurveda promise to make us well while causing less harm than medicine. Do they work?

As most doctors and some alternative practitioners know, most people who seek medical attention get better on their own, no matter what we do to them. This is because most illnesses are mild and self-limiting. Still, many of us are not content with letting nature take its course. When we feel a sniffle, we reach for some over the counter medicine. None can make us better. When we get better, we want to believe it was because of what we took.

We spend billions each year on brand named pills and folk remedies that have lingered from earlier times. They became popular in the same manner as do all superstitions. One person tried them, got better, and believes the treatment worked. They pass this along through retelling and retailing, and so a so-called cure is born.

Alternative medicine practitioners now use TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and X (Twitter) to speed the spread of their “cures.” Although some of these practices are actually harmful, the false hope they offer to the seriously ill is misleading at best and criminal at worst. Sadly, modern medicine has sometimes been little better, pushing marginally useful pills or physical therapy on us when time and a better understanding of the natural process of healing would accomplish just as much—and at less risk and a lower cost.

What’s Next?

If you find this approach intriguing, I urge you to look further into what evolution has to say about how we heal from injuries, why allergies are more common today than in earlier times, how much sleep we really need, who we find sexually attractive, the benefits of grandparents, how many periods should a woman have in her lifetime, why morning sickness was good for us, why we get depressed, the advantages of Attention Deficit Disorder, what use are emotions, the origins of anxiety, whether cholesterol is really bad for us, why do so many people need glasses, how does sickle cell disease protect some people from malaria, and what can we do to live longer healthier lives. These topics and dozens more are the subject of the fascinating new science of Evolutionary Medicine.

About the Author

William Meller, M.D., is a board-certified internist who runs a medical practice and clinic in Santa Barbara, CA, where he also coordinates three busy medical centers. He has been published in The Journal of the American Medical Association and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He is the author of the book Evolution Rx: A Practical Guide to Harnessing Our Innate Capacity for Health and Healing.

CRISPR has been big scientific news since it was introduced in 2012. The science actually goes back to 1987, but the CRISPR/Cas9 system was patented in 2012, and the developers won the Noble Prize in Chemistry in 2020. The system gives researchers the ability to quickly and cheaply make changes to DNA, by seeking out and matching a desired sequence and then making a cut in the DNA at that location. This can be done to inactivate a specific gene or, using the cells own repair machinery, to insert a gene at that location. This is a massive boon to genetics research but is also a powerful tool of genetic engineering.

There is also the potential for CRISPR to be used as a direct therapy in medicine. In 2023 the first regulatory approval for CRISPR as a treatment for a disease was given to treatments for sickle cell disease and thalassemia. These diseases were targeted for a technical reason – you can take bone marrow out of a patient, use CRISPR to alter the genes for hemoglobin, and then put it back in. What’s really tricky about using CRISPR as a medical treatment is not necessarily the genetic change itself, but getting the CRISPR to the correct cells in the body. This requires a vector, and is the most challenging part of using CRISPR as a medical intervention. But if you can bring the cells to the CRISPR that eliminates the problem.

The potential, however, is huge. The obvious targets for CRISPR therapy would be any genetic disease. Mutated genes could be silenced, inactive genes could be activated to compensate for the mutation, or new functional genes could be inserted. CRISPR gene therapy could be a literal cure for genetic diseases.

Recently, however, a team from the University of Amsterdam presented an abstract at a medical conference showing a proof of concept for a different therapeutic use of CRISPR – to treat HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus).  HIV is a retrovirus, which means it uses reverse transcriptase to insert its genetic code into the DNA of host cells, in this case immune cells. In this way it hijacks the reproductive machinery of the host cells to make more copies of itself. HIV is insidious because at the same time it also preemptively weakens the host’s immune system. We now have very effective treatments for HIV, and properly treated those infected could live a near normal life expectancy. But HIV is notoriously difficult to cure or eradicate.

Part of the challenge is that HIV can go dormant inside host immune cells. It just sits there, in the host DNA, and can reactivate at any time. Some treatments are geared towards activating these viruses so that they can then be targeted by other drugs, and this helps, but still does not lead to eradication. What the Amsterdam scientists did was use CRISPR/Cas9 to literally cut HIV out of the host cells. They treated three volunteer patients for 48 week, showing that the treatment was safe, with no serious side effects. Of course, this is very preliminary evidence, and the researchers are careful to point out this is a proof-of-concept only. We are still years away from an effective treatment. But this preliminary data is encouraging.

It’s still too early to see what the effect of this treatment was. Again, the real challenge is the vector – getting CRISPR to enough immune cells to make a difference. It’s easy to see how this could become an effective treatment, further reducing the HIV load in an infected patient. But the real goal, and what sets this apart from other HIV treatments, is that this is designed to be a cure. But that means it has to completely eliminate HIV from infected cells, or at least thoroughly enough that it is undetectable. The real test will be, can treated patients stop their HIV medications without running the risk of a recurrence? Again, this will take years of research to find out.

This is a nice proof of concept, and a brilliant use of the CRISPR/Cas9 system. I have been following CRISPR news closely for the last decade, and it really has advanced quickly. I think that is primarily due to the fact that this technology facilitates its own research. The first real appeal of CRISPR was as a tool for genetics research, which includes CRISPR itself. It is cheap and fast, meaning that even small labs around the world can engage in CRISPR research, and the pace of genetics research has increased dramatically. This is a great technological positive feedback loop.

We can likely expect continued advances in the CRISPR technology itself along with basic science genetics research, and increasing medical applications. We are still just at the beginning of this technology. It is also perhaps the one recent technology that I feel is not overhyped.

The post Using CRISPR To Treat HIV first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

This controversial treatment for PTSD involves moving the eyes side to side.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss415_Dan_Stone_2024_03_19.mp3 Download MP3

The Holocaust is much discussed, much memorialized, and much portrayed. But there are major aspects of its history that have been overlooked.

Spanning the entirety of the Holocaust, this sweeping history deepens our understanding. Dan Stone—Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London—reveals how the idea of “industrial murder” is incomplete: many were killed where they lived in the most brutal of ways. He outlines the depth of collaboration across Europe, arguing persuasively that we need to stop thinking of the Holocaust as an exclusively German project. He also considers the nature of trauma the Holocaust engendered, and why Jewish suffering has yet to be fully reckoned with. And he makes clear that the kernel to understanding Nazi thinking and action is genocidal ideology, providing a deep analysis of its origins.

Drawing on decades of research, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History upends much of what we think we know about the Holocaust. Stone draws on Nazi documents, but also on diaries, post-war testimonies, and even fiction, urging that, in our age of increasing nationalism and xenophobia, it is vital that we understand the true history of the Holocaust.

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author or editor of numerous articles and books, including: Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press); The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Yale University Press); and Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press). His new book is The Holocaust: An Unfinished History.

Shermer and Stone discuss:

• Why this book now? What is unfinished in the history of the Shoah?
• Holocaust denial: 20% of Americans under 30 who, according to a poll by The Economist, believe the Holocaust is a myth. Another 20% believe it is exaggerated
• Just as “Nazism was the most extreme manifestation of sentiments that were quite common, and for which Hitler acted as a kind of rainmaker or shaman”, suggests Stone, the defeat of his regime has left us with “a dark legacy, a deep psychology of fascist fascination and genocidal fantasy that people turn to instinctively in moments of crisis – we see it most clearly in the alt-right and the online world, spreading into the mainstream, of conspiracy theory”
• What was the Holocaust and why did it happen: intentionalism vs. functionalism
• Ideological roots of Nazism and German anti-Semitism
• “ideology, understood as a kind of phantasmagorical conspiracy theory, as the kernel of Nazi thinking and action”
• From ideas to genocide: magical thinking
• Blood and soil
• Hitler’s willing executioners
• The Holocaust as a continent-wide crime
• Motivations of the executioners
• Polish law prohibiting the accusation of Poles complicit in the Holocaust
• Industrial genocide vs. low-tech mass murder
• The banality of evil
• Nearly half of the Holocaust’s six million victims died of starvation in the ghettos or in “face-to-face” shootings in the east.
• Jews were constrained by a profusion of demeaning legislation. They were forbidden to keep typewriters, musical instruments, bicycles and even pets. The sheer variety of persecution was bewildering. It was also chillingly deceptive, persuading some law-abiding Jews that survival was a matter of falling into line. Stone quotes the wrenching letter of a woman reassuring her loved one that getting transported to Theresienstadt, in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, might be better than living in Germany. “My future place of residence represents a sort of ghetto,” she explained. “It has the advantage that, if one obeys all the rules, one lives in some ways without the restrictions one has here.”
• Wannsee Conference of Jan. 20, 1942
• In March 1942, “75 to 80 percent of the Holocaust’s victims were still alive.” Eleven months later, “80 percent of the Holocaust’s victims were dead.”

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

For the last two decades electricity demand in the US has been fairly flat. While it has been increasing overall, the increase has been very low. This has been largely attributed to the fact that as the use of electrical devices has increased, the efficiency of those devices has also increased. The introduction of LED bulbs, increased building insulation, more energy efficient appliances has largely offset increased demand. However, the most recent reports show that US energy demand is turning up, and there is real fear that this recent spike is not a short term anomaly but the beginning of a long term trend. For example, the projection of increase in energy demand by 2028 has nearly doubled from the 2022 estimate to the 2023 estimate – ” from 2.6% to 4.7% growth over the next five years.”

First, I have to state my usual skeptical caveat – these are projections, and we have to be wary of projecting short term trends indefinitely into the future. The numbers look like a blip on the graph, and it seems weird to take that blip and extrapolate it out. But these forecasts are not just based on looking at such graphs and then extending the line of current trends. These are based on an industry analysis which includes projects that are already under way. So there is some meat behind these forecasts.

What are the factors that seem to be driving this current and projected increase in electricity demand? They are all the obvious ones you might think. First, something which I and other technology-watchers predicted, is the increase in the use of electrical vehicles. In the US there are more than 2.4 million registered electric vehicles. While this is only about 1% of the US fleet, EVs represent about 9% of new car sales, and growing. If we are successful in somewhat rapidly (it will still take 20-30 years) changing our fleet of cars from gasoline engine to electric or hybrid, that represents a lot of demand on the electricity grid. Some have argued that EV charging is mostly at night (off peak), so this will not necessarily require increased electricity production capacity, but that is only partly true. Many people will still need to charge up on the road, or will charge up at work during the day, for example. It’s hard to avoid the fact that EVs represent a potential massive increase in electricity demand. We need to factor this in when planning future electricity production.

Another factor is data centers. The world’s demand for computer cycles is increasing, and there are already plans for many new data centers, which are a lot faster to build than the plants to power them. Recent advances in AI only increase this demand. Again we may mitigate this somewhat by prioritizing computer advances that make computers more energy efficient, but this will only be a partial offset. We do also have to think about applications, and if they are worth it. The one that gets the most attention is crypto – by one estimate Bitcoin mining alone used 121 terra-watt hours of electricity in 2023, the same as the Netherlands (with a population of 17 million people).

Other factors increasing US energy demand include recent investments in industry, through the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill, and the Chips and Science Act. Part of the goal of these bills was to bring manufacturing back to the US, and to the extent that they are working this comes with an increased demand for electricity. And fourth, another factor that was predicted and we are now starting to feel, as the Earth warms the demand for air conditioning increases.

All of these factors are likely to increase going forward. Also, in general there is a move to electrify as many processes as possible, as an approach to decarbonize our civilization – moving from gas stoves and heating to electric, for example. Even in industry, reducing the carbon footprint of steel making involves using a lot more electricity.

What all this means is that as we plan to decarbonize over the next 25 years, we need to expect that electricity demand will dramatically increase. This is true even in a country like the US, and even if our population remains stable over this time. Worldwide the situation is even worse, as many populations are trying to industrialize and world population is projected to grow (probably peaking at around 10 billion). The problem is that the rate at which we are building renewable low carbon energy is just treading water – we are essentially building enough to meet the increase in demand, but not enough to replace existing demand. This means that fossil fuel use worldwide is not dropping, in fact it is still increasing. These new energy demand projections may mean that we fall further behind.

Most concerning about these recent reports is that we currently are unable to meet this new projected increase in demand with renewables. Keep in mind, this is still far better than relying entirely on fossil fuel. Wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear capacity all replaces fossil fuel capacity, and is helping to mitigate CO2 release and climate change. But it has not been enough so far to actually reduce fossil fuel demand, and it’s going to get more challenging. The problem we are facing is bottlenecks in building new infrastructure. The primary limiting factor is the grid. It takes too long to build new grid projects. They are slowed by the patchwork of regulations and bickering among states over who is paying for what. New renewable energy projects are therefore delayed by years.

What needs to happen to fix the situation? First, we need more massive investment in electric grid infrastructure. There is some of this in the bills I mentioned, but not enough. We need perhaps a standalone bill investing billions in new grid projects. But also, this legislation should probably include new Federal authority to approve and enact such projects, to reduce local bottlenecks. We need Federal legislation to essentially enact eminent domain to rush through new grid projects. The report estimates that we will need to triple our existing grid capacity by 2035 to meet growing demand.

This analysis also reinforces the belief by many that wind and solar, while great sources of energy, are not going to get us to our goals. The problem is simply that they require a lot of new grid infrastructure and new connections to the grid. We will simply not be able to build them out in time. Residential solar is probably the best option, because it can use existing connections to the grid and is distributed to where it is used. This is especially true if you plan to switch to an electric vehicle – pair that with some solar panels. But still, this is not going to get us to our goals.

What we need is the big centralized power plants that can replace coal, oil, and natural gas plants – and this means nuclear, geothermal, and hydroelectric. The latter two are limited geographically, as there is limited potential to expand them, at least for now. Perhaps we may top out at 15% or so (that is of existing demand). This leaves nuclear. I know I have beat this drum for a while, but the most compelling and logical analyses I read all indicate that we will not get to our decarbonization goals without nuclear. Nuclear can generate the amount of electricity we need, and be plugged into existing connections to the grid, and can go anywhere. The main limitation with nuclear is the regulations make building new plants really slow – but this is fixable with the stroke of a pen. We need to streamline the regulation process for all zero carbon power plants – a project warp speed for energy. The bottom line really is coming down to – do you want a coal-fired plant or a nuclear plant? That is the real practical choice we face.  To some extend the choice is also between nuclear and natural gas, which is a lot better than coal but is still fossil fuel with the pollution and CO2 that comes with.

As the report indicates, many states are keeping coal-fired plants open longer to meet the increased demand. Or they are building natural gas fired plants, because the technology is proven, they are the fastest to build, and they are the most profitable. This has to change. It needs to be feasible to build nuclear plants instead. Some of this is happening, but not nearly enough.

We are dealing with hard numbers here, and the numbers are telling a very consistent and compelling story.

The post Energy Demand Increasing first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Tax Scams; News Items: Pentagon UFO Report, Microplastic Risks, Parasite Cleanse, Gut Microbe Communication, Interstellar Meteorite; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Thou, Mach Effect Drive; Science or Fiction

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss414_Eric_Schwitzgebel_2024_03_16.mp3 Download MP3

Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental questions lie beyond our powers of comprehension. We can be certain only that the truth—whatever it is—is weird. Philosophy, he proposes, can aim to open—to reveal possibilities we had not previously appreciated—or to close, to narrow down to the one correct theory of the phenomenon in question. Schwitzgebel argues for a philosophy that opens.

According to Schwitzgebel’s “Universal Bizarreness” thesis, every possible theory of the relation of mind and cosmos defies common sense. According to his complementary “Universal Dubiety” thesis, no general theory of the relationship between mind and cosmos compels rational belief. Might the United States be a conscious organism—a conscious group mind with approximately the intelligence of a rabbit? Might virtually every action we perform cause virtually every possible type of future event, echoing down through the infinite future of an infinite universe? What, if anything, is it like to be a garden snail? Schwitzgebel makes a persuasive case for the thrill of considering the most bizarre philosophical possibilities.

Eric Schwitzgebel is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures; Perplexities of Consciousness; and Describing Inner Experience?

Schwitzgebel has studied the behavior of philosophers, particularly ethicists, using empirical methods. The articles he has published investigate whether ethicists behave more ethically than other populations. In a 2009 study, Schwitzgebel investigated the rate at which ethics books were missing from academic libraries compared to similar philosophy books. The study found that ethics books were in fact missing at higher rates than comparable texts in other disciplines. Subsequent research has measured the behavior of ethicists at conferences, the perceptions of other philosophers about ethicists, and the self-reported behavior of ethicists. Schwitzgebel’s research did not find that the ethical behavior of ethicists differed from the behavior of professors in other disciplines. In addition, his research found that the moral beliefs of professional philosophers were just as susceptible to being influenced by irrelevant factors as those of non-philosophers. Schwitzgebel has concluded that, “Professional ethicists appear to behave no differently than do non-ethicists of similar social background.”

Shermer and Schwitzgebel discuss:

• bizarreness
• skepticism
• consciousness and sentience
• AI, Turing Test, sentience, existential threat
• idealism, materialism and the ultimate nature of reality
• solipsism and experimental evidence for the existence of an external world
• Are we living in a computer simulation?
• mind-body problem
• truths: external, internal, objective, subjective, and mind-altering drugs
• anthropic principles and fine-tuning of the universe
• theism, atheism, agnosticism, deism, pantheism, panpsychism
• free will, determinism, compatibilism
• Is the universe predetermined?
• entropy, the arrow of time, and causality
• infinity
• souls and immortality, mind uploading
• multiverse, parallel universes, and many worlds hypothesis
• why there is something rather than nothing.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

Ah, the categorization question again. This is an endless, but much needed, endeavor within human intellectual activity. We have the need to categorize things, if for no other reason than we need to communicate with each other about them. Often skeptics, like myself, talk about conspiracy theories or grand conspiracies. We also often define exactly what we mean by such terms, although not always exhaustively or definitively. It is too cumbersome to do so every single time we refer to such conspiracy theories. To some extent there is a cumulative aspect to discussions about such topics, either here or, for example, on my podcast. To some extent I expect regular readers or listeners to remember what has come before.

For blog posts I also tend to rely on links to previous articles for background, and I have little patience for those who cannot bother to click these links to answer their questions or before making accusations about not having properly defined a term, for example. I don’t expect people to have memorized my entire catalogue, but click the links that are obviously there to provide further background and explanation. Along those lines, I suspect I will be linking to this very article in all my future articles about conspiracy theories.

What is a grand conspiracy theory? First a bit more background, about categorization itself. There are two concepts I find most useful when thinking about categories – operational definition and defining characteristics. An operational definition is one that essentially is a list of inclusion and exclusion criteria, a formula, that if you follow, will determine if something fits within the category or not. It’s not a vague description or general concept – it is a specific list of criteria that can be followed “operationally”. This comes up a lot in medicine when defining a disease. For example, the operational definition of “essential hypertension” is persistent (three readings or more) systolic blood pressure over 130 or diastolic blood pressure over 80.

Operational definitions often rely upon so-called “defining characteristics” – those features that we feel are essential to the category. For example, how do we define “planet”? Well, astronomers had to agree on what the defining characteristics of “planet” should be, and it was not entirely obvious. The one that created the most controversy was the need to gravitationally clear out one’s orbit – the defining characteristic that excluded Pluto from the list of planets.

There is therefore some subjectivity in categories, because we have to choose the defining characteristics. Also, such characteristics may have fuzzy or non-obvious boundaries. This leads to what philosophers call the “demarcation problem” – there may be a fuzzy border between categories. But, and this is critical, this does not mean the categories themselves don’t exist or are not meaningful.

With all that in mind, how do we operationally define a “grand conspiracy” and what are the defining characteristics. A grand conspiracy has a particular structure, but I think the key defining characteristic is the conspirators themselves. The conspirators are a secret group that have way more power than they should have or any group realistically could have. Further they are operating for their own nefarious goals and are deceiving the public about their existence and their true goals. This shadowy group may operate within a government, or represents a shadow government themselves, or even a secret world government. They can control the media and other institutions as necessary to control the public narrative. They are often portrayed a diabolically clever, able to orchestrate elaborate deceptions and false flag operations, down to tiny details.

But of course there would be no conspiracy theory if such a group were entirely successful. So there must also be an “army of light” that has somehow penetrated the veil of the conspirators, they see the conspiracy for what it is and try to expose it. Then there is everyone else, the “sheeple” who are naive and deceived by the conspiracy.

That is the structure of a grand conspiracy. Functionally, psychologically, the grand conspiracy theory operates in order to insulate the belief of the “conspiracy theorist”. Any evidence that contradicts the conspiracy theory was a “false flag” operation, meant to cast doubt on the conspiracy. The utter lack of direct evidence for the conspiracy is due to the extensive ability of the conspirators to cover up any and all such evidence. So how, then, do the conspiracy theorists even know that the conspiracy exists? They rely on pattern recognition, anomaly hunting, and hyperactive agency detection – not consciously or explicitly, but that is what they do. They look for apparent alignments, or for anything unusual. Then they assume a hidden hand operating behind the scenes, and give it all a sinister interpretation.

Here is a good recent example – Joe Rogan recently “blew” his audience’s mind by claiming that the day before 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld said in a press conference that the Pentagon had lost 2.3 trillion dollars. Then, the next day, a plane crashes into the part of the Pentagon that was carrying out the very audit of that missing trillions. Boom – a grand conspiracy is born (of course fitting into another existing conspiracy that 9/11 was an inside job). The coincidence was the press conference the day before 9/11, which is not much of a coincidence because you can go anomaly hunting by looking at any government activity in the days before 9/11 for anything that can be interpreted in a sinister way.

In this case, Rumsfeld did not say the Pentagon lost $2.3 trillion. He was criticizing the outdated technology in use by the DOD, saying it is not up to the modern standards used by private corporations. An analysis – released to the public one year earlier – concluded that because of the outdated accounting systems, as much as 2.3 trillion dollars in the Pentagon budget cannot be accurately tracked and documented. But of course, Rogan is just laying out a sinister-looking coincidence, not telling a coherent story. What is he actually saying? Was Rumsfeld speaking out of school? Was 9/11 orchestrated in a single day to cover up Rumsfeld’s accidental disclosure? Is Rumsfeld a rebel who was trying to expose the coverup? Would crashing into the Pentagon sufficiently destroy any records of DOD expenditures to hide the fact that $2.3 trillion was stolen? Where is the press on this story? How can anyone make $2.3 trillion disappear? How did the DOD operate with so much money missing from their budget?

Such questions should act as a “reality filter” that quickly marks the story as implausible and even silly. But the grand conspiracy reacts to such narrative problems by simply expanding the scope, depth, and power of the conspiracy. So now we have to hypothesize the existence of a group within the government, complicit with many people in the government, that can steal $2.3 trillion from the federal budget, keep it from the public and the media, and orchestrate and carry our elaborate distractions like 9/11 when necessary.

This is why, logically speaking, grand conspiracy theories collapse under their own weight. They must, by necessity, grow in order to remain viable, until you have a vast multi-generational conspiracy spanning multiple institutions with secret power over many aspects of the world. Any they can keep it all secret by exerting unbelievable control over the thousands and thousands of individuals who would need to be involved. They can bribe, threaten, and kill anyone who would expose them. Except, of course, for the conspiracy theorists themselves, who can work tirelessly to expose them with fear, apparently.

This apparent contradiction has even lead to a meta conspiracy theory that all conspiracy theories are in fact false flag operations, meant to discredit conspiracy theories and theorists so that the real conspiracies can operate in the shadows.

Being a “grand” conspiracy is not just about size. As I have laid out, it is about how such conspiracies allegedly operate, and the intellectual approach of the conspiracy theorists who believe in them. This can fairly easily be distinguished from actual conspiracies, in which more than one person or entity agree together to carry out some secret illegal activity. Actually conspiracies can even become fairly extensive, but the bigger they get the greater the risk that they will be exposed, which they are all the time. Of course, we can’t know about the conspiracies that were never exposed, by definition, but certainly there are a vast number of conspiracies that do ultimately get exposed. It makes it hard to believe that a conspiracy orders of magnitude larger can operate for decades without similarly being exposed.

Ultimately the grand conspiracy theory is about the cognitive style and behavior of the conspiracy theorists – the subject of a growing body of psychological research.

The post What Is a Grand Conspiracy? first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

While not going so far as arguing, as some have, that psychotherapy is always effective, I’d like to present some data and offer some contrasting considerations to Harriet Hall’s article: “Psychotherapy Reconsidered” (in Skeptic 28.1). Probably no other area within social science practice has been so inordinately and unfortunately praised and damned. Many of us working in the field have long been acutely aware of the difficulties to which Hall and others point, as well as other problems. However, we also regularly observe the positive changes in clients’ lives that psychotherapy—properly practiced—has produced, and in many cases, the lives it has saved.

In her article, the late Harriet Hall, whose work I and all skeptics admire and now miss, stated that no-one can provide an objective report about the field, indeed, that there “…aren’t even any basic numbers,” that we don’t know whether psychotherapy works, that it is not based on solid science, and that there is “…no rational basis for choosing a therapy or therapist.”

Hall and other sources she quotes are quite correct in saying that there is much we still don’t know about human psychology, and much that we don’t understand about how the mind and psychotherapy work. Yet it’s also necessary to look at the data and analyses which demonstrate that psychotherapy does work. The case for the defense is made in detail in The Great Psychotherapy Debate: The Evidence for What Makes Psychotherapy Work by Bruce Wampold and Zac Imel, and also in Psychotherapy Relationships That Work by Wampold and John Norcross, both of which present decades of meta-analyses. They review conclusions from an impressive number of psychotherapy studies and show how humans heal in a social context, as well as offer a compelling alternative to the conventional approach to psychotherapy research, which typically concentrates on identifying the most effective treatment for specific disorders by placing an emphasis on the particular components of treatment.

This is a misguided point in Hall’s argument, as she was looking at the differences between treatments rather than between therapists. Studies that previously claimed superiority over one method to another ignored who the treatment provider was.1 We know that these wrong research questions arise from using the medical model where it is imperative to know which treatment is the most effective for a particular disorder. In psychotherapy, and to some extent in medicine generally, the person administering the treatment is absolutely critical. Indeed, in psychotherapy the most important factor is the skill, confidence, and interpersonal flexibility of the therapist delivering the treatment, not the model, method, or “school” they use, their number of years in practice, or even the amount of professional development they’ve had. How we train and supervise therapists largely has little impact on the outcomes of psychotherapy, unless each therapist routinely collects outcome data in every session and adjusts their approach to accommodate each client’s feedback.

The Bad News About Psychotherapy

Hall is right on the point that psychotherapy outcomes have not improved much over the last 50 years. Hans Eysenck’s classic study debunking psychotherapy was performed in 1952.2 His view was not challenged until 1977, when a meta-analysis showed that psychotherapy was effective, and that Eysenck was wrong.3 It found the effect size (ES) for psychotherapy was .8 above the mean of the untreated sample. Recent meta-analyses show that this ES has remained the same over the intervening 50 years, despite the proliferation of diagnoses and treatment models.4

Hall was also accurate in saying that much conflicting data exists from studies about the efficacy of the hundreds of types of psychotherapy. Yet she was incorrect in saying that we don’t even have basic numbers. We now have decades of meta-analyses showing what works and what doesn’t work in psychotherapy.5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Hall was also mostly on-target when she stated, “…proponents of each modality of psychotherapy give us their…impressions about the success of their chosen method.” Decades of clinical trials comparing treatment A to treatment B point to the conclusion that all bona fide psychotherapy models work equally well. This is consistently replicated in trials comparing therapists who use two different yet coherent, convincing, and structured treatments, as long as these treatments provide an explanation for what’s bothering the client in addition to discussing a treatment plan for the client to work hard at overcoming their difficulties. Psychotherapy research clearly shows that all models contribute 0–1 percent towards the outcomes of psychotherapy.11 This means that proponents of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy—or any model—claiming its superiority to other treatments, are not basing their claims on the available evidence.

Another correct statement of Hall’s is that most therapists have no evidence to show that what they’re doing is effective. This lack of evidence led others to conclude that, “Beyond personal impressions and informal feedback, the majority of therapists have no hard, verifiable evidence that anything they do makes a difference…Absent a valid and reliable assessment of their performance, it also stands to reason they cannot possibly know what kind of instruction or guidance would help them improve.”12

For decades, free pen-and-paper measures by which therapists can track their outcomes have been available,13 recently superseded by online versions.14 These Feedback Informed Treatment (FIT) online platforms are easy to use and have been utilized by thousands of therapists around the world to get routine feedback from every client on each session. The result: Data from hundreds of thousands of clients is continually being updated. Regrettably, those of us who use these methods are still a small minority of therapists practicing around the world compared to the unknown numbers who, as Hall rightly pointed out, provide psychotherapy in its manifold (and perhaps unregulated) forms.

The online outcome measurement platforms mentioned above are recommended by the International Center for Clinical Excellence (ICCE).15 For decades, the ICCE has been aggregating data from therapists around the world and so providing evidence that corroborates some of Hall’s critical claims about psychotherapy. Current data show that dropout rates, defined as clients unilaterally stopping treatment without experiencing reliable clinical improvement, are between 20–22 percent among adult populations (even when therapists use FIT).16 Dropout rates are typically higher (40–60 percent) for child and adolescent populations. This raises the unfortunate possibility that dropout rates for therapists who don’t get routine feedback from clients are probably higher still.

Hall was, however, incorrect in stating that we don’t know about the harms of psychotherapy. There are many examples of discussions and analyses of what doesn’t work in psychotherapy and what can cause harm.17 One study of aggregated data shows that the percentage of people who are reliably worse while in treatment is 5–10 percent.18

Regrettably, the data indicate that the average clinician’s outcomes plateau relatively early in their career, despite their thinking they are improving. One review found no evidence that therapists improve beyond their first 50 hours of training in terms of their effectiveness, and a number of studies have found that paraprofessionals with perhaps six weeks of training achieve outcomes on par with psychologists holding a PhD, which is equal to five years of training.19 These data support Hall’s statement that unless they are measuring their outcomes, no therapist knows whether their method is more (or less) effective than the methods used by others. Even then, it leads to a conflation that it’s due to the method instead of the therapist. Studies also show that students often achieve outcomes that are on par or better than their instructors. These facts are amply demonstrated in Witkowski’s discussion with Vikram H. Patel,20 whose mental health care manual Where There Is No Psychiatrist is used primarily in developing countries by non-specialist health workers and volunteers.21

Further, there is now evidence that psychotherapists who have been in practice for a few years see themselves as improving even though the data show no such improvement.22 Psychotherapists are not immune either to cognitive biases or to the Dunning-Kruger effect, and a majority rate themselves as being above average. In other words, psychotherapists generally overestimate their abilities. Finally, meta-analyses show that there is a large variation in effectiveness between clinicians, with a small minority of top performing therapists routinely getting superior outcomes with a wide range of clients. Unfortunately, these “supershrinks” are a rare breed.23

To balance the bad news above, following is some of the data which shows that psychotherapy works.

The Good News About Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy works. It does help people. Since Eysenck’s time and in response to the numerous sources cited by Hall, many studies have demonstrated that the average treated client is better off than eighty percent of the untreated sample.24 That doesn’t mean that psychotherapy is eighty percent effective, but it does mean that if you take the average treated person and you compare them to those in an untreated sample, that average treated person is doing better than eighty percent of people in the untreated sample. This effect size means that psychotherapy outcomes are equivalent to those for coronary artery bypass surgery and four times greater than those for the use of fluoride in preventing tooth decay. As discussed earlier, this has remained constant for 50 years, regardless of the problem being tested or the method being employed.

Just as in surgery, the tools that psychotherapists use are only as effective as the hands that use them. How effective are psychotherapists? Real world studies have looked at this question, asking clinicians to measure their outcomes on a routine basis with each client in every session. They’ve compared these outcomes against those in randomized clinical trials (RCTs). It must be noted that in RCTs researchers have many advantages that real world practitioners do not. These include: (a) a highly select clientele, in that many published studies have a single unitary diagnosis while clinicians routinely deal with clients with two or more comorbidities; (b) they have a lower caseload; and (c) they have ongoing supervision and consultation with some of the world’s leading experts on psychotherapy. Despite all this, the data documents that psychotherapy outcomes are equivalent with those of RCTs.25

Therapists around the world, including me, have been using Feedback Informed Treatment (FIT) for decades. I have been seeing clients since 1981 and my clinical outcomes started to improve when I started incorporating FIT into my practice nearly 20 years ago. Those of us who use FIT routinely get quantitative feedback from every client at the beginning of every session. We ask about the client’s view of the outcomes of therapy in four areas of their life: (1) their individual wellbeing; (2) their close personal relationships; (3) their social interactions; and (4) their overall functioning. This measure is termed the Outcome Rating Scale or ORS.26 At the end of every session, we also get quantitative feedback about four items to gauge the client’s experience of: (1) whether they felt heard, understood, and respected by us in that session; (2) whether we talked about what the client wanted to discuss; (3) whether the therapist’s approach/method was a good fit for the client; and (4) an overall rating for the session, also asking if there was anything missing in that session. This measure is termed the Session Rating Scale or SRS.27 The resulting feedback is successively incorporated into the therapy, ensuring that the client’s voice and preferences are privileged.

Research shows that individual therapists vary widely in their ability to achieve positive outcomes in therapy, so which therapist a client sees is a big factor in determining the outcome of their therapy. Data gathered over a 2.5-year period from nearly 2,000 clients and 91 therapists documented significant variation in effectiveness among the clinicians in the study and found certain high-performing therapists were 10 times more effective than the average clinician.28 One variable that strongly accounted for this difference in outcome effectiveness was the amount of time these therapists devoted outside of therapy to deliberately practicing objectives which were just beyond their level of proficiency.29

What these studies show is that we’ve been looking in the wrong place for the answers as to why the outcomes of psychotherapy have not improved over the last 50 years. We’ve been studying the effects within the therapy room rather than what happens outside of the therapy room, i.e., what clients bring into their therapy and what therapists do before and after they see their clients.

Indeed, clients and their extra-therapeutic factors contribute 87 percent to outcomes of psychotherapy!30 Extra-therapeutic factors comprise the client’s personality, their daily environment, their friends, family, work, good relationships, and community support. On average clients spend less than one hour per week with a therapist. The extra-therapeutic factors are the components of the client’s life to which they return, and which make up the other 167 hours of their week. This begs the question “does this mean that there’s nothing we can do about it?” The key is for therapists to a) attune to these outside factors and resources, and b) tap into them. The remaining 13 percent of treatment effects which accounts for positive outcomes in therapy is made up of: the individual therapist, between 4–9 percent; the working alliance (relationship) between therapist and client, 4.9–8 percent; the expectancy/placebo and rationale for treatment, 4 percent; while the model of therapy contributes an insignificant 0–1 percent. This highlights that who the therapist is and how they relate to their clients is the main variable accounting for positive outcomes outside of the client’s extra-therapeutic factors.

So, how should you choose a therapist?

There is now a movement led by eminent researchers, educators, policymakers, and supervisors in the psychotherapy field to ensure that after graduation therapists consciously and intentionally engage in ongoing Deliberate Practice—critically analyzing their own skills and therapy session performance, continuously practicing their skillset (particularly training their in-the-moment responses to emotionally challenging clients and situations), and seeking expert feedback. Deliberate Practice is based on K. Anders Ericsson’s (who made a name for himself as “the expert on expertise”) three decades of research on the components of expertise in many domains of activity, including in sport, medicine, music, mathematics, business, education, computer programming, and other fields. Building on research in other professional domains such as sports, music, and medicine, a 2015 study was conducted to understand what differentiated top performing therapists from average ones.31 It found that top performing therapists spent 2.5 times more time in Deliberate Practice before and after their client sessions than did average therapists, and 14 times more time in Deliberate Practice than the least effective therapists!

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.4
Buy print edition
Buy digital edition
Subscribe to print edition
Subscribe to digital edition
Download our app

Experts in the field encourage therapists, supervisors, educators, and licensing bodies to “change the rules” about how psychotherapists are trained and how psychotherapy is practiced.32 The research reviewed here highlights that we can do this in two main ways: first, by making our clients’ voices the central focus of psychotherapy by routinely engaging in Feedback Informed Treatment with every client in every session to create a culture of feedback; and second, by each therapist receiving guidance from a coach who uses Deliberate Practice. To ensure accountability to clients, health insurance companies, and the psychotherapy field itself, this should be the basis for all practice, training, accreditation, and ongoing licensing of therapists.

In summary, psychotherapy does work. For readers who are curious to explore why psychotherapy works and which factors contribute to it doing so, I’d highly recommend Better Results: Using Deliberate Practice to Improve Therapeutic Effectiveness33 and its accompanying Field Guide to Better Results.34

About the Author

Vivian Baruch is a relationship coach, counselor, psychotherapist, and clinical supervisor specializing in relationship issues for singles and couples. She has been practicing since 1981, has been a psychotherapy educator at the Australian College of Applied Psychology, and taught supervision to psychotherapists at the University of Canberra. In 2004, she trained with Scott D. Miller, and has been using Feedback Informed Treatment (FIT) for 20 years to routinely incorporate her clients’ feedback into her psychotherapy and supervision work.

References

1. https://rb.gy/iw4yb
2. https://rb.gy/4y3su
3. https://rb.gy/bc9u9
4. Miller, S.D., Hubble, M.A., & Chow, D. (2020). Better Results: Using Deliberate Practice to Improve Therapeutic Effectiveness. American Psychological Association.
5. Wampold, B.E., & Imel, Z.E. (2015). The Great Psychotherapy Debate: The Evidence for What Makes Psychotherapy Work. Routledge.
6. Norcross, J. C., & Lambert, M. J. (Eds.). (2019). Psychotherapy Relationships That Work: Volume 2: Evidence-Based Therapist Responsiveness. Oxford University Press.
7. https://rb.gy/qm2hz
8. https://rb.gy/x7bm9
9. https://rb.gy/rfq74
10. https://rb.gy/rz91t
11. Wampold, B.E., & Imel, Z.E. (2015). The Great Psychotherapy Debate: The Evidence for What Makes Psychotherapy Work. Routledge.
12. Miller, S.D., Hubble, M.A., & Chow, D. (2020). Better Results: Using Deliberate Practice to Improve Therapeutic Effectiveness. American Psychological Association.
13. https://rb.gy/edpb6
14. https://rb.gy/ktioc
15. https://rb.gy/2bjuy
16. https://rb.gy/6f55y
17. https://rb.gy/tpuo2
18. https://rb.gy/uqp3k
19. https://rb.gy/obhfg
20. Witkowski, T. (2020). Shaping Psychology: Perspectives on Legacy, Controversy and the Future of the Field. Springer Nature.
21. Patel, V. (2003). Where There Is No Psychiatrist: A Mental Health Care Manual. RCPsych publications.
22. Miller, S.D., Hubble, M.A., & Chow, D. (2020). Better Results: Using Deliberate Practice to Improve Therapeutic Effectiveness. American Psychological Association.
23. Ricks, D. F. (1974). Supershrink: Methods of a Therapist Judged Successful on the Basis of Adult Outcomes of Adolescent Patients. In D.F. Ricks, A. Thomas, & M. Roff (Eds.), Life History Research in Psychopathology: III. University of Minnesota Press.
24. https://rb.gy/obhfg
25. https://rb.gy/uulpw
26. https://rb.gy/d5mbx
27. Ibid.
28. https://rb.gy/0hvy3
29. https://rb.gy/rkr85
30. Wampold, B.E., & Imel, Z.E. (2015). The Great Psychotherapy Debate: The Evidence for What Makes Psychotherapy Work. Routledge.
31. https://rb.gy/ye406
32. https://rb.gy/r2jb8
33. Miller, S.D., Hubble, M.A., & Chow, D. (2020). Better Results: Using Deliberate Practice to Improve Therapeutic Effectiveness. American Psychological Association.
34. https://rb.gy/f3c3e

In response to a recent surge in interest in alien phenomena and claims that the US government is hiding what it knows about extraterrestrials, the Pentagon established a committee to investigate the question – the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). They have recently released volume I of their official report – their conclusion:

“To date, AARO has not discovered any empirical evidence that any sighting of a UAP represented off-world technology or the existence a classified program that had not been properly reported to Congress.”

They reviewed evidence from 1945 to 2023, including interviews, reports, classified and unclassified archives, spanning all “official USG investigatory efforts” regarding possible alien activity. They found nothing – nada, zip, goose egg, zero. They did not find a single credible report or any physical evidence. They followed up on all the fantastic claims by UFO believers (they now use the term UAP for unidentified anomalous phenomena), including individual sightings, claims of secret US government programs, claims of reverse engineering alien technology or possessing alien biological material.

They found that all eyewitness accounts were either misidentified mundane phenomena (military aircraft, drones, etc), or simply lacked enough evidence to resolve. Eyewitness accounts of secret government programs were all misunderstood conversations or hearsay, often referring to known and legitimate military or intelligence programs. Their findings are familiar to any experience skeptic – people misinterpret what they see and hear, fitting their misidentified perception into an existing narrative. This is what people do. This is why we need objective evidence to know what is real and what isn’t.

I know – this is a government report saying the government is not hiding evidence of aliens. This is likely to convince no hard-core believer. Anyone using conspiracy arguments to prop up their claims of aliens will simply incorporate this into their conspiracy narrative. Grand conspiracy theories are immune to evidence and logic, because the conspiracy can be used to explain away anything – any lack of evidence, or any disconfirming evidence. It is a magic box in which any narrative can be true without the burden of evidence or even internal consistency.

But the report is devastating to those who claim the government has known for a long time that aliens exist and are in possession of alien tech. It also means that in order to maintain such a belief, you have to enlarge the conspiracy, give it more power and scope. You have to believe the secret program is secret even from Congress and the executive branch, and that it is either secret from the defense and intelligence communities or they are fully involved at every level. At some point, it’s not really even a government program, but a rogue program somehow existing secretly within the government.

This is how grand conspiracy theories fail. In order to be maintained against negative evidence, they have to be enlarged and deepened. They then quickly collapse under their own weight. Imagine what it would take to fund and maintain such a program over decades, over multiple administrations and generations. How total would their control need to be to keep something this huge secret for so long? There have been no leaks to the mainstream press, like the Pentagon papers, or the Snowden leaks, or even the Discord fiasco. And yet, some rando UFO researchers know all about it. There is no way to make this story make sense.

I also don’t buy the alleged motivation. Why would such an agency keep the existence of aliens secret for so long? I can see keeping it a secret for a short time, until they had a chance to wrap their head around what was going on – but half a century? The notion that the public is “not ready” for the revelation is just silly. We’ve been ready for decades. If they want to keep the tech secret, they can do that without keeping the very existence of aliens secret. Besides, wouldn’t the principle of deterrence mean that we would want our enemies to know – hey, we have reverse-engineered alien technology, so don’t mess with us?

Also, the conspiracy theories often ignore the fact that the US is not the only government in the world. So do all countries in the world who might come into possession of alien artifacts have similarly powerful and long-lived secret organizations within their government? Some conspiracy theorists solve this contradiction by, again, widening the conspiracy. This leads to “secret world government” territory. Perhaps the lizard aliens are really in charge, and they are trying to keep their own existence secret.

I’ll be interested to see what the effect of the report will be (especially in our social-media post truth world). Interests in UFOs wax and wane over the years. It seems each generation has a flirtation with the idea then quickly grows bored, leaving the hard core believers to keep the flame alive until a new generation comes up. This creates a UFO boom and bust cycle. The claims, blurry photos, faked evidence, and breathless eyewitness accounts all seem superficially fascinating. I got sucked into this when I was around 10. I remembering thinking that something this huge, aliens visiting the Earth, would come out eventually. All the suggestive evidence was interesting, but I knew deep down none of it was conclusive. At some point we would need the big reveal – unequivocal evidence of alien visitation.

As the years rolled by, the suggestive blurry evidence and wild speculation became less and less interesting. You can only maintain such anticipation for so long. Eventually all it took was for me to hear Carl Sagan say that all the UFO evidence was crap, and the entire house of cards collapsed. Now, 40 years later, nothing has changed. We have mostly the same cast of dubious characters making the same tired claims, citing mostly the same incidents with the same conspiracy theories. The only difference is that their audience is a new generation that hasn’t been through it all before.

Perhaps the boom bust cycle is faster now because of social media and the relative short attention spans of the public. I suspect the Pentagon report will have the effect of forcing those with a more casual interest off the fence – either you have to admit there is simply no evidence for alien visitation, or you have to go the other way an embrace the grand UFO conspiracy theory. Or perhaps the current generation simply does not care about evidence, logic, and internal consistency and will just believe whatever narrative generates the most clicks on Tik Tok.

The post Pentagon Report – No UFOs first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.