  George Santayana 'Scepticism and Animal Faith, IX' 'Pseudoscience' is all around us, especially in these times of TikTok and YouTube videos trying to fool us into believing something that is false. We've all seen videos of perpetual motion machines, flat earth proofs, and amazing stunts. Mostly they're pseudoscience. What exactly is 'pseudoscience'? It's a set of beliefs, often hidden in a collection of scientific-sounding mumbo-jumbo, that is usually put forward by people who may be sincere in their belief, but often are trying to make money by lying to you! Here are some examples: Astrology Astrology is the oldest pseudoscience. Astrologers claim that they can predict your future by analyzing the position of the planets and the stars at the time of your birth, using ancient rules and 'star charts'. The basis for this pseudoscience is centuries old, and in fact its practitioners were originally very scientific in their methods. They were the first to study the heavens, and use their data to predict the positions of the planets. These studies actually formed the beginning of the science of astronomy. The original astrologers went a step further, however. They believed that the positions of the planets and stars could influence events here on earth; could in fact determine the success or failure of individual human endeavours. Our modern knowledge of planetary and stellar positions and the forces they exert on us cannot suggest any possible method by which any such influence is possible. Could the effects be caused by gravitational forces? No, not even remotely! These celestial objects ... the planets and the even nearest star ... are so far away that their gravitational force is hardly measureable. You experience more gravitational force from the Rocky Mountains while visiting Alberta than you do from the planet Saturn; a person across the room pointing a finger at you is exerting more gravitational force on you than even the nearest star is! Modern science can suggest no force by which planets and stars can influence human behaviour directly. 'Well, perhaps then the force they exert is one that science knows nothing about!' This is a commonly used argument amongst the practitioners of pseudoscience, and in fact it is a valid argument. Our body of scientific knowledge is continually growing...we do learn new things every day! Unfortunately, this is not a scientific argument! Until a thing can be observed, until it can be measured, until some sort of explanation can be made, even a wrong one, speculation about some unknown force is just that ... speculation. But Astrology can not be considered valid for other reasons. We have no evidence of ancient predictions, but there certainly is enough modern-day astrology around us to test its worth. Astrology columns are everywhere. Aren't they useful? Valid? Scientific? Here are some reasons that should convince you that horoscopes are garbage.
People believe what they want to believe. And remember that the average IQ of the public in general is 100. That puts a whole lot of the population lower on the IQ curve. Some much lower. They're the people who believe in conspiracy theories about the moon landings being fake! Return to Index Homeopathy Homeopathy uses a 'remedy' consisting of a sugar pill which has had a drop of treated distilled water added to it. Although the water added supposedly contains an 'active ingredient', (sometimes arsenic), it actually contains not a single molecule of any ingredient. Homeopaths claim that continually diluting a substance will make it more potent. They call this the 'Law of Infinitesimals'. The ingredient is diluted to one part in 100 in water. Then this solution is diluted once again to one part in 100. This process is repeated up to 30 times. Of course, a knowledge of Avogadro's constant that you learned in chemistry class will tell you that the resulting solution after repeatedly diluting it to a 1% solution will likely leave not a single molecule of the original ingredient in the water. Homeopaths also insist that 'tapping the liquid' in a certain way during the dilution process instills in it a 'memory' of the active ingredient. Why there is no memory in the water of all the previous substances that were once in the water ... while it was in the sewer, for example ... is not explained. They also claim that the water, despite having no active ingredient left in it, contains an 'energy signature' that no-one can measure or even detect. People who take homeopathic remedies are simply swallowing a sugar pill with a little distilled water on it. It causes no harm to the patient. But it does no good either; the basis for homeopathy defies the laws of chemistry and physics, and many clinical trials have failed to show any effect beyond that of placebos. The real unfortunate part of all of this is that people are tricked into spending hundreds of dollars on fake remedies, and at the same time, by believing that such treatments are the equivalent of modern medicine, may be delaying appropriate treatment for themselves or their children. Tragically, pharmacies in North America are forced to display these bogus products next to actual medicines! Return to Index Psychics We've already discussed astrological psychics, but this category also includes mind-readers, Tarot-card readers, tea-leaf readers, spoon-benders, psychic healers, and others. Here are some facts. There is absolutely no scientific evidence for any of these phenomena, despite what you may have heard or read somewhere. 'Scientific evidence' is merely a fancy way of saying that you'd like the spoon bender to bend spoons for you under controlled conditions ... ie: conditions under which there can be no question that some 'psychic' force is involved. You may have seen reports that purported to prove that a psychic was for real. Often these will involve the spoon-bender or psychic healer performing his stuff in front of a respected panel of scientists. The scientists will report that what they saw was amazing, and that they could detect no trickery. Did you spot the flaw in this 'evidence'? If you wanted to discover what part was malfunctioning in the engine of your car and causing a strange knocking sound, would you invite several lawyers and judges to have a look and give their opinion? You might, but you probably wouldn't learn anything new! Suppose that psychics are indeed charlatans and frauds. How do they manage to fool teams of respected scientists? Easy ... the scientists, despite their stature in the scientific field, are NOT experts in the field they are observing, which is... sleight-of-hand! Yes, magic! In every single case where a psychic of any kind has been tested by a professional sleight-of-hand artist (ie: magician), the psychic has either failed miserably, or the magician has discovered the psychic's trick and exposed it as nothing more than legerdemain! Then the magician turns around and does the psychic performance even better than the psychic did! It was reseach like this, many decades ago, by magicians such as The Amazing Randi, that eventually exposed famous psychics like the Brazilian Psychic Surgeon (who was even written up in Readers' Digest) and the spoon-bender Uri Geller. Randi felt they were giving magicians a bad name! Return to Index Water Witching This is my favourite pseudoscience, because so many otherwise-rational people will swear up and down that it works, and they know this guy who found water on a piece of land where nobody else could. They saw it, for Pete's sake .. it has to be real! You know what 'water-witching' is, don't you? It's where some guy wanders around your property holding a (usually) 'Y'-shaped piece of branch, and when. it starts to vibrate, he yells 'Dig here!' O.K., so you won't accept the argument that there is NO known scientific explanation for this phenomenon. Lets look at some other facts then!
Whenever a water-witcher has been tested along with a regular person who is 'pretending', neither one has a success rate higher than what could be expected from random statistical results (ie: pure luck). Like all pseudosciences, water-witching fails to produce when put to the test. Return to Index Vegetarianism Many people are vegetarians or vegans. It's harmless, and most people who practice this unnatural activity claim to feel better for it. Actually, if the reason for their avoidance of meat is to steer clear of the multitude of chemicals, colourizers, preservatives, and synthetic hormones that are used in the meat product industry, then they may have a point! There has never been any long-term research into the effects of these additives ... and many scientists suspect that their effects may show up in the long term, and may cause such illnesses as allergies or immune deficiency diseases. But at present there is no hard evidence for this. Vegetarians who don't eat meat because of these additives are doing so for a scientifically valid reason. They may have difficulty getting enough protein in their diet, but they are making a legitimate effort to stay healthy. The problem here is the reasoning. The pseudoscience is in the beliefs that people hold about vegetarianism. Vegetarianism makes sense only if you're trying to avoid consuming any added chemicals. This means a vegetarian should not eat any fruits, breads, or vegetables that have been artificially fertilized, preseved, enhanced, sprayed with insecticide, fungicides,... or otherwise tampered with to make them nicer looking. Needless to say, that is mearly impossible to do. In other words, vegetarianism is a scientifically valid undertaking only if what you do eat is organic! This rules out most vegetarians. In fact, most people who practice vegetarianism are not that logical. They do it out of a vague sense of unease about what's in meat, but mostly because they feel it's not natural or proper, in the 21st century, for humans to continue to eat flesh. The act of eating flesh itself is thought to be unhealthy or unnatural, or just plain barbaric. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth! Eating meat cannot be unnatural if the human race (and the prehuman races from which it evolved) have been thriving on it for the last 50 million years! In fact, humans are omnivores ... our bodies have evolved to thrive on a mixed diet of vegetable matter, grains, fruits, nuts, and flesh. For most of our existance as a species, the main component of our diet has been flesh. Only comparatively recently (say, the last 600 years), when standards of living for many people have risen to the point where we have a choice, (other than basic subsistence), has vegetarianism become popular, let alone possible. There were no vegetarians 10,000 years ago...you ate meat (and thrived!) or you died. Return to Index Wolves How people feel about wolves varies greatly depending on who you talk to. The truth about these magnificent creatures may surprise you. Wolves have been with us for thousands of years. They slink around in the dark, just out of range of the firelight, with their eyes glowing in the night ... wolves have terrorized humans for all of recorded history. There is a great tradition in Europe, also dating back many centuries, that wolves are deadly creatures, to be exterminated whenever possible. Like all such superstitions, this one arose out of ignorance and fear, and has never been corrected, mainly because wolves do everything possible to stay away from people, so it is almost impossible to observe them in their natural state. All we know about them we get from a few glimpses in the dark, (those glowing eyes are scary), the sound of their howling (eerie, to say the least), and the evidence of their bloodthirsy ways (dead carcasses!) Moreover, this myth has been perpetuated generation after generation in our fairytales, stories, and folk 'wisdom'. The true nature of the wolf is also distorted because the few people who get to see wolves in their natural habitat, for example, hunters, guides, or trappers, misinterpret what they see. They may occasionally observe wolf packs trailing or chasing herd of deer, or groups of moose. They see evidence of wolf kills. Ranchers near isolated areas may see occasional kills of their livestock. These are the people who perpetuate the myth that the wolf is a dangerous predator that is a threat to farmers, ranchers, and the hunting industry. Scientific studies of the wolf in its natural habitat now have, in recent decades, been conducted many times. The results are always the same. Wolves stay as far away from people as they can. Their diet is ideally larger animals, but just about always it's the weaker ones. (This is actually good for the prey, such as deer, since it culls the weak and sick ones, leaving the strong ones to survive and reproduce.) This data is often supressed by governments, who have a vested interest in appeasing the hunting, trapping, and ranching industries, most especially where those industries are important to the region. You may doubt that last statement...but that is exactly what happened with fish stocks on the east coast of Canada ... the government's own biologists reported that overfishing was depleting the fish population, but the government, in the interests of preserving jobs, covered it up as long as possible. This is not speculation... you've heard the reports too! Some fish species were wiped out from overfishing. So how does unbiased scientific data on wolves explain the conflicting attitude of people who work in the wilderness, and see the wolf 'first hand'? The answer is in the word 'scientific'... that's what this article is about. An ordinary person making observations will, quite naturally, make conclusions ... often wrong ones ... that are not supported if all the data is examined. Moreover, it is often in the interests of these people to see the wolf as competition for their livelihood ... killing animals for profit ... and to ignore the conflicting evidence. That's why there is often still a bounty on wolves in many places. But that's a whole other story... Let's look at the facts one by one.
Wolves may the most complex social order of any animal alive. They mate for life, they teach their young to play, they live with an extended family, they have a great sense of humour, and they're innately curious. Do you know what the strangest thing is? Because of the wolf's mythical image as a killer, even a killer of humans, people are afraid of wolves. But they'll stop at the side of the road in a national park to feed bears, which have a warm, cuddly image (again thanks to hundreds of years of fairy tales!). In fact, there are dozens of cases every year of unprovoked bear attacks on humans ...but there has never been an authenticated case of a healthy wolf killing a human! I don't know about you, but if I was lost in the bush somewhere, a howling wolf-pack might not bother me too much ... but the knowledge that a bear was in the area would have me sleeping in a very tall tree! Return to Index Sobering Up a Drunk You're at a party, and ready to leave. Your friend has had way too much to drink, and is barely capable of standing, let alone driving. How can you sober him up? Lots of people have answers for this one...you've probably used one or two of them yourself. Stand him up, get him moving around. Give him something to eat, maybe bread, to soak up the alcohol. Lots of black coffee. Fresh air. The truth is, none of these remedies do a darn think to make a person less affected by alcohol! Before we look at why, lets examine a few facts. Alcohol affects your coordination and reaction time, which is why you shouldn't drive if you've been drinking. Any amount of alcohol will have an effect... even just one drink. It may be less noticeable on heavier people, or more experienced drinkers, but the impairment in coordination and reaction time, even if slight, is measureable. In an emergency on the road, when split seconds and good judgement count, even a tiny decrease in your skills can cause an accident. However, the legal definition of impairment is considerably higher ... for simplicity, we'll call it '80 units of alcohol' in your bloodstream (in Canada). This is an amount that, while it is impairing your reflexes, may not be noticeably doing so if you are of average weight. You may legally drive a vehicle, despite your impairment. The question we want to deal with here is how to reduce your impairment if your alcohol consumption has left you with far more than 80 units in your bloodstream. Let's say your reading is 140 units. What can you do about it? As already stated, the answer is 'nothing'. Here's why. Your reading of 140 units is a measure of how much alcohol is already in your blood. Your body has the ability to remove this poison from your bloodstream, but it can do so at only 15 units per hour. This number is a function of the working of your internal organs, such as your liver, and cannot be changed by you. Short of having total blood replacement in a hospital, there is nothing you can do to speed up this process. If your blood alcohol level is 140, and you need to reduce it to 80 in order to legally drive, the only thing you can do is wait 4 hours (15 less every hour, remember?). So what about all the common remedies for drunkenness? Well, mostly they just improve the person's appearance of soberness, and the way he feels. You may even get him looking and feeling completely sober. But those 140 units of alcohol are still there in the blood, slowly disappearing at the inflexible rate of 15 per hour! Coffee makes you a wide-awake drunk, as does fresh air and exercise. Eating and drinking may in fact soak up some of the alcohol in the stomach, but that's not what's making you have a high reading ... and it will be released to the blood eventually. All you are doing is preventing the blood alcohol level from going above 140! So is there anything you can eat while you are drinking to keep you below the '80 units' mark? Well, yes ... eating while drinking slows the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream slightly, so if you are drinking slowly enough, it might help. The problem is that most people, because they are not feeling impaired so quickly, tend to drink more. And the snack foods that commonly accompany alcohol are usually high in salt content, which also makes you drink more! The simple answer? If you have had anything to drink at all, don't drive; and if you're over the legal limit, the only thing that will make you 'legal' (ie: impaired, but not legally so), is time. Return to Index Fire Walking  People can walk on a bed of hot coals and seldom burn their feet. This is true. The ability to walk on fire has been ascribed to many things, depending on who does it. Faith, intensity of religious belief, trance, or purity of soul, have all been given as reasons. In fact, the real reason it works has to do with heat conductivity. Magicians who handle hot metal rods, or put molten lead in their mouth, or plunge their hand into liquid nitrogen, all know that a layer of moisture on the skin protects it, briefly, from intense cold or heat. In particular, firewalking (not to mention the thought of firewalking!) causes the feet to sweat profusely. This layer of moisture, appearing between each footfall, vaporizes to form a protective sheath over the sole of the foot. But this alone is not enough to protect the foot from third degree burns; another far more important property is involved here. The bed of coals through which firewalkers walk can reach temperatures of up to 1600 degrees. However, as they walk through the coals, participants in a fire-walk have their feet actually in contact with the coals for only brief instants ... perhaps half a second or so of actual contact, for each step. Unlike steel or other metals, skin, and particularly foot-sole skin, has very low thermal conductivity. It doesn't pass heat easily. During the short time each foot makes contact with the coals, not enough heat can penetrate the foot to do damage. Interestingly enough, if the temperature of the coal bed is raised to closer to 2000 degrees, the temperature becomes high enough that heat will penetrate the skin of the foot in the fraction of a second it is in contact, and the fire-walker will get burned. Firewalking traditionally is done in coal beds where the temperature does NOT exceed 1600 degrees. Nothing mysterious at all. In fact, curious skeptics (with no faith whatsoever) have tried it many times, and it works just as well for them as the 'mystically inclined' participants. You've done something similar if you've ever licked your finger before testing a hot iron. Or juggled a very hot potato between your hands. As long as the contact is brief, you don't get burned. 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