Science Vs - Lemmings

Episode Date: April 6, 2017

Why do four out of five dentists recommend Colgate? How many Americans really approve of Trump? This special episode is a two-parter: First, we talk to Prof. Dan Levitin, author of ‘Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era’, about some recent news stories and how to be skeptical of the statistics you see. Then, we bring you a surprise you won’t want to miss. It’s about deception, murder, and of course, ~science~. Credits:Ebay - Listen to Ebay's podcast Open For Business on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcastsWordpress - go to wordpress.com/science to get 15% off a new websiteHello Fresh - For $30 off your first week of meals go to hellofresh.com and enter the promo code SCIENCEVS30Our Sponsors: This episode has been produced by Austin Mitchell, Ben Kuebrich, Wendy Zukerman, Heather Rogers, and Shruti Ravindran. Our senior producer is Kaitlyn Sawrey. Our editor is Annie-Rose Strasser. Fact Checking by Ben Kuebrich. Sound engineering, music production and original scoring by Bobby Lord. The lemmings musical mega-mix was created by Austin Mitchell. Thanks to Dr. Malte Andersson, Dr. Anders Angerbjörn and Dr. Rolf Anker Ims. As well as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for the use of Cruel Camera.  Further Reading:Weaponized Lies by Prof. Dan LevitinA Theory on the Cause of Lemming BoomsLinking Climate to Lemming Cycles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Learn more at sunnybrook.ca slash special. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet Media. On today's show, we're talking facts versus fluff. All the different kinds of fluff, especially fluffy data. We're doing something a little bit different here. We're taking three big news stories that have unfolded recently

and we're asking, how much can we trust them? Is there good science behind the headlines? Or are we all just a bunch of lemmings? And then, after the break, we've got a surprise for you. But first, the news. To help us navigate the headlines, we called up Dr. Dan Leverton. And Dan got into his field of research in a very unusual way. You see, Dan started out as a musician and record producer. I think the lightbulb moment was being in the studio with Carlos Santana. And he was playing a solo and I was getting goosebumps.

I was thinking, what is it that Carlos is doing that's causing this physical reaction in me? And how can I learn more about that? And so I started sitting in on classes at Stanford in neuroscience and music and found that the neuroscientists were closer to figuring out where goosebumps come from and how emotion is communicated. A few years later, when I went back to school, that's the field I went into. Now, Dan's a professor of cognitive neuroscience at UC Berkeley. He's also the author of Weaponized Lies, a book aimed at helping people to be a little more skeptical about the statistics that they read. And Dan told us all sorts of examples where data gets manipulated and misreported. And one of my favorite examples of his is that old Colgate statistic that you've probably

heard a zillion times. I love this one because there's so much wrong with it. The claim that four out of five dentists recommend Colgate, most people assume this means that four out of five dentists prefer Colgate. Recommending and preferring are not the same thing. And it turns out the question that Colgate asked in this survey was for the dentist to name as many toothpastes as they wanted that they recommend. Oh, no. And yes, four out of five recommend Colgate and Crest and AIM and Aquafresh and Gleam and, you know, all the others. So this claim has no bite to it.

No, I would say it's got a cavity in it. And, you know, then the other question is, what's with this fifth dentist? What the hell is he recommending? But we're not here to talk toothpaste. We're here to talk news. And news stories rely on statistics a lot. So today we're walking through the numbers behind three big stories. And because we're science versus, we gave Dan some sound effects

so that he could rate the news for its scientific accuracy. Oh, you mean like from Cheers to Raspberries or something? What? We're a classy show. So instead of raspberries, we have this sound. Then to tell us that, yeah, I think they've really nailed this, this is your sound. OK. All right.

And then for, you know what, it's OK, but we need to do a bit more detective work. This is your sound. That's the Law and Order sound. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, OK. Because we're doing detective work.

That's good, right? Yeah. OK, first up, approval ratings. So throughout March, there were a bunch of approval ratings that were being reported, and these numbers were jumping up and down. One showed that 52% of voters approved of Trump's job performance, another said that 37% did, and then at the end of March,

CNBC reported that his approval rating sat at 44%. And we just keep hearing more and more numbers. Take a look at the numbers. There's approval 42% in this latest NBC News. We have made incredible progress. Our new Rasmussen poll just came out a very short while ago and it has our approval rating at 55% and going up. Now, this is something that a lot of people turn to.

It's like every time a new approval rating comes out for President Donald Trump, the internet practically breaks. So, Dan, how much can we trust these approval ratings? Can we look at that poll that showed that 44% of Americans approve of Donald Trump's job performance? Well, OK, so this particular one, I found a report on CNBC. Fortunately, they do tell us in the fine print what the sampling methods are. And here's where I see the biggest red flag. Everybody who answered their survey did so through SurveyMonkey. Now you have to ask yourself, do you think that the kinds of Americans who regularly use SurveyMonkey are representative of Americans overall?

Can I just ask, who on earth regularly uses SurveyMonkey? Well, exactly. So that's the 44% approval rating. And so the best we can say is that Trump's performing at about 44% among people who take SurveyMonkey polls. The real trouble with approval ratings is that pollsters are trying really hard to find a group of people who will answer surveys and who represent the entire US voting population. Because they're ultimately surveying a thousand or even several thousand people. And they're trying to multiply that out

so that it accurately represents the millions and millions of Americans who vote. Get that sample wrong, and it can skew the entire poll. Random sampling is very, very hard. But, you know, this isn't my profession. I'm a simple country neuroscientist. I'd give the law and order sound.

Oh, but it doesn't get a... Well, it doesn't seem like a lie. This is just, I'm sorry to say, business as usual distortion. OK, up next. A recent Independent UK article claimed that, quote, Donald Trump could reverse cuts to arts poor and elderly if he stopped staying at Mar- fancy golf club resort in Florida, it would cost around $600 million,

which is about how much money he'd save from his proposed cuts to a set of social services. Motorcade just passed through here just minutes ago. That's Mar-a-Lago right there. President Trump calls the winter White House. He has been there the past three weekends in a row. The travel has an estimated price tag of $10 million. And the idea here is that it costs so much in security to move the US president around

that if he just stayed put in the White House, where we've kind of already sunk those security costs, then it's much cheaper. Can you kind of walk me through this? Is this true? If he stopped going to his golf club resort, could we have more funding for arts, poor and the elderly services, Dan? Well, so is it plausible? Let's start with the cost of operating Air Force One, which just, I don't know, it seems like it's going to be one of the big expenses. CBS News estimated that at $180,000 per hour.

Now, I know that a 747 in general can be chartered for about $25,000 an hour. I happen to know that from my music business days when rock stars would want to charter one. Amazing. And so, you know, Air Force One is a special plane. It's not just your average garden variety 747. I'm willing to bet that it costs, you know, seven times as much to operate as a standard 747. So 180,000 an hour, two hours each way seems reasonable, right? You know, now we bring in the Marine One, the helicopter that the president might take from the White House lawn to the airport.

They need to have backups and decoys. Once he gets to Florida, Secret Service agents need to set up a perimeter around the president, around Mar-a-Lago. The Coast Guard is patrolling the waters. Air Force is patrolling the airspace. You're already at about two-thirds of the cost that CBS estimated. And I'm willing to say that, you know, there's an extra third for all these Coast Guard and Air Force workers. Yeah, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me. So Dan thought the cost estimates in this article were plausible,

but there was something else to consider here. CBS says that in the first 33 days of Trump's presidency, he spent 11 days at the golf course. And they're extrapolating from that. They're saying if he spends a third of his time there and makes, you know, a trip a week or something, this is how much it will cost. And, you know, I don't buy it. I think that that's not a fair assumption. I mean, he might, but I don't know that we can assume he'll keep up that pace.

So the estimates actually look okay, but the extrapolation is the problem here. What sound would you give this reporting? It's not great. I think we just did the detective work and figured out that it's probably okay, but it's not a sure thing. So I'd go with the clunk clunk. I mean, you could have Scooby-Doo going, er? Yes. Now, you have found a new story for us that you thought was a little bit shaky. Is this right? Well, I found a lot,

but the one that I wanted to talk about was British politician Nigel Farage's claim that the Swedish city of Malmö is the rape capital of Europe, if not the world. Pro rata, Sweden have taken more young male migrants than any other country in Europe. And there has been a dramatic rise in sexual crime in Sweden, so much so that Malmo is now the rape capital of Europe, and some argue even the rape capital of the world. One important thing here is to recognize in the Sweden case,

the social democratic government introduced a new sex crime law in 2005. And this established one of the world's most expansive definitions of rape. So immediately in 2005, the number of cases jumped, not because there were more rapes, but because more activity that hadn't been counted as a rape was being included. We saw something similar when the definition of autism changed some years ago. There were more reported incidents of autism, not because there were more people with autism, but because more people were being labeled.

So with regard to Sweden, so actually, so what had happened was if anyone was just looking at the stats without thinking of legislation changes or anything, they see a, so Farage, for example, saw an increase in the number of asylum seekers coming to Sweden, saw an increase in the number of rapes that were being reported and thought, bam, I've got it. The immigrants are causing the rape. But you say more complicated, the story is more complicated. Well, of course, this is the classic fallacy of correlation is not causation. Just because two things co-occur doesn't mean that one caused the other. And so this correlation is not causation issue comes up a lot. In your book, you and I have the same favorite example of this,

which is when the Harvard law student Tyler Viggen made a good and very strong correlation between the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool correlating with the number of films by Nicolas Cage. I said, put the bunny back in the box. The world is a big place and there are billions of things happening. And he found that these two things go together. And do you think that's what's happening when we see these kinds of articles and statements being done that people have this belief about the world,

they see two random events and then they want to put them together because they don't see the possibility for randomness. There has to be a mechanism at play. Yes. And this is because, you know, we can get into a bit of evolutionary biology and neuroscience here. We are a pattern seeking species. We look for patterns even where there are none, which is why we see animal shapes

in the clouds. And if you're lying in a hospital bed and looking at that ceiling with all the holes in it, you start seeing patterns. So what sound, just to put a line through it, what sound would you give this Nigel Farage claim that this town in Sweden is the rape capital of the world and that somehow the immigrant community that went there are responsible? So I give this the lowest rating. So today we've learned that two plus two could equal five if you tweet about it enough. Unfortunately. That's the world we live in. But it doesn't really.

And to those people who say, well, I don't want to engage in evidence-based thinking. I want to trust my gut. I would say, you know, guts don't get you that far. You know, do you really want to take a medication that was, you know, the product of somebody's gut, not the product of actual evidence? Do you want to get in an airplane that was built by somebody who knows nothing about it, but just had a feeling that he or she could make a better airplane? Right. The gut is designed to produce crap. Yes, very graphically put. Thank you, Dan. Neuroscientist, author, Professor Dan Levitin. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. After the break, a salacious story of murder and betrayal. Stick around. Welcome back. So on Science Versus, we like to tackle the big issues. And sometimes we like to tackle the small ones, the very small ones. So now, lemmings. And let me tell you, this story that we have about lemmings is no cutesy little tale. It's about murder, deception, and of course, science. To start off, let's find out what New Yorkers know about lemmings. Of course, science. To start off, let's find out what New Yorkers know about lemmings.

Like, do they even know what a lemming is? Gimlet producer Austin Mitchell hit the mean streets of New York City. Like somewhere between a beaver and a cat. Like the face of a beaver, but slenderness, gracefulness that a cat may have. Kind of like a fleming, but it's a lemming. What's a fleming? Oh, like a flamingo? I'm thinking like a little bird or something like that, but it can't be a bird because then they'd be able to fly,

so it must be like a little rodent or something. Yes, lemmings are rodents. They look a little bit like small brown guinea pigs. That's the sound of an actual lemming, and they hang out in the grassy tundra of the Arctic, a harsh landscape that's covered in snow for most of the year. And lemmings hide down in burrows where they stay warm and away from predators like the arctic fox,

the snowy owl and the peregrine falcon. A quick Google image search turns up pages of these little puffballs scampering around in the snow and chilling in patches of grass. Austin Mitchell showed some photos to people on the street. Oh, my gosh, It's super cute. That's an adorable little creature. Yeah, I would pet that. What do you think of when you think of lemmings?

Animals running off cliffs. Suicide, right? They jump off cliffs together in packs. Isn't that like the animal that runs off a cliff or something like that? Like a huge number of them. And it's about some sense of group mentality or crowd mentality. This is our idea of lemmings. Silly little animals marching blindly off cliffs to their silly little deaths. And it's so ingrained in our culture that lemmings, just the word,

has become synonymous with people blindly following something, often to their destruction. Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money, describes investors on Wall Street as lemmings. Could this be National Lemming Day? There's lemmings all over the place. Sting sings about how our lives are just like lemmings. And this idea that lemmings jump off cliffs en masse to their deaths is even in our video games. Remember the lemmings? The whole point of the game was to build bridges fast enough so that lemmings? The whole point of the game was to build bridges fast enough

so that lemmings wouldn't fall over cliffs to their death, which, when you think about it, is really dark. Now, there's one species of lemming that inspired all of this. Yes, the very idea that mindless lemmings just follow each other blindly unto their death. And that's the lemming found in Norway, creatively dubbed by scientists Lemmis Lemmis. These lemmings do something that many, many animals don't, and it's something that has bemused and befuddled people for centuries.

The Norwegian lemming population explodes every four years or so. When it does, the landscape can be crawling with thousands of them. But as quickly as the lemmings appear, soon they're gone. And by the next year, their numbers drop to the point where scientists have trouble even finding them. In 1975, it was estimated that during those booms per hectare, the number of Norwegian lemmings grows more than a thousand times. That's like a rural town transforming into New York City every four years or so. So what we have is puffballs everywhere and then puffballs practically nowhere. So mysterious are these lemming eruptions

that for centuries scholars have tried to explain them. Almost 500 years ago, a Bavarian scholar called Jacob Ziegler said that lemmings fell from the sky during the booms. And what about the bust? Well, 200 years ago, Sir Arthur de Capplebrook, one of the first fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, was told that thousands of lemmings had, quote, been carried away by the currents and drowned, end quote.

Thousands of lemmings drowned? But how? Was it? Could it really be mass suicide? Were these rodents blindly following each other to their death? By the 20th century, this seemed certain. A 1924 paper described, quote, the spectacle of processions of lemmings ecstatically throwing themselves

over the ends of railway bridges and falling to an apparently useless death below. The sea, strewn with dead lemmings, like leaves on the ground after a storm. End quote. By the early 1950s, newspapers and magazines were writing about the lemming mass suicide phenomena. But one thing was still missing. No one had actually recorded that suicidal event

showing lemmings flinging themselves off cliffs. That was until someone did. It was captured on camera. The lemming. Here's an actual living legend. For it's said of this tiny animal that it commits mass suicide by rushing into the sea in droves. This is from White Wilderness,

a documentary about Arctic wildlife released by Walt Disney Productions in 1958. Film crews braved the unforgiving Arctic to film walruses, polar bears, seals and, yes, lemmings, all in their natural habitat. And they were filmed in a way that many had never seen before. In the documentary, we see lemmings getting lost while searching for food, lemmings in burrows with their young.

And then we see something remarkable. Droves of lemmings start scurrying across the tundra. They're running towards one clear final destination Once in motion, none stops to ask why And carried along by an unreasoning hysteria Hordes and hordes of lemmings are seen scurrying to a cliff Each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destination We see a sheer rock face overlooking a mass of water below.

It looks terrifying. They reach the final precipice. This is the last chance to turn back. Yet over they go, casting themselves bodily out into space. Over they go, testing themselves bodily out into space. Over they go, scores of lemmings plunging off the cliff edge and flying helplessly through the air, spinning end over end until they finally smash into the water. And soon the Arctic Sea is dotted with tiny, bobbing bodies.

Little dead puffballs floating on the surface. And so is acted out the legend of mass suicide little dead puffballs floating on the surface. The footage is unbelievable, really unbelievable. And for their remarkable efforts, the filmmakers were awarded the 1959 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. The only problem was... ..it was all a lie. Bill Carrick, a Canadian cameraman who worked on White Wilderness,

admitted that the lemming scene was faked. Here he is in a TV documentary about animal cruelty in filmmaking called Cruel Camera, which was made by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1982. It was a recreated thing down in Canmore in Alberta. A recreated thing. You say recreated now. Well, they built a set. It looked like the Arctic and had a nice painted sky for a background.

And the lemmings were purchased from kids who ran around and collected the little puffballs for a quarter each. Bought their lemmings up in Churchill. The Eskimo kids ran around and caught them at 25 cents apiece and shipped them all to Canmore. And so what of that great moment, the final precipice? How did they get the footage of the little lemmings diving off the cliff if they just recreated the whole thing? Well, the Disney film crew heaved the critters off a cliff.

They literally forced the little puffballs off a cliff edge and into a nearby river. Poor little fluff balls. What? Oh, my God. They killed little animals? Yeah, that's really messed up. Oh, my God. Jesus.

Wow. Wow. It's a shame that that sort of thing has to happen. Here's Roy Disney, Walt's nephew, talking about the film years later in the CBC doco Cruel Camera. As I recall, they did stage some of that. Even though Roy admitted that the footage was faked, he still tried to justify it.

We've lost a few lemmings, OK. You know, the lemmings probably would have gotten lost anyway. Actually, Roy, it wouldn't have happened anyway. Because, no, lemmings don't commit mass suicide. We've all been lied to about these little puffballs. They don't mindlessly jump off cliffs to their death. But this does leave us with one rather big mystery. Why do their populations go from boom to bust so quickly?

Well, as it turns out, the story of the lemming is much more mundane than mass suicide. While the details are still being nutted out, it seems that the populations of lemmings go boom when the conditions are just right. Perhaps it's the perfect lemming weather, which is quite cold, or perhaps there's lots of food around, or maybe even less predators.

And this all means you get more and more Norwegian lemmings. Eventually, the lemming population explodes. But at some point, there are just too many lemmings and things start to get bad for the little guys. They run out of good food, the predators start to pick them out, or they start fighting with each other or even get ravaged by disease. Regardless of how the lemming apocalypse starts going down, many go searching for a better life.

Droves and droves of lemmings migrate across the land on their own four paws. And sometimes on that grand journey, they try to cross waterways. And the little guys aren't very strong swimmers. So sometimes they die in the water. But the vast, vast majority of lemmings don't die this way. They starve or get eaten or even get sick. Still, the few that survive eventually start the cycle again. And when the conditions are right, they start making babies.

And then those babies make more babies. And so the cycle goes on. So, now that we know how lemmings have been slandered, how do we feel about them? I love lemmings now. I don't feel like calling people lemmings ever again. And they're not mindless animals just walking off of a cliff. Right.

Someone gave them a bad name, you know. Maybe they're just like, would love to turn around and go into the world and enjoy it like everyone else, you know. Perhaps they would. But, and here's the rub, while lemmings aren't dying from mass suicide, their boom and bust cycles have actually disappeared in parts of the Arctic. And scientists aren't exactly sure why this is, but the reason does seem to be climate change. The warming weather is melting the snow too quickly,

which is making it harder for lemmings to get food and hide from predators. Poor little fluffballs. So, that's science versus lemmings. I'm sorry we couldn't have a few lemmings. We've lost a few lemmings, okay. It's a shame, shame, shame. We did stage some of that.

We've lost a few lemmings, OK. You know, the lemmings probably would have gotten lost anyway. This episode has been produced by Austin Mitchell, Ben Kebrick, me, Heather Rogers and Shruti Ravindran. Our senior producer is Caitlin Sori. Our editor is Annie Rose Strasser. Fact-checking by Ben Kebrick. Sound engineering, music production and original scoring by Bobby Lord.

And that little mega mix you heard was created by Austin Mitchell. Thanks to Dr Malte Anderson, Dr Anders Anderbjorg, Dr Rolf Anker-Ims, as well as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for their use of cruel camera. Next week, we're tackling genetic modification. We actually had an incident on campus here where they bombed one of our buildings. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.