StarTalk Radio - Extended Classic: Cosmic Queries: Pseudoscience, now with Elise Andrew of IFLS and Bill Nye

Episode Date: December 21, 2014

Put on your thinking caps as Neil Tyson and Leighann Lord answer fan questions about pseudoscience, from crystals to creationism and ancient aliens to alternative medicine. Plus, a new interview with Elise Andrew, Bill Nye, and Chuck Nice. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, where I also serve as director of Hayden Planetarium. We're here at StarTalk. I think of it as StarTalk after hours, but in fact it's StarTalk Cosmic Queries.

And I've got with me in studio the one, the only Leanne Lord. Leanne! Hey, I like that. The one and only. The one and only Leanne Lord. Especially since you spell your name L-E-I-G-H-A-N-N. Thank you. I can't take credit for that. That's my parents. Okay. But thank you. And I make a point of that because if you want to follow Leanne on Twitter, you've got to spell her

name right. That's right. She's at Leanne Lord. Easy to find. Easy to follow once you get the letters right. It's great to have you on here. Oh, it's so nice to be here. So you actually, you make a living as a professional comedian. I make a living as a professional comedian. That is awesome.

That is crazy. Bringing laughter where it's needed most in the world. Exactly. Exactly. It's not rocket science, but you know, people need it. And I always, I like following you where you go around the country and the world. Thank you.

You've been to the Middle East? I've been to the Middle East. The troops? I have. That is so Bob Hope of you. Oh, man. Oh, my God. And they really are a great audience.

I love doing it. Yeah, yeah, very appreciative. And so it's great to have you here. So this Cosmic Queries segment, we're going to talk about pseudoscience. Pseudoscience. Yeah. Do we have, how many hours do we have for this topic? Righteries segment, we're going to talk about pseudoscience. Pseudoscience. Yeah. Do we have?

How many hours do we have for this topic? Right, right, right. So it's stuff that people think is science but in fact isn't. They want it to be science. Right. Science actually knows quite well what it is and how it works and how the methods and tools apply. And so a big effort of people who are trying to sort of the debunkers out there to try to show people what science is and how we know and tools apply. And so a big effort of people who are trying to, sort of the debunkers out there, to try to show people what science is

and how we know what we know and how we know what we don't know. All right. How do we know what we know? No, no. It's how we know what we know and how we know that we don't know something. Okay?

That's just as important. That's true. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. So we've called questions from the Internet. On the Internet, we are startalkradio.net. You can chat with us there. There's a blog, places to deposit your questions and comments.

The archive of our past shows are there as well. Also on Facebook, you can like us there, Star Talk Radio, that's easy to get to. And of course, we're in the Twitterverse, Star Talk Radio. I also tweet, if you have patience for my cosmic brain droppings. They're brilliant, brilliant. They're not related, they're just stuff

that floats in and out of my head. I happen to have a medium to put them. That's all it is, a repository for my brain dropping. Your tweets make me stop and stare into space, because I'm like, wait a minute. Not while you're driving. Oh, no. Yeah, because I'm tweeting while driving. What?

No. So these questions, I think these all came from Facebook. Is that correct? These look like they are all Facebook questions. Yes, they are. Yeah, and I haven't seen them before So this will all be very fresh Good, good And if I can't answer one

I'll say I can't answer it Okay, that's fair By the way, I While I have a lot of thoughts to share about pseudoscience There are people out there who do this professionally So this is just a service to our listeners Yes But there are books written by folks who

For example, Michael Shermer who wrote Why People Believe Weird Things. Yes. The title very similar to that. Go find him on the, you can find, and in there, customers who bought that book also bought. So if you look at the rest, there's a whole slew of ways you can sort of read up on this. So let's see how well I can do for this. Let's go. All right.

We have the first question here is from Benjamin Camacho Garcia. And he says, Look at you Garcia. Garcia. Just put a little Spanish flair on it there. Now he says, we know all kinds of pseudoscience are garbage, but which one do you find more entertaining

and which one would be the most dangerous to practice? Okay. The one I think is most entertaining is the Ouija board. Okay. We're going old school. Old school, yeah. I didn't expect that. Don't even have to plug that one in.

Wow. Yeah, it's the Ouija board where people gather around a table and it's on your lap, I guess, if I remember how you do this. It's touching your knees. No, no. No, no, it's on a table.

I did it when it's on a table. You put it on a table. No, no, no, you've got to. Well, you have the board and then you have your hands. No, no. No, no. It's on a table. I did it when it's on a table. You put it on a table. No, no, no. You've got to. Well, you have the board and then you have your hands on the little device. Everybody has to touch the pointer, I guess. Oh, right, right. Okay.

That's one version of it. When I first did it, that object on the board would move by gravity. So the board would tilt and it would slide to the letters on the board. Okay, so here this is like sort of group movement. Yes. So I think that's just, it's a fun party thing. It's like playing Twister. Without the inappropriate contact.

And so I kind of like the Ouija board. And of course it's your, what they did was, it turns out if you're blind, the Ouija board doesn't work very well for you. What are the odds? Yeah, you're influencing where the puck lands on it because you can actually see it. And it turns out if you don't know how to spell well, you actually misspell the words while you – there are fascinating experiments you can do that just summarily debunk the entire process. So, for example, are you channeling someone else's words through your ability to communicate

through the Ouija board, and you find out they misspell the same words that you do? Yes. Love it. Yeah. So, unless your spelling profile exactly matches that of the dead person whose spirit you're channeling, this is not working. So, Ouija board, I would say, was mine. Is your most entertaining. What about now? What about the most dangerous? Oh, the most dangerous. These are the ones where you think you have a cure for a medical

ailment. And this is on sort of what they call alternative medicine. By the way, have you ever heard of alternative math? Of course not, because they call alternative medicine. By the way, have you ever heard of alternative math? Of course not, because it doesn't exist. Have you ever heard of alternative physics? Of course not, because there's no such thing. Yet somehow we all want to believe that there's something called alternative medicine.

There's either the stuff that works and the stuff that doesn't. And the stuff that works, let's call medicine, and the stuff that doesn't, let's call that quackery. Let's just simply be honest about this, okay? Believe believe it or not we have that in my profession too alternative comedy it's called not funny not funny uh so so that then it's dangerous it's not dangerous to others it's dangerous to yourself because you think there's a cure that someone claims is real but has not undergone rigorous scientific testing.

And then you forego treatment that you get through other means. And you end up dying sooner or dying or becoming maimed or crippled because you didn't seek the attention that it required. So that's where the danger comes in. So that's why I don't jump all over people who do, you know, their tarot card readings and palm readings. And, you know, I don't distract myself by people who want to believe that's real. But when the medicine steps in there, that's a problem. Okay. You've been listening.

You are listening to StarTalk Radio, the Cosmic Queries Hour. And I'm here with Leanne Lord. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. And we'll continue after the break. radio the cosmic queries hour and i'm here with leanne lord i'm neil degrasse tyson and we'll continue after the break we're back on star talk radio i'm neil degrasse, your host. I'm an astrophysicist by day and StarTalk Radio announcer by night. Love it. No, actually, an astrophysicist can be anything they want at night because nobody's looking. Everyone else is asleep.

We're awake contemplating the cosmos. So we've called questions from the Internet, and these are all related to pseudoscience. Yes. questions from the internet and these are all related to pseudoscience yes and and leanne let me just ask you do you do you feel do you do you lean towards anything that you think might be pseudoscience i don't think so i i might have before i met you um but i i think it's been i think it's been educated out of me oh i like that phrase to get something educated out of you oh can we use that? We've got to use that.

Well, be my guest. Absolutely. Oh, my God. Get the pseudoscience educated out of you. There we go. All right. That's why we do this. So you've got a question.

I do. I do. It's actually almost maybe a follow-up. These are questions from listeners. These are questions from listeners. This is our give-back, in a way, to we want to make sure you're a part of what we do here. And I love the interaction with fans. This is fantastic.

We want to make sure you're a part of what we do here. And I love the interaction with fans. This is fantastic. This is a question from Brian Shields, and he wants to know sort of what spurred the use of items such as crystals in the realm of pseudoscience? I mean, were users attracted to their physical beauty, or did they just assume that it had more enduring qualities? What an awesome question. That's a great question. What an awesome question. That's a great question. So, what we have found in the history of cultures is that civilizations tended to gather together and cherish, that might overstate what it actually is in some cases, but establish a higher level of curiosity for some things over other things. Okay. a higher level of curiosity for some things over other things. So it's a curiosity factor because it's different.

And by the way, there's a famous quote from Isaac Newton. And he imagines himself sitting at the water's edge. And as the waves come upon the shore, he says, I feel like a child on the shore, picking up one pebble over another just because it looks slightly more interesting than the rest. Yet the ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me. So there he is, humbled by the fact that he knows there's a lot more to discover. But there he is, nonetheless curious about the little things that are in his arm's reach. One pebble being shinier than the next. So over history, what we've done is you pick up shiny things.

You pick up. I love that deeply scientific explanation. Shiny things. We pick up shiny things. We wear shiny things. Jewelry is typically shiny. Yes. You yourself are wearing shiny things, okay?

So I'm not talking about only ancient civilizations. I'm talking about modern life. So we find silver, gold. It goes to high luster. We like these things. We collect them. They are different from other things you find in nature. from other things you find in nature.

We also, crystals, are the world's first transparent solid things. Think about that. Yeah, I just did the head cock. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The dog that just heard the high pitch. The world's first solid transparent thing. Yes. Normally you think of solid. It's solid.

Nothing goes through it. And now I've got a solid thing that light can pass through. That's an awesome thought. That is pretty cool. And there it is in nature. There's quartz. Quartz crystal is transparent to visible light. Now, take that fact and say, well, can you do anything with it? Do you realize this even worked its way into early ideas of the cosmos? So before we knew that earth went around the sun and this sort of thing, it was like the sun goes around the earth and everything goes around the earth because earth is the center of the entire universe. Well, we know there are different distances because some move faster on the sky than others,

but what holds them up there? What keeps them there? So guess what held them there? What holds them up there? What keeps them there? So guess what held them there? Something has to hold them there and completely surround the Earth, but you have to be able to see through it to see the planets that are farther away than they are. This was the birth of the crystalline spheres. Okay. Crystal not because crystal is a special form of mineral.

Crystal because the damn thing is transparent. And you can see through it to the rest of the cosmos. And so there was the crystalline spheres out there. So crystals were valued simply because they were different. Okay. And they were transparent. And we always, it's a natural part of human curiosity to pick up that which is different and bring it home. Wow. Mom and dad aren't always happy about that which is different and bring it home. Wow.

Mom and dad aren't always happy about that. I don't know, honey. A little transparent. So that's, in fact, if you want to think about it in another kind of way, those are the seeds of the birth of science. The fact that we are curious about some things that are different than others. If you look at the, I think it was the Inuit, whatever is the culture that frequented the shores of Greenland. Okay. And as we know, Greenland is mostly glacier, at least for now.

There is the Cape York meteorite, which is currently the largest meteorite in captivity. Being held against its will, everybody. It is at the American Museum of Natural History in our meteorite hall. That meteorite was cherished by the local peoples. And in fact, meteorites have been, iron meteorites have been the entire source of metal for civilizations that did not otherwise have access to iron ores beneath earth's surface so native american tribes um the the inuits i think eskimo is not the proper term these days but the terms that described the coastal peoples who

fished for food and lived in the Arctic regions, the metal that's in those cultures, in almost every case, is metal carved off of rocks that didn't match anything else in their environment. And those were iron meteorites that were exposed on the surface that had been there for tens of thousands, possibly in some cases, millions of years. So something different. Yes. Nice.

That was a long answer, man. No, but that's great. Okay, all right. I love it. Do you want another question? Actually, the meteorite would not have been there for millions of years because continental drift would have redistributed where everything is. So if you found a meteorite in the ground, it would have fallen within the last tens

of thousands of years, typically. Yeah. So you just footnoted yourself. Yes. Okay, thank you for your answer. Caveat. the ground, it would have fallen within the last tens of thousands of years, typically. So you just footnoted yourself. Yes. Okay. Thank you for your answer. Caveat. Okay.

I have a question. Yeah. This might be a little controversial. This is from Richard Conant. And again, the theme is pseudoscience. The theme is, oh, this is definitely pseudoscience. And it begins with, Mr. Tyson, is there hope for America when 46% believe in creationism? Yeah.

Are we going to edit that out? Okay. No, that's fine. There is hope for America if 47% believe in creationism, provided that that 47% doesn't require that the other 53% believe it as well. Aye, there's the rub, sir. Yeah. So the problem is not what people believe. This is a free country.

Believe what you want. I will not tell you what to believe. What I will say to you is that if you want your belief, which is not based on objective truths, it's based on what are generally known as revealed truths. There's some sacred document that someone has truth revealed to them through whatever forces that you recognize in your religion. And there are many of these. There's Joseph Smith's documents and there's the Koran. There are all these revealed truths. If those truths conflict with objectively verifiable truths and you want to teach that as science, that's the beginning of the end of the technological foundation of your culture.

I just alert you of the consequences of this. I will not tell you what to think or how to think it. I just want to say if you do this, then that's what happens. You have been warned. You have been warned. Proceed at your peril. Yeah, you've been warned. And by the way, there's no tradition of atheists or scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher, that might not necessarily be true.

No, there's no one trying to change church religious curriculum. It's not happening. So to have religious communities try to alter a science curriculum to meet their needs, that's a profound imbalance of what the historical relationship has been between religious communities and scientific communities over the centuries. So the problem is not the problem. The problem is when people want to learn science, think that creation problem is not, that's not the problem. The problem is when people want to learn science, think that creationism is science, they have been removed from the frontier of cosmic discovery. Wow, very nicely done.

Oh, thank you. I like that. I like that. And I, you know what, I think this might actually lead into, and maybe you've already answered this in a way, but I wanted to ask it anyway, and this is from Brandon, Brandon Rogers. He said, what should people be doing more often in order to combat the rapid spread of pseudoscience? And he suggests take more classes on skepticism. Yeah, that's an excellent question. So, we always assumed in the sort of educated scientific community that if you learn science and you learn the laws of physics, that you won't be susceptible to the pseudoscience. That it's kind of an inoculation against it. And largely that's true. If you're scientifically literate, it is a kind of a vaccine

against those who would exploit your ignorance of natural law for their own gain. All right. You know what I'll do after the break? I'll give you my recipe for fighting pseudoscience. You're still sticking around, I presume. Oh, absolutely. Yes, thank you. All right, you're listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. We'll be right back.

We're back on StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Joining me as my co-host for this StarTalk Cosmic Queries Hour is Leanne Lord. Leanne, great to have you. Oh, great to be here. Professional comedian. Do you say comedian or comedian? Whatever you want to say, as long as I'm getting paid to show up. Getting paid.

I'm good. Yeah. So comedienne is the feminized version of comedienne. It is. It's pretty. It's pretty. I don't mind it. My feminism doesn't extend to being offended by that.

Yeah. It's actually a pretty word. It is. I'll take it. Yeah. So where do we leave off in the last segment? There was a question about... Well, we were talking about pseudoscience and what can we be doing to sort of combat that?

And is there something, I guess, in the toolbox? In the toolbox, exactly. So first, science literacy just as a state of mind is quite the vaccine against those who speak pseudoscientific ways. seen against those who speak pseudoscientific ways. And you listen to them and you just, you immediately notice where the arguments fail. And then you just walk the other way. There's an old saying, if an argument lasts more than five minutes, then both sides are wrong. Ooh.

Yeah. Congress hasn't heard this. No, they, well, they argued for much longer than five minutes, which means both sides are wrong. So you've got this. So here, I think in addition to just learning how science works, is there's an awesome

wiki page. An awesome wiki page on what's it called? It's ways that your cognition can fail. Okay. Okay. Cognitive failures.

Maybe just a Google search on cognitive failures. There's a whole list. Okay. And you read it and you say, my gosh. I'm an idiot. The human brain is not good at taking data. The human brain is awful at interpreting what it experiences. But we've known this since second grade. We all played telephone, didn't we?

Yes, we did. Take two or three people before the story was completely warped and distorted. And you're being kind. And what happened is information goes in one ear, and when it came out your mouth, it was different. So our susceptibility as humans to cognitive failure is extraordinary. So I think once you know you're susceptible and you read the list of ways you can be susceptible, I think that could take care of most of these. Most of these, the attraction that people might have to what is ultimately false pseudoscience. Okay.

And I'll give you a quick example. You know that people say, I have a lucky number. It comes up every time. Okay. And in fact, when I won the lottery last week, I knew it when I bought the ticket. Okay. So you could say, well, that's the I'm special error. But I am special error, right?

But I am special. Here's a good example. Take 1,000 people, give them a coin, heads and tails coin. Tell them to flip the coin. Anyone who's got heads, they remain standing, tails, you sit down. All right? That's about how many left? 500 left.

Because I started with 1,000. Right. And it's what they call a fair coin, 50-50. Mm-hmm. Right? So you do it again for who remains. All right? It's 500 left.

Flip a coin. 250 are standing. And you keep doing this. And then 125 are standing. And then 60 are standing. 30, 15, 8, 4. I'm impressed by your division skills on the spot. Two. And then there's one person who flipped heads 10 consecutive times.

And that person wins, all right? Who does the press go to? Does it go to all the losers? No, they all go and that person wins. All right? Who does the press go to? Does it go to all the losers? No, they all go to that person. And they say, how do you feel about this? That person will likely say, you know, I felt the head's energy about halfway through, so I knew I was going to win. Yeah.

And they say, wow, he had this power of knowledge. Did they ask the other people who had exactly the same feeling? No, because we're not interested in losers. We're only interested in the winner. Different and shiny. Every time you do this experiment, somebody is going to basically flip heads 10 consecutive times. Have you ever flipped heads 10 consecutive times in your life?

No. All right. But if you did that experiment about 1,000 times? I'd be the person? Chances are, in those 1,000 times, chances are you'd flip heads 10 consecutive times. Well, I know what I'm doing for the rest of the day. So there's always going to be a winner here, but that doesn't mean the person who won is special. But you're that person.

You think somehow the gods were on your side. So that's one example of a way to misthink information that's laid bare right in front of you. So you study that page. So every science class should come along with, here's how the brain fails you. And this will double down on the vaccine that being scientifically literate can do for you. So that double whammy there, that's a good start for you. Oh, yeah. And then you see it in others and you have the urge to try to fix it.

Then they'll tell two people. And so on and so on. You could wipe this out in a week. Wow. Because it doesn't take higher learning to see the susceptibility of the human mind. And by the way, scientists are also susceptible to this. It's just that we know we're susceptible. And we invent methods and tools to reduce our susceptibility because we're honest with ourselves about it.

That is what science is. That's what the scientific method is. Scientific method is not hypothesis testing. It can be that, but that's not what it is at its heart. At its heart is do whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking that one thing is true when another thing is true. This is also very good relationship advice, everybody. This is multiple uses here. Can I add a question to this? Trying to figure out how the brain fails.

Yeah. What age do we start this? Oh, well, let's do that when we come back from our break. You're listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. We'll be right back. We're back at StarTalk After Hours. I think of it as that, but it's really

StarTalk Cosmic Queries. And I'm being helped out here by my co-host, Leanne Lord. Leanne. Yes. Your awesome question reader. Thank you. No pressure. Quick questions from the internet. These, I think, were from Facebook.

Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And you handed me a question right when we had no time to answer it. What was it? Just before the break. Well, my question is you were talking about ways to sort of inoculate yourself against pseudoscience. And you were saying that we should study how the brain fails.

If you've got that, you've got half the battle. And my question to that is, well, at what age do we start introducing this? Oh, in utero. Oh. Not like. Wow. Okay, so the little baby Einstein case. This is how your brain's going to fail you.

It's not even here yet. No. Here's how it's going to fail. Here's, in my experience, in my experience interacting with kids, kids are not susceptible to pseudoscience. The pseudoscience that they ever talk about is because they hear adults mentioning it. All right? Kids are just simply naturally curious about the natural world, and they ask natural questions about the natural world. And then the adult says, oh, the moon is in the wrong house and the jupiter aligns with mars and and they hear this

but left to themselves as kids curious about their environment they are the least susceptible to pseudoscientific thinking or to mystical thinking or to magical thinking and what i have found is now this is not a formal study it's just my sort of walks through life. When puberty sets in, and life gets really complicated. It ruins us all. Does he like me? Does he not like me?

Will I have money for this? Will I be hurt? Will I do well on my test? All of a sudden, life descends on you, and you realize you're not actually in control of the things that are going on in your life. Right. And so there's a susceptibility to that which asserts it can bring control to your life outside of your own initiative to do so. These are rub these crystals, and you'll heal yourself.

Read your horoscope, and it'll make your day better. Walk this way. Talk this way. Chant this way. And all of a sudden, you believe that now the world is not just you and your control of yourself, that there are these forces that you get to blame when things don't go well in your life. So I would say the critical phase is basically middle school. Okay.

When hormones start kicking in and they're susceptible to thinking that they're not in control of their destiny. Okay. And they're looking at these crutches. Yes, exactly. They're emotional, intellectual crutches of life. Wow. Shed the crutches, walk on your own power, become scientifically literate. Oh, that would make an awesome poster.

It would. It would. It would. All I can say is, dude, where were you when I was 12? Where were you, sir? Wow, that's great. Okay. So what else you got? All right.

I have a question from Ed Travis. And wow, Ed, really? Ed says, my wife wants a machine that can translate dreams into physical images how impossible is this that's awesome that sounds like something that would show up on the movie on the the fox series uh fringe yes they're always like reading minds and making the mind do things i uh why not really yeah i think that neuroscience is in its infancy today Okay And I think that is one of the most fertile scientific frontiers that currently exists Neuroscience

You know, we know the brain You know, we're a sack of chemistry is what we are A sack of chemistry? A conscious sack of chemistry You are a walking t-shirt slogan manufacturer, sir Well, humans, we're a conscious sack of chemistry We know we are because that's why medicine works, all right?

You put chemicals in you and it changes what you think, how you feel, how alert you are. What do you think caffeine is? It's influencing your alert state as Leanne Lord holds up her cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Okay? So, I know it says Dunkin' Donuts

not Starbucks. You're on a budget now? Wow, yeah. Because what I'm it says Dunkin' Donuts, not Starbucks. You're on a budget now? Wow, yeah, because what I'm making here is StarTalk. Oh, sorry. Finance my higher coffee desires. We'll have to cover you on the next cup of coffee. So, I think that's a brilliant idea and a brilliant suggestion. And I would put that as a sort of science fiction-y but still within reach. Wow. Still within reach. Wow.

Still within reach. What would be great is if it was a live image of what your dream was. Well, maybe you wouldn't want that, actually. So you have the dream and then wake up and see the dream. Well, you could. Or others can watch you dream in real time. That sounds a little invasive. That's a little invasive, so maybe not.

Maybe not. Maybe not. Okay, let's pull back on that one. That sounds a little invasive. That's a little invasive, so maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe not. Okay, let's pull back on that one. That's fine. But maybe you can put it in your library of dreams and relive them by just popping in the disk. Right. Right, right.

So brain activity is simply chemicals and chemical interactions among neurons. And given that, once we know what a certain kind of chemical interaction means in terms of an image, in terms of words, in terms of faces, you just draw it up. Have a little machine that draws it. That would be the cool future of neuroscience. When we come

back, more of StarTalk Radio's Cosmic Queries. Leanne Lord is my official question reader. Yes. And today's topic is pseudoscience. And we've got questions from our listener base. Yes. You call it a fan base. I don't think of it as listeners.

Okay, listener base. I mean, if they're listeners. They are fans, but I think of them as listeners. They are listeners. They are partners in education. There you go. How to bureaucracize the answer. Okay.

Now, I kind of, if you don't mind, I want to backtrack just a little bit. You were very kind in saying, you know, when you thought sort of we should be educating kids about inoculating themselves against pseudoscience. But you said that, you know, little kids, in your experience, don't really engage in magical thinking. Or they're not susceptible to pseudoscience. They're not susceptible. Right, right. And I don't know about that.

Why? Listen, kids have magical blankets. They have imaginary friends. No parent wants their kid to have an imaginary friend. Okay. Because you said most of this comes from the parents, and there's stuff like that that doesn't. Okay, so I would put a line in the sand between what people do that is the expression of their imagination, maybe gone a little too far. Okay.

And things that you do that you think are actually controlling your behavior and conduct. If you think there's a monster under the bed, you could actually check for that. You're just too afraid to. All right. Okay. Is that pseudoscience or is it you're not really in control of your imagination at that point? I can tell you that adults don't worry about monsters under the bed.

I'm not. Unless they've been imbibing something really strong. So I am not worried about the monster under the child's bed influencing them as an adult. influencing them as an adult this is the this childhood thinking about fairies and and kingdoms and and and and the the kiss of the prince and all of this uh this is if you put a child out in the middle of the street and you say i mean put put them out in the open and say what do you believe is affecting your life right now? They're not going to say the fairies They're not going to say the monster under the bed You take an adult who is susceptible to pseudoscience

They're going to give a list of things That they will assert is in control of their life Or influencing their life That they cannot influence. And so it's a different kind of thing. So I agree. You have kids with great imagination, and it's fun, and it's the seeds of so much fantasy and literature, even.

Stephen King. Yeah, Stephen King, if you want to get bloody, but Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. If that's not an LSD trip, I don't know what is. And it's Pinocchio with his nose grows. These are fantasy stories, and kids love to have fun and to play. But what I'm saying is we don't need to stop them from thinking about a monster under the bed because that doesn't carry into adolescence. Okay.

None of that carries into adolescence. Okay. Don of that carries into adolescence. Okay. Don't step on the crack, you break your parents back. That doesn't, it stops. I don't need to stop that with other efforts.

It stops itself because they simply outgrow it. Okay. I'm talking about stuff that adults don't even outgrow. Okay. And that list of those things you don't find in children.

Okay. Okay. Kids are not afraid of black cats. They want to pet the kitty until an adult says, that's a black cat. That's bad. Okay. So they got to be told by someone who's older and not as wise to be afraid of a black cat. Well, I-

You got any more questions? How many questions? I do. You got a whole sheet there. I do. I do have another question. Go for it. I do.

Okay. I do. I do have another question. Go for it. I do. Okay. All right. This is from Bora Vai. And they want to know, I used to watch the TV show Ancient Aliens. And at one point, they've stated that Bigfoot may be a prisoner from outer space, much like how England used to send prisoners to Australia. Do you think we would eventually send prisoners into space? Wow, that was a long way around to get to that. Wow, Bora, really?

Ancient alien. Wow, that's a long way around. Okay, so first, it'd be kind of cool if Bigfoot, if some powerful alien civilization said, Earth, there's a good place to send our criminals. Let's send Bigfoot there. I wonder what crime did Bigfoot commit? Stole a candy bar.

You know, one of, who's it, Mitch Hedberg, the late comedian Mitch Hedberg. You know what he said of Bigfoot? He said, you know what's even scarier than Bigfoot? Would be if Bigfoot is actually out of focus. Every picture we have of Bigfoot, it's a fuzzy photo. Oh, that's hilarious. If he's actually out of focus, that would be really scary. So, yeah, I would hope Earth is not some prison colony

for misbehaved aliens from another planet. That would explain a lot. I would like to believe that I believe in the future of neuroscience. And I think if you go far enough in the future, we would find a way to cure people who are career criminals so that we would not need prisons for them at all. Wow. Therefore, we wouldn't need to look for a planet upon which to,

where to send them. And, you know, the historical analogy here is england sending their prisoners right to australia an isolated continent island in the middle of the you know southern hemisphere pacific but now isn't that the slippery slope doctor yes it is if we start correcting criminal behavior yes what is a crime in one generation versus another? You're absolutely right. That's a whole other show. It is.

Leigh-Anne, thanks for being on Star Talk. Thank you for having me back. This has been fantastic. This is Star Talk. After hours. The Cosmic Query segment. So, you've been listening to Star Talk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. so we're back we've been talking about pseudoscience and look what the cat dragged in

chuck nice yes sir fresh with claw marks and all from that cat Thanks for stalking us Of course Chuck We've got Bill Nye Bill, old friend and buddy and CEO of the Planetary Science New bestseller on New York Times with his book on evolution And we'll call it Undeniable Undeniable

Congratulations on that And we have, by Skype, the one, the only, Elise Andrews. Elise, hello. Hi. She freaking loves science. And she, how much do you love science? You. I really, really.

Check out her Facebook page, IFLS. I freaking love science. And you'll get the proper translation of that acronym, of that abbreviation. There you go. So we're coming off a show on pseudoscience, and Elise, you've got nearly 20 million likes on your Facebook page. And you have some filter, I presume, about what you put on as your aggregated science and what you don't. How do you know that there's not some crackpot idea that somebody has and they're posing as real science? Or maybe there's science that other scientists that got published in a real journal but is itself kind of fringy what how do you how

do you slice and dice this i mean i think the most important thing is you there's so many ways you look at it first thing first you obviously go back and read the actual paper rather than the press release you can look at the journal that was published if it was published in a high level journal it's maybe a little bit more trustable than something published in a non-high-level journal, something with a lower impact factor. You can look at the study. You can look at the sample sizes. You can look at everything else.

And, I mean, you can usually get a feel if something's dodgy or if something's not. You can look at the other coverage. And I think it's one thing I've realized is that it is important to cover something. Even if I'm not impressed with a study, I think it's important to cover it anyway and to express that. Because people ask my opinions.

People will come to me with stories published in this website or in that website. And they'll say, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? So I think it's important, even if I am skeptical or even if I don't agree with it, to still write about it and to still say that. Can you give us an example, a recent example? Off the top of my head, no. Because so much of what you publish is dead on it seems so cool yes we we've been all impressed by its reliability and and but how about this

could you might you publish might you post something that you know is scientifically controversial and then just talk about the fact that it's controversial among scientists absolutely okay absolutely and i think that's important i think people need to know that everything isn't always dead set that there's going always dead set, that there's going to be disagreements and there's going to be arguments. There is not. There are not going to be arguments. Wait.

So, let me ask the three of you, when it comes to the contradictions in science and, more importantly, new discovery. Often you have people who say, well, see, you were wrong. Well, that's, we love that in science. Yeah, and so, but they try to use that as a means of talking about or affixing unreliability to all science, people who are attacking science.

Or then any other idea should have equal value. Right, or to say, right, more importantly, well, then any other idea should have equal value. Right. Or to say, right, more importantly, well, see, that's why we say this. Okay. So how do you deal with that? Chuck is asking this because a friend of his feels this way about science. Yes. Isn't that true, Chuck?

Well, listen, and I have a friend, okay, and his name is Buck Rice. Okay. Buck Rice. And he has a blog that will be sponsored by ExxonMobil that is titled Climate Change, The Jury's Still Out. So, Elise, how do you do that? Look, I think those people are completely lucky in logic, to be honest. It doesn't really make any sense to me that you would say that science can't be trusted because science holds its hands up and says when it's wrong. That's the great thing about science is that we have the ability to be wrong, that we look constantly finding new evidence and say, okay, this is what we thought before.

We've got new evidence and this is what we know now. To me, that's an indicator of reliability that you can trust science to hold its hands up and say, we fucked up. Here's now what we know. Here's what we've learned. Here the evidence to me if if you've got a school of thought that holds on to something in the face in the flying in the face of the evidence that's something you can't trust you know i think i just i don't understand it at least i think if you actually said it just like that you would have more fans more than 19 more than 19 million yeah it's just we effed up but just you know you get 19 million. Yeah, it's just, we effed up. But you get into this thing where it's the progress of science.

That's what is also hard for people. For example, I can't think of a planet. Used to be a planet. Now it's a plutoid. I got no problem with that. It's a process. Chuck, have you had your plutoids checked? Yes, I have.

It's a medicine. This is solved for that. From whatids checked? Yes, I have. It's a medicine. This is solved for that. From what I understand, I now have to have a colonoscopy. So, do you guys go to that? See, I don't go to that scatological route with the word plutoid. But I found that- Everyone else does. I found that- I know.

Okay. Well, I think Chuck and Neil are... Maybe it might just be you guys. Chuck and Neil are of a certain age. And we're both fans of Katie Couric. Yeah, we're still in middle school is the problem. So, Bill. So, speaking of which, middle schoolers have no problem with this.

You say there used to be nine traditional planets. Now there's eight and there's a whole new class of planets called Plutoids. It's an example of a low-stakes thing that people are just passionate about. And whereas when you get to a high-stakes thing, people are really passionate about it. But Bill, I want to distinguish between someone who says God created humans

because the Bible says, and God created humans because the bible says and and god created humans because we found scientific evidence to support it right one of them is sort of religious and and wait and the other one is has has is putting a science patina on it so that someone who says i believe science and there is science in the Bible. So you must have confronted that. Oh, yeah. So I don't know if you got this far into this thing in Kentucky, but the guy has observational science and historical science. In other words, if you weren't there, it doesn't count.

I mean, the evidence is lower than if— You can't just scrap the whole idea of forensic science. That's right. Right. Exactly. Unless you were there, unless you saw it. That's right. Doesn't count. And it's just hugely ironic because if you do know anything about forensics and about

the criminal justice system, you know the eyewitness testimony is the least reliable evidence out there. Believe me, Elise. Without a doubt. I'm a black man. I do know that. That's right. I think you weren't, weren't you the guy?

He was the guy. I saw him. Officer, that's the guy. Bill gets it. That's the guy. Right, right. I said, where? No, that voice?

I know that voice. So now let me ask you guys this. Let me ask you guys this. So recently the Pope came out and said, hey, let's not be idiots about this. Science is science and we don't have to you know uh evolution not a magic wand right not a magic more empowered okay so how about that do we write you a check catholic church thank you you're you've now joined the last two centuries you know welcome aboard okay but it's good they've accepted

evolution of the big bang theory since the 19th something like that he was just reiterating yeah yeah so so he i'll go for that correct thank you for clarifying that right so it's been in the doctrines in fact an earlier one was uh yes evolution is cool but humans became humans when in the evolutionary track when god breathed the soul into what the first set of those primates that then became human. This was the parameters around that. It's your clockmaker.

Right, right. And plus, of course, the Big Bang itself was first written down by a- It was a Jesuit- It wasn't Jesuit, actually, but he was a monk. A monk. He was a- Monkey. He was a-

Monkish. He was a Belgian priest. A Belgian priest. Belgian priest. A Belgian priest. Belgian priest. Okay. Speaking Flemish. Tell me his name again. I'd ask astrophysicist historian, man.

I'm a mechanical engineer. I can tell you about Petrov's laws. In the next 90 seconds, I swear to you, I'll have it. More circle. So, in any event, so all the latest Pope did, he added punctuation, I think, to those remarks. One reiteration. Hey, let me ask us this, Elise. So did you hear about this debate in Kentucky about evolution?

With you in Canada? Yeah. In the United Kingdom, you heard about that? Well, I live in Canada. Usually I'm just visiting family at the moment, and I did hear about it, yeah. Obviously, I mean, I posted about it. I was writing about it. Of course I heard about it.

No, I mean, by you, I um the populace of the united kingdom i don't know what the media was like here at the time i wasn't i wasn't in canada did it make i was in canada yeah it did it was so here's what i'm driving at why did he bring that up now why did the pope go out of his way to make mention this now i don't know i don't know i find it really bizarre anyway it kind of cracks me up. I mean, American evangelists, when the Pope thinks you're taking the Bible too seriously, it might be time to rethink your life choices. Rethink life choices. Elise Andrew, ladies and gentlemen.

He's the Pope. Rethink life choices. When he thinks you're taking this whole religion thing too seriously, just take a step back and look at yourself. Now, of course, it was the UK that separated from the Catholic Church just because their king couldn't get a divorce. Let's be fair about the disclosure here. But I did remember the priest.

A whole new one for himself. The priest named George Lamartre. Look at you. George Lamartre. And it's got some stuff Over the vowels Right LaMatre LaMatre

Some groves and nagoos He was a physicist Elise we gotta call it quits here Thank you for dialing in To StarTalk Radio And I hope this is not The last time we reach for you No problem

Thanks for having me Excellent And Bill We're all shaking each other's hands I was reaching I was reaching for Elise Bill, thanks for coming by. Oh, no, it is I who must thank you. And Chuck, always good to have you.

Thanks for agreeing to be dragging off the street for this very last segment. All right, guys, this is Neil Tyson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, signing off from StarTalk. As always, keep on looking up.