Abbr. Enth.

I like to refer to myself as a Skeptic. I think the term “atheist” is too specific, because I don’t limit my disbelief to just gods, but I approach everything from a critical perspective. Well…to an extent. I follow the axiom that extreme claims require extreme evidence. If you tell me you had a salad for lunch, I’m not going to call you a liar until you provide me with proof because there’s nothing extraordinary about your claim. Unless you’re a fatty. Fatties don’t eat salad. They eat Cheetos.

Fatties aside, this philosophy applies to pretty much everything in my life, from religion (as you can tell), to science. I’m just as skeptical of extraordinary claims made “in the name of science” as I am to ones claiming to be miracles of the devine. That’s where this video comes in:

For those of you with a too short of an attention span to watch a 10 minute video, the premise is that the Earth has been greatly increasing in size, and that its rate of expansion is accelerating. It claims that the theory of plate tectonics is wrong, and that the reason that all the continents seem to fit together is not because of a pangean origin, but because a few hundred million years ago all of the continents took up the entire Earth.

It makes a very extreme claim, and makes an attempt to back it up with evidence. But what happens when we really look into it? It falls apart, just as a critical mind would expect it to.  My analysis of this video is going to come in two parts.  The first part (this one) is going to focus on looking at the logical fallacies presented in the argument.  The second argument will look more into the evidence for and against the hypothesis.

There are a few clues that you start looking for when you are debunking pseudoscience.  The first is shown very prominently in this quote from the video:

There is a kind of conspiracy of science among certain scientists. They know but are not telling you that the upper tectonic plates of earth also join in the pacific, not partially, they join totally. You are asked to believe that the continents swim or drift about willy-nilly, bumping and crashing as if they were on a greased skillet. This is not true. The simple truth is apparently too upsetting to too many apple carts?

It’s all too typical to see people with these absurd claims hiding behind conspiracy theory. If you think about it, it’s a pretty solid defense mechanism if your target audience is stupid. As soon as somebody opposes your idea you can just say they’re part of the conspiracy and BAM, they’re the bad guy and you’re the victim. Claims that scientists know something that they don’t want the general public to know, and yet the speaker knows, is simply appealing to our desire to know what the secret is. If you walk up to anyone and tell them you have a secret suddenly it’s the only thing that person can think about, and when it’s some big powerful group of scientists keeping the secret it’s all the more appealing.

The simple truth that shatters this quote is that scientists love upsetting the apple cart! It’s the people who do that who win the Nobel prizes! Look at Copernicus. He made the claim for a heliocentric solar system and it turned the common belief upside-down, and he went down in history for it. It’s absurd to think that scientists would be afraid to present this knowledge because this would be the breakthrough of a lifetime! I see similar claims all the time in the Intelligent Design movement; people just love to claim that scientists know life was designed by an intelligent being but are afraid to say anything. Purveyor of bad science, I scoff at thee!

The Atlantic spread is so obvious that a child would recognize it.

This one is a variant of “even an idiot could see X”. Of course the non-critical mind will immediately think “well I don’t want to be an idiot! I believe!” Even beyond that it’s just wrong. If you showed a child a map of the Atlantic sea floor do you really think he or she would start talking about the Atlantic spread? I think not.

I’m not making this up. This map comes from the scientific community.

This is a vague twist on the age old argument from authority, meaning using “an authority figure said it, so it has to be right!” as evidence for your claim. I see this one used a lot by the people who believe that autism is linked to child vaccinations (the evidence says otherwise, but it’s probably all a big conspiracy anyway). They will quote Jenny McCarthy, who is an avid spokesperson about the issue, but doesn’t have the scientific or medical background to be an authority figure here.  In this case the map used is valid, but the way it’s used as an argument makes it sound more like they’re referring to the same “scientific community” referenced by the herbal supplement sellers in my spam folder.

Why does the scientific community desperately cling to and promote the idea that the ocean bottom is sliding under the continents and into a magma which is twice as dense as solid granite, a totally unsupportable and scientifically unsound idea? They Have to. Or else they’d have to observe and admit that the earth is growing. And that, viewers, is a very big deal. That would change everything in science, from the smallest particle to the whole universe. One hundred years of scientific theory out the window.

This is another example of the first one I mentioned. I really don’t see how people think big discoveries are a bad thing for the scientific community. It boggles the mind. This one also makes the claim that the theory of plate tectonics is “a totally unsupportable and scientifically unsound idea” but never bothers to say why. In order for something to be a scientific theory it has to be supportable and scientific. Did the authors just not even bother to look up the Wikipedia page on plate tectonics?

It also tries very hard to make the idea sound even bigger than it is.  Even if the Earth is growing, that doesn’t change chemistry, biology, anthropology, psychology, and most other forms of science.  It would have some big implications for physics and geology, but that’s about it.  And where’s the evidence saying that it would “change everything” even just in physics and geology?  Maybe it would just be new data, but would actually fit in quite well with what we know about physics and geology.  I’m not saying it would, I’m just pointing out the logical fallacy that the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise.

Tectonic spreading, even according to the most conservative scientists, has created 2/3 of the earth’s surface in the last 200 million years. And therefor, the same, the same must be true for all planets, including Mars. Must!

Perhaps this is just an accidental misuse of the word “therefor”, but otherwise this is a blatant non-sequitur (from the SGU: Non-Sequitur In Latin this term translates to “doesn’t follow”. This refers to an argument in which the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises. In other words, a logical connection is implied where none exists.). I mean seriously, their claim is that if it happens on Earth it must happen on ALL planets. I would brush this off as a simple mistake, but given how much they emphasize it through repetition, I know they actually believe it.

Ok, one more and then it’s time to wrap up Part I. There’s still a bunch to choose from, but I think this one is the best:

Or…you can continue to ignore the facts and say, as the ancients said, that the Earth is unique and singular in the universe, and that we are the center, and the universe rotates around the Earth.

What they’re basically saying is that if you don’t believe in their theory, then you believe in a geocentric universe. This one spans so many logical fallacies I just cannot fathom how it ever made it to the theory. Let’s count them, shall we?  Again, these definitions are taken from the SGU link above.

1. Ad hominem An ad hominem argument is any that attempts to counter anothers claims or conclusions by attacking the person, rather than addressing the argument itself. True believers will often commit this fallacy by countering the arguments of skeptics by stating that skeptics are closed minded. Skeptics, on the other hand, may fall into the trap of dismissing the claims of UFO believers, for example, by stating that people who believe in UFO’s are crazy or stupid.
   
2. False Dichotomy Arbitrarily reducing a set of many possibilities to only two. For example, evolution is not possible, therefore we must have been created (assumes these are the only two possibilities). This fallacy can also be used to oversimplify a continuum of variation to two black and white choices. For example, science and pseudoscience are not two discrete entities, but rather the methods and claims of all those who attempt to explain reality fall along a continuum from one extreme to the other.
3. Reductio ad absurdum In formal logic, the reductio ad absurdum is a legitimate argument. It follows the form that if the premises are assumed to be true it necessarily leads to an absurd (false) conclusion and therefore one or more premises must be false. The term is now often used to refer to the abuse of this style of argument, by stretching the logic in order to force an absurd conclusion. For example a UFO enthusiast once argued that if I am skeptical about the existence of alien visitors, I must also be skeptical of the existence of the Great Wall of China, since I have not personally seen either. This is a false reductio ad absurdum because he is ignoring evidence other than personal eyewitness evidence, and also logical inference. In short, being skeptical of UFO’s does not require rejecting the existence of the Great Wall.
4. Tu quoque Literally, you too. This is an attempt to justify wrong action because someone else also does it. “My evidence may be invalid, but so is yours.”

Well, that’s all the time we have for today.  When I delve back into this for Part II I’ll look at the actual evidence for and against an expanding planet.  While we can pick apart someone’s claims for logical fallacies pretty easily, knowing that their argument is flawed doesn’t mean that their conclusion is false.  It would be enough ground to dismiss the argument until they came up with a better one in most cases, but I’d like to spend a little more time on this so I’ll keep digging anyway.  As it turns out, this expanding world idea is one that has been around for decades, so it has accumulated a lot of arguments for and against it.

So what have we learned today?  Hopefully I’ve helped to make you all a little more skeptical when it comes to claims of the extreme, but I would be quite happy if you all came away just knowing this: just because some guy made a YouTube video of it doesn’t make it true.

It’s been a long week, so to give myself a break I compiled some of my favorite YouTube videos of stupid criminals.  Enjoy.

I’m not sure if it’s just Americans or if it’s a worldwide phenomenon, but I’m willing to bet that it’s just part of being human, that wanting to see the underdog win is something everybody experiences from time to time.  We love to hear stories about the guy who came back from cancer to be a seven time Tour de France winner, or pitch a no-hitter, or just for being a black guy and running for president.  Seeing people overcome this type of obstacle can reassure our faith in humanity, and even allow us to put off thoughts of our own mortality for just a brief while.  These stories will surface in the news, in our movies, in our music, and by word of mouth, bringing smiles to faces all around.

At some point over the last few years I started noticing a shift from people loving the underdog to people trying to be the underdog.  Some people have managed to convince themselves that they are up against huge odds, when in reality they are not.  I’ve recently been listening to a Christian rock band called Skillet (I know it seems silly, an atheist listening to religious music, but some of it is really quite good if you can get past any bias you may have).  One song stuck out a bit, and as I started thinking about the lyrics I realized why.  Here’s an excrpt from Skillet’s Best Kept Secret:

You’re the best kept secret in my generation
The best kept secret of all time
You’re the best kept secret in my generation
And I found you out

I’m not sure how 85% of Americans can claim to believe in the Judeo-Christian god an have it still count as a secret, never mind a well kept one. It really has nothing to do with that, it’s all just a front to get the underdog appeal. Not only that, but far too many people are just plain loud about their “secret”.

Here’s another example of this from the Audio Adrenaline song Underdog:

I’m in this race to win a prize
The odds against me
The world has plans for my demise
What they don’t see
Is that a winner is not judged by his small size
But by the substitute he picks to run the race
And mines already won

So pretty much this:

I hope I don’t have to point out the irony here (or how easy it is to make pie charts look like PacMan). Maybe running around screaming “Help, help, we’re being repressed!” is just good marketing. You see the same thing in any conspiracy theory, people will claim that the government is trying to keep their secret from getting out, and it’s them against the big bad government, or whoever is conspiring against them this week.

I’m sure there are other examples of this out there, but I can’t think of any others worth mentioning.  If you can think of any feel free to mention them in the comments below.

Stereotypes.  I’m willing to bet over 90% of the people who read that word will be reading it with a negative connotation.  A few years ago while I was still at UNH I couldn’t help but notice how much of a big deal they were making about diversity.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with New Hampshire, we have three or four people in the state who are not Caucasian.  Somehow, the people at UNH in charge of distributing newsletters to the dorm bathrooms around campus had come to the conclusion that it was our fault.  Somehow, by being white we were interfering with the progress of every other ethnicity.

While the idea seems a bit ridiculous at first, as I thought about it more I could see myself forcing my black/asian/gay/female friends to be more white/blond/tall/blue-eyed because I’m Hitler.  No wait, the idea really is ridiculous.  Having very few people of color at UNH was not my fault just because I was white.  I ended up writing up a paper about it and left it in our lounge for other people to read if they wanted to, and it ended up getting some pretty heated discussion going a few times.  Anyway, it’s like five pages long, so you can skip over it and still be able to follow this post, but here’s a link to it in case you want to check it out.

One thing I didn’t touch on as much as I wanted to in the paper was my view of stereotypes.  The word is often used synonymously with words like bigotry, discrimination, and prejudice.  While there are many negative stereotypes out there, I don’t see the word or action as being inherantly negative.  The reason our brains form stereotypes is purely for organizational purposes.  While stereotypes can often be influenced by our personal prejudices, they are also very much influenced by statistics.

With all of the people you meet on a day-to-day basis, it is impossible to form enough of a relationship with them to know enough about them to not stereotype them.  You will immediately pick out traits based on looks, clothes, age, gender, location, mood, etc. and use those factors to fit them in a group that you have already formed a set of opinions about.  A wise person would understand that the group your brain has placed them in is a temporary location until you either forget about the person or learn more about them.  I think this is why first impressions are such a big deal for some people, because too many people will stick you in a group at first and then have a hard time moving you to a different group, or recognizing you as an individual.

You’ve all probably heard someone justify a racist comment by saying “the stereotype is there for a reason”, and while that is usually true, I really doubt many people who say that actually think about how it applies to them.  The stereotype can be there for a reason that is not your own, or it could be based on the statistics of your own experiences.  If a higher percentage of a certain group exhibits a specific trait, then you would expect to see that trait in the rest of the group until proven otherwise.  It’s not prejudice, it’s organization.  I can’t imagine going through life and not having any idea how to react to anyone until I knew them on an individual basis.  That would be madness!

Let me throw an example at you in case you’re lost in a dense forest of hypothetical situations.  Let’s look at emos, because they’re more fun to pick on than a barrel of art majors.  If you walk up to someone who’s wearing all black, has spiked hair, too much eyeliner, a teardrop tattoo on his face, metal studs sticking out of every available piece of real-estate, and a DeathRock’R shirt, and you say to him “I bet you don’t like being generalized” he would probably respond with “You don’t know me, sheep” and explode in a self-promoting stereotypical paradox.

So, what caused you to assume Mr. Somebodypleaseloveme didn’t like being generalized?  Chances are it was based on the actions of other people whom you have dealt with who have had similar traits and mannerisms.  Does that make you a bad person?  I would say that it makes you a sane person.  Sure, you’re a bad person anyway, but not for this reason.  It probably has more to do with the dead hooker under your bed.