Cognitive scientists have long known that people can be induced to feel as if a fake limb is their own. This is done by hiding the arm from the subject’s view (under a table, for example), putting the fake arm in view, and then physically stimulating the visible fake arm and the unseen real arm in an identical fashion. The human brain, being easily confused by the conflict between the visual and tactile systems, will correct this discrepancy by suddenly mapping the fake arm onto the body plan, causing people to think the fake limb is now their “real” limb. (My own mind, however, being so used to being wrong and embracing absurdities such as the belief that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, does not even attempt to resolve this conflict; indeed, if it chooses to do anything, it will often choose to embrace further absurdity and just assume, for example, that the whole damned room is my actual arm.)

Having discovered this, scientists have desperately tried to find even more ways to screw with people’s minds. For instance, Swedish researchers made study subjects feel as if a prosthetic arm were a third arm in a recent study. Not content with this magnitude of a mindfuck in the participants, though, the researchers then brandished knives menacingly at the newfound arms, just to see if the participants would have a physiological reaction, which was measured by the sweatiness of their palms (hopefully of the real arm). Needless to say, though, they could have just as easily measured the physiological responses by noting the participant’s words (e.g., “What the fuck are you doing, you crazy asshole? You make me think I have a third arm and then you fucking try to cut it?!”), their fearful and confused expressions, or their attempts to punch the researchers in the face (which often failed because they tried to punch with their fake third arm, resulting in only a phantom punch). Not surprisingly, the subjects induced into thinking the prosthetic arm was their third arm had significantly sweatier palms when the prosthetic arm was threatened with the knife than those subjects who had not been tricked into thinking the plastic arm was their own.

This research shows that a person’s body image is not limited to a body plan with only two arms, two legs, and two heads [Editor's note: the author of this article strangely has two heads]. If people can be induced into thinking they have 3 arms, perhaps they could be induced to think that they have 4, 5, or 4211 arms. However, there are limits to the body plan revisions. When the prosthetic arm was replaced with a prosthetic leg, for instance, the subjects did not suddenly think they had a leg for an arm, much to the scientist’s chagrin. (These sick fucks wanted people to believe they had a third leg where their third arm should have been. That’s just going too damned far!)

It has not escaped this author’s attention, however, that this study opens the door to several perverse opportunities. Not content with only two dicks [Editor's note: among the author's already numerous problems, this extra dick is yet another], I could use these techniques to make myself believe this oiled-up banana is my third dick, allowing me to triple the rate at which I have sex, bringing the total up to zero. And if I was doomed to loneliness, perhaps finding that women are not attracted to two-headed, three-dicked monstrosities, I could try to use these techniques to map my body image onto a more popular person’s body. There are certain Hollywood actors who have sex with hookers and women from LA (pardon the redundancy) all the time. If I were to watch them being touched all over and then simulate the exact same touch-sensations on my own body, with enough time I could possibly map my body image onto the actor’s, allowing me to finally live the dream of inhabiting an actor’s body without the attendant side effects of stupidity and scientology (again, pardon the redundancy). Of course, these possibilities still remain to be tested. And while third arms definitely seem to be a possibility, it is unclear whether thirteen thousand dicks are, much less a leg made of machine guns and arms made of Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, respectively. Nothing will stop me from trying, though, and I simply will not stop—not for food and not for women with three-vagina body images—until I have constructed for myself an arm made of Charlie Sheen, the finest actor of our day and the finest stuff of which arms could possibly be made.

If you want to get a liberal to look at something, direct your own gaze to it.  But if you want to get a conservative to look at something, throw money at it while screaming “A socialist black terrorist is trying to steal our guns!”  The latter is only a hypothesis, to be sure, but the former is demonstrably true, according to a recent study titled “The politics of attention: gaze-cuing effects are moderated by political temperament.”  Essentially, the study showed that liberals are more focused on social cues, and conservatives significantly less so, as demonstrated by eye-gaze cues.

I know what you are thinking, dear reader, and it is inevitably something along the lines of: “What the fuck does that mean, and why is it important?”  Well, it is very important, and I will explain what it means shortly.

In the study, participants were told to watch for a target and click the space bar on the keyboard when they saw it.  However, they were distracted by a drawing of a face that had circles for eyes.  First, pupils would appear in the eyes of the face, looking either left or right, and then the target object would appear.  Participants were told that the object would not necessarily appear where the face was looking.  Those subjects that took longer to find the object and press the space bar were thus distracted by the social cue of where the eyes were looking.  After the participants were given a survey detailing their political beliefs, it was found that liberals tended to be more distracted by the social cues than the conservatives.

When interpreting the results, the researchers hypothesized that conservatives were not as influenced by the social cues because of their belief in personal autonomy.  Similarly, liberals were presumably influenced by the cartoon face because they are foolish pushovers who care too much about other people.  Libertarians, on the other hand, did not respond to eye gaze cues, pleas for help from drowning children, or even the tortured cries of their own children, as they sat there motionless, lecturing them on personal responsibility and the need to return to the gold standard.

Republicans, of course, have already seized on this research in an attempt to outwit the Democrats.  While Republicans remain focused on their goal of getting tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, Democrats have been constantly distracted by the Republicans as they keep looking ever-rightward. Obama himself, who once insisted that the wealthy should not have their tax cuts extended, was so distracted by cartoon eyeballs looking around that he seems to have forgotten his original stance, and he is now lecturing other liberals on the importance of extending the tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. Soon, the Republicans will install hundreds of giant cartoon eyeballs on the Senate floor, always looking away from things of importance, so that Republicans can vote unanimously for whatever vile bill they want as Democrats stare into the corner with cocked heads and befuddled looks on their faces, their eyes unknowingly drawn in this direction by cartoon eyeball social cues.  This way, with so many eyeballs looking at one corner, not even the likes of Bernie Sanders could hope to derail the Republican agenda with an 8-hour filibuster speech.  Instead, he’d speak for five minutes, find himself wanting to look at what everyone else is looking at, and then mumble softly until eventually he was saying nothing at all and merely standing there slackjawed, just like President Obama is now.

“This just goes to show how superior Republicans are,” said Republican House minority leader John Boehner. “If there were ever a scenario in which the world would end if the President did not hit the spacebar a few milliseconds after spotting a target on a computer screen, we’d all be dead with a liberal President in office if he were distracted by eye-gazing or concerns about homeless people. I think this just goes to show that Democrats are not competent and should be immediately impeached.”

On the bright side, however, the presence of eyes has been shown to cause better behavior in some studies.  Therefore, the Republicans, should they install hundreds of eyes staring into a corner, would suffer the unintended consequence of feeling actual emotions, like guilt, about their vile deeds, a novel experience that would no doubt be shocking to a class of people who have experienced only the emotions of greed and outrage for decades.

Philosophers stereotypically care a great deal about making distinctions that aren’t very meaningful, and Massimo Pigliucci lives up to this stereotype in his blog post “Why Plumbing Ain’t Science“. He maintains, of course, as all philosophers do, that the distinction is actually quite meaningful and important, but that just proves his guilt. A fireman saving a child from a burning building, for example, never has to explain why his actions were important (except perhaps to a philosopher).  A man who invents a new vaccine doesn’t have to explain its importance.  Justin Beiber has never had to account for his vast importance.  As everyone knows, the first thing a guilty party does is profess innocence, which proves guilt.  Massimo is a philosopher, however, so he’d probably point out that the first thing an innocent person does is also profess innocence, meaning my hypothesis concerning his guilt cannot be falsified with this evidence.  But this is just the sort of underhanded thing a philosopher making a meaningless distinction would do.

Massimo points out three features of science that differentiate it from plumbing:

1. Its more refined methods.
2. Its historical precedents.
3. Its sociological structure.

The points are well-taken.  Plumbing does not utilize statistics or double-blind studies to unclog a pipe.  Plumbing has not historically been considered part of science.  And there are no educational social structures for plumbing by which plumbers go to school for half their lives to learn how to use very refined methods to arrive at conclusions.  So far as I know, journals like the Annals of Plumbing Science and the New England Journal of Clog Removal exist only in my mind (but if it exists in my mind, doesn’t it still exist, philosoraptor?!).  However, I think these distinctions aren’t important, and that plumbing is similar enough to science in its important information-seeking and problem-solving methods that there is really no reason to consider it a non-science other than for arbitrary personal reasons.

Let’s apply Massimo’s reasoning to another subject: namely, mathematics.  As a philosopher, Massimo could (and probably would) ask himself the pointless question, “Is addition a part of mathematics?”  The answer would seem to be no, according to Massimo, because the mathematics that people study in the university is much more refined and uses more complex techniques than simple addition.  Also, there are no sociological structures in place, like journals, professorships, and so on, for those who simply want to add things.  Presumably, the only indicator that addition is a part of mathematics is its historical inclusion in this class, and because addition fails two of these three tests, it must not be mathematics.

This reasoning should strike the reader as absurd, and that is because we don’t see the features of sociological structures and complexity as necessary components of “math-ness”.  I think the same criticism could apply to Massimo’s exclusion of plumbing from the domain of science.

For one, if plumbing were more difficult, or more of its questions were unanswered and hard to fathom, there probably would be a structure to plumbing that is similar to science, not unlike that of engineering.  The methods for answering plumbing questions, by dint of its new difficulty, would also therefore become more complex and refined.  But the methods would remain fundamentally the same: plumbers, like scientists, would use empirical evidence and hypothesis testing and induction to solve problems and answer questions about the world.  The fact that plumbing is easier and less complex is no reason to exclude it from the realm of science, in my book.

But let us return to the relevant question: Is the demarcation of science from non-science important?  Massimo answers in the affirmative, pointing out that there are negative political and social consequences to expanding the definition of science, such as allowing for crazy ideas like homeopathy, creationism, and parapsychology to fall under the rubric of science.  I, however, do not see these intrusions as negative.  Homeopathy, creationism, and parapsychology can be seen as science; it’s just that they are failed hypotheses.  Each of these hypotheses is as empirically testable as the most well-known theories in physics and biology.  The only problem is that they failed their tests.  Seeing these subjects as science, specifically failed science, thus does not harm anything.  In that case, the proper route to take with the political and social ramifications is to simply argue that people should not be learning, teaching, or practicing failed science, rather than non-science.  Nothing really changes should we expand the definition of science to include plumbing, except that a few plumbers might start wearing white labcoats. The “problem” therefore doesn’t seem to important and involves no disagreement about anything of worth.  You say gavagai, and I say rabbit-stage, but in the end we’re both pointing at a damned rabbit.  For all intents and purposes, those who think plumbing can be considered scientific agree with Massimo on all points, and the only disagreement is on the labeling.  And that, my philosopher friends, is the kind of concern over little nothings that made philosophers famous.

In a recent study by scientists at Harvard, the enzyme telomerase was shown to reverse the effects of aging in mice. The study vindicated long-standing hypotheses concerning a connection between the aging process and telomeres.

Telomeres are basically protective strings of DNA. They are necessary because when a strand of DNA is copied during cell division, the copying process is imperfect and won’t proceed to the very end of the strand: short pieces on the end are therefore cut off with each replication. To prevent important genes from being discarded by this wasteful copying process, the ends are padded with superfluous repetitive strings of DNA, which are the telomeres.

A good analogy for DNA replication is sewing.  The string on the needle would represent the DNA, and the telomeres would be represented by the excess string that is snipped off after the knot has been tied to secure the stitch.  Aging would then be analogous to using copies of the ever-shortening string to sew together other rips of the same size—as the string becomes smaller and smaller, the sewing becomes less efficient, leading to fabric that becomes folded and wrinkled (not unlike wrinkly skin in the elderly) when the rips are sewed with the smaller copies of string. Eventually, the string will become so shortened that it cannot be used in the stitch. Telomeres, then, are expendable strings of DNA that protect the rest of the DNA from being lost during the replication process, like the excess string in a sewing stitch.

This process of telomere-shortening has long been associated with aging and cell senescence. The enzyme telomerase, then, helps prevent aging because it lengthens and repairs telomeres. Of course, the mice in the study had been bred to lack active telomerase, which caused the precocious mice to age prematurely. Thus, unlike normal mice that live a hearty two years and produce telomerase all their lives, these mice experienced the degenerative effects of aging much sooner, as evidenced by their insistence on telling long-winded tales about how far they had to walk to school, their continual complaints about the “jungle music” of their younger mice peers, and their intractable bigotry against anything different. When these crotchety old mice with worn out bodies were given an injection that reactivated their telomerase, however, the effects of aging were observed to reverse. The most notable regeneration was seen in the testes, spleen, and intestines, presumably making the mice feel incredibly manly, and no doubt opening up a new market for spam emailers, who will begin deluging the inboxes of mice with promises of bigger, better balls if they only pay for a bottle of telomerase.  Aside from the all-important testes, the brains of the mice also improved (new neurons were grown).  However, even with renewed neuronal growth, they never developed fully-functioning human brains, though they were apparently the same size as one-time senate hopeful Christine O’Donnell’s brain, which was notoriously tiny and mouse-like to begin with.

These amazing results, of course, are no cause for celebration among humans. Humans are very different from mice, most notably in being about five feet taller and being proportionately less furry, and the anti-aging effects of telomerase are unlikely to apply in humans. For one, the mice in the study were artificially made to age prematurely through a genetic defect, and adding the telomerase essentially corrected the defect.  Not only that, but humans do not normally produce telomerase in their somatic cells, and when they do, the enzyme tends to be associated with cancers, most of which utilize the anti-aging effects of telomerase to allow the perpetual and out-of-control reproduction of cells.  Nevertheless, the research paves the way for future research that may eventually cure aging-related problems in humans, allowing us all to die from cancer, overpopulation, AIDS, or being mauled by pumas instead. (As of yet, scientists have not been able to cure puma-mauling, even in mice.)

Even though the study seems to signal the happy end to aging-related problems in the future, some speculate that this potential panacea will lead to more bad than good.  Some claim, for instance, that eliminating aging will lead to overpopulation, mass starvation, resource depletion, and a preponderance of elderly conservative political candidates that further magnify the problems of starvation and resource depletion as they deny global warming and insist that the invisible hand of capitalism will fix everything.  Others simply argue from more philosophical grounds, stating that man was not meant to live more than a hundred thirty years and would eventually get bored with life and commit suicide.  Strangely, however, whenever these people are asked whether they will kill themselves the next time they are bored, they stammer out some kind of excuse and turn bright red. Thankfully, for the reasons mentioned above, these people will not have to worry about a cure for aging in their own lifetimes, and they can wither away in excruciating pain while losing their minds to dementia in peace.

Even though it is unlikely humans will see any sort of therapeutic advance from this study in the near future, mice will inevitably become our immortal overlords.  For years, mice have toiled as model organisms in studies on cancer, aging, and every other ailment one could imagine. They have endured studies in which human ears have been grown on their backs and in which they’ve been made extremely obese. Presumably, an organism would only suffer through such indignities for a greater end, and that greater end seems to be immortality (or at the very least the ability to hear out of their backs). Having moved one step closer to curing aging in mice, soon we’ll also cure cancer in mice, and every other disease in mice, at which point the then immortal mice would spring to action and enslave all humans, those sub-par monkey-like creatures that still get old, that don’t have ears on their backs, and that develop such archaic things as cancerous tumors. Such rampant speculation, of course, was not supported by the study, but that has never stopped science journalism before!

Despite the obvious commonalities between the two groups, the atheist movement has always had a rather strained relationship with the more generalized skeptical movement.  In part this is the fault of organized atheism, as many atheists endorse mystical crap like acupuncture and other alternative medicines while pretending to be reasonable just because they reject religion.  However, the real schism between the two groups is a result of the unfounded idea that atheism, at least in some forms, is not sufficiently scientific.  Those skeptical movements that disassociate themselves from atheism tend to see atheism as a philosophical outlook rather than a scientific or empirically justified stance.  The arguments in support of this claim, though, tend to be rather unconvincing.

Most forms of atheism address conceptions of God that are explicitly amenable to scientific tests.  The bulk of religious believers, for instance, do not believe in obscure deistic entities that never interact in the physical world.  They believe in a God that can manifest itself as a human being, perform miracles, heal sickness, control the vocal cords of those filled with the holy spirit (though God seems to take some perverse joy out of using those vocal cords just to speak in jibberish), and so on.  Even those deities that are a bit more remote and do not perform miracles of this sort are nevertheless testable, as they are said to be creators of the universe and to have placed humanity on top of some sort of cosmic hierarchy of importance.  These are all characteristics that yield testable hypotheses, and when our observations do not support these hypotheses, we have scientific grounds for rejecting these religious claims.  When we see that humanity is the product of random forces whose existence is not probable, much less logically necessary, that throws serious doubt on any conceptions of God who created the universe with humanity as its pinnacle achievement.

In that sense, then, atheism is indeed scientific.  Most forms of God can be ruled out on a purely evidentiary basis, in much the same way a scientist would rule out similar scientific hypotheses in other fields.  This is generally accepted, even among those skeptics who feel atheism is a philosophical stance rather than a scientific one.  The problem, naturally, is that some forms of God cannot be ruled out in this manner.  These versions of God are so remote and deistic that they yield no testable predictions or observations of any sort, and thus, the skeptics would argue, they are not susceptible to scientific investigation.  Massimo Pigliucci recently made an argument of this sort in a blog post titled “On the Scope of Skeptical Inquiry“.

Pigliucci acknowledges that some religious claims about God are scientifically testable, but in the end maintains that atheism is primarily a philosophical position because it addresses claims that can’t be assessed scientifically through the process of observation.  One of the examples he gives is the claim by some creationists that God designed the world to look as if it were billions of years old when it is in fact only 6,000 years old.  No evidence could contradict this kind of statement, obviously, and as such Pigliucci claims that it can only be assessed on philosophical, not scientific, grounds.

The problem, of course, is that this could extend to any realm of inquiry traditionally seen as within the scope of skeptical inquiry.  If believers in cryptofauna like bigfoot and Nessie protected their claims from inquiry by saying, such as they do, that we would not expect to see evidence of their existence even if we looked, clearly we cannot scientifically address such a claim.  Nevertheless, no skeptical organization is thus busy rewriting its mission statement to exclude cryptozoological investigations from its scope of inquiry; atheism, on the other hand, is singled out for just this reason.  If the basis for rejecting atheism as a form of scientific skepticism rests on the unfalsifiability of religious claims, then any other field of skeptical inquiry is open to the same sort of criticism, as those who believe in alternative medicine, creationism, psychic powers, and ghosts frequently make claims that are unfalsifiable.

With that said, the other problematic aspect of rejecting religion as a field of skeptical inquiry concerns the overly narrow conception of “science” endorsed by such skeptics.  Science isn’t just a process of simple falsification of claims.  It is much more nuanced and much scientific activity is philosophical.  Pigliucci tries to differentiate science from philosophy in noting that scientific knowledge seems to progress whereas philosophical knowledge seems to stagnate on the same unanswered questions.  This is an uncharitable characterization of philosophy, though.  Science itself is one of the ultimate successes of the progress of philosophy!  The early Greek philosophers weren’t simply asking questions about souls and free will, but were addressing questions of the natural sciences.  The scientific method is merely an epistemological and philosophical framework.  The reason philosophy doesn’t seem to progress isn’t because it is not successful, but because when it is successful it becomes renamed as science!

So, in a sense, the demarcation between science and philosophy is not clear.  Nevertheless, even if we accept the demarcation, it is clear that scientists do entertain and reject untestable hypotheses all the time.  Science isn’t simply a matter of testing reality against observation, but it also puts into practice epistemological principles like Ockham’s razor.  For example, basic philosophy of science shows that theories are always underdetermined by the data.  That is, for any set of data, an unlimited number of potential explanations exist that would also fit the data.  Evolution explains the data we see for the origin of human beings, for instance, but so does a hypothesis stating that the universe and human beings popped into existence two seconds ago with only the appearance of age.  Scientists reject all the other potential explanations, even though they can cohere with scientific observations, because they are untestable or not parsimonious.  Notice that scientists do not reject these alternative explanations after observing evidence that the additional elements of these hypotheses do not exist!  They are rejected for epistemological, and hence philosophical, reasons.  In this case the principle of rejecting untestable claims serves as a check against the tendency of human beings to make mistakes and err.  The more you assume, the more likely you are to be wrong, and thus scientists assume the least that is justified by the evidence.  As can be seen, the principle of parsimony is essential to science, because it cuts through problems of underdetermination by requiring evidence for additional explanatory entities.  As such, scientists do not claim the origin of humanity is not within the scope of skeptical inquiry merely because untestable hypotheses can be generated to “explain” our origin.  Scientific inquiry is not so constrained or feeble and frail that it cannot overcome untestable hypotheses.  This includes untestable hypotheses of a religious nature.

In short, the attempt to form ghettos of critical inquiry that exclude atheism from skepticism are misguided.  It would be as misguided as randomly excluding cryptozoology or alternative medicine merely because their supporters also make untestable claims.  Scientific analysis is always dealing with untestable claims.  Any theory accepted by scientists entails the rejection of countless untestable claims compatible with the underdetermined data set.  As such, rejecting untestable claims, whether they be religious in nature or not, is thoroughly scientific.  For the skeptical community to attempt singling out atheism for this reason thus seems silly and disheartening, especially knowing that it is likely motivated by the unfounded respect (which entails a lack of criticism) traditionally accorded to the religious.  I suspect that had we evolved in a parallel universe where cryptozoology was the reigning belief system, and we were all socialized to respect claims about Bigfoot and never criticize them, then we’d be seeing skeptical movements decrying the inclusion of cryptozoology within its scope.  Luckily, we do not live in that universe.  And hopefully we can change our current universe from one in which the skeptical community attempts to exclude atheism to one in which skepticism of religion is just as acceptable as any other area of inquiry..