Science With Becky

Science clapback of the year: astrophysicist Katie Mack sticking it to an anti-science Twitter troll. 😂😂

Where is your flying teapot now, skeptics?

This familiar figure tells you to eat your spinach, kids, it’ll make you strong. But why? For the iron content, of course. But this is actually a myth. The iron content in spinach was overestimated by a factor of ten due to a simple decimal error made in the 1930s.

But wait! Other sources trace the error all the way back to the 1890s, or 1870s, and claim it was debunked in the 1930s.

But wait (again)! Actually, there’s no credible source that the decimal error ever occurred. Dr Mike Sutton, a criminology professor from the UK, calls this a supermyth. A myth spread by academics in order to promote healthy skepticism and to illustrate the wide-ranging consequences of simple human errors–academics who, ironically, commit those same errors themselves by not checking the sources properly. Ole Bjørn Rekdal investigates the spread of this supermyth further. Hundreds of academic papers in fancy, credible journals and books by credible authors have spread this myth. Sometimes they cite a source; other times, it’s taken as common knowledge in the academic world. Rekdal and Sutton both trace the source of the myth to a single source: a 1981 article by Hamblin in the British Medical Journal. This is often obscured by layers of secondary sources which ultimately lead back to this single source. This source, in turn, provides no evidence for the assertion that the confusion about spinach was due to a decimal error by mysterious “German scientists.” Nor does it cite any sources. Hamblin himself doesn’t remember where he learned this “fact”, but further sleuthing reveals a lecture given in 1972 by Prof. Arnold E. Bender, which might well be the ultimate source of the myth. Interestingly, Bender’s hypothesis becomes stronger over the years: in 1972 he says that “the fame of spinach may well have grown from a misplaced decimal point”, while in 1982, this has become (emphasis added): ‘the belief can be traced back to a mistake in the transcription of analytical results in 1870, when a decimal point was misplaced.“ Possibly Bender’s certainty about this point was bolstered by the publication, one year earlier, of Hamblin’s unsourced recollection of Bender’s own statements made years earlier. What a mess!

I’ll spare you all the gory details of digging through citation after citation in the search of elusive facts. One interesting fact unearthed through all this data analysis, including re-reading of old Popeye comics (for science, really!), is that Popeye eats spinach for its vitamin A content. If we are to believe Rekdal, skeptic-buster, this was the entire raison d’ etre for the Popeye character:

According to Sutton (2010a: 13–14), Elzie Crisler Segar had an entirely different nutrient, vitamin A, in mind when he invented Popeye and contributed to a massive increase in spinach consumption in the United States during the 1930s.

This could be interpreted to mean that Popeye was created as a health food propaganda tool. But actually he first appears as a side character in another comic by Segar, Thimble Theatre, before his massive popularity allowed him to usurp the comic’s title for himself. And if we read Sutton’s paper, cited by Rekdal, Popeye didn’t start eating spinach and promoting it as health food until years after the character was first introduced–thus revealing the lack of a master propaganda plan behind the character’s creation. Sutton also cites evidence that spinach consumption was already sharply on the rise in the US between 1915 and 1928, which happens to be the year before Popeye appears.

Semmelweis, Schmemmelweis

Even cautionary tales of how urban legends arise told by skeptics are rife with the kinds of errors that promote urban legends. Sutton has identified several other such "supermyths.” (I think “meta-myths” would be a better word for this specific kind of myth about myths, which are spread by the orthodox scientific and skeptic community to promote healthy skepticism.) One of them is the cautionary tale of Ignaz Semmelweis. He was the famed doctor who discovered that simple hygiene could reduce the rate of puerperal fever in maternity wards, but whose ideas were so badly received by the medical community, it literally drove him insane. In fact, Semmelweis wasn’t the first one to suggest hygiene as a way to prevent spreading disease to mothers in labor; there are other credible reasons why he would be unpopular in the medical community; and he did eventually die insane, but the likely cause was syphilis (a disease carried by 30% of Vienna in Semmelweis’ day) or Alzheimer’s. He lived a happy life, married a woman half his age, and had five children before his illness took hold. And while he was beaten in an asylum, asylums were frequently awful places back then, and far from being murdered by the medical establishment, he may have sustained his injuries resisting involuntary commitment–he was committed by his own family after he began exhibiting inappropriate behavior, such as arriving to dinner naked.

So all the core components of this metamyth are false. But Semmelweis was made a hero of science via the concerted efforts of Hungarians living in union under Austria and harboring nationalist tendencies.

But Dr. Mike Sutton is far from a stranger to controversy. A few years after his apparently invigorating attacks on Popeye, he goes for a gut punch to one of the greatest idols in science. Who do we think of when we picture a scientist? Newton and Einstein, of course–and Darwin. Sutton analyzes old sources in order to argue that Darwin plagiarized the theory of natural selection from Scottish scientist Mike Sutton. At least that’s what I think he says, because Wikipedia says so–I haven’t read his book, Nullius in Verba. The Wikipedia article on Mike Sutton carries a slew of warnings about neutral PoV, such as, “a major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject” and “this article may be written from a fan’s point of view.”

The future of Physics in 2116

$7500 prize,  until 1 June 2016, see details at Physics Today.

Oh, and get inspired by the Frank Wilczek’s essay, Physics in 100 years.

PhD, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University