The authors of 'Pseudoscience' explore and debunk your favorite conspiracy theories
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. It's hard to deny that there's a certain allure to conspiracy theories. I'm not even talking about the more pernicious stuff in our current culture, like QAnon or something. But more like, do aliens exist? Or what's the deal with spontaneous human combustion?

These are the types of questions that Nate Peterson and Dr. Lydia Kang, yes, doctor as in medical doctor, take on in their new book, Pseudoscience, an amusing history of crackpot ideas and why we love them. And while, yeah, they are talking about the more amusing stuff, they talk to NPR's Asha Roscoe about how they drew the line between what was funny and what was actually dangerous. That's ahead.

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Conspiracies and pseudoscience can be very harmful. But indulging in some of them, I'm looking at you, mothman, can be fun. From traveling sideshows to TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries.

and The Unexplained with the one and only William Shatner. Could Bigfoot be one of man's ancient ancestors? According to many cultures around the world, it's a distinct possibility. People adore a strange story. A new book explores and...

Thanks for having us. We're glad to be here. Thank you. Let's get this out of the way. Is Bigfoot real? Yes.

I think it comes down to, what do you think? I don't really want the answer for that. Oh, I totally, I get that. One of the fun things about all these creatures, it's so much fun to harbor belief that they're still there and they're still mysterious and we can't quite find them. Yeah, I mean, it is fun. This book is separated into four parts and you have entries here that range from aliens and flat earth and even polygraphs.

One of the favorite entries for us here at Week in Edition, and I learned a lot from this, was the one about spontaneous human combustion. Well, ultimately, there's really no such thing as spontaneous human combustion. But unfortunately, there's such a thing as human combustion that appears spontaneous. And the reason that this looks unusual when you're investigating the remains from a human combustion event is for something called the Wick Effect. Yeah.

Yeah, unfortunately, it's that we tend not to think of ourselves as being like walking candles, but we kind of are. A couple hundred years ago, there were just several of these episodes that happened where people would like be found burned to death and like nothing else in the room will have like turned into ash, just part of the human. And so it just really...

really puzzled people, but it turns out it's just us. You mentioned people becoming a human candle. Can you explain the wick effect? Sure. So it's kind of a sort of a horrifying idea, but if you imagine how a candle works, you

You've got a flame burning on top of a wick. And what the flame does is it actually melts the wax and it pulls it up through the fabric of that wick and it burns it slowly but surely, which is why you see after a while a candle will burn down. Unfortunately, humans are not unlike a candle. Their clothes could act as the wick. And if there's a fire, it will use the human fat as its candle wax, so to speak. So it's kind of an awful idea. And

And Nate, the history behind how the idea of spontaneous human combustion spreads, some of that was tied up with the temperance movement, right?

So scientists isolate oxygen for the first time in 1774, and they realize that oxygen is necessary for both breathing and for burning. So this gave rise to a theory for a little while that floated around that breathing itself was a form of combustion. So as you're inhaling and you're exhaling, you're actually sort of like continually burning oxygen inside of your lungs.

which I think is kind of this beautiful theory that there's these little fires that are burning away in your lungs all the time. And so there's this growing popular belief in the connection between drinking alcohol and bursting into flames.

And so that wasn't lost on folks that were behind the temperance movement because it was a way to drum up popular support. It's something that people would be scared of happening to them. You know, I don't want to, if there's these little fires that are burning away in my lungs, then I don't want to fill my body up with alcohol and potentially ignite, right? So that's something that they could exploit toward their own ends. But it does show you how anything really, but pseudoscience in particular, can be captured by a popular movement and then used for its own ends. How did you...

What did you choose what to include in the book? Because you start off kind of say that, you know, there's certain things that you made a choice not to touch on in this book. It was a hard decision. And it just ultimately we realized that the tone of the book for the most part was more lighthearted, was more fun. And I was like, I don't think it's appropriate to take a lighthearted tone.

When it comes to hitting some really seriously horrible situations that are surrounded in pseudoscience, you know, so we made the hard choice of leaving out things like Holocaust denial and gay conversion therapy. And I put therapy in quotes there because there was just nothing to laugh at in any of those subjects.

It seems like one thing that makes a conspiracy kind of catch on is not just ignorance, but maybe it's knowing just enough to the point where it could be dangerous or I guess just to be misinformed, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, especially with conspiracy theories and pseudoscience in general. I mean, the reason why they even exist is because there are gaps in knowledge. You know, we, for example, can't figure out 100% of the time why people lie or we don't know exactly what all the UAPs are. But you combine those gaps in knowledge with distrust of big institutions and

And you put those together and that's where a lot of this, you know, kind of stems from. From a historical perspective, a book like this, it can hopefully serve this purpose of laying history out as something to gradually learn from, you know, and that we don't always make the right judgment calls about pseudoscience. But, you know, hopefully we can learn a little bit from the past.

That's historian Nate Peterson and Dr. Lydia Kang. Their new book is Pseudoscience, an amusing history of crackpot ideas and why we love them. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks so much for having us on. ♪

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