ASM108 Gay Parents, Foster Care, and Death by Machete or Chimpanzee

[transcript automatically generated - please help edit to make it better]

gay parents foster care and death by machete or chimpanzee all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life really excited to talk to all you new listeners who've come in from the recent featuring of the liturgist podcast on npr i hope you enjoy this strange little spin-off show we have here um i've run out of things to say so professional whatever let's get it started [Applause] [Music] oh man i love it when uh i'm just getting the show started and i'm already giggling at myself it's always a good sign i really should do the intro again but i enjoy uh just admitting i have nothing of value to say for the rest of the time that we have music that my friend jeb wrote really funny okay let's talk about events that's always fun you like to know where we can see each other today the day this podcast comes out march 20th i'm in athens georgia at iris 2017. that's the interdisciplinary research and ideas symposium so i'll be the hack podcaster among a bunch of actual academics which i really genuinely enjoy march 24th i'll be at the blue conference in fairfax virginia and my portion of that incredible event will be to talk about the theological and faith implications of artificial intelligence so if you weren't tempted before i'm sure you are now march 29th i'll be in houston texas for the christ and creation event with biologos the 2017 biologos conference nt wright's going to be there aaron nequist is going to be there really really stellar event i'm totally excited about that one i'm tempted to skip my own session honestly because there's so many quality scientists and and theologians and and brilliant folks as part of that event i've got some things that will be coming in april but aren't on the calendar yet so keep an eye out may 13th i'll be at christ church in greenwich connecticut that'll be fun so also really big news like you know like i had trumpets or something there this is this is a big announcement tomorrow tickets go on sale for the next liturgist gathering events so we're doing boston october 6th and 7th and seattle washington october 27th and 28th and also in september we're going to be in los angeles but we aren't actually announcing those dates or selling tickets yet but tomorrow march 21st tickets do go on sale for boston and seattle now we open ticket sales up early for uh patrons for the liturgists and uh tickets are selling really well even though they're not publicly available i do expect both of these events to sell out so if you're interested in going to the liturgist gathering which is about us getting together we'll do a live podcast we will do spiritual practice together we'll practice meditation and different christian prayer techniques uh we'll do some typical liturgist style mind-blowing conversations about things we've been thinking about and i think the most important part of religious gathering is we all meet each other not just you meet me and michael and people who may have contributed to our work but each other the liturgists the people who are the spiritually homeless and frustrated and trying to chart out what faith looks like in their lives today without all the judgment and dogma so i'd love to see you at the liturgist gathering now one other thing october 21st i'm going to be in dublin ireland for the rubicon conference and while i'm in the republic of ireland and the united kingdom i would love to put together a little book tour so if you have a spot that could host me in scotland northern ireland's covered but if you if you want to do the rest of ireland or if you want to hit up anywhere on the island of england including london we're calling for events this will be a very inexpensive way to get me to come to your church or college or venue or whatever you've got because i'm already going to be over there the airfare is covered so if you're interested in being a part of the finding god in the waves tour that's happening in the republic of ireland northern ireland and the united kingdom i hope i said that right i know before i called ireland part of the united kingdom and i'm an american so i'm kind of dumb about that stuff even looking at like a map on wikipedia i still messed it up uh so i hope i'm trying to do better there thanks for your tweets and emails anyway i'd love to see you and have you tell me how to properly describe your homeland on the internet so uh just go to my website uh spike.com and there's a speaking button just click there that'll take you to the folks at chafee management just fill out the little form on that website and tell them hey i'd like to host mike in the uk or northern ireland or the republic of ireland or wherever in that geographic vicinity you are located and they'll give you more details on how that happens okay really excited about the show this week uh more than usual and you'll find out why when we get to the questions so let's do it so for people who support ask science mike on patreon they have this special ability to put questions right into the podcast without having to go through the normal voting process and we have two questions like that this week um and i want to apologize to my patrons i offer you that benefit but i don't tell you how to do that so these are places i found in my email box or or the inbox on patreon where people have said hey i have questions for the show so if you're a patron and you're at the right tier to have a question on the show just use the message function on patreon to send me a message and i'll be sure i see those messages there some of these patron questions are a few months old so my apologies the first patron question this week is come comes from kate uh who says is this how you submit a question i'm not sure anyway love the podcast i've started listening to the liturgist podcast at your recommendation it's beautiful so i want to know what makes a good radio voice i listen to a lot of podcasts and some people's voices are so engaging and smoothing and others are just not i am definitely one of those people having been told after i needed vocal cord surgery that i have a percussive voice so my question is what about our anatomy and speech patterns make our speaking voices not singing voices appealing to others also are there differences in what people prefer based on the gender of the speaker that might be cultural i guess and how can you change your speaking voice if you want to improve it for recordings okay this is a phenomenal question my answer is not as neat as i would like because there's less research into this than i expected but i did find several studies and they all seem to have little different ideas and little different pictures and different questions they explored so i'm going to try to knit those together into something useful and actionable so one thing australian researchers tested the voices of commercial radio broadcasters against regular people and public radio broadcasters and they did this by putting high-speed cameras in the mouths of people and having them talk so they could see the movement of vocal cords and the difference they found in that experiment which i can't imagine how it was done even if you were using a fiber lead i think it would be hard to talk with a fiber lead in your mouth normally but they found that the vocal cords of professional broadcasters consistently closed faster than they opened and that was universal on all subjects so for regular people and people who did public radio in australia they had a similar open and closing speed for their vocal cords whereas professional broadcasters uh had vocal cords that closed faster than they opened they don't know what that means it's just what they found so we can't really use that to learn how to have a better voice but it is a difference we start to see in the data now when we've looked at pitch in relationship to voices many studies show that we generally find higher voices more attractive in women and lower voices more attractive in men i've had kind of an opposite experience that you've had since about uh late puberty early adolescence people have told me that i have a wonderful voice probably deeply shapes how i speak honestly think about the positive reinforcement when i move my voice deeper and deeper into my chest right that we'll kind of tease what we're going to talk about a little later in the answer but so i have a low voice now interestingly enough we tend to favor voices that have a similar pronunciation to our own so there is some basis here for a cultural context people who pronounce vowels similarly to the way that we pronounce vowels tend to be voices we find more attractive or more interesting now that doesn't really explain why we tend to find foreign accents interesting uh i can listen to australian and british people speak all day or south africans speak all day whatever that's what the data says uh now in terms of voices we find authoritative or powerful regardless of gender we favor lower voices isn't that interesting so in men we're looking for a low voice for both attractiveness and authority but women have difficulty being perceived as both attractive and authoritative at the same time now i don't know how much of that is culturalized uh versus endemic to our sort of neurological responses to voices but either way don't we see a little bit of a foundation for sexism and patriarchy there in that data so anyway we when we've done uh experiments where we've pitch shifted voices using computers as we make voices lower people report both genders as being more authoritative or powerful when the pitch goes down if you would imagine uh evolutionarily and anatomically speaking we're talking about tones that we tend to associate with certain evolutionary signals like body size and reproductive suitability right larger men larger chested men are typically viewed as more attractive and that often correlates with a deeper voice and in many ways the inverse is true for women again within reason if a man's voice becomes old enough it's hard to even hear and if women's voices become very high they hit a point of diminishing returns and the negative effects on perceived attractiveness now in terms of authority that lower pitch is associated with age and therefore wisdom so that might make sense why even with uh women we look for a deeper pitched voice to denote power or authority so that's some studies i've seen when it comes to how to improve your voice for recordings first your microphone technique is really important so i know a lot about my voice and how it works with microphones so i tend to put microphones off to the side the left side of my mouth pointed at my mouth with about depending on the microphone one to four finger distance from my mouth to the microphone and that gives me a nice even tone if i go low and point up then you'll get more of a nasal tone which is what i'm doing right now and if instead i point down towards my mouth it gets really really boomy and you get more chest tone and if i talk right into the microphone it gets overly present and less soothing which is why i place the microphone just right off to the side see what i did there now i tend to talk very similarly into the microphone as i talk in person i think my ass science mic voice is a little more radio than my liturgist podcast voice or my stage voice or my in person voice but i think that's because i like trying to keep myself awake and engaged i'm doing this for my benefit and not yours because i'm an extrovert standing alone in his office to record this show so after you've got the right mag technique which is incredibly important in terms of what you would do to practice the tone of your voice or improve the tone of your voice is the more you can breathe and speak from your diaphragm the better your voice will sound so if i were to talk way up in my nose my voice is a lot less present and then if i move just into my mouth i can't even do it i don't use a head voice to speak you want to make sure that you're almost treating your lungs like a bagpipe putting a lot of air in them and then using the diaphragm to slowly squeeze it out by the way watch this i can talk for a really really long time without taking a breath because i fill my lungs with so much air see what i did there that's because i i'm talking from the diaphragm now you're supposed to sing the same way i don't sing with my diaphragm i'm a terrible singer but i do love to hear myself talk so anyway so you also want to be careful with enunciation i'm not great at it but enunciation helps people appreciate your voice but if you do it too crisply or too sharply it can be staccato and people will find it less pleasing i think i sort of naturally aim for relaxation with the way i speak so it depends on what you want to communicate what tone you want to convey and if you'd like to really unpack that well work with a voice coach or actually go to ask sciencemic.com and click on this episode 107 and look at the show notes because i included an article written by a voice coach it's very intuitive for me i have a lot of microphone experience i have a lot of talking experience so i think it's actually relatively difficult for me to unpack you know my approach but i also don't have a very versatile voice i have like how i'm talking now and then i have like what i guess i would call like my meditation voice let's see if i can do it begin by closing your eyes right so that a little more gravely a little softer um but that's really all i can do when people have told me i should do voice-over work in the past i'd be like that's great if they want my voice but if they have notes on what i should do differently i'm not an actual voice professional i do all this stuff intuitively either way fantastic question from a patron hey mike i enjoy listening you speak into the the challenges and the conflicts that so many people go through but i often wonder what what are the topics and the ideas or or the elements of theology that you are currently struggling with and then secondarily you know sometimes you will talk about giving yourself just a few minutes to do a limited amount of research about any any given topic or question that somebody asked and i would love to hear you know what's that quick process that you go through to seek and then find the answers and then compose that in a way that that's digestible makes sense to the rest of us all right thanks man well i always love the two for one questions people kind of sneak in two questions and those neither of those are quick questions so hats off to you for getting that one by both andrew and the patrons uh because when i picked the show questions uh i always picked the easiest ones which meant double questions almost never made it because it was more work for me um i had zero no intended guilt there it's actually funny to me so i will honestly answer both of those you'll hate my first answer i don't struggle with any theology whatsoever [Laughter] this is the thing about kind of the open-handed nihilist you know ecclesiastical vapor approach to faith what is there for me to struggle with i hold it all so loosely i enjoy the search i enjoy studying scripture and reading about theology even theologies i find preposterous because i like to see what role that theology has played in the development of the church and the development of human civilization so there's nothing to struggle with i doubt things all the time but that's not a struggle doubts how i have fun if you think less theologically and more stuff that's i think about a lot right now what's the balance between calling out harm and inviting people to see the world more broadly every time you put your foot down on a topic of injustice some people walk away from the table but if all you ever do is invite people nothing gets done what is the right balance on police brutality and racial injustice in social and economic context and climate change and all these pressing issues in our societies how do i do the most good and the least harm i think about that more than anything else i've been wrestling with uh if human nature and collective cognitive action is compatible with democracy or indeed with civilization for the long term i wrestle with that that's a struggle for me what could we do to make the internet more healthy than harmful for human civilization i wrestle with that one a lot and then something i think about all the time i can't tell you about because it's top secret it's a research for my next book that i'm not ready to talk about yet so the thing i'm thinking about the most you'll probably start hearing about 18 months from now isn't that a bummer now the second question you sent in my process for researching questions i actually wrote out the answer to this question last after watching myself answer the other questions on this episode and here's the process i read or listen to the question that has been submitted and then off the top of my head i make a bulleted list of how i'd answer the question if it was a live show right just three to five sometimes eight or ten bullets there's usually only three major bullets and then you have sub bullets off of that ideas supporting a point if that answer isn't enough that means it's not going to be a quick research question and that means it's got to go into the deep research pile the stuff that sometimes i'll spend hours researching or occasionally on the show a day and a half maybe two days researching the answer to a question those are pretty rare there are none of those for this episode so once i've written out that little outline i check any facts or figures for accuracy against a source so anytime i'm quoting a number or an equation or a scientific fact i looked that up or if i couldn't recall it exactly i go and get the exact figure off of the internet then i look for supporting documentation research studies articles uh that people can a validate where i got my information and two dig deeper and i'm really good at google so if the very first phrase that comes off my head doesn't give me what i want the first three or five results i amend it and by usually the third search i have the exact thing i was looking for i'm really my google foo is strong okay and uh then if i'm thinking about like book length stuff i literally have a bookshelf in my office that's just full of uh the kind of non-fiction books i love to read and i use my spatial memory they're organized by a topic on each shelf and i'll just scan the spines to see like which book did i read that told me a lot about that topic and then i include that book in the show notes if i didn't get what i was looking for in google and then i'll usually try to find some studies that push back on what i said and then i just hit record after i have all that stuff so like for example this entire uh answer that i just read to you for both questions is only uh seven bullet points so because i've done so much stage work in my life and anyone who's seen ask science mike live knows i really do come up with these answers off the top of my head i've studied storytelling enough to try to create an accessible topical answer off the top of my head the first try greg takes out the pauses and the ums but generally what you're hearing is pretty close to what i said the first time off the top of my head that's just sort of i guess my gift you know people say well why do you do this you're not a scientist you're not a pastor you're not an expert all those things are true but i am a lifelong communicator and educator and uh i do think i'm i'm actually gifted at it and i work really hard at it so i think the intersection of those things as long as i stick to communicating and educating people on things i've done the work to study then i'm helping if i position myself as the actual expert or if i try to pass off my nasal gazing as you know credible academic information then i would go off the rails so i'm really careful to tell you when i've ventured off into my opinion and how i see the world and when i speak about science or history or theology i do my very best to be faithful to the good work of the people who came up with that stuff in the first place uh really good questions thank you okay our next question is also a patron question and it's it's a great one mike i am new to science and i'm not sure if i am a confused atheist or a confused christian okay let me stop you right there you've come to the right place this is the perfect podcast for you i do know that i am a closet non-conformist in an evangelical community and family my question is why do humans exist if you accept a version of creationism god created humans if he knows all things he would have known how terrible we would be that we would turn our backs on god and basically he would have to mass murder us several times to thin the herd why would he create us just to watch us suffer if god had nothing to do with the creation of humans and we are in fact a cosmic accident of good fortune then why would anyone including you believe in that god it seems to me that the god that had the power to create matter from nothing would have had enough power to direct its course therefore we would be intentional creations and we are back to the first point in why let us exist to begin with i feel i am stuck between choosing a god that is a narcissistic jerk or no god at all well boy i think a lot of people feel that way today so you are not alone there you're wrestling with the problem of evil you're wrestling with the idea of theism versus atheism as a result of that dilemma and boy a lot of people have been there here is why you are wrestling with those things you've grown as a person so what once got you through the day doesn't anymore this is a good thing your understanding of the world is growing and so the metaphors that once helped you navigate reality don't fit any more now don't hear me wrong i'm not saying that the way you once believed in god was simplistic or inappropriate what i'm saying is it no longer fits where you are so let's celebrate that when i had the same discussion with rob bell that you're having now and i said i don't believe any of this stuff for very similar reasons he said you're here let's celebrate that well you're here you asked the question let's celebrate that now i love evangelicalism i love who it made me i love the personal god it presents i even love the focus on doing the work of christ to remake the world but some of the theist associations with evangelicalism and indeed with the broader church they raise issues that are hard to answer and when i see theologians try to do so it's often somewhat appalling so i'm going to tell you my take which may or may not help you along this is one of many possible views i think when we wrestle with this very involved or very distant or non-existent god we make god too much like us we're viewing god anthropomorphically anthropomorphically if you've listened to the show you know me and pronunciation aren't friends you're making god a person with like awareness and intent agency emotions irrational consideration of cause and effect that's a very reasonable thing to do because you're human if we put a face on something we imagine it has a perspective like our own that's the root of empathy we view animal behavior through a human lens why wouldn't we view the divine as though it were a mirror but where i am today theologically i'm actually much more with spong or spinoza even einstein i don't understand god to be a being but to be being itself i love the phrase the ground of being or the source of all such a god is the animating is-ness of everything so every particle interaction every sunrise every moment of beauty emanates from god as does every death and every lung cancer isn't that a fascinating troubling view of god now what's interesting about me is uh that is both true and a little bit of [ \_\_ ] because i absolutely experience a more personal god through contemplative mysticism my time and presence with god in meditation very often denotes a personal relationship a god that loves me a god whom i love how do i resolve that oh that's easy i don't i don't use theology at least cataphatic rational theology to analyze and box in the divine is it possible that what i experienced as god is simply my brain responding to reality in a particular way sure it is totally possible even likely and it doesn't bother me a bit it doesn't diminish the miracle or the beauty is it more likely that uh jesus was crucified and stayed in the ground or that jesus rose from the dead well it is way more likely that jesus stayed in the ground or that his body was removed from the tomb but mystically by loving god i encounter a risen christ so i sit with that but i don't master that and i understand this is a very strange place to be most people are deeply uncomfortable with it because we're addicted to certainty and frankly since the enlightenment we have all lived and camped out in our left brain and told the holistic view of reality or right hemisphere offers to hit the road jack or jill or gender non-conforming person i would encourage you to read a book like why christianity must change or die by john shelby spong maybe check out finding god in the waves by that guy mike mccarg um but understand there are more options than the evangelical god and atheism but hey if atheism gets you to a life of beauty and peace and helping others well atheism's just fine if the practice of faith matters to you if the presence of god in your life is important but you just can't go along with evangelical theology hey that's okay what matters where you'll find the gospel is in doing the work to help heal the world in being a good neighbor yes but also in loving god but as we see god in the bible there were so many ways of understanding god across the biblical narrative do you think jesus's 12 disciples all understood him the same way or viewed god in the same way i believe deeply that we are given whatever word image relationship to the divine we must have in order to serve the world if we're open to it and they all point to the same great and beautiful mystery that ground of being and that source of all hey science mike i'm katie from dallas texas you are going to be so happy i have an actual science question for you and this has been a long-standing debate within my family so i think we will all be very excited to hear what you have to say though many of us may not believe you would you rather fight to the death against an unarmed chimpanzee or a human male who is armed with a machete when we get together and sit down for thanksgiving dinner we don't fight about politics most of the time we fight about this question and it gets heated people have very strong opinions it's kind of fun to be honest but i'm excited to hear your take on it and to have an actual educated argument next thanksgiving when we sit down and inevitably begin discussing how we would rather die thanks science mike i was amazed when this question got the most votes of any recorded question on this week's show the patrons really wanted to see this question go on the air and frankly with the gravity of questions we get on the show so often it is a refreshing question now it's it's uh you know i suppose it's a science question um it's not a faith question um not really a live question not definitely not advice so of the categories i put the questions into this would technically be a science question but i don't have any studies or peer-reviewed data to offer you there's some variables here it depends on the chimpanzee it depends on the man for example a navy seal with a machete is a completely different thing than uh you know one of my computer programming friends with a machete and the chimpanzee is it a wild chimpanzee has it encountered humans before and in what context has it been taught to fear people has it been abused by people how are you going to get a chimpanzee to understand that it's in a fight to the death in the first place so let's start with the obvious i would not stand a chance against any competent human with a machete or a chimpanzee i got in one fight in my life my adversary was seated and i swung and my aim was off so i like just glanced off his shoulder with my incredible punch and missed his face and the cafeteria full of students laughed at me and that was the end of the fight so who would i rather fight nobody um if talking my way out is an option i don't know i could take the chimpanzee and and show non-aggression and submission and hopefully have it lose interest if we're trapped in a cage that's gonna be a problem if it's a human hopefully appeal to its sense of empathy obviously chimpanzees are much faster and much stronger than humans but the fossil record is really clear that once humans have sharpened weapons we're incredibly dangerous animals we wiped out not only prey species but decimated large predator populations as soon as we learned to sharpen sticks and throw them you know both both are mortal adversaries you know it i'd probably fight the person assuming the human is intent on trying to kill me here's why it would be unethical to kill a champion z just to prove i could chimpanzees lack the capacity to make a choice to enter the situation in the first place gyms can't offer consent so um yeah i mean that's just cruel animal abuse assuming i survive which i'm not likely to i i don't think i can't think of many situations where a human would be able to kill a chimpanzee with his bare hands now if both i and the other person were forced into the situation meaning there was an option there was no option to walk away it was like if you don't one of you doesn't kill one of the other then we're going to kill both of you it was that situation then i would volunteer to be killed and i would ask for a clean slice of my carotid artery because i think with a blade weapon it could be difficult to get between the vertebrae of my neck and very unlikely someone could cleanly hack my head off but if someone sliced my carotid i'd die pretty fast with relatively literal suffering [Laughter] and that is not the answer you're looking for but that is my answer it's unethical to kill a chimpanzee and i'd lose in a fight to either one so it's kind of a moot point [Music] our next question uh came in the email and it reads hi mike let me start by saying your show blesses me regularly i found the liturgist last year and binge listened to that podcast and am now binge listening to ask science mike i'm only about halfway through the available episodes so forgive me if you've already answered this kind of question i very recently began a deconstruction of my faith like you i grew up in a very conservative evangelical home you hear this a lot don't you and thus was raised to believe that lgbtq lifestyles are sinful for many years that idea didn't feel right to me but i always pushed away my questions about it for the comfort of knowing firmly what it is that i believe well that idea has since fallen apart and so i'm just now openly exploring lgbtq issues and questions a large part of the anti-lgbtq rhetoric in conservative circles is that their relationships are not as successful as traditional straight relationships in terms of divorce rates specifically and that their family lives are not as stable some of the language might include the idea that this is imperative that a child have both a mom and a dad so god forbid a child grow up with either two moms or two dads is there any data to back any of that up now that i'm growing and learning rather than pushing away my feelings of doubt i question these kinds of things when i hear them is it all just propaganda as i suspect or is there something to it thanks for everything you do seriously i know you get a lot of thank yous i hope you can feel through the interwebs house and seer this one is signed misty well misty i get a lot of thank yous and i feel the sincerity in all of them i don't think a lot of people flippantly tell me thank you for my work and i appreciate it every time so thank you for thanking me okay a couple of issues one same-sex marriages have not been legal in america very long so uh i think everyone should have the intellectual humility to admit we are studying a relatively new phenomenon so it's a little bit of a red herring to compare divorce rates among same-sex couples and different sex couples we're not really comparing apples to apples to begin with we've only recently allowed this to happen at a national level now when i have seen studies that compare those rates though i don't see support to say that same-sex marriages fail more often and when you include cohabitating couples which is obviously more common in same-sex relationships for legal reasons until very recently i've seen some studies that actually say they're more successful and if we want to go by success rate as the operative for what marriages should be entered into then we would say most people should move to the northeast and become atheists before getting married because those are the longest lasting marriages you could make an argument from the data that christian marriages are not as successful as secular marriages and therefore are a bad idea right so you have to be careful uh we use those kind of metrics to define your work uh now when we get to children the science is actually pretty unambiguous there's no harm done to children when they're raised by same-sex parents in similar circumstances meaning a stable couple with similar economic means those are big qualifiers same-sex couples tend to be wealthier than heterosexual couples so [Music] on average some studies show that the children of same-sex couples are a little bit better off now some studies actually do show elevated risks for children in same-sex couples versus heterosexual marriages but that's because they don't differentiate between stable monogamous same-sex couples where the child's been in the same household their entire time and marriages where a heterosexual couple ended in divorce because one of the partners came out and then remarried when we know that divorce can have detrimental effects on children and these studies have failed to mitigate for our account for those effects in their research but when studies are done that don't have deep methodological flaws again no there is no data certainly no consensus to support the idea that children raised in same-sex homes are any worse off again based on some studies you would make an argument that a children was better off in a same-sex home and much better off with two atheist parents than they are in a christian home and that's the data so i appreciate your question it's a great question as you're growing an awareness of what it means to walk alongside lgbtq people understand that they don't view themselves as issues they don't view the way they live their lives as the gay lifestyle or the lesbian lifestyle they just view it as their lives and don't hear don't hear me wrong i'm in no way pushing back against your question i honor your question i am thankful for your question but as you seem to care for your fellow humans that's one thing i've learned that when we talk about the issues that lgbtq people face as a result of discrimination i try to avoid saying you know lgbtq issues or lgbtq lifestyle because those are terms foisted on those communities by religious fundamentalists and why let the oppressor control the language right i think it's the least we can do for oppressing and marginalizing these people for generations is to use the language for them that they prefer to use for themselves really great question i hope my answer was helpful and i have included a link in the show notes this week to 74 yes 74 studies that will support my answer that may be handy to have available when having these discussions with your more conservative friends and family our last question came in via email hi science mike thanks so much for the work you do i am a case manager for a foster care agency i've been working there for about a year now as i've gotten to know the system and seen a lot of very sad things i've begun to wonder is this even a good idea taking children away from their parents the children that i interact with often seem to be just as traumatized by their entry into and movement through the foster care system as by anything that their parents did or did not do so i guess my question for you is this have there been studies that show that children are better off when they are taken from their homes than if they were left there is that even something you would be able to measure i would love to hear any insight you have because i am feeling hopeless and questioning whether any of this work is even making positive change thank you your question was by far the most voted for question this week by the patrons this was a far favorite far favorite about the other questions which makes me sad because the question is just too important uh for me to answer and way out of my league this is not false humility you have asked me about work you are doing that matters in the world and you deserve a better answer than i can give so i spent some time digging and digging and digging and digging and digging and uh boy the research i found and the materials i found were not encouraging foster care seems to be full of um abuse and exploitation and even when it's not it still seems to cause harm to children now does it cause more harm to children than their parents beating them with a baseball bat every day does it cause more harm to children than a parent who is consistently verbally abusive or simply negligent who never pays attention to the child and feeds them so infrequently that they are malnourished i don't have the qualifications to make those determinations on a blanket level or on a case-by-case basis so i i have to start disclosing that now foster care came out of noble pursuits the horror of orphanages in the 1800s led to the implementation of the us foster care system it was an attempt to make things better for children facing displacement but even among social scientists i read and child psychologists i couldn't find a consensus on the best approach or the best alternative to foster care or what constitutes an appropriate threshold for removing a child from parental care i couldn't find it i tried i really really tried so this week for people who want to dig deeper i do include a link to a beautiful essay that explores the issue more deeply from someone who was a well-meaning foster parent it's a beautiful piece and here's what i'm going to do because i want to honor the question if you have experience credentials education or qualifications in this question i'd love for you to come to the show notes of episode 107 on ask sciencemike.com and weigh in on the comments and if we get enough comments that are quality comments that hopefully also include citations to support any foster care alternatives or good venues for advocacy i will cover those on a future episode but what i don't want to do is give my useless opinion on such an important topic now for you who feel hopeless and questioning whether this work is making positive change i can't answer that for you i can say that a foster care system full of people who want to make a positive difference is probably better than one full of people phoning it in or doing it for personal gain so your sense of empathy your sense of hopelessness may be a necessary catalyst in the future for reform for revitalization and ultimately a better hope for children well gosh this is a long studio episode of ask science mike but there were six questions so that's why we had a little extra time together uh thanks everybody for listening thanks to my patrons for making the show financially possible for picking the questions that come onto the program thank you andrew galucki for not only picking the questions every week but putting together our together groups if you'd like to connect with other ask science mike listeners in your local area just go to sciencemike.com and click the together button you'll find it to the right of the episode show notes um thanks greg nordin for producing the show and sound designing the show and everything you do and jeb my man thanks for that theme song i'd love to hear it every week everybody it's been good to talk with you i can't wait to talk with you next week [Music]