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Curiosity Weekly

Did Your Microbiome Come from Dirt?

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Science

4.6 • 964 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2021

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Award-winning journalist and economist Tim Harford explains three simple rules for understanding statistics and evaluating truth in the news. Then, you’ll learn about why our microbiomes may have come from dirt.

Additional resources from Tim Harford:

Microbes in dental plaque are more like soil microbes than tongue microbes, which suggests our microbiomes came from dirt by Cameron Duke

  • Caldwell, A. (2020, December 15). Microbes in dental plaque look more like relatives in soil than those on the tongue. EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/uocm-mid121420.php
  • Shaiber, A., Willis, A. D., Delmont, T. O., Roux, S., Chen, L.-X., Schmid, A. C., Yousef, M., Watson, A. R., Lolans, K., Esen, Ö. C., Lee, S. T. M., Downey, N., Morrison, H. G., Dewhirst, F. E., Mark Welch, J. L., & Eren, A. M. (2020). Functional and genetic markers of niche partitioning among enigmatic members of the human oral microbiome. Genome Biology, 21(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-020-02195-w

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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/did-your-microbiome-come-from-dirt

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from

0:04.8

Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Goff. And I'm Ashley Hamer.

0:07.9

Today you learn about three simple rules for understanding statistics from

0:11.9

award-winning journalist and economist

0:13.7

Tim Harford. Then you'll learn about why our microbiome may have come from dirt.

0:18.4

Let's dig up some curiosity. If you read the news or open up social media,

0:24.8

you'll see a lot of statistics being thrown around.

0:27.6

But if you're not a statistician,

0:29.1

how exactly are you supposed to know

0:31.0

whether a given number is accurate or if it's being

0:34.4

distorted to mess with your emotions? Well luckily today's guest has an easy

0:38.9

rule of thumb you can use the next time you run into a statistic you're not sure about.

0:44.0

Tim Harford is an award-winning journalist, economist, and broadcaster, and author of the new book,

0:49.4

The Data Detective, 10 easy rules to make sense of statistics.

0:54.0

Here's a clip from our conversation.

0:56.0

The questions you need to ask to evaluate statistics

1:00.0

are actually the same sorts of questions you would ask to evaluate anything else.

1:04.6

I actually advocate the three C's. So the three C's, calm context, curiosity. So calm, it's really straightforward. Just calm down when you're faced with a

1:17.5

statistical claim is making you angry, you're outraged, you're in denial, or your triumphant or this just proves I was right my

1:26.6

spouse is wrong that idiot on the internet is wrong wait till I show them and if you

1:32.0

just calm down and notice that you're having an emotional

1:34.3

reaction you're immediately in a better position to then start thinking clearly

...

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