Antonio Martínez Ron, author of The Naked Eye: "We are very overestimated" | BBC

In December 2010, the Spanish science popularizer Antonio Martinez Ron became famous with a joke.

"National Geographic discovers stonehenge fraud", in his blog Fogonazos, where he published an article. article on a surprising badumption: apparently, 90% of the stones of the legendary site in England were new.

The parody, published on April Fool's Day, made dozens of websites. to be denied by the magazine itself and to prove, according to the author, that " you should not trust everything you read, no matter how good it looks and the many sources that seem quote ".

This mix of humor, skepticism and science are ubiquitous in the work of this 42-year-old young man from Madrid: three books, two Internet pages and a podcast are just a few of the publications of the journalist.

They all talk about science. And that's not why they're boring or complex.

" Basically, I ask myself the questions that anyone asks, I am a curious journalist, I am not a scientist," he told BBC World in the eve of his speech at the festival of Arequipa (Friday, November 9 at 4 pm at San Agustín National University, Mariano Melgar Hall).

Here are some questions that he answered before going to Peru.

Are we extremely ignorant or extremely wise about the world around us?

Well, a little bit of both, and that's precisely the message (taken from the book "The naked eye"). We are living beings with very specific sensory characteristics, of which we see only a very small part of the spectrum and from there we have been able to overcome these limitations.

We saw, for example, other dimensions of light that seemed imaginable. We were able to discover planets simply by performing a mathematical calculation; discover the atoms, the dark matter, the natural selection and another lot of things that are not seen at all with the naked eye.

What makes us different from animals?

Few things. In general, we are much less special than we think. Curiosity, for example, has been discovered even in unicellular beings, who need to explore their environment.

The difference is that in humans and primates this characteristic has become an essential element of survival.

So we are a privileged species that can see more?

Let's see: the part we can capture from the electromagnetic spectrum is very small. To understand it, it is often said that if the spectrum was a film strip of a film from Madrid to Moscow, what we see would be equivalent to only one of the images. Or as if we had a television with a million channels and only one tuned.

Now, there are species that can see the same thing, or even more, because it's more useful to see other parts of the spectrum. Snakes, for example, can see more towards the infrared to be able to detect the heat of their potential prey.

We are trichromed (we see three channels of color reception), but the birds are quadriceps. The pigeons, who look half idiotic, can integrate the information from their two eyes that reaches them independently.

Are pigeons underestimated?

Yes, pigeons are underrated and, in general, human beings are very overestimated. We are very pretentious, we think to be the summit of evolution. In reality, it does not work like this, because evolution is a huge tree in which we are a branch with concrete characteristics.

But hey, there are bugs that have incredible abilities. Mantis shrimp, for example, has 17 types of color receptors; we have three; we do not have a faraway idea of ​​what they see.

The praying mantis Is it superior to us?

No, because in terms of evolution, it is not logical to speak of inferiority or hierarchy.

We are not special, we should not consider ourselves special. In fact, the history of science is a story of forced humility. We first thought we were the center of the universe and it turned out that this was not the case. It turned out that the Sun does not turn around us but is simply a star in a galaxy. And then it turned out that our galaxy is one of the billions in the universe and that we are insignificant.

Science has dropped the emanations.

What was the most important invention in history?

Obviously, there are many, but I like to point out the work of some scientists who play a more minor or lesser role in the role of Ignaz Semmelweis, the doctor who realized in the middle of the nineteenth century, the simple act of washing hands could reduce the mortality of women who gave birth and caught puerperal fever.

This, at a time when the origin of the diseases was not known. His observation has saved millions of lives and remains today a fundamental factor for our daily health and in hospitals.

And at the time, I had read that being as clean was not so good, right?

Yes, well, you are talking about the hygiene hypothesis. This is because we have recently discovered a new universe of which we did not know the existence, namely the universe of bacteria.

We now know that not only can they cause disease, but that we have bacteria whose functioning is almost as important to us. like our living cells. We could not digest certain foods without them, for example. And it has been discovered that the elimination of certain bacteria could be the cause of many allergies and autoimmune diseases.

Dolores García Bello, a very interesting scientist, works on the badysis and comparison of the gut microbiota of people living in industrialized cities and people living in smaller and even isolated population centers in the Amazon. . And we realize that, first, the microbiota we have in our intestines depends on what we eat, which is why it is different in each of these groups. And second, it conditions the diseases we have.

This is a line that is still under investigation, but it seems that an excess of hygiene can be harmful. that we could have messed up with the cleaning. And that is why it is recommended to let children play with sand, for example.

So, is it true that you should not wash with soap?

Well, it is true that if you wear a lot, you get the microbiota

Is selling more than an invention of the industry?

There is an industry behind it and there is to be careful because there is now an "industriafobie" a little unjustified. Not because there is a company behind a product, it is necessarily bad. There are people to whom the mere mention of the word "industry" produces hives. And this does not only happen with soaps, but especially with the pharmaceutical industry.

This brings us to the subject of new trends that may be critical of science, especially in medicine, alternative medicine. . Acupuncture, Reiki. What do you think?

That of "alternative" medicine does not exist. In fact, these are dangerous disappointments for our health. When something works, it is called "medicine" directly.

In the case of pseudoscience and pseudotherapies, there is a great "industry" that pays a lot to deception. It's a thing that's been repeating for a long time, because it's something very human: we're superstitious beings. Often we control our emotions and hold on to the last hope when we are in danger or sick.

What is problematic is that there are people who are willing to use this human sensibility to do business, as in this case. homeopathy, which is water with sugar.

I believe we are having a good time of scientific knowledge, but we risk that humanity will lose the reference. What some call the times of the afterlife. Some people hang on to patterns of the past and have failed. For example, a world without vaccines