Soul Searching Experiments

I came across this interesting news item recently. On conducting a limited number of experiments on terminally-ill people, in 1907, Dr. McDougall of Massachusetts believed that human soul weighs about 21 grams*! On placing his subjects (nearing their death) on sufficiently sensitive weight scales, he observed that at the time of death, the subjects lost about 21 grams of their body weight. He couldn't account for this loss from sweat, excretions, etc. He also conducted similar experiments on dogs, and found no weight loss. Based on this, he concluded that humans lose weight at the time of death because we have souls, and the dogs don't, as animals do not possess souls.

Of course, the scientific community quickly disputed the validity of results of his experiments, as the evidence for his claims was anecdotal at best. Deficiencies in his experiments include inadequate # of samples and lack of control on losses due to evaporation of sweat - it takes a loss of only ~21 ml in sweat to account for a loss of 21 grams (for water, 21 grams = 21 cc = 21 ml).

This reminded me of the weight of all BitTorrents in the world = 0.06 millionths of an ounce.

* if his claims were proven to be true somehow, I am sure LA Weight Loss would have developed a weight-loss program for over-weight American souls, like at $10/gram. And of course, they will find cholestrol in souls too.